Eric Voegelin, page 19
REPRESENTATION.
“The form by which a political society gains existence for action in history.” Societies use symbols to represent transcendent truth. This is a process of self-interpretation (NSP, 1). Voegelin classifies three types of representation: “elemental,” “existential,” and “transcendental.”
S
SACRUM IMPERIUM.
A concept from the Middle Ages that derives from the Christian notion of the kingdom of God and evolves into the idea of the Western Christian civilization. Its more literal meaning is “sacred empire.”
SCIENTISM.
An ideology that subordinates the search for truth to scientific method. Interchangeable with positivism.
SECONDARY IDEOLOGIES.
Ideologies like conservatism and traditionalism that are created to preserve the existing order from radical political movements like Jacobinism or Marxism. Voegelin rejects secondary ideologies because they form ideological propositions to preserve truth but in doing so they risk separating symbols from their engendering experiences and they tend to close off the search for truth. David Hume is an example of a secondary ideologue.
SECOND REALITY.
Term used by Voegelin, following Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer, to denote false perceptions of the human condition. The creation of a second reality is akin to creating an “imaginary reality” that serves the purpose of screening “the first reality of common experience” from human perception. The creation of a second reality is an act of imagination that deceives the self into perceiving life in a way that creates friction between the self and first reality. This friction is the impetus for the revolt against reality that characterizes modern ideological movements.
SELF-INTERPRETATION.
The self-illumination of a society. Voegelin notes that from within particular societies “elaborate symbolism” is used to express the meaning of that society, including its place in history and in the larger reality (cosmos).
SOTERIOLOGICAL SYMBOLS.
Symbols created to express the experience of being moved by a personal god who exists in the human soul.
SPENGLER, TOYNBEE, JASPERS, HEGEL.
Intellectuals who wrote philosophies of history. Voegelin’s work is contrasted to theirs because it does not claim to have discovered the ultimate meaning of history.
SPOUDAIOS.
Aristotle’s term for the mature man.
SUMMUM BONUM.
The greatest or highest good; the transcendent standard of justice and the good. Equivalent to Agathon.
T
THEOGONIC PROCESS.
Term Voegelin borrows from Schelling to describe the “movement of religious sentiment” in profane history.
THEOPHANY.
Movement toward the divine that results from attunement. Distinguished from egophany, which is movement away from the divine, a revolt from transcendence.
TRANSCENDENT.
The universal; the ground of being; the Beyond.
TRANSCENDENTAL REPRESENTATION.
Representation of transcendent truth. Voegelin argues that in addition to existential representation societies represent transcendent truth. “By transcendental representation I meant the symbolization of the governmental function as representative of divine order in the cosmos.” In the modern age, the “god whom the government represents has been replaced by an ideology of history that now the government represents in its revolutionary capacity” (AR, 65).
TRANSPARENT.
Voegelin’s term for language symbols that have not lost their original meaning because they remain attached to their engendering experiences and thus remain a living force in social and political existence.
TRANSPOSITION.
Voegelin uses this concept to explain how eighteenth-century thinkers like Turgot transpose the Christian idea of mankind. “Turgot’s evocation of the mass totale transposes the Christian idea of mankind into the utilitarian key.” The Christian idea of mankind is that a universal community exists because each human being possesses within the Spirit the divine spark. This part of human nature allows individuals to participate in transcendental reality and thus experience homonoia. “This bond of the spirit is timeless” (FER, 96). But with Turgot and other modern thinkers, the masses are disconnected from the transcendent. The transposition includes the idea that “intramundane mankind as a whole is the new realissimum” and that the intellectual or political leaders of the masse totale are god-men (FER, 98). Comte, for example, considers himself both the new Messiah and the Pope.
TRUTH OF EXISTENCE.
Voegelir’s term for the “object” of the philosopher’s quest.
X
XYNON.
The common reality that humans experience (Heraclitus). The common ground to which philosophers, poets, and prophets refer to convey the truth of reality.
Z
ZETEMA.
The intellectual and existential search for truth.
ZETESIS.
The search for the truth of existence that is engendered by the transcendent pull (helkein).
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NOTES
Introduction
1. Voegelin’s published and unpublished works are being published jointly by Louisiana State University Press and the University of Missouri Press in thirty-four volumes.
2. The following discussion of Voegelin’s obscurity relies on Ellis Sandoz’s introduction to Eric Voegelin’s Significance for the Modern Mind (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1991). See especially 1–7.
3. A notable exception is Ellis Sandoz, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under Voegelin. Sandoz is one of the leading commentators on Voegelin’s work and is on the editorial board of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He is also the series editor for the recently published History of Political Ideas. Voegelin cultivated students throughout his professional career, especially while professor and director of the Institute for Political Science, a position at the University of Munich. For Voegelin’s reasons for leaving the U.S. and accepting a position in Germany, as well as his view of students in both the U.S. and Europe, see AR, 91–92.
