210 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
for future life then this so-called science is unspirit, an impediment
to the intellect.^52This type of science, while producing facts, cannot and must not
provide knowledge in the sense of traditional science, because it
is, like politics, symptomatic of arche. Landauer then contrast-
ed the representative of such scientific thinking, referred to as
“professor”, whose mind is closed to reality, with the “prophet”,
whose spirit is fully open and who serves the creation of a future
which raises true community from its potentiality within symbols
to actuality.^53 While the prophet warns of foreclosing reality, the
professor does precisely that, and is, thereby, the statesman’s ally.
Both thinkers then proceeded to explain the detrimental effects
of arche, its statesmen and professors, on the community. As the
previous section showed, to maintain itself and the appearance of
reality as a system, fluidity and openness, which are natural to social
relationships, are hidden and destroyed. Society becomes an infinite
deferral of direct engagement^54 in a complex network of expedient
reality. Its order is a collection of separated individualities, attributes
and representations,^55 coexisting within their enclosed, segmented
spaces as, in Landauer’s words, “a mad cluster of purposes,”^56 force
and self-constraint, interacting alongside the governed nodal points
of legislated existence. This rigidification is ultimately incompatible
with life, for Landauer argued, “there is clarity only in the land of
appearances and words. Where life begins, systems end”^57 , so that,
“death is the atmosphere between us.”^58 Because arche requires rep-
etition, society grows ever more dehumanising. Totalitarian politics
and the ideological mass movements which Landauer and Voegelin
encountered in Wilhelmine Germany and the Third Reich respec-
tively, appear to be not an aberration from politics, but, rather, the
logical path of arche. To explore, in contrast to this society, the pos-
sibilities for true community, this differentiation between substitute
and reality must be restored.
Returning to reality
The starting point Landauer and Voegelin appear to agree, is
the individual herself and, more precisely, her spirit (Landauer)