On November 6, 2026, our retreat on the philosophy of belonging concluded with a lecture from Dr. James Greenaway (Saint Mary’s University) on the mythic dimension of belonging. Any theory of existence depends upon the deep and fecund symbolic imagination of its recipient, a well-spring of inherited mythic identity that draws persons together and bequeathes a sense of belonging in the cosmos.
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Transcript
The theme of these lectures, I mentioned to you the first time I spoke, was being at home in the cosmos — to try to give that nebulous, ambiguous phrase some meaning, to give it some realistic traction. In the first lecture, if you remember, I was speaking about belonging as foundational, in the sense that we don’t often notice our foundations: we build upon them; we don’t often have to pay attention to them until there is some kind of slippage. I also wanted to talk about belonging, back then, as primordial. I wanted to open up this sense that we are always living within a whole, a totality, an ordered totality — it’s a cosmos, of lasting and passing. This is a phrase I’ve been using throughout, to show that what we live within is given, but it doesn’t explain why it’s given, or how it’s given. And we live within it, and as part of it, we live and die within mystery. We live and we die within mystery. We don’t often notice that, either. We don’t often pay much attention to that, either.
And in that first lecture I also spoke about belonging as sacred. We may well take things for granted; but we know that those we love, our callings, our vocations, our homes, are of the highest value to us — a value beyond any sort of price. And so the only word we are left with to describe that is sacred. They bear the quality of something of absolute value.
Yesterday, in the second lecture, I wanted to speak about belonging in a practical way, so I chose education, something I think we all know quite a lot about. And the point was: we put wisdom first when we put persons first. There is a priority on the person, and there’s nothing theoretical about this. There’s nothing theoretical — we must do this; we don’t have any option except to do this, if we want our work to be something meaningful.
And so today I’m going to speak about belonging as myth — as mythos. Now, if I say, “Well, belonging is a myth,” you might think, “What? Have you just been lying to us?” So I’m going to avail myself of the older term, mythos, to try to obviate some of those difficulties. The title, “Belonging as Mythos,” proposes that belonging is mythical. But let me clarify what I mean by the mythical character of belonging. It may not be necessary to say this to a group of Valor educators, but I’m going to say it anyway. The term myth is not intended in the familiar, usual, contemporary, pejorative sense of something contrived or misleading, something in need of being surpassed. That is not what’s meant — “Oh yeah, it’s just a myth; it’s just nonsense; forget about it.” That is not what we mean by myth, and I think you all know that. Mythos means something else. It is intended in the technical sense of a tale or a story that communicates the drama of existing in the cosmos — an order of reality.
And I’m going to stay close to the analysis of the twentieth-century philosopher of history Eric Voegelin, and in particular to his analysis of myth in Plato’s Timaeus. So this lecture is going to aim for two things. The first is to give an account of Voegelin’s philosophy of myth, based on his reading of the Timaeus. And secondly, to demonstrate that a philosophy of belonging must comprise a mythos of belonging in addition to a theory of belonging. That is, a theory of belonging must be undergirded, motivated, contextualized, and rectified by a myth, or mythos, of belonging that makes claims upon the heart, even as a theory of belonging makes claims upon the intellect. A philosophy of belonging, if it is to be of any use at all, must reconcile mind and heart, to bring the belonging person into greater communion with one’s own self as well as into greater communion with the other.
So I’m going to begin — and this is the more academic part of the talk. Since we are in pursuit of the mythical aspect of belonging, our first task should be to consider what myth is. In his discussion of the Timaeus, Eric Voegelin presents a meditation on the nature and function of myth that I think, anyway, proves helpful. His discussion requires a meditation on myth because he identifies the main theme of the Timaeus as the attempt to establish the model of order in the cosmos. So the cosmos is an order — but what is that order? How can we establish a model of order in the cosmos? For Plato, such a cosmic model can be furnished by paying attention to the model of order of the soul: the order of the soul approximates, in some strange way, to the order of the cosmos. Remember what we’ve already spoken about — maybe it’s something to hold on to — that the person is a kind of hub of the fourfold cosmos, of the fourfold fields of reality that we’re in relation to. We’re like the hub, with the spokes.
