Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition

Explorations in Modern Political Thought

Lee Trepanier, Steven F. Mcguire, Lee Trepanier, Steven F. Mcguire

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780826219107
• eBook ISBN: 9780826272386
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Twentieth-century political philosopher Eric Voegelin is best known as a severe critic of modernity. Much of his work argues that modernity is a Gnostic revolt against the fundamental structure of reality. For Voegelin, "Gnosticism" is the belief that human beings can transform the nature of reality through secret knowledge and social action, and he considered it the crux of the crisis of modernity. As Voegelin struggled with this crisis throughout his career, he never wavered in his judgment that philosophers of the modern continental tradition were complicit in the Gnostic revolt of modernity.

But while Voegelin's analysis of those philosophers is at times scathing, his work also bears marks of their influence, and Voegelin has much more in common with the theorists of the modern continental tradition than is usually recognized. Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: Explorations in Modern Political Thought evaluates this political philosopher—one of the most original and influential thinkers of our time—by examining his relationship to the modern continental tradition in philosophy, from Kant to Derrida.

In a compelling introduction, editors Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire present a review of the trajectories of Voegelin's thought and outline what often is portrayed as his derisive critique of modernity. Soon, however, they begin to unravel the similarities between Voegelin's thought and the work of other thinkers in the continental tradition. The subsequent chapters explore these possible connections by examining Voegelin's intellectual relationship to individual thinkers, including Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Gadamer.

The essays in this volume go beyond Voegelin's own reading of the modern philosophers to offer a reevaluation of his relationship to those thinkers. In Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, Voegelin's attempt to grapple with the crisis of modernity becomes clearer, and his contribution to the modern continental tradition is illuminated. The book features the work of both established and emerging Voegelin scholars, and the essays were chosen to present thoughtful and balanced assessments of both Voegelin's thought and the ideas of the other thinkers considered. As the first volume to examine the relationship—and surprising commonalities—between Voegelin's philosophy and the continental tradition as a whole, this text will be of interest not only to Voegelin disciples but to philosophers engaged by continental modernism and all disciplines of political philosophy.

1
Out of Such Crooked Wood
How Eric Voegelin Read Immanuel Kant

Thomas W. Heilke

To start with the premise that the philosopher is entirely free—the governing assumption of . . . all analytic philosophy—might only end with the assertion that what he can teach us is infinitely less than what political life requires. Conversely, to be bound to a history of ideas . . . might liberate thought and politics from the negative and dissolving conclusions of analytic philosophy.

—Eldon Eisenach, Two Worlds of Liberalism

My assignment is to consider Eric Voegelin's reception of Immanuel Kant, the magisterial Prussian philosopher of the late eighteenth century. The questions in this collection of essays that serve as the bases for interpreting Voegelin's reception of any particular philosopher are concerned with finding commonalities between Voegelin and these other thinkers on questions important to both: the nature and order of reality, the epistemological challenges of modernity, and plausible social and political arrangements we might hope for in the modern world. Our general approach is to explore with respect to these questions how Voegelin's own project of understanding human experience in a philosophically adequate mode might have been helped by a sympathetic reading of certain modern philosophers. This approach seems intrinsically plausible if it is true, as Jürgen Gebhardt argues, that Voegelin “was consistently engaged in a critical discourse with the great thinkers who struggled with the enormous task of making modern man understand himself.”¹

Although Gebhardt lists “Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, William James, and [Alfred North] Whitehead” in that line of great thinkers, he curiously enough does not mention Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who, “appear[ing] in the guise of a universal pulverizer . . . initiates the era of scientific philosophy so that everything that preceded him declines by comparison to the level of relatively irrelevant metaphysics.” On the other hand, Gebhardt does include Kant in a similar list of “outstanding political philosophers” (quoting Voegelin) in an introductory comment a decade later.²

Gebhardt is a competent and careful interpreter of Voegelin's work: his two different placements of Kant's work in Voegelin's opus is an observant reflection of Voegelin's own ambiguity. For example, Kant's new mode of philosophy is, according to Voegelin in 1928, a “brilliant development” that “with Hegel . . . abruptly breaks off.” Forty-nine years later, however, his remarks concerning Kant seemed more dismissive. In “Remembrance of Things Past,” he recollected concerning his rejection of Marburg neo-Kantian influences, among many other “schools,” that overcoming their “formidable force” took considerable time and effort. This project of overcoming might lead one to think that Kant's philosophy was subsequently of little concern to him.³ Similarly, a recently published anecdote from Ernest Walters concerning Voegelin's unwillingness to teach Kant's philosophy seems to vitiate any attempt to construct either a conversation between Voegelin and Kant or to develop an understanding of any Kantian “influence” on Voegelin:

