Review of Ellis Sandoz: The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
Original version published October 1982 in Chronicles of Culture.
Republished with permission.
Eric Voegelin ranks among the major thinkers of the aftermath of the Second World War who are usually classified as `conservative.’ Ellis Sandoz regards him as a revolutionary. Why so?
Voegelin endured the Weimar Republic and escaped Nazi Germany, becoming a refugee scholar in America. Understandably, he makes much of constitutionalism, insisting that a constitutional order must rule—really rule—in practice as well as on paper, or it may fall to one who will rule without constitutional restraint. He also appreciates that a statesman cannot simply rule ‘by the book,’ treating a constitution like a collection of recipes. Within the restrains imposed by the constitution, the statesman must act, thoughtfully. Voegelin considers practical wisdom or prudence “a compact type of rationality” necessary to any sound political action. By “compact” he means non-discursive, concentrated, reasoning that can make sensible judgments `on the spot’—that is, within a political community, with no thought of radically transforming that community. Hence his appeal to conservatives.
Prudential reasoning links action within the restraints of a man-made constitution to the restraints imposed by God and nature. In discussing Solon, Voegelin observes that while a statesman must share “the passions of the people” in order to make himself politically acceptable, he can only act with authority for them if “in his soul these passions have] submitted to the universal order” apprehended by reason and/or by faith. Voegelin criticizes those who would simply override ordinary passions. In the fourth volume of Order and History, he observes: “The counsels of the Sermon [on the Mount] originate in the spirit of eschatological heroism. If they were followed by the Christian layman to the letter among men as they are, they would be suicidal…. Since the Sermon is unbearable in its purity, the Church infuses as much of its substance as men are capable of absorbing while living in the world; the mediation of the stark reality of Jesus to the level of human expediency, with minimum loss of substance, is one of the functions of the Church.” He applauds this “Pauline, ecclesiastic compromise with the frailty of man.” God’s revelation serves as a standard—immutable but also unreachable in any thoroughgoing and consistent way; God’s regime as manifested on earth, with its institutions invented in part by human beings, mediates between God and His creatures, providing an institutional framework for prudential rule of the passions. Because it is prudent, such rule will allow for those passions, not attempt to obliterate them.
Despite the founding of the Church, the Christian Fathers failed to arrange a sufficient number of prudent compromises. They “did not understand that Christianity could supersede polytheism but not abolish the need of a civil theology.” In addition, the Fathers inclined toward a potentially dangerous apocalyticism: “The Pauline myth of the struggle among the cosmic forces validity expresses the telos of the movement that is experienced in reality, but it becomes invalid when it is used to anticipate the concrete process of transfiguration in history. Although in some respects “deeper” than classical philosophy, Christianity is also more dangerous, as “it tempts the pneumatic visionaries into the deformation of expecting the transfiguration of reality in the near future thereby proclaiming the end of history at the epense of the balance of consciousness.” The early Christians’ failure to stay within the bounds of reality on both of these counts left politics vulnerable to those who would give the people a political belief system that refers not to divinity but to the passions. Voegelin calls this system by its first post-Christian name: “Gnosticism.”
“Gnostics,” Voegelin writes, “will not leave the transfiguration of the world to the grace of God beyond history but will do the work of God himself, right here and now, in history.” Gnostics would replace the “theophanic” world of Athens and Jerusalem with an “egophanic” world. Voegelin sees the heirs of this doctrine as the dominant voices in modern ideological-political life. Ellis Sandoz, who persuaded Voegelin to record a valuable memoir for use in this book, quotes him referring to Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach as “probably the best world-fetish ever constructed by a man who wanted to be God.” Under the auspices of Gnosticism, every major new book becomes, as Voegelin puts it, a “Koran”; it supersedes all previous books and tolerates no criticism of itself. This approach replaces “the oldest wisdom of mankind concerning the rhythm of growth and decay which is the fate of all things under the son” with a “dream world”—”the non-recognition of reality as a matter of principle.” For individuals and for politics this brings on a fit of “moral insanity.”
Such attempts to change human nature fail. But they often succeed in inoculating their advocates against the discovery of that failure by accepting “the non-recognition of reality as a matter of principle,” as Voegelin writes in The New Science of Politics. (In his earlier, brilliant book on Dostoevsky, Political Apocalypse Sandoz quotes Marx as insisting that questions about God must simply be repressed, an insistence that prefigures the enforced forgetfulness dear to Marx’s literal-minded `totalitarian’ disciples). Non-recognition of reality begets “moral insanity,” a comprehensive ignorance that imagines itself to be a full gnosis, or knowledge of all of History’s “laws.” Human consciousness, Voegelin observes, is a given; however we may try to account for it, we unquestionably “have” it. Our consciousness experiences the other, things and relations that at least apparently exist “outside” of ourselves. this, again, is a given, however philosophers may try to explain it away. Although empiricists and some “idealists” try to explain consciousness by referring to “subjects” and “objects,” Voegelin insists that the only genuinely empirical experience we have refers primarily to the consciousness of the other as a genuine other, not as a mere “mental construct.”
