Dr. Hancock in his latest post has hit upon a problem that has plagued philosophy since the age of the Greeks in writing that "thinkers" should, " . . . .appreciate the dependence of their own transcendence on the intimations available in ordinary, pre-philosophic life."
It seems to me that Hancock is alerting us to the problem of "false philosophy" described by Pyrrho as "existential skepticism" in extremis which was "reformed" and described by Hume as a methodological derailment where the philosopher abandons place, nature, and custom and ascends to the proverbial "Ivory Tower." Voegelin referred to the phenomenon as "second realities (from Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities )" where the thinker derails into a self-alienated existence, and creates a second reality in order to "eclipse" true reality. The argument centers on whether the phenomenon of self alienation, spurred on by a erronious methodology, is a psychopathology or a pneumopathology but we aren’t going there today.
Modernity proffers a whole lotta "false philosophy" and "second realities" that make opaque our efforts to examine man’s existence in the tension toward the divine ground which seems to me to be the intrinsic objective of the pomocons. So it becomes necessary to engage in a phenomenology that examines being and its relationship to the nous, where Reason (in the noetic sense) is illuminated "as both the force and the criterion of order."
Modernity dissociated itself from ontolgoical problems while demanding the divorce between philosophy and theology thereby destroying the transcendent pole in the tension of man’s existence, not to mention God. However, with Husserl and Scheler there began a re-examination of the philosophy of essence.
The "point of departure," Edith Stein, Husserl’s protege and colleague tells us in her magnum opus, Being and Infinte Being , in our quest for the truth of being is the recognition of consciousness, or more properly self-consciousness, and the reduction of the world of reality to consciousness (ego). It is a turning away from the external world and a turning toward the internal, the "I am." Being incorporates the concepts of quiddity, actual and potential being, enduring being within the "ontic birth of time," pure ego, essence and essential being and so forth all of which is beyond this short post. However, we may say with certitude that to recognize ourselves as being we become aware of not-being, the knowledge of death, lived out in the drama of "moment to moment," constantly renewed in an "ontological security" until the final moment. Heidegger famously declared that we are involuntarily "thrown out" into existence then described death as nothing, all of which has a decidedly pessimistic outlook, an example of a true/false philosophical dichotomy.
Being then exists in the complex of consciousness-reality-language, encapsulated within the It-reality where the It-reality is symbolized as the movement of "spiritual consciousness" at, for example, the Beginning when this pneumatic phenomenon, this "first mover," spoke (language) all things into existence as IT moved through the fomless void. Voegelin further explicates the It-reality as " . . . a nonhuman process, to be symbolized as divine; and yet it has to convey an aura of analogy with the human process because man experiences his own acts such as the quest for truth, as acts of participation in the process of the It."
Being appercieves the It-reality by acting on that Reason that incorporates noesis. To exist in the condition of existential consciousness the philosopher must reject the pathology of "false" philosophy and "second realities."
