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Eric Voegelin's Framework for Political Evaluation in His Recently Published Work*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Dante Germino
Dante Germino*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Abstract

Eric Voegelin's evaluation of politics is grounded in the symbols and experiences which illumine man's participation in the process of reality. The trail of symbols and equivalent experiences whic constitute history provides the fundamental criteria by which the language of politics is to be evaluated. The central philosophical symbol is the Between (metaxy), coined by Plato. It indicates that human existence is a tension between the poles of the divine height and the cosmic depth. Politics and its language must acknowledge the limitations of this tension: that the human perspective is always from within reality. Existentially, man is a participant, not an observer looking at non-metric reality from the “outside.” The existential balance of the open psyche is the product of a perpetual struggle against the tendency to distortions. Such distortions can arise when one or other aspect of reality is allowed to absorb the whole, and individual thinkers attempt to abolish the tension by replacing it with a system which provides the “solution” to the mystery of reality.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 110 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1978

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Footnotes

*

Revised version of a paper prepared for the panel on “Political Evaluation” and delivered at the 1975 APSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. I wish to thank the Guggenheim Foundation for the award of a fellowship for the period during which this paper was written.

References

1 Voegelin, Eric, From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. Hallowell, John H. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), p. 257Google Scholar.

2 Germino, Dante, “Eric Voegelin: The In-Between of Human life,” in Contemporary Political Philosophers, ed. Minogue, K. R. and de Crespigny, A. (New York:Dodd, 1975), p. 111Google Scholar.

3 Voegelin, Eric, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” in Eternità e storia (Florence: a cura dell'Istituto Accademico de Roma, 1970), pp. 215–34, at 215Google Scholar. Voegelin discusses the problem of so-called “value relativism” in an earlier work, where he said in part: “In order to degrade the politics of Plato, Aristotle, or St. Thomas to the rank of ‘values’ among others, a conscientious scholar would first have to show that their claim to be science was unfounded. And that attempt is self-defeating. By the time the would-be critic has penetrated the meaning of metaphysics with sufficient thoroughness to make his criticism weighty, he will have become a metaphysician himself.” Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 20Google Scholar.

4 Voegelin, , “Equivalences,” p. 233Google Scholar.

5 Voegelin, , From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 21Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 257.

7 Voegelin, Eric, Order and History, Vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 11Google Scholar.

8 Voegelin, , “On Hegel—A Study in Sorcery,” Studium Generate, 24 (1971), 335–68 at 351Google Scholar. This has also appeared in The Study of Time, ed. Fiaser, J.et al. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1972), 1:418–51 at 434Google Scholar. It will also appear in Order and History, Vol. 5.

9 Voegelin, , “On Hegel—A Study in Sorcery,” Studium Generate, p. 360Google Scholar; The Study of Time, p. 443.

10 The Ecumenic Age, pp. 174–75.

11 The Ecumenic Age, p. 186.

12 Ibid., p. 237.

13 The Ecumenic Age. Voegelin is here restating the arguments against an “Infinite regress” in Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, I, Q. 2, Article 3). With out a “first cause,” motion could not be explained, without a Beginning or Source (Archē), creaturely existence could not be explained, without an independent Being, dependent beings could not be explained, and without a final Cause, efficient causes could not be explained. The intractability of mythical speculation for scientific explanation is due precisely to the inability of mythical speculation to differentiate the transcendent Ground from intra-cosmic existence.

14 Ibid.,p. 39.

15 Ibid.,p. 75.

16 The Ecumenic Age, pp. 17–18.

17 Ibid., p. 19. cf. Ibid., p. 320: “The Question is not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious ground of all being.”

18 The Ecumenic Age, p. 20. Voegelin himself has said, however, in response to the question whether he would call himself a Christian, “I try to be, and also to be a philosopher.” (Conversation with the author, April, 1975.)