4. For a discussion of the New York Times and Voegelin’s work see George A. Panichas, “The New York Times and Eric Voegelin,” Modern Age 29 (spring 1985): 98–103.
5. See New York Times 23 January 1985, 8(B).
6. Among the enumerated convictions were “[t]hat God’s order in man’s world includes a moral code, based upon man’s unchanging nature and not subject to man’s repeal, suspension or amendment.” The article also cited Supreme Court Justice Douglas’s statement from Zorach v. Clauson (1952) that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” and added that “American history cannot be understood or correct policy formed except with recognition of that fact.” Based on this understanding of American political institutions Time asserted that “equality before the law is based on each man’s dignity in God’s sight; that political liberty is based on the soul’s freedom to accept or reject the good.…” The article suggested that rights must be protected but that the state has an obligation “to protect its authority.” In support of this idea, Justice Jackson’s comment that the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact was quoted. Voegelin quotes the very same comment in The New Science of Politics and in his essay “Democracy in the New Europe” in PE 1953–1965, 59. The final noteworthy conviction was “[t]hat all attempts, revolutionary or reformist, of progress based on the idea that man is perfectible, will lead to stagnation at best and calamity at worst.” “Journalism and Joachim’s Children,” Time, 9 March 1953, 57–61.
7. For a lucid discussion of gnosticism and its political implications, see Voegelin, “Gnostic Politics,” in PE 1940–1952, 223–240.
8. Time, 30 March 1953, 6. A gentleman from Minor, North Dakota, wrote “Garbled nonsense.… This Voegelin is just another egghead.…” Another reader took offense at Time’s disparaging portrayal of Comte and stated, “Come on, Time, dig the cultural concept and a little bit of the scientific method if you want to play in the intellectual big leagues. You and Reinhold Niebuhr are sticking your heads into the same sandpile and waving your tailfeathers while the world goes by.” Time, 23 March 1953, 10.
9. Time, 23 March 1953, 10; 30 March 1953, 4.
10. He explained in AR: “I have in my files documents labeling me a communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old Liberal, a new Liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was strongly influenced by Huey Long” (46).
11. The attempt to place Voegelin in a particular ideological or political category continues to be evident in recent reviews of his works and in reviews of secondary literature on Voegelin. See, for example, Theodore Weber’s review of Eric Voegelin and the Good Society, by John J. Ranieri, in Theological Studies 58 (June 1997): 379–380.
12. George H. Nash considers The New Science of Politics to be “one of the most important books by postwar intellectuals of the Right.” See Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 42.
13. When Voegelin refers to experience, he means something specific. By experience he means the individual’s attunement to the ground of being.
14. Jürgen Gebhardt, Epilogue to In Search of Order (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 131.
15. The term “modern” as it is used by Voegelin and other critics of modernity does not mean simply recent or contemporary. It is a concept with ideological content. As Russell Kirk explains, it means “preference for change over permanence; exaltation of the present era over all previous epochs; hearty approval of material aggrandizement and relative indifference toward a moral order; positive hostility, often, toward theism.” Russell Kirk, “Obdurate Adversaries of Modernity,” Modern Age 31 (summer/fall 1987): 203.
16. See also Voegelin, “On Readiness to Rational Discussion,” in Freedom and Serfdom: An Anthology of Western Thought, ed., Albert Hunold (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1961): 269–284.
17. See chapter 5 in FER for Voegelin’s use of these terms.
18. What Voegelin means by the modern or Western crisis will be discussed in detail in chapter 2. A valuable source for understanding the Western crisis is the Thirtieth Anniversary Issue of Modern Age, 31 (summer/fall 1987). The theme of the issue is “Essays on the Crisis of Modernity,” and it contains several essays on Voegelin or that relate to his understanding of the Western crisis.
19. The frustration readers experience with Voegelin’s terminology can be minimized by consulting secondary literature on Voegelin. See, for example, Eugene Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981). Webb provides a useful glossary that includes terms commonly found in Voegelin’s writings. This glossary is a starting point for new readers of Voegelin. I have also included a glossary in this book.
20. Gebhardt, Epilogue to In Search of Order, 130.
21. For Voegelin’s misgivings regarding dogma see “Response to Professor Altizer” (PE 1966–1985, 294–295). For his more positive statements about dogma see Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History, 214.
22. Voegelin is not alone in reaching this conclusion. Leo Strauss and Irving Babbitt also identify modern methods of analysis, like positivism, as obstacles to the open search for the truth of existence.
