The Eric Voegelin Reader

Politics, History, Consciousness

Charles R. Embry, Glenn Hughes

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826222893, 9780826221346
• eBook ISBN: 9780826273901
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

By the time Eric Voegelin fled Hitler's regime and made his way to the United States in 1938, he had already written four books criticizing Nazi racism, establishing what would be the focus of his life's work: to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century. One of the most original political philosophers of the period, Voegelin has largely avoided ideological labels or categorizations of his work. Because of this, however, and because no one work or volume of his can do justice to his overall project, his work has been seen as difficult to approach.
 
Drawing from the University of Missouri Press's thirty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (1990-2009), Charles Embry and Glenn Hughes have assembled a selection of representative works of Voegelin, satisfying a longstanding need for a single volume that can serve as a general introduction to Voegelin's philosophy. The collection includes writings that demonstrate the range and creativity of Voegelin's thought as it developed from 1956 until his death in 1985 in his search for the history of order in human society.
 
The Reader begins with excerpts from Autobiographical Reflections (1973), which include an orienting mixture of biographical information, philosophical motivations, and the scope of Voegelin's project. It reflects key periods of Voegelin's philosophical development, pivoting on his flight from the Gestapo.
 
The next section focuses on Voegelin's understanding of the contemporary need to re-ground political science in a non-positivistic, post-Weberian outlook and method. It begins with Voegelin's historical survey of science and scientism, followed by his explanation of what political science now requires in his introduction to The New Science of Politics. Also included are two essays that exemplify the practice of this "new science." Voegelin started his academic career as a political scientist, and these early essays indicate his wide philosophical vision.
 
Voegelin recognized that a fully responsible "new science of politics" would require the development of a philosophy of history. This led to the writing of his magnum opus, the five-volume Order and History (1956–1985). This section of the Reader includes his introductions to volumes 1, 2 and 4 and his most essential accounts of the theoretical requirements and historical scope of a philosophy of history adequate to present-day scholarship and historical discoveries.
 
In the course of his career, Voegelin came to understand that political science, political philosophy, and philosophy of history must have as their theoretical nucleus a sound philosophical anthropology based on an accurate philosophy of human consciousness. The next set of writings consists of one late lecture and four late essays that exemplify how Voegelin recovers the wisdom of classical philosophy and the Western religious tradition while criticizing modern misrepresentations of consciousness. The result is Voegelin's contemporary accounts of the nature of reason, the challenge of truly rational discussion, and the search for divine origins and the life of the human spirit.
 
During his philosophical journey, Voegelin addressed the historical situatedness of human existence, explicating the historicity of human consciousness in a manner that gave full due to the challenges of acknowledging both human immersion in the story of history and the ability of consciousness to arrive at philosophically valid truths about existence that are transhistorical. The essays in this final section present the culmination of his philosophical meditation on history, consciousness, and reality.
 
 

PART ONE

INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

The consciousness of concrete men is the locus where order is experienced; and both the noetic and non-noetic interpretations of social order radiate from this center of experience.

—Eric Voegelin, “What Is Political Reality?”

The selections included in this section, with one exception, are taken from Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections, a book edited by Ellis Sandoz and based on his recorded conversations with Voegelin in the summer of 1973. They sketch—using Voegelin’s own words—crucial influences upon his intellectual development and key motivations of his life’s work.

Between the chapters “Anschluss and Emigration” and “Why Philosophize? To Recapture Reality!” has been inserted Voegelin’s “Preface” for the second printing (1939) of his book The Political Religions, where he responds to certain criticisms that had been made of the first edition (1938) by underscoring the importance of religion in understanding both modern politics and modernity itself.—Eds.

from Autobiographical Reflections (1973)

From Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 34: Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, With a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 56–73.

Chapter 10: American Influence

I HAVE ALREADY referred to my year in New York, in which one important influence came through the younger men surrounding Thomas Hunt Morgan. This year in New York was possible because at that time the Rockefeller Foundation extended research fellowships to European students under the title of the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Fellowships. I was one of the first recipients, so far as I know the first from Austria, and I had this fellowship for three years. The first year I spent in New York at Columbia University. In the second year I went for one semester to Harvard and the second semester to Wisconsin. The third year I spent in Paris.