19 Ibid., p. 28.

20 Voegelin, , “Equivalences,” p. 220Google Scholar.

21 Voegelin, , Ecumenic Age, p. 271Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 255 and passim.

23 Ibid., pp. 9–16, 242–44, 258–59.

24 Ibid., pp. 17,253, 314–16.

25 Ibid., pp. 56, 202, 234–38.

26 Voegelin, , Ecumenic Age, pp. 11–16, 237–38Google Scholar.

27 Ibid.,pp. 20–57, 260–71.

28 Voegelin, , Ecumenic Age, pp. 313–16, 330–35Google Scholar.

29 Hallowell, John H., Introduction to Voegelin, Eric, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975), p. viGoogle Scholar. I have myself expressed the view that the history of political thought is a “conversation of many voices,” most recently in my chapter in Polsby, Nelson and Gieenstein, Fred, Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), I, 229 ff.Google Scholar One problem is to distinguish between “error and the person who errs,” as John XXIII expressed it. Voegelin frequently seems to suggest that not only the ideas of Hegel, Marx, and the rest of the “gnostics” are erroneous, but that the thinkers themselves are spiritually diseased as persons. I must confess that I still find it difficult to accept this latter judgment and wonder if it is necessary to condemn these thinkers as whole persons in the way, again, that Voegelin appears to argue. Hannah Arendt's remark that there is an “abyss” between facile ideas and brutal ideas needs to be recalled here. And yet, there is an obviously powerful, if unintended, effect of gnostic or messianic ideas on the climate in which a Hitler or a Stalin lives and works. Voegelin's point is that they do not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. Thinkers presumably have an obligation to weigh the probable consequences of their words on future generations of some not so philosophical human beings. However, we today can say all of this about Condorcet, Helvetius, Hegel, Marx and the rest from the advantage of hindsight: of having witnessed the horrors of twentiety century totalitarianism.

The most that I can say at present is that in From Enlightenment to Revolution Voegelin has opened up an enormously difficult and important problem of historical interpretation which should concern political scientists in general and all of us who write about the history of political thought in particular much more than it has.

30 Voegelin, , From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp. 20, 28Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., p. 21.

32 Voegelin, , From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp. 27–28Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., p. 95.

34 Ibid., p. 258. Voegelin here quotes the judgment of Landshut, S. and Mayer, J. P., Introduction to Marx: Der historische Materialismus (Leipzig, 1932), I, xxiiGoogle Scholar. Voegelin points out that if Marx had been open to the question regarding the ground of human existence, he would not have produced an ideology which denies that man is situated in an order of being and a cosmic order to which he is subordinated. Had they raised the question, Marx and Engels would have correctly recognized themselves as “predicates” of a divine subject instead of indulging in the illusion that they were Promethean creators of a new reality. Had Marx raised the question of the nature of reality, he would have been led to recognize the “total context” of which he was only a minute part. Instead, Voegelin contends, Marx engaged in “pseudo-logical speculation,” and “grandiose ranting,” with the result that he and his followers produced a “general intellectual mess” on the basis of illustory second-reality constructions. “And these,” Voegelin wryly concludes in his section on Marx, “are the ideas that shake the world!” (Ibid., p. 272). Voegelin's critique of Marx provides philosophical underpinning for Solzhenitsyn's judgment, in his 1974 Stockholm Nobel Prize interview, “Solzhenitsyn Speaks out” (reprinted in National Review, 6 June 1975, 606)Google Scholar, that it is wishful thinking to draw a dramatic distinction between the “humanism” of Marx and the antihumanism of Lenin and Stalin.

As mentioned in note 29, the difficult problem as I see it, is to reconcile the demands for intellectual perspicacity with those of human charity (to employ a distinction of the late Leo Strauss). Without indulging in sentimentality, we are obliged to be charitable to our fellow human beings in the Between. I cannot imagine that Voegelin would disagree with my last statement.

35 Voegelin, , From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp. 69,97,132,178,258Google Scholar.

36 Voegelin, , From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp. 72–73Google Scholar.

37 Voegelin, , The Ecumenic Age, Ch. 5, pp. 239–71Google Scholar. See the vehement review by Wilhelmsen, Frederick D. in Triumph (January 1975), pp. 32–35, for an admittedly rather sensationalist manifestation of this concernGoogle Scholar.

38 Voegelin, , The Ecumenic Age, p. 56Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., p. 57.

40 Voegelin, , Enlightenment to Revolution, pp. 299–300Google Scholar.

41 Voegelin, , “On Hegel—A Study in Sorcery,” Studium Generate, 24 (1971), 355–68, at 349Google Scholar, The Study of Time, p. 432. To be reprinted in Order and History, Vol. 5.

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