Eric Voegelin's Dialogue With The Postmoderns: Searching For Foundations

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Author: Peter A. Petrakis; Cecil L. Eubanks; Eric Voegelin

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Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns

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Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns Searching for Foundations

Edited with an introduction by

Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2004 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 08 07 06 05 04 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eric Voegelin’s dialogue with the postmoderns : searching for foundations / edited with an introduction by Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8262-1564-5 (alk. paper) 1. Voegelin, Eric, 1901—Contributions in political science. 2. Political science—History—20th century. I. Petrakis, Peter A., 1964– II. Eubanks, Cecil L. III. Voegelin, Eric, 1901– JC263.E75 2004 320'.092—dc22 2004020162 ™

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Text design: Stephanie Foley Jacket design: Susan Ferber Typesetter: Phoenix Type, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typeface: Minion

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction PETER A. PETRAKIS AND CECIL L. EUBANKS

1 1. Voegelin and Ricoeur Recovering Science and Subjectivity through Representation PETER A. PETRAKIS

23 2. Sight, Sound, and Participatory Symbolization Eric Voegelin’s Political Theory as an Attempt to Recapture the Speech-Dimension of Human Experience MURRAY JARDINE

57 3. Immanence/Transcendence Deleuze and Voegelin on the Conditions for Political Order JEFFREY A. BELL

93 4. Voegelin and Levinas on the “Foundations” of Ethics and Politics Transcendence and Immanence Revisited WILLIAM PAUL SIMMONS

121 v

vi / Contents

5. Politics, Metaphysics, and Anti-Foundationalism in the Works of Eric Voegelin and Jan Patocˇka EDWARD F. FINDLAY

145 Epilogue PETER A. PETRAKIS AND CECIL L. EUBANKS

169 Contributors 179 Index 181

Acknowledgments

D

ialogue requires the proper milieu. Given that this work is a dialogue in the fullest sense of the term, thanks is due to those settings vital to the creation of this manuscript. The idea, a dim one at the beginning, took shape and some form in a typical manner. In September 2000, several of the authors in this collection met in Washington, D.C., and presented papers at the Eric Voegelin Society meeting, held in conjunction with the American Political Science Association. Thus, without the quiet and consistent dedication of the individuals responsible for organizing those meetings, this idea likely would have failed to take shape. In this context and many more, special appreciation is afforded to the Eric Voegelin Society generally and most especially to Ellis Sandoz, the Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University and director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies. Cultivating a culture of learning and scholarship devoted to intellectual integrity, Ellis and the society have forged an important institutional shelter where scholars can, with hard and serious work, find their voice. Most of the voices in this manuscript owe considerable debt to the Department of Political Science at LSU and its political theory faculty. Four of the five authors and both editors have considerable ties to that venerable program. Ed Findlay, Peter Petrakis, and William Simmons all received their graduate training at LSU and as such realize the uniqueness of their experience in Baton Rouge. With three full-time tenured faculty in political theory, numbers unheard of in most contemporary political science departments, James Stoner, professor of political science and current member of the National Council on the Humanities, the aforementioned Ellis Sandoz, and Cecil Eubanks, alumni professor of political science, conducted superlative graduate seminars, sponsored or facilitated superb guest lectures, and generally endeavored to foster a deep appreciation for the vocation of political theorist. Without their efforts, this manuscript and many other contributions would not have been possible. vii

viii / Acknowledgments

Our early conversations about Voegelin were particularly enhanced by a special cadre of graduate students, Peter Buttross, Charles Burchfield, Randy Leblanc, and Murray Jardine, a post-doctoral political theorist from Duke University lured to Louisiana by the Voegelin Society. These factors and many more created a haven for young scholars; and with increasing awareness, we know how truly rare such communities have come to be. Southeastern Louisiana University is also owed considerable debt. Two of the contributors, Peter Petrakis and Jeffrey Bell, owe their current sustenance, both material and intellectual, to SLU; and without the assistance and support of William Robison, head of the Department of History and Political Science, this work would not have been possible. Jeffrey Bell has a prodigious mind and wonderful spirit, and his friendship has been most sustaining. The University of Missouri Press deserves special thanks, most particularly Beverly Jarrett, director and editor-inchief, Jane Lago, managing editor, Karen D. Renner, marketing manager, Beth Chandler, publicity and exhibits manager, and copy editor Julie Schorfheide, all of whom have been extremely supportive and helpful. Similarly, the anonymous reviewers used by the press were very gracious in their criticisms and helpful in their suggestions. Needless to say, the editors and authors are also grateful to the University of Missouri Press for permission to quote extensively from The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, most especially for selections from volumes 12 and 28. Reprinted from The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12: Published Essays, 1966– 1985 edited by Ellis Sandoz, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright (c) 1990 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. Reprinted from The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 28: What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, edited by Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright (c) 1990 by the Louisiana State University Press. Finally, portions of several essays in this collection were published elsewhere: a brief section of Peter Petrakis’s “Voegelin and Ricoeur: Recovering Science and Subjectivity through Representation” appeared in Cecil L. Eubanks and Peter A. Petrakis, “Reconstructing the World: Albert Camus and the Symbolization of Experience,” Journal of Politics (Blackwell Publishing, May 1999); parts of an early version of Murray Jardine’s “Sight, Sound, and Participatory Symbolization: Eric Voegelin’s Political Theory as an Attempt to Recapture the Speech-Dimension of Human Experience” were originally published in Speech and Political Practice: Recovering the Place of

