Eric Voegelin’s Late Meditations and Essays. Critical Commentary Companions.
Edited by Michael Franz.
St. Augustine’s Press, 2023.
Paperback, 375 pages, $32.00.
Reviewed by Lee Trepanier.
One of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin (1901-85), is not as well-known as some of his contemporaries like Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, or Herbert Marcuse. There are several reasons why this is the case. Voegelin never worked at an American doctorate-granting university, so there is no Voegelinian school per se. His academic expectations of his readers and the opaqueness of his language make his philosophy not as publicly accessible when compared to his European émigré counterparts. And the evasiveness of categorizing him ideologically creates difficulties in translating his ideas into practical politics and public policy.
But perhaps the driving cause for Voegelin’s relative public obscurity is that he substantially changed his philosophical thinking over time. This was most evident in the 1974 publication of Order and History IV: The Ecumenic Age, where Voegelin radically revised his methodological approach to study political order. Instead of believing history moved lineally (“historiogenesis” to use his words), Voegelin argued that history itself lacked any patterns discernible for the political philosopher. All that was constant was a person’s experience of the divine, which was manifested in a variety of settings that were experientially equivalent to one another.
In Eric Voegelin’s Late Meditations and Essays, Michael Franz, a Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland, has gathered the leading scholars on Voegelin to understand the political philosopher’s later writing as it had evolved. While there is a vast literature on Voegelin’s philosophy, there are few commentaries on his later essays and meditative works. Looking at each of the 14 essays in Voegelin’s Published Essays 1966-1985, each contributor reviews and assesses Voegelin’s arguments. These essays were critical in the evolution of Voegelin’s thought, where he changed the direction of his philosophical project from one of tracing a linear history of Gnostic modernity to exploring the unbroken human encounter with the divine throughout the ages.
The book begins by examining the breakdown of rational public discourse. In his analysis of “On Debate and Existence,” Steven F. McGuire points out that the ideological motivation to ignore reality is a result not of cognitive error but of spiritual alienation (or what Voegelin called “pneumopathology”). Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, Voegelin diagnosed the ideologue’s mind as one that wishes to objectify the world rather than live in a state of participatory reality with the divine. Conversation with ideologues becomes impossible because they perceive reality as something to dominate and manipulate rather than to understand and comprehend. This is the reality of Weimar Germany, which Voegelin wrote about in “The German University and the Order of German Society.” Barry Cooper writes about how German society has become “dedivinized”—lost all spiritual contact with divine reality—and therefore Germans were unable to defend themselves in both action and speech against the Nazis. This loss of spiritual reality started with the apolitical Humboldtian university, which was incapable of transmitting knowledge of how to discuss public affairs rationally.
The hostility to rational public discourse is the subject in Julianne M. Romanello’s analysis of Voegelin’s “On Classical Studies.” Whereas the study of classical thinkers like Plato can illuminate students’ understanding of spiritual reality, the modern university’s emphasis on science and academic specialization repeats the mistake of the Humboldtian educational system. An example of how the university could recover its mission to teach students how to think and speak rationally can be found in Charles R. Embry’s explanation of how to understand a text in his chapter, “Voegelin’s ‘On Henry James’s Turn of the Screw.’” Instead of relying upon postmodern techniques like deconstructionism to study past thinkers, Voegelin called for students to give primacy to the text itself in order to recognize and learn from the existential content in the work.
But what is reason? In his essay, “Voegelin’s ‘Reason: The Classical Experience,’” William Petropulos provides Voegelin’s definition as “Divine Reason in which human-being participates.” Reason, for Voegelin, was not an epistemological mode of inquiry but a state of being where humans lived in a state of tension with the divine and manifesting itself in society and history. The opposite of the life of reason is one of enchantment, which David Walsh writes about in “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery.” Hegel claimed to provide a coherent, systematic, and definitive interpretation of the whole of reality, a claim of which Voegelin denies humans being capable. Walsh takes issue with Voegelin’s interpretation of Hegel by arguing that the “absolute knowledge” of Hegelian philosophy is not a claim that Hegel has achieved such knowledge; rather, it is the highest form of existence to which one should strive.
