Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: Kurze Einführung in das Werk Voegelins

Kurzinhalt: Realität bestimmt d. Bewusstsein, anamnetische Meditation, Entfaltung der Symbole der göttlichen Präsenz in Richtung Transzendenz, from compactness to differentiation, Dornbusch

Textausschnitt: Voegelin finds consciousness, the concrete consciousness ... to be first of all constituted by reality. Even though the consciousness will be shown to have an important role in what we may call the 'co-constitution' of reality, the primacy lies with the always prior forming reality. This prior reality, in which Voegelin found his consciousness already moving and by which it was already structured, opened up, in the questioning search provoked by that reality's movement in himself, to the mystery that Voegelin called 'the Beginning and the Beyond,' following the language of the constitutive history he recovered in his own work-opened up to the mystery, in a word, of 'what men call 'God'.
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The 'history' that Voegelin remembers in anamnetic meditation ... is the history of divine presence and its manifestation in human consciousness. Voegelin makes modern ... the great foundational experiences and symbolizations of divine presence, the great movements of consciousness toward 'transcendence' in the directions of the Beginning and the Beyond, ...
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The movement of reality in human experience, in personal autobiography as well as in the larger history of societies of persons, goes from compactness to differentiation of experience and is always accompanied by the struggle of imaginative symbolization to express adequately the emerging differentiation. For Voegelin, this movement from compactness to differentiation is primarily the movement in which the mystery of the divine formative presence in the whole of reality deepens into the mystery of the divine Beyond of its moments of presence. This differentiation of the 'Beyond' is inseparable from the corresponding differentiation of the concrete consciousness ...
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The concrete, reflecting consciousness finds itself in emphatic partnership with a divine Beyond that reveals itself precisely by drawing the participant consciousness beyond itself in its experienced presence of the movement of 'revelation' toward a beyond of revelation.