The Timaeus, as a dialogue, is an exploration of why this expansion of the order of the soul to the order of the cosmos is what Plato calls “a likely story.” So Plato isn’t saying, “This is the story, this is the definitive truth.” That’s not the business Plato is in; he’s not trying to sell you a bill of goods. He says it might be something like this. Remember, philosophy rests upon what Xenophanes called a kind of “seemliness” — a reverberation, a resonance, a movement in the soul. So the role of symbol and myth becomes crucial. And in the case of the Timaeus, we have the philosopher’s myth, which functions as the likely tale.
So, early on in the Timaeus, Plato tells us a story — everybody loves a good story. We usually refer to it as the Egyptian tale, right at the beginning of the Timaeus. And Voegelin presents the Egyptian tale as the means by which Plato can trace the relationship between consciousness and its own psychic depth, the interiority of the soul and its own psychic depth. The figurative model here is that consciousness has a threshold level, below which is the metaphorical region of what we now refer to as the unconscious — a depth out of which images and emotions sometimes arrive at that threshold. It’s kind of like a dream. Here’s the threshold of consciousness; you’re asleep, not thinking of anything; and then you start to dream, and all of this stuff that’s swirling around in what we call the subconscious, or maybe the unconscious — I’m not a psychologist, I don’t know what the best word is — sometimes causes an eruption. These things arrive on the threshold of consciousness, and you start to have these crazy dreams. Sometimes you can’t remember the images in the dreams: you wake up and think, “Oh my goodness, what was that?” You’re left with the feeling, but the image drops away. Sometimes you hold on to it. But the point is that something seems to have arrived. And for Plato, it’s as if there is this psychic depth: the soul has a depth, and a threshold — a surface — and that surface is the conscious self, the intentional self. But there’s this vastness. So myth is a narrative that imaginatively puts these depth-expressions into a more or less intelligible order, even if its meaning remains polyvalent — many different meanings — or even just ambiguous, where I don’t know what the meaning is; they just sort of arrive.
Plato has the Egyptian tale recounted by one of the characters, Critias — Critias the Younger — a tale that had been forgotten but, once remembered, could be recounted. Critias says — and this is a quotation:
Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfather Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poem. And Dropides told the story to Critias, my grandfather, Critias the Elder, who remembered and repeated it to us.
Now, you don’t need to remember the names. But something has been remembered, and told, and has come down through the generations, from grandfather to grandson, who is now relating it to Socrates. The Egyptian tale itself is not one I’m going to recount in any detail; but suffice to say that it was among the priests of Egypt that records of world-significant events were kept. Because of the unique geographical position of Egypt, according to the myth, Egypt was not susceptible to natural calamities such as floods and earthquakes; and subsequently, according to Plato’s mythic account, the Egyptian people have a longer memory than all others. All others have been rocked by floods and earthquakes, and lost their deep memory; but Egypt was not, and it can remember things about the nations that the nations themselves can’t remember. The Athenian people are described as babies in comparison to the old, venerable memory of the Egyptians. And the story involves the race of ancient Athenians — whom the current Athenians have no memory of — standing firm against the aggression of the world-dominating people of Atlantis. The myth of Atlantis comes from this part of the Timaeus. It was the ancient Athenians, whom current Athenians don’t remember, who saved the world; they defeated the people of Atlantis. And the memory of this great Athenian victory was lost among the Athenians, who were soon devastated, along with Atlantis.
So Voegelin, writing about this, has two things he wants to say. The first is about the mythic depth of the psyche, or the soul. The transmission of the Egyptian tale, he says, symbolizes the dimension of the unconscious in depth, by tracing the myth through the levels of the collective soul of the people — here, representatively, Solon, the old Critias, the younger Critias, and Socrates, the collective soul of the Athenian people — and of the generic soul of mankind — this is the old Athens, and this is Egypt, on behalf of humanity — into the primordial life of the cosmos, from whose travail springs man. And what he’s referring to here is the level of the gods. So you have a story that has all of these different dimensions; it penetrates all the way down. This sequence of levels — from its present among the interlocutors, to humanity in its own beginning days, to the divine mystery of the origins of the world — is not only traced in the symbolic depth of the psyche, but also serves to contextualize the personal predicament of the philosopher and the political predicament of Athens as always nested within the cosmic process of lasting and passing.
