5 - The philosopher's vocation: the Voegelinian paradigm

Summary

In his personal and scholarly demeanor, Eric Voegelin's stance was overtly and explicitly that of a philosopher and teacher professing truth and resisting corruption. The mark of his life was intellectual integrity in the Weberian sense, and his only professional commitment was that of a partisan of truth. This was more than academic duty, however. It was quite distinctly a vocation – or calling (klesis) – of the highest order and responsibility, one intrinsic to the paradigm of philosophizing that Voegelin accepted from Plato and Anselm and demonstrated in his own life and work. It is exemplified and directly evoked in the “Introduction to Political Science” he taught as a lecture course at the University of Munich in the spring semester, 1964, now published under the title Hitler and the Germans. Yet it can be traced everywhere in his writings, beginning in the 1930s, as a constant and defining attitude. The implications are important not only for Voegelin but also for philosophy itself when it is rightly done as embracing the science of human affairs, palpably akin to that first elaborated in antiquity by Aristotle. It is this decisive, unfashionable, and somewhat elusive contextual dimension of Hitler and the Germans that I explore here.

The responsive center of the philosopher's calling lies in the divine–human partnership, understood as participation in the process-structure governing metaxic-reality-experienced – the only reality we have – with the philosopher cast in the role of representative man. Voegelin announces the calling and its authoritative consequences in his essay “The Oxford Political Philosophers,” in which he writes, “This is a time [1953] for the philosopher to be aware of his authority, and to assert it, even if that brings him into conflict with an environment infested by dubious ideologies and political theologies – so that the word of Marcus Aurelius will apply to him: ‘The philosopher – the priest and servant of the gods.’”