What may seem a purely theoretical and even narrowly epistemological concern actually has political implications for the contemporary world. Modern politics—Voegelin calls it “Gnostic” politics—depends on precisely the sort of epistemology that splits “subject” and “object” so that one can conquer the other. In the modern West, all “values” are said to be “subjective,” in spite of traditional claims for ethical principles rooted in human nature. The modern mind has cut itself adrift from what Voegelin calls “the ground”—from being or reality itself. In the modern East, Lenin teaches (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) that the “objective” material world colonizes the “subjective” consciousness. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot carried this “objectivist” conquest of the other to its insane extreme. “When a person refuses to live in existential tension toward the ground, or if he rebels against the ground, refusing to participate in reality and in this way to experience his own reality as man, it is not the `world’ that is thereby changed but rather he who loses contact with reality and in his own person suffers a loss of reality. Since that does not make him cease to be a man, and since his consciousness continues to function within the form of reality, he will generate ersatz images of reality”—utopian visions—”in order to obtain order and direction for his existence and action in the world.” These images are usually drawn from the passions or the “Ego.” Utopianism, which appears to be a vision of a new society, in fact spins out of nothing more than solipsism. Violence necessarily ensues when reality refuses to cooperate with the solipsist’s illusion. Astutely, Voegelin cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror as an example of this—a lethal injection into the life of the mind.
But, as Voegelin insists, “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” By insisting on consciousness of the other as a given, as irreducible to “subjectivity” or “objectivity,” Voegelin would cure modernity’s radical mental imbalance, restoring the balance between matter and form, process and structure. He calls this rebalanced condition of human consciousness “metaxy.” This balance restores the sense of divine hierarchy, one that is dynamic rather than static. A difficulty arises here because form, process, and structure, in Voegelin’s arrangement, are not material, whereas matter obviously is. He suggests that matter “issues” from the divine, and admits the mystery of that. Mystery allows him to meld reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem. According to Sandoz, “Faith in the reason of the Whole is… the foundation of all philosophizing.” This leaves Voegelin in a bind. If he were to give matter its due by not only observing that it turns into something else, namely energy, under certain conditions, but then (for that very reason) linked matter to his non-material (but not immaterial, or ghostly) divinity, he might fall into just the sort of world-immanent eschatology he justifiably detests.
In his book Anamnesis (which means “not-forgetting,” and itself recalls an activity of the soul described by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus) Voegelin remembers that his favorite childhood schoolbook was called The Book of Realities. “The realities of nature that were to be found in this book I do not remember; but history is still firmly retained.” This interest in history is one of Voegelin’s characteristic signatures, and it misleads those who do not read him carefully. The classical philosophers considered man a rational and political animal; “the genius of the Hellenic philosophers discovered reason as the source of order in the psyche of man.” Voegelin adds “historical” to “rational and political” in order to emphasize that history remains one matter we surely do not know in full. Voegelin esteems the Socratic insistence that the philosopher knows that he does not know, that this is philosophic wisdom. Socratic philosophy does ascend from the cave, Socrates’ image of the conventions and opinions of the political community in which the philosopher philosophizes. But there is no “vantage point outside of existence” itself. Socratic perception of the ideas, the forms, the philosophic noesis, must not be allowed to rigidify into doctrine because mere knowledge of doctrine would make the philosophic longing for wisdom dissolve into a complacent mistaking of doctrine—which must always be an approximation of the vastness of being, seem like a comprehensive account of being. In parallel to the Christian Church Fathers, the Greek philosophers left their enterprise open to the danger “that the new truth about the poles [of participation] turns into propositions about a reality supposedly independent of the perspective of noetic experience.” But this led to a loss of the actual experience of noesis itself, a forgetting of the “metaxy.”
Much of the confusion in understanding Voegelin’s use of the term `history’ derives from a failure to see that by `history’ Voegelin does not mean a course of events determined by a set of knowable laws of motion, as seen in the writings of Hegel and Marx. That is rather the project of historicism: an attempt to derive a dogmatic teaching from history. But if history consists of our experiences of the metaxy itself, our participation in the in-between-ness of the human condition, then historicist doctrines are only the latest and most lethal versions of Gnosticism. `Gnosticism’ literally means `knowing-ism; Gnostics are know-it-alls, but philosophers are wonderers. Far from claiming, with Hegel, that in his thought the philosophic quest has ended and the wisdom philosophers love has now been attained, Voegelin seeks to recover the groundedness of the human mind in the original delight in noesis, whether it be understood as a revelation of God or as an insight into nature—revelations and insights always understood as limited by our own decidedly un-godlike particularity. Hegel and the other historicists are therefore a-historical; they reject the limits of human nature (“constant in spite of its unfolding”). But “if man exists in the metaxy, in the tension `between god and man,’ any construction of man as a world-immanent entity will desroy the meaning of existence, becaue it deprives man of his specific humanity.” “The substance of history,” Voegelin writes in The New Science of Politics, “consists in the experiences in which man gains the understanding of his humanity and together with it the understanding of its limits.”
