224 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
experience and knowledge, forgotten. Community, in reality based
on openness and fluidity, was replaced with its rigid surrogate,
society. Consequently, they argued, the condition of politics can
only be overcome through deep experience of reality to restore
knowledge of the world and unlearn the illusions of imaginary
reality. Landauer referred to this process as “separation”, for one
leaves behind the particular, closed society, Voegelin as anamnesis,
or remembrance of the primary reality that had been pushed into
oblivion. Landauer’s and Voegelin’s mysticism is their argument
that the multiplicity of existents issues from a single source that is
within and yet infinitely transcends the individual, allowing each
individual access to her source, but only to the extent that she
grows to know that she cannot know her ultimate essence. The
potentiality for human community, then, is to be found not in
external ordering via politics, but precisely within each individual
herself as she becomes the world. The shared anarchic element in
Landauer and Voegelin is their argument that only the individual
herself has direct, unmediated access to the world with which no
intermediary, such as politics, can interfere and therefore has the
power, in the present here and now, to reconnect the link between
experience and knowledge.
Notes
- Landauer has been considered a “Jewish-Christian-Atheist” mys-
tic, Voegelin self identifies as mystical philosopher, arguably in the
Christian tradition. Both conceive of mystery not as an object of the
external world to be confronted with, but as something knowable
only through participation in it. Landauer identifies spirit, Voegelin
consciousness as the locus of reality’s self-revelation, which paradoxi-
cally experiences reality as an object intended, while also itself occur-
ring in reality. Thus, the human situation is characterised by its partic-
ipation in a reality that is a mysterious, known unknown. Landauer
and Voegelin consider mystery existential; Philosophy is their existen-
tial project of expressing this basic experience and seeking adequacy. - Voegelin, rather than referring to a common source, speaks of the
“ground”, aition, as it occurs in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.
Accordingly, “the ground” is not a spatially distant thing but a divine