These two years in America brought the great break in my intellectual development. My interests, though far-ranging, were still provincial, inasmuch as the location in Central Europe was not favorable to an understanding of the larger world beyond Continental Europe. At Columbia University I took courses with Franklin Henry Giddings the sociologist, John Dewey, Irwin Edman, John Wesley the economist, and Arthur Whittier Macmahon in public administration, and I was overwhelmed by a new world of which hitherto I had hardly suspected the existence. The most important influence came from the library. During the year in New York, I started working through the history of English philosophy and its expansion into American thought. My studies were strongly motivated and helped by Dewey and Edman. I discovered English and American common sense philosophy. More immediately, the impact came through Dewey’s recent book, Human Nature and Conduct, which was based on the English common sense tradition. From there, I worked back to Thomas Reid and Sir William Hamilton. This English and Scottish conception of common sense as a human attitude that incorporates a philosopher’s attitude toward life without the philosopher’s technical apparatus, and inversely the understanding of Classic and Stoic philosophy as the technical, analytical elaboration of the common sense attitude, has remained a lasting influence in my understanding both of common sense and Classic philosophy. It was during this time that I got the first inkling of what the continued tradition of Classic philosophy on the common-sense level, without necessarily the technical apparatus of an Aristotle, could mean for the intellectual climate and the cohesion of a society.

Precisely this tradition of common sense I now recognized to be the factor that was signally absent from the German social scene and not so well developed in France as it was in England and America. In retrospect, I would say that the absence of political institutions rooted in an intact common sense tradition is a fundamental defect of the German political structure that still has not been overcome. When I look at the contemporary German scene, with its frenetic debate between positivists, neo-Marxists, and neo-Hegelians, it is the same scene that I observed when I was a student in the 1920s in the Weimar Republic; the intellectual level, however, has become abnormally mediocre. The great figures engaged pro and con in the analysis of philosophical problems in the 1920s—men like Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim—have disappeared from the scene and have not been replaced by men of comparable stature and competence. During my year in New York, I began to sense that American society had a philosophical background far superior in range and existential substance, though not always in articulation, to anything that I found represented in the methodological environment in which I had grown up.

During the year at Columbia, when I took the courses of Giddings and Dewey and read their work, I became aware of the categories of social substance in the English-speaking world. John Dewey’s category was likemindedness, which I found was the term used by the King James Bible to translate the New Testament term homonoia. That was the first time I became aware of the problem of homonoia, about which I knew extremely little at the time, because my knowledge of Classic philosophy was still quite insufficient and my knowledge of Christian problems practically nonexistent. Only later, when I had learned Greek and was able to read the texts in the original, did I become aware of the fundamental function of such categories for determining what the substance of society really is. Giddings’s term was the consciousness of kind. Although I did not know very much about the background of these problems, I remember becoming aware that Giddings was intending the same problem as John Dewey but preferred a terminology that would not make visible the connection of the problem with Classic and Christian traditions. It was his attempt to transform the homonoia, in the sense of a community of the spirit, into something innocuous like a community of kind in a biological sense.

This year at Columbia was supplemented by the second year in which the strongest impression at Harvard was the newly arrived Alfred North Whitehead. Of course, I could understand only a very small portion of what Whitehead said in his lectures, and I had to work myself into the cultural and historical background of his book that came out at the time, The Adventures of Ideas. But it brought to my attention that there was such a background into which I had to work myself more intensely if I wanted to understand Anglo-Saxon civilization. The occasion for expanding my knowledge offered itself in the second semester of the year 1925–26, when I went to Wisconsin. I had become aware of the work of John R. Commons at Columbia, because during that year his Human Nature and Property was published. Thomas Reed Powell, who at that time was still at Columbia (the next year he went to Harvard), had commented upon Commons’s work. In Wisconsin I got into what I considered at the time, with my still limited knowledge, to be the real, authentic America. It was represented by John R. Commons, who took on for me the shape of a Lincolnesque figure, strongly connected with economic and political problems both on the state and national level, and with particular accent on the labor problem. In that environment in Wisconsin, with a man like Selig Perlman as the historian of labor and the young people who worked with Commons and Perlman as fellow students, I acquired my first enlarged knowledge of the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court and its opinions as the source of political culture in America. This experience of Wisconsin became a strong factor in my later career. When I came permanently to America in 1938, I wanted to go into the teaching of American government as the core for understanding American political culture; and since as a newly arrived foreigner I would not be admitted to teach American government at an Eastern university, I went to the South, where reservations in this respect were somewhat less strong.

