Essays in Anarchism and Religion

214 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1

referred to this process of re-uniting with true reality as “separa-
tion” from false reality, which constitutes, simultaneously, a form
of self-annihilation, because the imaginative “I kills itself so that
the world-I can live.”^78 An anarchist kills only himself, Landauer
wrote, “in the mystical sense, in order to be reborn after having
descended into the depths of their soul”.^79 An anarchist is some-
one who, through separation, becomes a nobody in the terms of
society, moving beyond all names, race, colour, country or nation
and who yet becomes a somebody in the highest, spiritual sense of
the term by reconnecting to true community. The specific quality
of the anarchist’s “world-I” is that it has no quality, because the
annihilated soul that has become conscious to itself knows that it
cannot know itself fully, and that no attributes can serve to char-
acterise its own or any other individual’s being. Thus,

The way to a newer, higher form of human society passes by the

dark, fatal gate of our instincts and the terra abscondita- the “hid-

den land” of our soul, which is our world. This world can only

be constructed from within. We can discover this land, this rich

world, if we’re able to create a new kind of human being through

chaos and anarchy, through unprecedented, intense, deep experi-

ence. Each one of us has to do this.^80

This process of separation is reflected in Voegelin’s description of
the re-uniting of knowing and being, to which he gave the Greek
term anamnesis, or remembrance.^81 According to Voegelin, an-
amnesis is to bring to the presence of knowledge that which has
wrongly been forgotten, revealing it as knowledge in the mode of
oblivion, where it has aroused such existential unrest that it had to
be raised to knowledge through remembrance. Precisely, anamne-
sis is the remembrance of experiences that have “opened sources
of excitation, from which issue the urge to further philosophical
reflection”, such as experiences of transcendence in space, time,
matter, dreams, etc. Through its recalling of truths about the im-
manent and transcendent structure of the real or about the “or-
der of reality”, anamnesis constitutes a process of unlearning and
unknowing of the imaginative limitations of the second reality,
recovering “the human condition revealing itself in consciousness,
when it is smothered by the debris of opaque symbols.”^82