The myth is “a true story” — I have this in quotation marks; this is Plato’s term for what a myth is. It is a true story, not in a historiographic sense, but in the sense of communicating deep truths drawn from the Egypt of the soul — this depth, this remembering, by the process of anamnesis. Anamnesis: it’s the Greek term for a recovery from some kind of depth; it’s a kind of remembering.
Secondly, Voegelin presents another level of meaning, which features Plato’s mature philosophy of the soul. In drawing out the consequences of modeling cosmic order, a philosophy of the soul, with its symbolic depth, becomes in essence a philosophy of myth. Truth expressed in the mode of myth addresses the problem of the bond and order of the cosmos more adequately than theory, because the cosmological communion of the whole of reality is not something that can be verified by the methods of science, or indeed by common sense. But the Egyptian tale presents the truth of myth as surfacing into consciousness from the depth beneath consciousness — think of a submarine that surfaces (in fact, that’s not really going to work too well, but for now, hold on to it). Its recovery from the depth is the Platonic work of memory. The depth that lies below consciousness is where images and their feelings derive. Just as in dreams, the vitality of images and feelings evokes expression, sifting above a threshold into consciousness. Myth results from such a movement within the psychic depth. Indeed, the very existence of myth bears testimony to the existence of a depth. The existence of myth, writes Voegelin, implies the recognition that the conscious subject occupies [this is intentionality] only a small area of the soul. Beyond this intentional area extends the reality of the soul, vast and darkening in depth, whose movements reach into the small area that is organized as the conscious subject.
So Voegelin’s reading of Plato in the Timaeus is that everything I call “me” — all my plans and thoughts, everything that’s going on with me — the depth is a kind of opening into an abyss. The soul has this limitless depth to it. And there’s a kinesis; the thing is moving in there. And every once in a while something ruffles the surface — and that’s what a symbol is. It’s a rich image; it’s feeling-laden; it announces itself. Such movements from the psychic depth are forces that precede the, quote, “universe of empirical knowledge constituted by consciousness in attention to its objects.” There’s something of Merleau-Ponty’s “first-order expression” here as well — just a connection. Figuratively, conscious intentionality functions on the surface, atop a depth whose boundless fecundity correlates with the depths of the cosmos itself, and from which there can come movements that occasionally come to conscious attention and urge toward conscious expression. The depth of the soul is mythically consonant with the boundlessness of the cosmos, which holds and sustains it, because beneath consciousness the soul is constituted by its own boundless movements, its own kinesis. Out of the depth, such movements arrive on the border of consciousness as image-rich and feeling-laden symbols. These are the fruit of its symbolic openness toward the surging depth of the cosmos.
So I suggest, effectively, that we’re dealing with the theme of belonging. The soul is constituted by, or exists from, a depth, symbolized as present beneath the surface of consciousness and prior to the operations of intentionality. And the movements of the depth that urge toward expression across the threshold of consciousness, as symbols, remind the subject that he or she already exists from a depth that is not of their own making. But in myth, where the soul dynamically responds to the welling up of such symbols — well, that’s exactly where the existence-toward happens. We try to make sense of it; that’s the story, that’s the narration. Arranging such symbols into a narrative form, the myth is expressive of how a soul dynamically exists toward the psychic, cosmic mystery of being that it is already constituted by — attempting to make sense of its unsettling and unpredictable eruption into consciousness.
Now, I’m going to say more about the hermeneutic of belonging — existence-from and existence-toward — in light of the mythic depth, in a few moments. And I’m going to suggest that that hermeneutic we’ve been using might be in need of an update. On the depth, the depth below the surface: my recently deceased colleague and dear friend Glenn Hughes wrote that symbols, or complexes of symbols — and this is a quotation — “well up from our rootedness in the cosmos. Images infused with and haunted by deep emotions, these symbols are retained and accumulated and preserved and venerated when they are convincing in their expression about what it means to exist in the cosmic process.” I’ll give another quotation, slightly longer; I think it’s magnificent. Glenn Hughes continues:
The earliest symbols of song, dance, and picture eventually became elaborate tales. And the tales were gathered so as to construct inspiring and comforting shelters of culture. They satisfied the felt understanding as to what this awesome, terrifying, joyful, sorrowful journey of participating in the cosmos appeared to be about. To be human is to have a story that is part of the cosmic story. And it is inconceivable to curious and worshiping humans that the cosmos would not reveal its own tale. Thus certain symbols and tales were embraced as the essential cosmos-revealed and cosmos-interpreting myths.
