Lee Trepanier - Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: Explorations in Modern Political Thought

Conscious reflection on the philosophical foundations of Western civilization has increased steadily since Descartes, and especially since the middle of the twentieth century with its growing concerns about the possible collapse of modernity. The Enlightenment confidence in human reason's ability to understand and convey the fundamental structure of reality has been shaken by the advent of revolutionary political movements, totalitarian ideologies, and the philosophical skepticism of postmodernity. Perhaps this should not be surprising given the modern restriction of knowledge to the external and empirical sphere of reality, which was made possible by Cartesian subjectivism and then subsequently legitimated by the methods of the natural sciences. Ours is a truncated reason. The experiences of God, morality, and the other transcendent teleologies that constitute human existence are no longer allowed the status of knowledge in this Cartesian world. Instead, they are seen as private and often suspect beliefs.

Eric Voegelin (19011985) is one of the severest critics of this Cartesian subjectivity, its successive philosophical practitioners, and its political and philosophical consequences. For Voegelin, modernity was fundamentally characterized by man's attempt to refashion the world in his own imagean attempt that ultimately was doomed to failure, but was nonetheless enacted at the price of millions of lives. This failure was perhaps best exemplified by the rise of National Socialism, but it could only occur in a civilization that had fallen into a spiritual and intellectual malaise. As Voegelin notes, The phenomenon of Hitler is not exhausted by his person. His success must be understood in the context of an intellectually or morally ruined society in which personalities who otherwise would be grotesque, marginal figures can come to public power because they superbly represent the people who admire them. Near the end of the twentieth century, Voegelin thought that modernity's ruin had not only pervaded all aspects of society but run its course. What was required was a new philosophya new sciencethat would restore a proper understanding of reality and reestablish a basis for its communication.

Voegelin thought that the modern philosophical trajectory was implicated in and partly responsible for the crisis of modernity, and thus he sought his philosophical bearings among the premodern philosophers. Yet Voegelin's relationship to modern philosophy is not wholly negative, and the essays in this volume reevaluate Voegelin's critique of modernity by examining his relationship to the continental tradition of philosophy from Kant to Derrida. Although Voegelin is often critical of many of the thinkers in the modern tradition of philosophy, it is the premise of this volume that he nevertheless has much more in common with them than is usually recognized. We think it is important to recognize this because we suspect that Voegelin's own attempt to grapple with the crisis of modernity would have been aided by a friendlier consideration of these other thinkers. In short, we want to go beyond Voegelin's criticisms of these thinkers and to explore, from a fresh point of view, how Voegelin's search for order can be enriched by a more sympathetic reading of their works. What commonalities can be found between Voegelin and the others? What contributions can both Voegelin and the other modern philosophers make in our understanding of both the crisis of modernity and the path beyond it? But before we explore these questions, who was Eric Voegelin, and what were his criticisms of modernity?