Eric Voegelin - Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays
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This concise classic is the most accessible work in the canon of one of the 20th centurysgreatest political scientists. Eric Voegelin here contends that certain modern movements, including Positivism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and the God is Dead movement, are variants of the Gnostic tradition of antiquity. Highly provocative, this book is essential reading for students of modern politics, philosophy, and religion.Hailed by the American Political Science Review as one of the most distinguished interpreters to Americans of the non-liberal streams of European thought, Professor Voegelin was director of the Institute for Political Science at the University of Munich as well as professor of political science and lecturer at numerous universities in the United States and Europe.With a new introduction by Ellis Sandoz, professor of political science at Lousiana State University and director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renasissance Studies.**Language NotesText: English (translation)Original Language: GermanAbout the AuthorVoegelin was one of the most influential philosophers of our time.
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
I T IS WITH PLEASURE that I write a few lines of introduction to Eric Voegelins Science, Politics and Gnosticism. In the period since it first appeared in German in 1959, and was later translated by Henry Regnery in 1968, it has become a classic of modern political theory. It demonstrates the power of Voegelins thought, his lucidity of expression, and his unique and cogent analysis of the demonic in modern existence. It also shows that the new science of politics, indebted to classical and Christian philosophy, can be used to diagnose the maladies of contemporary political existence and offer remedies within the modest limits of reason and science. In this brief introduction I should like to reflect on the character of Voegelins analysis, its common sense, as well as its philosophical foundations. In addition, I wish to suggest the place of the material, as presented here, in the larger scheme of Voegelins philosophy of human affairs.
Let me say first that the present volume extends and deepens the thesis of the latter part of The New Science of Politics (1952) that the essence of modernity is Gnosticism. It also continues to display the new science, which is anchored in ordinary experience and utilizes the Aristotelian method. The nub of the latter is the great strength of Voegelins philosophy. He begins with commonsense understanding of the issue at hand as a given and then ascends analytically, clarifying the key experiences of reality in which every man shares and through which he becomesif he is philosophically inclined and moved by reasona partner in the inquiry of truth.
The first part of the work, initially delivered as the inaugural lecture of the new professor of political science at the University of Munich on November 26, 1958, deals with the modern crisis of human existence intelligibly and brilliantly. The talk of Gnosticism, however, is not immediately accessible until some of the particulars come into view. But this is no more than a momentary obstacle to understanding. Those with a background in Voegelins thought need no introduction to the present material, so I shall address those who are less familiar with his work.
The context of Voegelins discourse is a philosophers search for truth and his personal resistance to untruth in its manifold forms, especially as untruth affects the political situation from which his philosophizing takes its impetus. There is nothing pretentious in this. For Voegelin believed that the vocation of the philosopher had much in common with the vocation of all other human beings, and he spelled out this belief in an early passage of his Antrittsvorlesung (inaugural lecture). As his principal philosophical mentor Plato contended, the philosopher is no more than an exemplary human beingnot a species apart. Therefore, in addressing his new colleagues and the assembled students of the University of Munich on a solemn occasion, Voegelin clarified the subject matter and truth of his discourse as applicable to each and everyone presentas well as to prospective readersas follows:
We shall now try to present the phenomenon of the prohibition of questions through an analysis of representative opinions. Thus, this effort will present not only the phenomenon, but the exercise of analysis as well. It should show that the spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate;... on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. And our effort [here] should not only indicate the means, but also show how to employ them. No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order. Our presentation of the phenomenon, therefore, will at the same time furnish the remedy for it through therapeutic analysis (15).
Thus, he evokes the philosopher as physician of the soul. One commentator, reflecting on the overall character of Voegelins philosophizing, offers these helpful remarks:
To understand Voegelins philosophy of order-disorder, it is necessary to recognize that his philosophy is the protest of good against evil.... Behind Voegelin the historian is Voegelin the prophet crying, Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil (Isa. 5:20). The judgments upon the kinds of philosophy available involve sorting out the evil from the good. The powerful forms politically have been fascist (including the worst variety of the Nazis) and communist; and the degenerate or derailed modern philosophy has only feeble protests against collectivist tyrannies of Right and Left. The bad forms are very bad, and Voegelin has no nice academic party manners that inhibit him from calling Karl Marx a swindler and his master, Hegel, a charlatan who played con games.... By true philosophy Voegelin means basically good philosophy. It is classical and Christian, the heritage of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, out of whom came St. Thomas Aquinas and scholasticism.... The conception Voegelin has of good and true philosophy is so noble that any practicing philosopher would tremble to try to do more than suggest what it is. Philosophy, which has the role of saving us from evil, is the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order ( OH I, xiv). I call Voegelin an Augustinian because philosophy must develop pairs of concepts which cast light on both good and evil ( OH III, 68-69). Voegelin presents a City of God against and above the City of Man. The social function of true philosophy is to resist disorder and form the community that lives through the ages....
Protecting philosophy against perversion is vital to the larger task of protecting human existence itself against perversion and tyranny. The issues are matters of life and death ( OHI, xiii). To illustrate this point, Voegelin juxtaposes famous philosophers like Marx, Comte, and Hegel, who prohibited questions that might undermine their systems credibility, with Rudolf Hss, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz, who testified to the inability of an SS officer to ask questions in a newspaper interview a few weeks before Voegelins lecture. No SS leader would even think of questioning his orders. Something like that was just completely impossible, said Hss. This is very close to the wording of Marxs declaration, Voegelin wrote, that for socialist man such a question becomes a practical impossibility. Thus, we see delineated three major types for whom a human inquiry has become a practical impossibility: socialist man (in the Marxian sense), positivist man (in the Comtean sense), and national-socialist man (18).
The line drawn in the material before us is mainly between philosophy and anti-philosophy in the form of Gnosticism. What are the differences between the two? Voegelin states the two principles as follows: Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is mans loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one (30). First, last, and always, philosophy is the love of wisdom, not its possession, as in the system and claim to actual knowledge (wirkliches Wissen) in Hegels Phenomenology. The closure against divine realityvariously effected through the libido dominandi, or will to power, appearing as philosophy by means of systems construction, the prohibition of pertinent questions, and the murder of Godis that in modern thought which allows, first, the evocation of the autonomous Man, and, finally, the conjuring of the pretended superman (bermensch). Voegelin analyzes such intentional falsifications of reality and perversions of philosophy in terms of Gnosticism in its various forms.
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