When a war, such as the proxy one that’s now being fought in Ukraine, is clearly lost by the parties that instigated it, it’s difficult, if not impossible, for someone who is still compos mentis to understand why the losing side insists on blindly prolonging it at the cost of completely destroying what the instigators claim to defend. Examples of this counterintuitive, counterproductive and evidently aberrant mindset are plenty and not limited to warfare and terrorism. For instance, it’s equally difficult to understand the mental condition of the climate change elites who fail to see that execution of their plans is destroying the world they so adamantly purport to save. What all these cases do have in common, though, is that facts, plain reality and rational arguments don’t seem to matter.
The disease of the soul
There have been eminent political thinkers who were able to explain with great precision this phenomenon as a form of pneumapathy. Eric Voegelin defined pneumapathy as “Krankheit des Geistes”, disease of the soul. Cicero called it the morbus animi, the disease of the animus, the rational soul in Man. The stoics called it agnoia ptoiodes or fearful ignorance. As such, the condition escapes the scope of psychology and psychiatry as well as the characterizations and definitions standardly applied in the field of mental health care. To be sure, pneumapathy is not a disease of the mind or the psyche. The pneumapath is not insane, but often intelligent and cunning.
The Will to Power
Since mainstream psychology and psychiatry have excluded the soul, the pneuma, from their field of expertise by reducing Man to nothing but mind/psyche and body (“brains”), these unfruitful practices cannot detect, let alone describe or treat, pneumapathy. Still, a psychosis is not a “pneumosis”, and a psychopath is not a pneumapath. The pneumapath is characterized by his/her flight from a noetic reality which includes the Spiritual ‒ Divine ‒ Ground of Being. It brings the fugitive into the realm of existence where, in the terms of classical and Christian ethics, the dominant drivers of human behavior are concupiscent passion and irrepressible libido. Eventually, combat, coercion, duplicity, terror, war and the Will to Power become the main aspects that outline the deformed character of the pneumapath.
Pneumapaths and society
Voegelin speaks of a condition of alienation, of deformed and closed existence in which the ability to make contact with reality is heavily disturbed. A Man thus deformed by his amor sui and the unmitigated “coming out” of his ego, is only strong and self-conscious in appearance. In fact, his behavior is driven by fear, especially the fear of his fellow Men. The main problem with this spiritual disease is that those who suffer from it aggressively claim the possession of an impeccable, vibrant and superior mental health and an equally impeccably functioning mind. Yet, pneumapaths would not be a societal problem if they kept their illness to themselves and their therapists. Unfortunately, they don’t. In 1965, in a lecture entitled “The German University and the Third Reich” (“Die deutsche Universität und das dritte Reich”), Voegelin explained how pneumapaths disturb and destroy not only themselves and those who are in direct contact with them, but also entire societies. [i]
Heraclitus’ Xynon
To begin with, Voegelin asks us to acknowledge that the key aspect that all Men have in common is their openness to the Divine Ground of Man’s existence. This is the human aspect we usually call “soul” (“Geist”). In the classical sense of the word, the soul is what all Men have in common (“das allen Menschen Gemeinsame”). Heraclitus called Man’s common denominator the xynon, which is, according to the Greek philosopher, the essential principle of order in the universe and as such the blueprint for the structure of civic law and moral custom. The blueprint can only be discovered and implemented when Man, through his soul, is capable of participating in the Divine ground of Being (“das Göttliche”) and become God’s image (the “imago dei”), which Voegelin defined as Man’s destination (“Bestimmung”).
Estrangement from the soul
But although Man is a Spiritual Being, he can drift away from and abandon his soul. This alienation or estrangement from the soul (“Entfremdung vom Geist”) means not only the closing off of the ability and possibility to participate in the Divine, but also the engendering of the active and sometimes passionate revolt against it. It is often difficult to distinguish what comes first, the closing off or the revolt, but practically always they go hand in hand and reinforce each other. The interesting point in Voegelin’s words is that they can only become meaningful for those of us who are still “soul-connected”. Anyone who is critical of or rejects the fact that the key aspect that he/she shares with all Men is one’s soul is already beyond the pale of “das allen Menschen Gemeinsame”. Such people will be incapable of following, let alone accepting or acknowledging, Voegelin’s line of reasoning.
Idiotes
By living life “in the soul” (“im Geist”), human existence becomes existence in community. In the openness toward the xynon grows the public sphere (“die Öffentlichkeit”) of society. Whoever closes off the xynon or revolts against it, reduces himself to the soulless private individual (“Privatmann”) whom Heraclitus called “idiotes”. Every day we can witness how the “idiotes”, individuals who became alienated from their souls, work themselves up to socially dominant figures. The problem is that for the “idiotes” the public sphere of the community is no longer characterized by the soul, but by the alienation from it. The socially dominant “idiotes” thus disturbs the natural relationship between the entire community and the principle of order in the universe, the Logos, the Divine Ground of Man’s existence. Yet, such “idiotes” will standardly cloak their alienation from their souls and the effect it has on society in narratives and theories that redefine the illness and the destruction they cause as the patients’ epic and heroic struggle with reality, a struggle that is fought for the benefit and glory of his or her people, if not of mankind.
The Soul is the crux of the matter
Between the extremes of, on the one hand, the public sphere that is infused by the communal xynon when, through their souls, people live in open contact with their Divine Ground, and, on the other hand, the community that, due to the radical individuation or enforced collectivisation of its members, suffers from a fractured xynon, lie the various concrete examples of communities that exist in the tension between soul and alienation. It is thus that the health or illness of each society can be established by assessing its concrete form of the public sphere. Since the soul or pneuma is the crux in this matter, a society’s illness is essentially of a pneumapathological nature, wherefore it cannot be corrected by taking action in the realm of politics, but only by overcoming the alienation and pursuing the restoration of the Soul of Man. This is the pursuit that the Founders of the united States of America had in mind when they defined the Pursuit of Happiness as one of the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator. The degree to which this and other unalienable rights, such as Life and Liberty, are respected or suppressed in the public sphere is the best indicator of a society’s health or illness. Just in case you decide to make this assessment, it’s not the “standard of living” that you should measure, but the standard of “living life in the Soul”.
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[i] 1966 “Die deutsche Universitaet und die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft.” In Die Deutsche Universitaetim Dritten Reich. Munich: Piper. pp. 241 -82.(Reprinted as “Universitaet und Oeffentlichkeit: Zur Pneumopathologia der Gesellschaft.” Wort und Wahrheit. XXI, 8/9, pp. 497 – 518.)