My friend Glenn Hughes was always very expressive. Here’s Eric Voegelin saying the same thing, but much more clipped: “The myth authenticates its truth.” Myth authenticates its truth. He means that because the forces that animate the imagery of truth are, at the same time, the subject matter of the myth, a myth can never be untrue. Some subtlety is needed here, and we’ll get to that in a moment; but myth is its own subject matter. “In general,” writes Voegelin, “myth would not exist unless it had its experiential basis in the movements of the soul that it symbolizes.” And he writes that the movements of the depth are like ocean currents. They’re like ocean currents. You look at the sea: it could be turbulent or calm — that’s the surface, choppy or calm, whatever. But you know that beneath the sea there are these long, steady currents, always in movement, always, always in movement. There’s that deep movement beneath the surface of things. So, for Voegelin, these movements of the depth “reverberate in the conscious subject without becoming objects for it.” He goes on: “Hence the symbols of the myth, in which the reverberations are expressed, can be” — think of light refracting through a prism — “the refraction of the unconscious in the medium of objectifying consciousness.” Our consciousness objectifies. We need a percept; once you get an insight, you need a concept; then you need to establish it as a fact. We’re always objectifying — that’s what we do. But is there something which we tend to objectify that isn’t itself an object? That’s what Voegelin is saying here: there is something that holds us, that constitutes us, that wells up in us. I can refer to it as an “it,” but that’s just because all I have here is language — and language objectifies, it turns things into objects. But it’s expressing itself in me. “The symbols, therefore, do not denote an unconscious reality as an object” — even if that’s the language we’re using — “but rather are the unconscious reality itself, broken in the medium of consciousness.”
I told you this was academic. Nearly there. The insight that any symbol can potentially yield can itself be named, or objectified, into a concept. But we must not overlook that what we are objectifying is non-objective reality. To talk about the cosmos, for example, we have to refer to it, put a word on it — but it’s not an object, the way this lectern is an object, or the table is an object. We refer to God as “being.” But there’s an apple, and there’s your typewriter, and there’s your bookcase — and there’s God, and there’s a stapler. Wait, hang on — what? I’ve just listed some objects, some beings. God is not just a being among beings; God is the condition of any being. But still, language has to have something; we have to put a name on it. This is why Pseudo-Dionysius referred to God as “the darkness beyond the intellect” — the whole apophatic tradition. By way of symbols, we are objectifying that within which we exist and of which we are part. The cosmos is not a thing — this is what I’ve been saying — even if we put a name on it, or speak of it. But it is present in persons, and persons are present in it.
I don’t know if this is at all helpful. Another pre-Socratic philosopher: I’ve mentioned Parmenides, we’ve mentioned Xenophanes — well, here’s Heraclitus. I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember the exact words, but he says that if you tried to explore the limits of your own soul, you could never do it, because it has a logos that is so deep that there is no end of it. What’s evoked here is a sense in which your soul is limitless, and sort of empties out into the abyss of the cosmos itself. So remember what Plato is doing here: he’s trying to get a model of the cosmos by thinking about the model of the soul — because it is the soul that has this depth that opens out into the abyss. And there’s kinesis, there’s movement; and sometimes that depth, whatever it is, that psychic-cosmic depth, troubles the surface of consciousness. And that’s where symbols come from. That’s where these deep myths come from.
