Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with Glossary

24. Range, Constancy, Eclipse, and Equivalence of Truth

[133], (103) Lines: 633 t ——— -10.2pt P ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [133], (103) 24 Range, Constancy, Eclipse, and Equivalence of Truth One of the fundamental problems in every philosophy of history turned out to be the constancy of reality experienced throughout the process of compactness and transition to differentiation. The reality experienced by so-called primitives is not different from that experienced by moderns. What happens between, say, the Neolithicum and the Modern Age are the events of differentiation . The thinker who first became aware of this problem and stated its structure was Aristotle in the first two books of Metaphysics. He understood that his philosophical analysis of reality analyzed the same reality that was experienced by the earlier “theologizing” thinkers who expressed their experience through myth. Specifically, he refers to Hesiod and Homer. When the earlier thinkers express their experience of the origin of being through the myth of Ouranos and Gaia, they are in search of the same divine ground of being of which he himself is in search and which he recognizes as the Nous. The philomythos is to him something like a philosophos. In his late years he became increasingly fond of myth as a source of wisdom, since it may sometimes be more comprehensive than the structures in reality differentiated by the philosopher. He understood the relations between experiences and symbolizations on the various levels of compactness and differentiation that I have brought under the concept of equivalence. By equivalence is meant the recognizable identity of the reality experienced and symbolized on various levels of differentiation.1 1. Cf. “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History [1970],” reprinted in CW, vol. 12, chap. 5. 133 autobiographical reflections [134], (10 Lines: 64 ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [134], (10 The most important consequence of this insight is the understanding of certain processes in history. When a new differentiation occurs, the area of reality newly articulated will be understood as an area of particular importance; and the overrating of its importance amidst the joy of discovery may lead to the neglect of other areas of reality that were contained in the earlier compact experience but now are neglected. The most important such event of neglect has occurred in the modern age in the wake of the newly differentiated natural sciences. The model of the reason that is operative in the cognition of the external world has become so much the model of reason that the existentially fundamental aspects of reason in the Classic sense, as the constituent of man’s humanity, were neglected and had gradually to be rediscovered in the twentieth century under the title of “existentialism,” which obscures rather than clarifies the structure of reason in existence. The dif- ficulties in this rediscovery of existential order forced Jaspers to abandon the language of existence that he favored in his earlier work and return to the language of reason (Vernunft) when he became aware of the derailments of existentialism, especially in the case of Sartre. This is not the only such example, however. One of the great cases of neglect, and of eclipses of reality, occurred in the wake of Christianity. The pneumatic differentiation that we owe to Christ and Paul became, under the title of revelation , the center of Christian thought. Since revelation—i.e., the differentiation of pneumatic consciousness—had to be something entirely new, constituting an epoch in history, the presence of the pneumatic stratum in its compact form in earlier human thought was neglected and even denied. Christian doctrine assumed that man’s reason is natural and, as such, a source of knowledge; in addition to this natural reason there has come into the world the new supernatural source of knowledge—revelation. That the Greek thinkers were highly conscious of having received a revelation when they discovered the Nous as the ground of being was simply ignored. Even today, the theophanic core of Classic philosophy is practically unknown, thanks to its eclipse by the Christian doctrine of natural reason. Hence, there is a remarkable dearth of investigations into the parallel phenomena of the Greek philosophers’ and the Israelite-Christian revelation, even though the fact that the word prophet is taken from the language of the 134 range, constancy, eclipse, and equivalence of truth [135], (105) Lines: 648 t ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [135], (105) Greek poets—who knew themselves to be...