One of those limits is the incapacity to go forward into a future in which human nature has achieved self-transfiguration by means of radical economic, political, and social reform. Another of those limits is the incapacity to return to the economic, political, and social reforms that prevailed in the past—the ancient polis, the medieval estate; in Voegelin’s language, we cannot return to “a former concreteness.” And this is a good thing, inasmuch as Judaism, Christianity, and classical philosophy all succeeded in de-divinizing the world—the religions by worshipping a holy—that is to say—Creator-God, the philosophers by discovering nature as distinguished from the gods. This is why “Jews and Christians [and, it might be added, philosophers] have a disconcerting habit of outlasting the rise and fall of political powers.” To them, neither the rise nor the fall of a political power necessarily indicates God’s approval or disapproval of that power, unless God chooses to reveal this to one of His prophets. The Bible carefully differentiates God and His commands from Man or Adam, and both from the covenant to which each consents. Notably, Voegelin regards the Bible stories themselves as part of a myth pointing to the truth, not as literal truth. “At its core human nature… is the openness of the questioning knowledge and the knowing question about the ground”—about the foundation of being or reality. “Through this openness, beyond all contents, images, and models [of it], order flows from the ground of being into man’s being.”
By contending that `History’ consists of a set of knowable, deterministic forces aiming at a knowable purpose or `end of History,’ historicist thinkers (in imagination if not in reality) re-divinize the course of events and nature—advocating a new version of the old conception of the divine as immanent in all things. But Hegel’s absolute (as distinct from the Bible’s holy) spirit assumes that man is the leading edge of divinity itself. In Hegel, “the metaxy has been transmuted into immanence,” both with regard to philosophy and Biblical revelation. “In a clean sweep he transfers the authority of both reason and revelation to his system and to himself as its creator.” Voegelin regards this as the delusion of a self-divinizing spirit, and therefore the ruin of the genuinely human, metaxic spirit—an “egophanic revolt against theophanic reality,” and thus an act of Pharaohanic or (more appositely in Hegel’s case) Napoleonic “intellectual imperialism.” “The death of the spirit is the price of progress.” far from progress, this really amounts to “a throwback from differentiation”—from the de-divinization of the world via the distinction between divine Creator and his Creation—”into the pre-historic compactness of the myth”—”compact” in the sense that it takes all reality to be of one piece, and a divine piece at that. Politically, this means that Pharaoh is a god or, in modernity, that Mao embodies the leading edge of historical progress. What is needed is not a fantasized progress toward an unattainable utopia but a recovery of human beings common sense, especially its sense of its own limits. Sandoz identifies this such human participation within the whole of being as “the pivotal conception” in Voegelin’s thought. Participation means thought and action conscious of “the reality of being in contact with reality outside myself.” Voegelin intends his monumental four-volume Order and History as a history of philosophy in opposition to the `philosophy of history’ or historicism.
Voegelin’s not-forgetting of history (which, as he conceives it, is not a succession of external events but “the unfolding of the typical in meaningful concreteness,” an aspect of the metaxy) and his forgetting of material nature (relegated to the status of the mysterious basis, but not the form, process, or structure, of life) allows him to do to the “Gnostics” what the “Gnostics” try to do to him: silent questioning. Silence can be discreet or crude. “Gnostic” silence, which usually results in totalitarianism on one extreme or libertinism on the other, deserves classification as a crude silence. Voegelin’s silence, conceived in resistance to “Gnosticism,” deserves the esteem we feel for refinement. Whereas crudeness teaches us only about itself, refinement can teach us about itself and about matters beyond it. The education Voegelin offers excels modern education even when it ends in the silence of unresolved paradox. Or perhaps because it does: Voegelin may deliberately leave his readers with something to think about, on their own.
All of this illuminates Ellis Sandoz’s description of Voegelin’s thought as revolutionary. Voegelin, he remarks, presents “a new language of philosophical discourse.” He does so in order to `revolve’ modern minds back to the original experiences of human thoughtfulness, to recover “commonsense experience” from the solipsistic and often dangerous dream world of Gnosticism. By seeking to understand human events and thoughts through “the self-understanding of the persons involved,” Voegelin searches “the trail of symbolisms in history as the chief means of recovering the engendering experiences which have given rise to them,” never forgetting—always mindful—that “truth lies at the level of experience, not of the symbols.” The “symbols” or thought-structures of thinkers, taken in isolation, will cover over the noetic perception that they are meant to express. What we must never forget, Voegelin argues, is that “the experience of the transcendence of consciousness” antecedes any systematic reflection upon that experience; anamnesis recalls the “experience of the transcendence of consciousness” from which philosophic reflection issues. This is why, for example, Aristotle describes natural justice as valid everywhere but also changeable; the insight is permanently true but the prudential instantiation of justice in the real world must change with the changing circumstances of life. This is also why Voegelin begins his book by saying that he does not write a definitive commentary on Voegelin’s doctrines but rather as what he has been “for many years, Eric Voegelin’s student and friend.” If you want to philosophize, don’t memorize a philosopher’s doctrines. Befriend a philosopher.
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