This account of my American experience would be incomplete without mentioning the strong influence of George Santayana. I never met him, but I got acquainted with his work in New York, partly through the suggestion of Irwin Edman. I studied his work with care and still have in my library the books that I bought that year in New York. To me, Santayana was a revelation concerning philosophy, comparable to the revelation I received at the same time through common sense philosophy. Here was a man with a vast background of philosophical knowledge, sensitive to the problems of the spirit without accepting a dogma, and not interested at all in neo-Kantian methodology. Gradually I found out about Lucretian materialism as a motivating experience in his thought, and this was of considerable importance for my understanding later, in Paris, the French poet Paul Valéry and his Lucretian motivation. Santayana and Valéry have remained for me the two great representatives of an almost mystical skepticism that in fact is not materialism at all. The emotional impact of this discovery was so strong and lasting that in the 1960s, when I had an opportunity to travel in southern France, I went to see the Cimetière Marin in Cette [Sète] where Valéry is buried overlooking the Mediterranean.

The results of these two years in America precipitated my book Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes.¹ The various chapters correspond to the several areas of literature and history that I had worked through. The chapter on “Time and Existence” reflects my studies in the English philosophy of consciousness and its comparison with the German theory of consciousness represented by Edmund Husserl. The chapter on George Santayana gives my summary of the work and philosophical personality of Santayana as I understood it at the time. A further chapter on “Puritan Mysticism” is the result of my studies on Jonathan Edwards—even in retrospect I must say it is a good essay. The next chapter on “Anglo-American Analytical Theory of Law,” about fifty pages, reflects my study of this area that in English and American civilization is the counterpart to the “norm logic” of Kelsen in the Continental European theory of law. And the last chapter on “John R. Commons” reflects my understanding of the work and personality of John R. Commons as well as the fervent admiration that I had for him.

This literary work in which I assembled the results of the two American years does not, however, give a full understanding of the importance these years had in my life. The great event was the fact of being thrown into a world for which the great neo-Kantian methodological debates, which I considered the most important things intellectually, were of no importance. Instead, there was the background of the great political foundation of 1776 and 1789, and of the unfolding of this founding act through a political and legal culture primarily represented by the lawyers’ guild and the Supreme Court. There was the strong background of Christianity and Classical culture that was so signally fading out, if not missing, in the methodological debates in which I had grown up as a student. In brief, there was a world in which this other world in which I had grown up was intellectually, morally, and spiritually irrelevant. That there should be such a plurality of worlds had a devastating effect on me. The experience broke for good (at least I hope it did) my Central European or generally European provincialism without letting me fall into an American provincialism. I gained an understanding in these years of the plurality of human possibilities realized in various civilizations, as an immediate experience, an expérience vécue, which hitherto had been accessible to me only through the comparative study of civilizations as I found them in Max Weber, in Spengler, and later in Toynbee. The immediate effect was that upon my return to Europe certain phenomena that were of the greatest importance in the intellectual and ideological context of Central Europe, for instance the work of Martin Heidegger, whose famous Sein und Zeit I read in 1928 no longer had any effect on me. It just ran off, because I had been immunized against this whole context of philosophizing through my time in America and especially in Wisconsin. The priorities and relations of importance between various theories had been fundamentally changed—and, so far as I can see, changed for the better.

Chapter 11: Concerning the Year in France

After the two years in America, the Rockefeller Foundation was kind enough to extend the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship for another year to continue my studies in France. I accepted the opportunity with the idea of enlarging my horizon by living in France for a year and finding out firsthand what points in French culture were relevant for a political scientist. The field for studies was wide open. I attended courses in the law school, especially with a French economist named Albert Aftalion, and I attended the lectures of the famous Léon Brunschvicg, the Pascal scholar. In the beginning my studies were somewhat hampered because I had a reading knowledge of French but not a really good knowledge of a more complicated vocabulary. I remember reading the Trois Contes by Gustave Flaubert, which was quite an ordeal because Flaubert’s vocabulary is enormous, and I had to use a dictionary in practically every sentence. But reading authors who have a large vocabulary is the only way of building up a knowledge of a language.

At the time, there was an irresistible attraction in Paris—that is, the flood of Russian refugees. I happened to get acquainted with quite a few of them and understood the necessity of learning Russian in order to have access to the political materials. So I started on it with Konstantin V. Mochulski and G. Lozinski as teachers. The work with these two excellent philologists continued practically through the whole year, and I got far enough to be able to read Dostoevsky. Unfortunately, I have forgotten most of what I learned because in the practice of my work I had later too little occasion to deal with Russian sources.