A philosophy of the soul has subtly become a philosophy of myth. And a philosophy of myth allows that, while a myth can never be untrue in itself, Voegelin says, it can become untrue historically. So here’s the subtlety I referred to. The truth of myth cannot be abolished, because symbols are permanently emergent into consciousness. However, since the expression of truth depends upon the quality of symbols, which may or may not be adequate to the person or the people in search of the truth, particular myths may lose their authority. Better said: while myths as symbolic expressions come and go, the truth of myth abides. This evokes what we were talking about earlier — renovation as opposed to innovation. You don’t just toss out the old myths. We read the old myths, don’t we? Because there is a truth of myth that is present and available, even if there are other myths. For us, the Enuma Elish of the Babylonians is no longer authoritative in terms of how we order our society — but it’s still worth reading, because there is a mythic truth available, and it has something to do with the depth of the cosmos and the human relationship to the cosmos. But the symbols themselves are no longer adequate for us; they’re no longer normative for us. Thus, the truth of the myth, as distinct from its various expressions, is not the possession of any person or people or time or place. Myth is possessed of the symbolic depth in between the abyss of the cosmos and the creativity of a person’s consciousness — even though its expression in particular symbols is subject to degradation in particular history. As such, the truth of myth cannot be supplanted by the fruits of conscious intentionality, such as — I don’t know — the scientific method, or instrumental reason, or positivism. All of these things are useful and important, and championed by modernity; but they’re not substitutes for myth. They’re not dealing with the depth issues.
So, what is myth? A symbolically adequate myth is the story of the truth of existence, whose authority seems to be vested in its symbols, as expressed as images and emotions in consciousness, but emergent as movements of psychic-cosmic depth beneath consciousness. Mythic meaning exercises an authority on us in molding our mood, or disposition. Do you ever wake up and your dream has left you in a funny mood, and you can’t even really remember why? Sometimes you can — “oh, it’s just a stupid dream” — but still, it’s bothered you. So symbols dispose you in a certain way; they form your mood. Anybody who’s read Heidegger knows the territory we could go into here. Myth, and religion, and politics provide the images and emotions that constitute one’s disposition, and provide the psychic data — again, those images and emotions — that can ground and justify conviction. Think about how people think about politics. Why could it become something like a religious substitute? Why do we have these convictions that are basically religious for us — we bind ourselves to them, we stake out our position: I am a man of the left; I am a man of the right? If politics really is meant just to be the reconciliation of means and ends, then what on earth is this? So there must be something of a mythos to political reality, to political existence, just as there obviously is to religious existence. De profundis — from the depths — symbolic images cry out to us, and to these we respond with all of our being. If the choice to give our lives to some person or task, or to commit to a way of life, is vindicated by the images and feelings that already symbolically constitute us through mood and disposition, then our conscience is at ease. We are at home with ourselves, with others, and with the world. And I suggest that now we’re in the domain of belonging. We belong in the cosmos — that is, we belong to others, to the divine mystery, to the astrophysical process that we call the universe, and, crucially, to ourselves.
So now, based on Plato’s Timaeus and Voegelin’s reading of it and his philosophy of myth, let’s bring this back into a philosophy of belonging. The Timaeus works as a philosophy of myth, and Voegelin is surely correct when he notes that a philosophy of myth necessarily extends itself to a mythos of the soul. Soul and cosmos seem to be functionally cognate terms for Plato and Voegelin — but to these we now suggest adding the term belonging. We’re essentially asking whether belonging is also a function of the psychic-cosmic myth. We are asking whether a philosophy of belonging articulates a philosophy of myth. Because if we unfold the meaningful experiences that we name as belonging, symbolized in image and affect, are we engaging in a philosophy of myth? When a person tells their story — “Who are you?” — when they give the story of their life, they don’t give a bullet-pointed list. “Yeah, I thought you’d ask that; I printed this up for you — bullet points.” Nobody does that. One’s times, one’s places, one’s achievements and failures, one’s family, one’s neighbors and friends: when we recount these, we say, “This is who I am.” Are we engaging in myth? Is that a mythos? “I’m telling you my story.” It seems to me the answer is yes.
