Eric Voegelin

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Eric Voegelin
Western Philosophers
20th-century philosophy
Full name Eric Voegelin
School/tradition Western Philosophy
Main interests History, Consciousness, Religion, Political Science

Eric Voegelin, born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, (January 3, 1901 – January 19, 1985) was a political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, Germany, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna. His advisers on his dissertation were Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann. He became a teacher and then an associate professor of political science at the Faculty of Law. In 1938 he, with his wife, fled from the Nazi forces which had recently entered Vienna, emigrating to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Voegelin was born in Cologne in 1901. He taught political theory and sociology at the University of Vienna after his habilitation there in 1928. While in Austria Voegelin established the beginnings of his long lasting friendship with F. A. Hayek.[1] In 1933 he published two books criticizing Nazi racism, and was forced to flee from Austria following the Anschluss in 1938. After a brief stay in Switzerland, he arrived in the United States and taught at a series of universities before joining Louisiana State University's Department of Government in 1942.

Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958 when he accepted an offer by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber's former chair in political science, which had been empty since Weber's death in 1920. In Munich he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft. Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow where he continued his work until his death on January 19, 1985.

[edit] Work

Voegelin worked throughout his life to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century in an effort variously referred to as a philosophy of politics, history, or consciousness.

Voegelin published scores of books, essays, and reviews in his lifetime. An early work was Die politischen Religionen (1938), (The Political Religions), on totalitarian ideologies and their structural similarities to religion. His magnum opus is the multi-volume (English-language) Order and History, which began publication in 1956 and remained incomplete at the time of his death 29 years later. His 1951 Charles Walgreen lectures, published as The New Science of Politics, is generally seen as a prolegomena to this, and remains his best known work. He left many manuscripts unpublished, including a history of political ideas that has since been published in eight volumes.

Order and History was originally conceived as a six-volume examination of the history of order occasioned by Voegelin's personal experience of the disorder of his time. The first three volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle, appeared in rapid succession in 1956 and 1957 and focused on the evocations of order in the ancient Near East and Greece.

Voegelin then encountered difficulties that slowed the publication down. This, combined with his university administrative duties and work related to the new institute, meant that seventeen years separated the fourth from the third volume. His new concerns were indicated in the 1966 German collection Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik, and the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, appeared in 1974. It broke with the chronological pattern of the previous volumes by investigating symbolizations of order ranging in time from the Sumerian King List to Hegel. Continuing work on the final volume, In Search of Order, occupied Voegelin's final days and it was published posthumously in 1987.[original research?] One of Voegelin's main points in his later work is that a sense of order is conveyed by the experience of transcendence. This transcendence can never be fully defined nor described, though it may be conveyed in symbols. A particular sense of transcendent order serves as a basis for a particular political order. It is in this way that a philosophy of politics becomes a philosophy of consciousness. Insights may become fossilised as dogma. The main aim of the political philosopher is to remain open to the truth of order, and convey this to others.

Voegelin is more interested in the ontological issues that arise from these experiences than the epistemological questions of how we know that a vision of order is true or not. For Voegelin, the essence of truth is trust. All philosophy begins with experience of the divine. Since God is experienced as good, one can be confident that reality is knowable. As Descartes would say, God is not a deceiver.

Voegelin's work does not fit in any standard classifications, although some of his readers have found similarities in it to contemporaneous works by, for example, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He has an unapproachable style and a heavy reliance upon extensive background knowledge. Voegelin often invents terms or uses old ones in new ways. He follows the German academic rule: if the subject was difficult, the style should be difficult. However, there are patterns in his work with which the reader can quickly become familiar.

Among indications of growing engagement with Voegelin's work are the 305 page international bibliography published in 2000 by Munich's Wilhelm Fink Verlag; the presence of dedicated research centers at universities in the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom; the appearance of recent translations in languages ranging from Portuguese to Japanese; and the publishing of the nearly complete 34 volume collection of his primary works by the University of Missouri Press and various primary and secondary works offered by the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

[edit] Voegelin on Gnosticism

Voegelin in The New Science of Politics, Order and History and Science, Politics and Gnosticism opposed what he believed to be unsound Gnostic influences in politics. Voegelin traced gnosis[2] of the followers of Gnosticism[3] as religious philosophical teachings that are the foundations of cults. Apart from the Classical Christian writers against heresy, Voegelin's sources on Gnosticism were of secondary nature, since the texts in the Nag Hammadi library were not yet widely available. For example Voegelin uses Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and the German philosopher Hans Jonas.[4]

Voegelin perceived similarities between ancient Gnosticism and modernist political theories, particularly communism and nazism. He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection with society and a belief that this lack is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation has two effects:

  • The first is the belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the Gnostics themselves referred to this as gnosis).
  • The second is the desire to implement and or create a policy to actualize the speculation, or as Voegelin described it, to Immanentize the Eschaton, to create a sort of heaven on earth within history.

