Beyond imaginative oblivion: Eric Voegelin's paradox of consciousness and the literary experience, Classic and Romanti

Eric Voegelin's final work, In Search of Order, provides a concise, yet ultimately difficult, exposition of his theory of the paradox of consciousness. I suggest here that this theory has profound consequences for literary studies. Through what Voegelin has termed the "intentional" and "participational" orientation of consciousness to 'reality,' a dual orientation toward texts arises which indicates a critical stance that is simultaneously New Critical and Post-Structural; that is, it recognizes the necessity of wresting a shared meaning from language used by intentional subjects at the same time it asserts, as Voegelin says, that such meaning should not be construed as a "piece of information that ... when found, would be unqualifiedly valid in its specific form for all future times in all future situations.".;In a movement from 'Classic' to 'Romantic,' my study focuses on individual works of four authors: Plato's Parmenides, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biosraphia Literaria, and Henry Thoreau's "The Succession of Forest Trees." I argue that they all were aware of the paradox of consciousness, and this awareness shaped their approaches to their work. Using a Voegelinian methodology, I illuminate various strategies--philosophical, linguistic, and textual--that each used both to convey the 'truth' of the literary experience, and to safeguard it against purely intentional or participational hypostatizations, or what Voegelin terms the "act of imaginative oblivion.".;In addition, much of Voegelin's work derives from a re-thinking of Platonic philosophy. This, and the fact that Coleridge characterized his own thought as "no other than the system of Plato and Pythagoras revived and purified from impure mixtures", indicates a reading of Plato that introduces problems of philosophy and language upon which Coleridge later elaborates. Through a Voegelinian methodology, I suggest that the Coleridgean conception of the 'symbol' consists, to a large degree, in bringing back to literary discourse the experience of the participational pole of consciousness in the 'Divine Nous,' first self-consciously articulated as such by the Greek philosophers. Consequently, I implicitly argue that the oft-noted dichotomy between 'Classic' and 'Romantic' neglects a crucial, indeed fundamental, experience shared by both.