So, while the Timaeus positions soul and cosmos in a necessary relation to each other, belonging, we recall, is the completion of relation, the consummation of relation. The soul and the cosmos are symbols within the emergent field of mythic symbolization, and it follows that between them lies the possibility of belonging — a possibility that is also mythic. Can a soul be at home in the cosmos? Can a soul be lost in the cosmos? The Timaeus does not raise these questions, but the existential predicament of the person certainly symbolizes them, in images and feelings of anxiety, of penitence, gratitude, and joy, and so on. Belonging is a tension of possibility that pertains to the relation between the person and the cosmos, the truth of which is no less concrete for its being symbolic. Indeed, the truth of belonging calls for expression in ever more adequate symbolization — which means that, instead of talking about the soul in the Platonic sense, let us employ the more appropriate symbol for our times: the person. The relationship between the person and the cosmos is narrated as a mythos of belonging, telling the tale of a life whose meaning would convey a symbolic array of affect and image. Such an array marks the range of belonging, from the mythic pole of completion, perfection, consummation, to the pole of alienation — that is, belonging and not-belonging, as opposed to unbelonging. A philosophy of belonging extends to a mythos of person, cosmos, and the belonging that would perfect the drama of their relation. A philosophy of belonging blends not only with a philosophy of myth, but essentially becomes a philosophy of the person too.
In the fullness of belonging’s intelligibility — what can we understand? what is there to be understood about belonging? — there is theory, and there is myth. And it is myth that sets the context for theory, setting the priority of life over concepts and hypotheses. Both the theory and the myth of belonging are cooperative with each other. One might say that an operative theory conceptually fixes the terms and relations, just as we have in science — that’s what theory does; it fixes the terms and relations; it’s how we understand things in their own terms — while myth is operative in evoking the story of belonging within a cosmos of lasting and passing, through the relevant feelings and images. For example, when we focus upon our belonging to another person, there is always a reaching, an eros, for the one who has come to constitute us in terms of meaning, value, and purpose. Theoretically, we can use the terms and relations I’ve already been working with — existence-from and existence-toward — and theoretically they are very useful: we exist from the one who constitutes us, and if we also exist toward the one who constitutes us, in appropriate degrees of love, we belong. We’ve talked about it. Such is the hermeneutical, or phenomenological, theory of belonging. It bears upon an intellectual grasp of existence, bearing these two structural directions simultaneously and conceptualized as a complete relation. It addresses the question of what belonging is, and provides a theoretical answer. But the question of how one exists in relation to anyone or anything finds its answer not in definitions or in theory, but in the personalized living-out of belonging — the drama of how any relation finds its consummation in communion.
Belonging, then, includes mythic intelligibility, because in narrating the adventure of one’s life, it necessarily invokes the total cosmic field of reality — not only as the permanent backdrop to all our individual relations, but as an abiding dimension of mystery that haunts the meaning of belonging in general. In belonging to the other — whoever that other may be: a spouse, a child, or even a place or a time, a friend — we exist from and exist toward them. But the other is felt, or imagined, before he, she, or it is known. In fact, the other continues to be felt even as we are coming to know, and after we have come to know them. You feel like you have emotions about people; you get a sense of them. And that might change all the time, even as you start to collect the data points. Indeed, the image of the other — perhaps the beloved — is apprehended by feelings before anything has been intelligently grasped. Here again is the flow of mood, or disposition, prior to intentionality. It discloses both the symbolic significance of the other to me, and who I am in relation to the other. The other is, effectively, a symbol before he, she, or it can ever become an object of cognition. Even as our belonging develops, and as our knowledge of the other builds, image and affect remain present and evocative in the flow of mood. These affects and images are pre-cognitional and extra-cognitional; they accompany cognition, providing the symbolic architecture that remains evocative in the process of coming to know, and to value, and to act. In a prior sense, they function as a pre-patterning of our attention.
So let’s revisit a philosophy of belonging in light of a mythos of belonging. With this sense of a mythic — a psychic-cosmic — depth, a kinesis below the threshold of consciousness, the tilt of disposition and mood is consciously caught, sometimes, by symbols. Let us bring this back to the book that we’ve been discussing together, and see what a mythos of belonging does to a philosophy of belonging. When I was writing the book, I was concerned to grasp the intelligibility of belonging — what is there to be understood that a feeling of belonging communicates. As you can see, the book contains some phenomenology, some metaphysics, some epistemology, even some political and theological thought. That is, it is primarily a work of theory, where theory seeks to understand things on their own terms, according to their own natures and frequencies. But the book also contains some mythos, doesn’t it? It is this mythic dimension of our belonging that I think needs to be raised to view, to be attended to.