According to Voegelin the Gnostics are really rejecting the Christian eschaton of the kingdom of God and replacing it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or practice.[5]

The primary feature that characterizes a tendency as gnostic for Voegelin is that it is motivated by the notion that the world and humanity can be fundamentally transformed and perfected through the intervention of a chosen group of people (an elite), a man-god, or men-Gods, supermen, newmen, who are the chosen ones that possess a kind of special knowledge (like magic or science) about how to perfect human existence.

This stands in contrast to a notion of redemption that is achieved through the reconciliation of mankind with the divine. Marxism therefore qualifies as 'gnostic' because it purports that we can establish the perfect society on earth once capitalism has been overthrown by a special group of people, the "proletariat". Likewise, Nazism is seen as 'gnostic' because it posits that we can achieve utopia by attaining racial 'purity', once the master race has freed itself of the racially inferior and the degenerate.

In the two cases specifically analyed by Voegelin, the totalitarian impulse is derived from the alienation of the individuals from the rest of society. This leads to a desire to dominate (libido dominandi) which has its roots not just in the Gnostic's conviction of the imperative of his vision but also in his lack of concord with a large body of his society. As a result, there is very little regard for the welfare of those who are harmed by the resulting politics, which ranges from coercive to calamitous (e.g. the Russian proverb: "You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet").

According to Stephen McKnight, after 1970 Voegelin began to take issue with the tendency of his readers to place special emphasis on the concept of gnosticism. He was now more inclined to stress apocalypticism, hermeticism and neoplatonism as being equally important in the constitution of modernity and to see an undue emphasis on gnosticism as obscuring important problems. However, McKnight's view is not universally accepted.[citation needed]

Ultimately, Voegelin's analysis of the disorder of the West and the rise of totalitarianism suggests that the primary cause is spiritual pathology rather than social disorganization, or rather that the first inevitably leads to the second.[citation needed]

[edit] Immanentizing the eschaton

One of his most quoted passages is the following:

The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.[6]

From this comes the catch phrase: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" which simply means: "Do not try to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now." or "Don't try to create heaven on earth."

When Voegelin uses the term gnosis, as a negative, it is to reflect as the word is found in the Manichaeism and Valentinianism of antiquity. As it is later then immanentized (or manifest) in modernity in the wake of Joachim of Flora and in the various ideological movements Voegelin outline in his works. [7] Voegelin also builds on the term gnosticism as it is defined by Hans Jonas in his work The Gnostic Religion in reference to Heidegger's gnosticism. Which is to have an understanding and control over reality that makes Mankind as powerful as the role of God in reality. Voegelin was arguing from a Hellenistic philosophers position that good gnosis is derived from pistis (faith) and that the pagan tradition (that later manifest as gnosticism) which was to draw a line between faith and noesis was a false distinction. That this dualist perspective or knowledge (gnosis) was the very essence of gnosticism via the misuse of Noema and caused a destructive division between the internal and external world in human consciousness. To reconcile the internal (subjective) and external (objective) world of consciousness was the restoration of order.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Federici, Michael: Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order, pg1 ISI Books 2002
  2. ^ Glossary of Voegelin terms online [1] (originally a general term in Greek for knowledge) back to the Gnostic movement of the early Christian era, which claimed that a spiritual elite can have immediate apprehension of truth without the need for critical reflection. According to Voegelin, the claim to gnosis may take intellectual, emotional, and volitional forms." [Webb 1981:282]
  3. ^ Glossary of Voegelin terms online [2] Gnosticism is a "type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. Gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism)." [Webb 1981:282]
  4. ^ The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin By Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gilbert Weiss, William Petropulos Published by Louisiana State University Press, 1989 ISBN 0807118265, 9780807118269 [3]
  5. ^ [4] 1
  6. ^ Eric Voegelin (1987). "The New Science of Politics", 2, p. 120.
  7. ^ New Science Of Politics chap. 4

[edit] Further reading

[edit] Primary literature

All of Voegelin's writing is published as his Collected Works (CW), which is reviewed by Mark Lilla, *"Mr. Casaubon in America" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 29-31.

People generally recommend beginning with CW 5 Modernity Without Restraint, which includes 'The Political Religions', 'New Science of Politics' and 'Science, Politics, and Gnosticism'. Some however suggest starting with "Immortality: Experience and Symbol". Those more interested in his empirical work however might prefer Hitler and the Germans (CW 31) or Order and History vol.2: The World of the Polis (CW 15). Those of a more philosophical bent might prefer Order and History vol.3: Plato and Aristotle (CW 16). After that, people should embark on the Philosophy of Consciousness phase with Anamnesis CW 6. If you are still reading, the two final volumes of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age and In search of Order, are worth the effort, as Voegelin attempts a new formulation of the problem.

[edit] Secondary literature

The best introductions to Voegelin are:

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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