23. Voegelin explains in the context of analyzing Plato’s Republic, “Concerning the content of the Agathon nothing can be said at all.… The transcendence of the Agathon makes immanent propositions concerning its content impossible. The vision of the Agathon does not render a material rule of conduct, but forms the soul through an experience of transcendence” (OH III, 166–167).
24. For a discussion of Voegelin’s analysis of Christianity, see Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History, 211–236; Also Thomas W. Heilke, Eric Voegelin: In Quest of Reality (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 145–177.
Chapter 1
1. For more detailed information on Voegelin’s Austrian experience, see Erika Weinzierl’s “Historical Commentary on the Period” in volume 4 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (The Authoritarian State).
2. Sandoz describes Voegelin’s Ph.D. dissertation: “It dealt with the ontological problem of the difference between constructing social theory on the assumption of reciprocal relations among autonomous individuals or on the assumption of a preexistent spiritual bond among human beings that would be realized in their interpersonal relations, i.e., the difference between Simmel’s individualistic and Spann’s universalistic theories of community.” Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 38.
3. For the intellectual influences at the University of Vienna that were part of Voegelin’s experience as a graduate student and professor in the 1920s, see Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution, 34–47.
4. Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution, 40.
5. For more details on Voegelin’s American experience, see AR, chapter 10, “American Influence,” 28–33. See also Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution, chapter 1.
6. Voegelin provides an extensive critique of Kelsen’s pure theory of law and neo-Kantian methodology in AS, 163–212.
7. For Voegelin’s epistemology, see Charles Warren Burchfield and Patrick Neal Fuller, “The Role of Faith and Love in Voegelin’s Mystical Epistemology,” Humanitas IX, no. 1 (1996): 35–51.
8. A brief representation of Voegelin’s analysis of the race problem is found in “The Growth of the Race Idea,” (PE 1940–1952, 27–61).
9. For a more detailed description of Voegelin’s escape from Austria, see Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundation of Modern Political Science (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1999): 1–32.
10. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Manfred Henningsen, vol. 5, Modernity Without Restraint (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 1. Voegelin used Thomas Mann as an example of the intellectual failure to critically and spiritually understand the spiritual emptiness of intellectuals in Germany. See “The German University and German Society,” (PE 1966–1985, 4–5).
11. Ellis Sandoz, “Truth and the Experience of Epoch in History: A Voegelinian Perspective,” Modern Age 38 (fall 1995): 9.
12. Critics of Voegelin, like David Walsh, consider this aspect of his work to be questionable and Voegelin’s argument to be overstated. Walsh attributes Voegelin’s depreciation of liberalism to his overstatement of the commonality between liberalism and totalitarianism. Voegelin’s argument can be seen as one reason why political and intellectual conservatives find his work appealing. The rise of the welfare state has been condemned by conservatives because it results in the destruction of private and sectional groups and associations that are considered vital to liberty and community. They have also seen the rise of big government as a movement toward totalitarianism. See, for example, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom or Nisbet’s The Quest for Community. What may be at the bottom of Walsh’s criticisms of Voegelin is ultimately a significantly different political intuition.
13. Sandoz, “Truth and the Experience of Epoch in History: A Voegelinian Perspective,” 11.
14. These lectures have been published as volume 31 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Hitler and the Germans) (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
15. Readers who tend to be more interested in history and politics may find works like Hitler and the Germans to be more interesting than Voegelin’s later work on the philosophy of consciousness.
16. See, for example, the essays in volume 12 (Published Essays 1966–1985) of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.
17. Robert Heilman, The Professor and the Profession (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 85–102.
18. George A. Panichas, “The New York Times and Eric Voegelin,” Modem Age 29 (spring 1985): 103.
19. Lewis P. Simpson, “Voegelin and the Story of the Clerks,” in Eric Voegelin’s Significance for the Modern Mind, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 71.
20. Gerhart Niemeyer, “Greatness in Political Science: Eric Voegelin (1901–1985),” Modem Age 29 (spring 1985): 109.
21. Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution, 88.
22. See James W. Tuttleton, “T. S. Eliot and the Crisis of the Modern,” Modem Age 31 (summer/fall 1987): 275–283.
23. One of the more interesting comparisons of Voegelin and another thinker on the Western crisis is provided by Russell Nieli’s essay, “The Cry Against Nineveh: Whittaker Chambers and Eric Voegelin on the Crisis of Western Modernity,” Modem Age 31 (summer/fall 1987): 267–274.
24. For Voegelin’s analysis of Scotus Erigena see HPI IV (Renaissance and Reformation), 151–157.
Chapter 2
1. Speech by Rosalynn Carter to the National Press Club, 20 June 1978.
2. Examples of editorials reacting to Solzhenitsyn’s speech are reprinted in Ronald Berman, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), 23–29.