One day at LSU, I was standing in the hallway, and I ran into Voegelin. I then asked him if he was going to take up Immanuel Kant. He said, well, he hadn't thought about that. Then he asked, “Why do you want me to?” I said, “Well, I know nothing about Kant and the German idealists.” Voegelin said, “That's where I started, and I spent my entire life trying to extricate myself from those idealists.” And I thought about it today when we were talking about freedom: Voegelin once said in class that the greatest writing on freedom was Schelling's essay on human freedom. So, for quite some time, I wondered if Voegelin had really extricated himself from Kant and from the sort of teachings that came after Hegel and Schelling.

But I thought that was rather revealing, that he would have said something like that to me.⁴

The most casual perusal of Voegelin's works indicates that accepting the dismissive orientation to the question of Kant's influence implied in this story would be a mistake. Voegelin's “extrication” would itself be worthy of a careful look, but in pursuing the question, we will find ourselves better off if we take a different route, discovering more than a story of escape.

Apart from one early essay and several episodes in the two books on European racism, Voegelin did not engage in a systematic, published form with Kant's thought. Having examined those loci, we must then take recourse in a deliberate survey of the various remarks and circumscribed encounters with Kant that Voegelin offered in sixty years of philosophical inquiry. His explicit criticisms of Kant's philosophizing as well as his approbations must, therefore, be gathered up as acorns in the harvest. Third, Voegelin's thinking may itself in identifiable ways be a tribute to Kant. Are there traces of Kantian influence or Kantian formation to be found in Voegelin's work? Does he share with Kant a common vocabulary, a common set of reference points, a common set of problems? If so, what are they and why? If not, what does that lack of coincidence tell us? What are the contexts of Voegelin's explicit and implicit departures from Kant? Where, and in what ways, do we find him specifically parting ways with Kant? Such an approach suggests, a priori, that Voegelin will have treated Kant and his philosophical inquiry not primarily as an object of investigation, in the way he treats Marx, but as a participant in a (philosophical) conversation.⁵ That assumption will itself require verification, and we will indeed discover a certain degree of ambiguity at times.

In the preface to the final volume of Order and History, published posthumously and uncompleted, Lissy Voegelin states that Voegelin “knew very well [that the pages of this his final work were] the key to all his other works and that in these pages he has gone as far as he could go in analysis, saying what he wanted to say as clearly as it possibly could be said.” Kant is regarded in these final pages as the first in a line of German philosophers who took up the task of recovering “the experiential basis of consciousness,” which required the removal of “layers of proportional incrustations accumulated through the centuries of thinking in the intentionalist subject-object mode.”⁶ His “scientific philosophy” was burdened in this regard with “the habit of thinking in terms of thing-reality,” a habit whose traditional legitimacy was further strengthened by the “success of the natural sciences” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁷ This success may have induced Kant to treat Newtonian physics “as the model of ‘experience’” in his Critique of Pure Reason, so that breaking out of the subject-object mode of thinking about consciousness, which Kant affirmed, was made that much more difficult.⁸ Thus:

in order to denote the “more” than physics that is to be found in “Reason,” he could do no better than to coin the symbol Ding-an-sich. Since the internal confusion of the famous symbol is not sufficiently realized even today, as far as I can see, it will not be improper to stress that “in-itself” the thing is not a “thing” but the structure of the It-reality in consciousness. The technical problems engendered by the symbol, however, are not the present concern; rather, the symbol's character as a symptom of the pressures that let the attempt to recover the experiences move existential consciousness into the position of a “thing” must be explored.⁹

This final extant remark concerning Kant sets our stage for a further retrospective consideration.