So, briefly, I want to return to the preliminary hermeneutic introduced in the book — existence-from and existence-toward — and think about these more in a mythic sense. So, existence-from. The term “the other,” which we use, is a kind of ubiquitous term, a placeholder for any other person, place, time, object, or event that is relevant. It is in belonging with the other that the person has, at least in part, become who they are. Concretely, the person exists from the other. The other is constitutively what, or who, already inhabits us in a symbolic sense, dwelling within us, predisposing our attention. The other is the one whose symbolic indwelling provides a weighting, or a significance, in advance, to the things or qualities we come to notice as we go about our lives, as we handle different events and situations. For example, to have a friend is to find oneself lovingly oriented toward those memories, those images, perhaps those words and songs, and those places and times, with which the friendship is already accented with significance. Where before I would not have paid any attention to a particular type of music — let’s say Bossa Nova — I would never have paid any attention to it; I notice it now because Bossa Nova is the music that lightens the friend’s demeanor. Bossa Nova has become a symbol, saturated with the stuff of friendship, resonating with those images and affects that communicate my particular friend in elemental yet powerful ways. The friend dwells within me, like a spirit within me; I’m constituted by the friend who dwells within. And that means that, in advance of anything, I’m disposed to notice a kind of music if I come across it. I would never have done that before — but the friend dwells within me.
Belonging, we may say, is constitutive, because it amounts to the meaning of the other as integral to who a person finds himself or herself to be. Like an indwelling spirit, this integrality functions as a pre-patterning, or perhaps a molding, of patterns of attention in advance. Belonging, as foundational, frames the subject’s perceptiveness, makes us take particular notice. Friendship, marriage, parenthood, citizenship, and so on can all be described as a kind of luminosity, a kind of spirit that dwells within, that precedes cognitive intentionality — because it seems to have already encompassed intentionality, as both a symbolic patterning of attention and a motivating telos. Belonging is no mere relation.
So what about existence-toward? To belong is constituted by existing from the other; but it is also, dynamically, to exist toward the other, by way of desire, or love, for the good of the other. The symbolic, as feeling, deeply embedded in rich images, is the affective pivot from the constitutive to the intentional and the dynamic. Intentionally, it is the friendship with the other that one’s actions aim at, or the love of the friend that directs and motivates one’s knowing and deciding. In intending the good of the other, one intends the other as the good. The person may attend to manifold goods for the sake of the other, but it is the other who becomes the summative telos, under which all subsidiary goods lay themselves out. In other words, the other becomes worthy of a person’s self-sacrificial intentions and actions. We may say that, on the one hand, belonging is certainly constitutive, because in this case I have become — I am constituted as — a friend of my friend. But on the other hand, belonging is also dynamic, propulsive in the direction of the other as the higher good. The theoretical sense of existence-toward is undergirded by a dynamism that seeks the other as the telos. The person is the good; and I am propulsive in the direction of the good of the person who is the good.
All right, I’ll bring it to a close here. A philosophy of belonging that is commensurate with a philosophy of myth becomes a philosophy of the person. Belonging, no matter how local and familiar, is always cosmic; it bears a cosmic significance. Belonging is implicitly concerned with the mystery that undergirds, sustains, and awaits all persons and things. Such mystery is never adequately symbolized by theory, because theory does not feel or imagine. Theory conceptualizes insight; it verifies its truth by testing the conditions for its truth; theory affirms. Theory is the work of critical thinking. But the person is more than a critical thinker. The person is a moral thinker, a spiritual thinker, a mythic thinker — because each of us is a hub of the fourfold primordial relations that constitute the totality of the cosmic order. We feel them. We imagine them. They resonate within us. Belonging is attention — we talked about this earlier — but belonging is also the story of a life, from beginning to end: a story that is lived and told by the authority of a cosmic process participating in the person. It is a story where meaning is manifest in the face of every person. And myth is the story of belonging.