218 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
order toward suffering from bewilderment about the “order of be-
ing.”^100 In short, to be conscious of one’s existence is to know that
one knows nothing at all, that no further answer is possible.^101
A first implication of Landauer’s and Voegelin’s argument is
a certain democratisation of mystical experience, which, rather
than being an elitist affair of a few select individuals, appears to
be a universally accessible, natural component of conscious ev-
eryday experience. Voegelin scholar Morrissey summarised the
situation as such:
These experiences cannot be proved any more than sense experience
can be proved. Yet there is nothing esoteric about such experiences.
Insofar as everyone experiences reality, everyone has experiences of
transcendence, at least on a limited level. A philosopher who experi-
ences his or her consciousness as transcending discovers the ground
of philosophizing, and no special belief is required to substantiate
it, for it is self-evident. To deny the self-transcending nature of one’s
consciousness would be to deny one’s own experience. Such a denial
is certainly possible, but then one would not be operating rationally;
one would be closed to the reality one is trying to investigate. One
may arrive at a number of different conclusions but one cannot in
good faith deny the nature of transcending consciousness.^102Thus, it can be argued that the shared anarchist element in
Landauer and Voegelin is precisely their emphasis on both grasp-
ing one’s own life and search, one’s direct and unmediated rela-
tionship with reality as the primary instrument in the quest for re-
ality, and this relationship being accessible, theoretically, to every
consciousness. This is also the reason why Landauer, when seek-
ing to define anarchism, strictly warned against considering it a
system of thought and action to be brought to all of humanity. For
Landauer this constituted an imposition of one’s own idea of free-
dom on others that was no different from the violence anarchists
sought to oppose. Rather, he stated, anarchism was a mode of
being, “a matter of how one lives” in the present here and now.^103
While it has been argued that Voegelin was highly critical of an-
archism, his essays on the topic, dealing with Bakunin, Kropotkin,
Tolstoy, Gandhi and Warren, reveal that he, rather, shared the same
criticism which Landauer raised against anarchists of the deed.^104