On the one hand, Kant's genius uncovers or rediscovers the elemental problems of philosophy, in this case the problem of thinking of consciousness exclusively (and illegitimately) in a purely intentionalist, subject-object mode. On the other hand, that genius is held short of a complete breakthrough by the limitations of the philosophical-terminological context within which it operates. The most important of these, to which we will return, is the subject-object mode of acquiring knowledge in the natural sciences as the only mode of human experience or source of knowledge.¹⁰ Voegelin's evaluation of Kant's work reminds us of his critique of the work of Max Weber in The New Science of Politics. Praising Weber for the breadth and depth of his scientific studies, Voegelin argues at the same time that Weber's commitment to positivism imposed shortcomings, because it strictly limited what he could achieve theoretically. Weber's work marks the final outcome of positivism, but sensing a horizon beyond positivism, Weber himself, like the biblical Moses, “knew what he wanted, but could not break through to it,” so that he “saw the promised land but was not permitted to enter it.” Because it rejects the metaphysical elaborations of classical Greek and medieval Christian civilization, Weber's science remains incomplete, but it points us in the direction we must take to fulfill Weber's scientific promise.¹¹ In the same way, his final remarks concerning Kant shed all the light necessary on Voegelin's dismissal of the “schools” in his recollection of overcoming neo-Kantianism in the Marburg style. Whatever Kant may have achieved philosophically, the dogmatic encrustations of neo-Kantian “schools” such as the one at Marburg subordinated those achievements to doctrinal constructions.¹² Thus, Voegelin could explain in 1966 that it was already clear to him while beginning his philosophical work in the 1920s that “the poor state of political science—through its being mired in neo-Kantian theories of knowledge, value-relating methods, historicism, descriptive institutionalism, and ideological speculations on history—could be overcome only by a new philosophy of consciousness.”¹³ The danger of leaving philosophy behind in favor of default epistemological and historiographical constructions is already present in Kant's system building: Kant's philosophical setting seemed itself to become a limitation to his philosophical work.

“Ought” and Human Freedom: Intimations of a Philosophical Anthropology

Voegelin's first and only systematic treatment of Kant's work in its own right occurred in a 1931 essay, “Das Sollen im System Kants,” by which time he had already come to realize the limits of the political science of his time. Despite the remarkable interpretive-analytical prowess he displayed in his analysis of Kant, Voegelin's interest was not “philological,” not in understanding Kant's thought for its own sake, per se, but for the sake of untangling a philosophical knot. It was a forensic and ironic exercise in extrication in which Kant played a double function.

The essay was published in a Festschrift for Hans Kelsen,¹⁴ Voegelin's doctoral supervisor at the University of Vienna, a famous advisor in the drafting of the Austrian Constitution of 1920, and the leading proponent of the positivist “pure theory of law.”¹⁵ The basic argument of the theory's advocates was that legal theory should not concern itself with “the phenomenon of law in the context of the totality of our experience of the state.” In other words, the experiential basis of law—the experience of obligation or “ought” [Sollen] (or, in less Enlightenment-bound language, the problem of justice, namely, who owes what to whom)—was not to be a consideration in or an element of legal theory. Rather, “the task of the legal scholar consists in establishing and interpreting the relevant legal statements, connecting the statements into a system, and subsuming cases into it.” For the reasons already noted, Voegelin had come to consider this approach inadequate, if one was interested in understanding the phenomenon of what he then called “the state,” and would later come to call—less parochially—political order or social order. Voegelin's examination of Kant's ethics was one in a series of studies and published articles that were moving toward the same goal: to develop a political science (Staatslehre) that offered a more thorough account of the roots of political community and organization than the prevailing positivist legal theory in the line of Kelsen.¹⁶ Such a project would require, among other things,

the development of a philosophy of human beings and their actions that would also include the problems in intellectual history of the jurist. We therefore return to Kant, because we find in his work a clear view of the essence of a human being, and because we hope that in examining his ideas concerning the moral law and ought, we will expose the topography of a problem area that is independent of his time and person. In this way it may even be possible to lay the groundwork for a theory of ought that is a desideratum of contemporary legal theory.

The purpose of this specific study, then, was not so much to understand and absorb the specific substance of Kant's system, but to fashion by means of Kant's questions a “reorientation” out of the context into which the problem of political order had been set, or misstated, or hidden in positivist theory of law. Voegelin proposed “to study the topic of this problem area in the work of a thinker who possessed a total view of human being.” For this project to “bear fruit,” Voegelin would have to “extract from the peculiarly Kantian ideas the problematic that is relevant to us.”¹⁷ This procedure is not, to be sure, an especially unconventional use of a philosopher's work, but it is one that requires a careful reading at three separate levels of analysis. First, what did the philosopher say? Second, what was he trying to do? Here we find a common location for interpretive missteps, since, as Voegelin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. “Out of Such Crooked Wood”
• 2. Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel
• 3. Voegelin and Schelling on Freedom and the Beyond
• 4. Noesis and Faith
• 5. Dionysus versus the Crucified
• 6. Eric Voegelin and Neo-Kantianism
• 7. Voegelin and Heidegger
• 8. Voegelin and Gadamer
• 9. Voegelin, Strauss, and Kojève on Tyranny
• 10. The Paradoxes of Participatory Reality
• Contributors
• Index