Eric Voegelin’s Search For Order In History, edited by Stephen A. McKnight.
In the spring of 1953, Time magazine published a long review-essay entitled “Journalism and Joachim’s Children.” The book reviewed was The New Science of Politics, written by an Austrian émigré scholar
named Eric Voegelin. Voegelin, the essay claimed, had made a
significant breakthrough in political theory: he had regained
the philosophical perspective on politics and had broken with
the reductionist systems of positivism and progressivism. His
insights into modern totalitarian ideologies as equivalents of
the early Christian heresy of Gnosticism were invaluable, the
essay concluded. Finally, the reviewers declared that in the next
ten years Time would work within the philosophical framework laid down by Voegelin.
Predictably, Time’s enthusiasm
for Eric Voegelin waned under the pressure of omnipresent
liberalism. But Voegelin’s achievement is not so easily
forgotten. Voegelin has continued to write, and his stature as one of this century’s leading philosophers is essentially secured—at least among those who do not worship the Zeitgeist. Literally
dozens of essays have been written on various aspects of his work,
and several conferences have met to discuss issues which he has
raised.
Voegelin [1901–1985] has rightly been
called a “professors’ professor.” He combines an encyclopedic
knowledge of politics, philosophy, religion, history, and
anthropology with a theoretical competence and vocabulary
comparable to that of Whitehead and Polanyi. Add to this erudition
Voegelin’s willingness to revise his ideas according to the
implications of his inquiries, and one has a thinker who is
challenging for even the most knowledgeable reader. In his Preface
to Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order in History, editor Stephen
A. McKnight cites these features of Voegelin’s thought and the fact
that essays on him are scattered as reasons for bringing out a
collection. Though the quality of the essays in McKnight’s
collection is uneven, they do deal with Voegelin’s major ideas. More
importantly, each essay raises respectful but difficult questions
about aspects of Voegelin’s work. Particularly helpful are the
complete bibliographies of works by and about Voegelin.
McKnight’s collection properly
begins with biographical essays which analyze Voegelin’s
philosophical journey. In “Voegelin’s Changing Conception of
History and Consciousness,” William C. Havard describes the
positivistic ideas which Voegelin held as a young professor of law
in Austria. Voegelin’s positivism was shaken when he confronted the
ideas of such scholars as George Santayana and Alfred North
Whitehead. But, as Havard points out, it was
the onslaught of totalitarian ideologies in Europe that brought
Voegelin to see the inadequacy of positivism. His
experience of national socialism taught him that “Europe had no
conceptual tools with which to grasp the horror that was upon her.”
He perceived that ideology either reduced or rebelled against
reality, and sought to impose a “second reality” (as Robert Musil
has called it) upon society.
Stephen McKnight’s essay, “The
Evolution of Voegelin’s Theory of Politics and History,”
continues Havard’s analysis. McKnight shows that by 1944 Voegelin
believed the study of politics in need of “re-theoretization.” The
“second reality” engendered by positivism had made politics a
study of institutions and power structures on the world-immanent
level. Without any reference to transcendent reality, modern
political science studied man’s “behavior” in the manner of the
natural sciences; the soul of man was no longer the focus of
political theory. Philosophy, which Plato had characterized a
the soul’s openness to divine truth, had been abolished by
modernism. McKnight describes Voegelin’s historical
investigations as an attempt to understand man’s experience of
reality in its wholeness.
At this point in his career, as both
Havard and McKnight observe, Voegelin was under contract with a
publisher to write a history of political ideas. In studying
Shelling’s philosophy of myth and revelation, Voegelin saw that
“ideas” had no autonomous existence. As Havard writes: “It
was becoming increasingly clear to him . . . that ideas are not
entities in history; the real entities are societies; which
express their existence in history through an enormously complex
set of symbols.” The articulation of these symbols by which
a society came to understand itself made for that society’s
existence in history.