Whereas there is a debate about the purpose of Hegelian philosophy among Voegelin scholars, there is less so with Marx and Nietzsche. In “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation,” Michael Franz demonstrates how these thinkers (along with Hegel) are “activist dreamers” who were in revolt against reality in their claims to know the future of history and whose personal disorder led to social contagion. Franz also traces the evolution of Voegelin’s thought, where concepts like Gnosticism, which were central to The New Science of Politics (1952), are completely absent in his latter work, like this 1983 essay.
Unlike these “activist dreamers,” Voegelin believed that the future of history was unknowable to the philosopher, for the subject of history is not the individual human being but “Being itself.” In “Voegelin’s ‘Configurations of History,’” Paul Kidder explains Voegelin’s later theory of history as one that studied reality itself (or if one prefers the terms, metaphysics or ontology). As Kidder puts it, Voegelin eventually adopted “an ontological philosophy of history.” By contrasting Voegelin’s philosophy with Gadamer’s, Kidder shows that the two thinkers share more in common than previously recognized: “The Gadamerian and Voegelinian approaches to the unknown of being are different, but this is a philosophical disagreement within their agreement that history and hermeneutics must be ontological.”
Although the history was unknowable for Voegelin, human experience with reality is constant. In “Voegelin’s ‘Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,’” Glenn Hughes explicates Voegelin’s theory of “equivalent experiences,” where every human being experiences reality as part of God, the world, and society, with the manifestation or symbolization of those experiences shaped by the social and historical context of that era. The search for truth is a constant reality for all human beings, whether that search is symbolized in Christian faith, the Platonic philosopher, or the Roman statesman.
The examination of these symbols, especially the Christian ones, is a topic of four essays in this book. In “Voegelin’s ‘Immortality: Experience and Symbol,’” Henrik Syse points out that Voegelin urged us to go back to the engendering experience that gave rise to the symbols of God and immortality instead of being preoccupied with the ideological chatter. In “Voegelin’s ‘The Gospel and the Culture,’” Thomas Heilke examines Voegelin’s account of how the Gospel was adopted in Hellenic-Roman civilization as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Because it offered the answer to the philosopher’s search for truth, the Gospel was able to enter a culture that was shaped by the life of reason. In “Voegelin’s ‘Response to Professor Altzier,” Paulette Kidder reviews Voegelin’s response to the “death of God” theologian’s review of Order and History IV: The Ecumenic Age. In his response, Voegelin believed that Altizer had been seduced by Hegel’s philosophy and consequently could not engage in public rational discourse. Finally, in “Voegelin’s ‘Quod Deus Dicitur,’” Heilke with Paul Caringella situate Voegelin’s last essay as an inquiry to understand God and contextualize the situation in which Voegelin wrote this essay shortly before his death.
After the Anschluss, Eric Voegelin had to flee Austria because of two books he published that challenged the Nazi race idea. He spent most of his career in America, later in Munich, and finally at the Hoover Institution at the end of his career. In “Voegelin’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’” Paul Kidder recounts Voegelin’s time in Europe when its spiritual decline made possible the rise of fascism. Kidder then discusses the similarities and differences between Voegelin and Husserl in understanding the crises of European civilization, with the former being open to a range of involvement and experiences in the world and the latter relying upon a singular method to make sense of it.
Long overdue, Eric Voegelin’s Late Meditations and Essays is an insightful and penetrating analysis of Voegelin’s later work and how it holds up today. It is a significant contribution to the scholarship on Voegelin. Hopefully, it will make Voegelin’s work more accessible to the public and point us towards a path where we can regain a public discourse that is rational, reflective, and humane.
Lee Trepanier is Dean of the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Assumption University and Editor of the Lexington Books series Politics, Literature, and Film.
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