But the main area of studies, of course, was French literature and philosophy. Good guides for introducing myself to the problems of these fields were the works of Albert Thibaudet on Mallarmé and Valéry, and of René Lalou on the history of French literature in general and on the history of the novel in particular. I acquired in this year in Paris a practically complete set of the important French prose literature from La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette to the work of Marcel Proust, whose last volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu were coming out at the time. Marcel Proust, like Flaubert, was an inestimable source for enriching my French vocabulary. René Lalou’s De Descartes à Proust was of fundamental importance for my understanding of the continuity of French intellectual history. Here I found the French history of consciousness that runs parallel to the history of consciousness in English and American philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present.

Through both Thibaudet and Lalou my attention was directed especially to Mallarmé and Valéry. At this time I assembled my almost complete collection of the works of Paul Valéry, several of them in first editions that now have become valuable. I had occasion to see Valéry when he gave an after-dinner talk at some meeting connected with the League of Nations. What interested me most about him at the time, besides the fact that he was a great artist, was his Lucretian philosophy, which I understood as a parallel phenomenon to the Lucretianism of George Santayana. The poem with which I fell in love particularly was the “Cimetière Marin.”

The opportunity of spending a year in Paris of course was also used, so far as means permitted, to see the surroundings. I remember my first great impression of Chartres and a trip in summer to the remnants of the monasteries in Normandy.

In the background, of course, were my studies in the French theory of law, especially of Léon Duguit. At that time I got my first acquaintance with the French problem of solidarité. Curiously enough, I was not yet attracted to the work of Henri Bergson, though I was already familiar with his Matière et Mémoire and his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. My real interest in Bergson only grew with the publication of his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion in 1932. A special area of interest became the French mémoires literature. I remember reading with fascination the memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, which gave me an introduction to the politics of the seventeenth century. Perhaps because of their size the memoirs of Saint-Simon interested me somewhat less. The Retz memoirs were to me especially important because they described one of the great conspiracies that were characteristic of the seventeenth century. I studied the parallel cases of the Wallenstein conspiracy, of the conspiracy of the Fiesco in Genoa, and of the conspiracy of the Spaniards in Venice. One of the mémoires I read at the time were those of the duc de La Rochefoucauld, which gave me the transition to the philosophy of the moralistes. In addition to La Rochefoucauld, I read the marquise de Vauvenargues and found out about the line of influence that goes from the French moralistes to Nietzsche.

I was again in Paris in 1934 for several weeks. At this time I was interested in the French sixteenth century and especially in the work of Jean Bodin. I collected materials for a comprehensive study of Bodin’s work and in fact wrote it later to form part of the History of Political Ideas, but it has never been published.² At that time, I worked through the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale on French publications on the history and politics of the sixteenth century. So far as I remember, I had every single item in the catalogue in hand at least once, and on this occasion I became aware of the enormous influence that the Mongol invasions and the events of the fifteenth century, especially the temporary victory of Tamerlane over Bayazid I, had as a model of the political process in the sixteenth century. Practically every author of importance dealt with these events, which were completely outside the normal experience of politics in the West and introduced an inexplicable rise to power, which affected the very existence of Western civilization, as a factor into world history. This experience of the Turkish Ottoman threat and its temporary interruption through the victory of Tamerlane were observed by the humanists and entered into the conception in Machiavelli’s Prince of the man who can rise to power by his own virtue. Some of the voluminous materials gathered at the time I published in an article on “Das Timurbild der Humanisten” in 1937, which I later had reprinted in my Anamnesis of 1966.³ The influence of these events on Machiavelli, and especially on his fictitious biography of Castruccio Castracani, I published in my article on Machiavelli’s background in the Review of Politics in 1951. But considerable piles of materials and the connection with the work of Bodin have never been published.⁴

In the same year, 1934, I spent some weeks in London exploring the resources of the Warburg Institute, which had already moved there from Hamburg. This was my first contact with alchemy, astrology, and the complicated gnostic symbolism of the Renaissance. The materials collected on that occasion were incorporated in a chapter on “Astrological Politics” for my History of Political Ideas, which, as I said, has not been published.⁵ This first acquaintance was the basis for my further interest in astrology and alchemy that developed much later and helped me to gain some understanding of certain continuities in Western intellectual history from the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Prologue
• Part One | Intellectual Biography
• Part Two | The Philosophical Science of Politics
• Part Three | Philosophizing in Modernity
• Part Four | Philosophy and the Open Soul: Consciousness, Reason, and Divine Reality
• Part Five | Philosophy of History
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Further Readings in Eric Voegelin
• Selected Writings on Eric Voegelin
• Index