The third essay in the McKnight collection is a review by Hans Aufricht of The New Science of Politics.
In this book, published in 1952, many of Voegelin’s ideas came
together. The book’s title, as Voegelin explained, meant not that he
was attempting to invent a “new” political science but that
scholars in various fields had broken through the constrictions of
positivism and progressivism and regained a truly scientific and
philosophical perspective. On the basis of those achievements,
Voegelin hoped to restore politics as a science in “search for truth
concerning the nature of the various realms of being.” The first
half of the book examines “existential representation”: the way
a society sees itself as related to transcendent truth through
symbols. The remainder of the book deals with “Gnosticism,” which
Voegelin sees as the essence of modernity. Modern ideology, like
ancient Gnosticism, Voegelin argues, sees the world as evil and
beyond reform. The modern Gnostic seeks the knowledge (“gnosis”)
of the laws of history or nature by which he can reconstitute
society into a heaven on earth, thus “immanentizing the
eschaton.”
Aufricht questions the seemingly
unbridgeable gulf which Voegelin sees between immanence and
transcendence. Aufricht writes that Voegelin “seems to deny man’s
capacity of experiencing God as ‘way, truth, life,’ since he
designates all endeavors in this direction as ‘fallacious
immanentization’ of God.” Though Voegelin’s later writings have
shown that man can experience God in his soul, Aufricht is correct in noting Voegelin’s lack of a sacramental vision of life,
and this criticism will surface again in his treatment of
Christianity. What Aufricht does not touch upon, however, is
Voegelin’s use of the term “Gnostic.” Though useful as a heuristic
device, the term is not wholly satisfactory: the ancient Gnostics
sought to escape the world; the modern Gnostics want to change it. The ancient Gnostics saw nothing in this world and yearned for life in a radically transcendent cosmos.
Because Voegelin believed that ideas
were not primary and that symbols arising in concrete societies
were the true sources of order, he turned toward the study of
consciousness. His multi-volume work, Order and History,
was conceived as an exploration of the modes of consciousness
which occurred as “leaps in being.” The two “leaps” which have had most
impact on Western civilization were the discovery of the mind in
Greece, called “philosophy,” and the experience of the
Israelites as the Chosen People. With his emphasis on
consciousness, Voegelin examined these “leaps” in relation to the
mythological civilizations from which they emerged.
Bernhard W. Anderson’s essay, “Politics and the Transcendent,” is a long and lucid essay on the first volume of Order and History, Israel and Revelation.
Voegelin, Anderson writes, sees the Exodus not simply as a
pragmatic event, but as an “exodus from the cosmological
civilization.” The theophany of the Exodus established the
Israelites as the Chosen People under God, bound by the Covenant to
follow the law and live in righteousness. Voegelin develops this
theme of the “leap” as a new life of personal attunement to the order
of divine being. Anderson questions whether
Voegelin’s philosophy of being as mere “attunement” does full
justice to the Old Testament. “According to Israel’s
witnesses,” Anderson writes, “there is no true being unless it is a
being-in-relationship, and there can be no attunement with God
unless it is manifest in the social sphere of man’s life.”
Anderson also observes Voegelin’s difficulty with the biblical
view of evil as irrational and stemming from the “heart,” because it
poses problems for Voegelin’s philosophical view of man as
rational being.
“Existence in Tension: Man in Search of His Humanity,” by John H. Hallowell, examines The World of the Polis and Plato and Aristotle, the second and third volumes of Order in History. In
these volumes, the Greek “leap in being” is seen to occur when
philosophy arises and supplants myth. Parmenides, in using the
symbol “Being,” broke with the myth. Voegelin, observes Hallowell,
notes that the experience of Being resulted not from
philosophical speculation but from mystical transport in which
the individual soul feels itself participating in divine
reality. Plato denied that philosophy was based on a set of
propositions; it was a way of life, and his dialogue form was the
closest he could come to a mimesis of life. Hallowell, tracing
Voegelin’s careful exposition of Plato and Aristotle, raises some
important questions. Voegelin speaks of myth, philosophy,
revelation, and mysticism as ways men may partially understand
the order of Being, Hallowell notes, but he does not make precise
distinctions among them. Hallowell also raises the question of how
good symbols can be distinguished from those which reflect a
deformation of reality.
