Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: Timäus, Spannung zw. It-reality - thing-reality; Seele - Mythos

Kurzinhalt: Plato, Timaeus, Paulus; platonischer - paulinischer Mythos; Mythos: Primärerfahrung + Erfahrung d. Seele + pistis; Symbol: Seele, Kosmos;

Textausschnitt: () The Timeaus exploration most fully illustrates Voegelin's paradoxic tension of consciousness, of It-reality and thing-reality, and the central role of the imaginative psyche within the process of reality and the telling of its story. The core of the Timaeus myth, the Platonic philosopher's myth par excellence, illuminates the consciousness and story of the twentieth-century philosopher Voegelin ...
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The philosopher discovers that the myth is the ineluctable instrument for communicating the experience of the soul; for he must himself develop mythical symbols in order to express his discovery both as a process and as a result. And through the opposition of his conscious myth to the less conscious forms he becomes aware that the old myth also expresses the truth of the soul, merely on a less differentiated level of consciousness. The soul as the creator of the myth, and the myth as the symbolism of the soul, is the center of the philosophy of order. That center, the philosophy of the myth, is reached by Plato in Timaeus. (OH III, 170)
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The Timaeus marks an epoch in the history of mankind in so far as in this work the psyche has reached the critical consciousness of the methods by which it symbolizes its own experiences. As a consequence, no philosophy of order and symbols can be adequate unless the Platonic philosophy of the myth has been substantially absorbed into its own principles.'
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When Plato tried to characterize the type of truth peculiar to the symbolism of the Timaeus he wavered between the more assertive alethinos logos and the more doubtful eikos mythos. But whether his myth of the Cosmos was a 'true story' or a 'likely myth,' he was sure that the symbolism had not been engendered through articulation of an experience. The anima mundi is a philosopher's myth: It articulates neither the experience of the primordial field, nor the experience of the psyche, but achieves the imaginative fusion of insights gained by the two types of experience separately. ... Still, the imaginative play has its hard core of reality as it is motivated by man's trust (pistis) in reality as intelligibly ordered, as a Cosmos. ... the trust in the underlying oneness of reality, its coherence, lastingness, constancy of structure, order and intelligibility will inspire the creation of images which express the ordered wholeness sensed in the depth.
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The most important of these images is the symbol cosmos itself, whose development runs historically parallel with that of the symbol psyche.