Voegelin’s conception of philosophy
is discussed further by James L Wiser’s “Philosophy as Inquiry
and Persuasion.” Like Plato and Aristotle, Voegelin sees
philosophy as a public act in which the philosopher attempts to
persuade men to turn toward the truth. Wiser concludes that Voegelin
has taken some large steps toward the restoration of philosophy in
our time. Wiser sees three of Voegelin’s concepts as particularly
important: the belief in an ontological ground by which the
adequacy of opinions be measured, the universality of symbols
representing man’s primary experiences, and the constancy of
human nature.
“A Diminished Gospel: A Critique of
Voegelin’s Interpretation of Christianity,” by Bruce Douglass,
raises an issue familiar to students of Voegelin. Douglass’
critique, unfortunately, seems to miss some of the central
problems in Voegelin’s handling of Christianity. Douglass, a
Protestant, spends a great deal of space criticizing Voegelin’s
conception of the Reformation. On a more important issue, the
Resurrection, Douglass is too easily satisfied. As Douglass
points out, Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity has been scanty, and
in the fourth volume of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age, is confined
to a small chapter on “Paul’s Vision of the Resurrected.” Voegelin
sees Christianity as the myth about Christ as expounded by St. Paul,
and feels that doctrine is a “fall” from the primary experience
which engenders the symbol of resurrection. In
a desire to align Christianity with his philosophy of myth and
symbols, Voegelin has ignored the centrality of the Incarnation,
and has not understood the efficacy of dogma in Christian life.
Like Hans Aufricht, Douglass believes Voegelin’s preoccupation
with Gnosticism makes him treat God’s sacramental presence as a
form of Gnostic “immanentization.” Douglass does make an
important point in saying that Voegelin does not understand the
essence of the Gospel message as salvation.
McKnight’s collection ends with a
long and intricate discussion by John William Corrington of
Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness. The concepts in The Ecumenic Age, Corrington
argues, show that Voegelin is more and more concerned with the
philosophy of consciousness. Whereas Voegelin placed the center of
man’s humanity in the soul in the earlier volumes of Order and History, he
now sees it as residing in the “consciousness.” Voegelin uses the
Platonic symbol of the Metaxy or In-Between to elaborate his
philosophy of consciousness. Man exists between life and death,
time and timelessness, order and disorder, truth and untruth.
“Though the divine reality is one,” writes Voegelin in The Ecumenic Age, “its
presence is experienced in the two modes of the Beyond and the
Beginning. The Beyond is present in the immediate experience
of movements in the psyche; while the presence of the divine
Beginning is mediated through the experience of the existence
of intelligible structure of things-in the cosmos.” Corrington
delves into the origin of the deformed consciousness which creates
the “second reality.” Following Voegelin, Corrington concludes
that it is the desire to eliminate the tension of the In-Between
and to erect the poles into separate entities which disorients
consciousness, and he uses Marxism as an example.
The only major disappointment in this
volume is the absence of essays by Gerhart Niemeyer and Dante
Germino, two of the leading Voegelin scholars. But this collection
is only a beginning. It is the evidence of the growing interest
in the work of Eric Voegelin, an interest that will continue for a
long time to come.
Books mentioned in this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
Gregory Wolfe is editor of Image Journal,
director of the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative
Writing Program, and writer in residence at Seattle Pacific
University. His website is http://gregorywolfe.com. This essay originally appeared in the University Bookman and is offered here with their gracious permission.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário
1. Seja polido;
2. Preze pela ortografia e gramática da sua língua-mãe.