Acknowledgments / ix

Human Responsibility (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); excerpts from William Paul Simmons’s “Voegelin and Levinas on the ‘Foundations’ of Ethics and Politics: Transcendence and Immanence Revisited” have appeared in his An-Archy and Justice: An Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas’s Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003); and revised portions of Edward F. Findlay’s “Politics, Metaphysics, and Anti-Foundationalism in the Works of Eric Voegelin and Jan Patocˇka” are based on his Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patocˇka (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). We are indebted to all of the aforementioned publishers for permission to include these excerpts in this collection of essays. No praise of settings, however, would be complete without mentioning our families. Judy Eubanks is and has been a source of enormous strength, joy, and love. Equally, Angela Petrakis and Tyler have fortified beyond the power of words. Their love and support, so vital to Peter Petrakis given the loss of both of his parents since this project began, provide ample testament to the heroic efforts required of families. This manuscript is small but sincere testament to all of our families and is offered, humbly, in memory of Helen and Gene Petrakis.


Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns


Introduction PETER A. PETRAKIS AND CECIL L. EUBANKS

There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a “knowing” from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our “idea” of that thing, our “objectivity.” —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

A philosophy with problematic foundations, with paradoxes which arise from the obscurity of the fundamental concepts, is no philosophy, it contradicts its very meaning as philosophy. —EDMUND HUSSERL, 1931 PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION OF IDEAS

T

he philosophical and political discourse of the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century is marked by a continuing concern for foundations, for a grounding, or nomos, that will provide some value and guidance to a world marked by massive human destruction and the renewed passions of tribalism. The modern experiments of the Enlightenment and positivism, and their associated faith in the power of reason and science, have proven to be incomplete at best, illusory at worst. In good measure, that is why the continuing conversation over whether there can be foundations is termed postmodernism. In that conversation two dominant voices have emerged: one, Nietzsche, is profoundly polemical and attacks the very foundations 1

2 / Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns

of Western thought; the other, Husserl, more quietly but no less passionately attempts to rebuild the metaphysical ground of philosophy and science. Every serious participant in the dialogue over foundations and foundationalism, from Heidegger to Rorty, as well as the subject of this collection, Eric Voegelin, has had to come to terms with the challenges presented by these two thinkers. The genesis of Nietzsche’s contribution to the postmodern conversation on foundations and foundationalism is his observation that human beings are engaged in a desperate and illusory search for metaphysical solace. Indeed, one of Nietzsche’s interpreters, Karl Jaspers, believed that this was true of Nietzsche himself and remained the key to understanding his philosophy, which Jaspers characterizes as a solitary, desperate, and unconscious search for meaning and transcendence in the immanent world. The illusory character of the human search for metaphysical solace is grounded in Nietzsche’s perspectivism, a unique and extreme form of skepticism that he launches against the most powerful metaphysical systems of the Western world: Platonism, Christianity, and science.1 All of these systems, including the common sense of the everyday world, are illusions—perhaps impressive illusions, but nonetheless nothing more than human constructs, interpretations, or perspectives. There is no foundation on which to base a true foundationalism, no metaphysical system that is not a human artifice. The existential consequence of these observations for human beings may be a sense of meaninglessness, even of tragedy—unless, of course, human beings of a future age are possessed of the power and courage to seek a different perspective, one that values life as opposed to those perspectives, notably Christianity and Platonism, that do not. The key to an understanding of this existential problematic, as well as to Nietzsche’s skepticism, is his notion of the will-to-power. If the cosmos is fundamentally undifferentiated chaos, then the will-topower is that which gives it form and substance, shape and meaning. Nietzsche has embraced a creative nihilism that is dependent upon an instinctual or psychological construct—the will-to-power—and in which 1. See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965). The clearest account of Nietzsche’s philosophy, including his perspectivism, is still Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), especially chap. 3, “Perspectivism.”

Introduction / 3

philosophers are lawgivers who impose order and significance on a chaotic world. Whether Nietzsche’s perspective marks the end of metaphysics or whether it is the last gasp of metaphysics has remained a matter of some controversy.2 Yet another and equally controversial expression of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is found in his infamous and quasi-theological utterance, “God is dead.” That assertion and its implications are best understood, however, in the context of a lesser known statement from Twilight of the Idols: “I am afraid that we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Nietzsche’s attack on foundations and foundationalism is inextricably intertwined with his view that the traditional, ordered sentence— subject, verb, predicate—is as much an illusion as is belief in the deity. Indeed, the false perspectives that have dominated Western thinking are perpetuated by a language and grammar of “crude fetishism” that causes us to “posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being” where none exists.3 Nietzsche’s preoccupation with language led him to a variety of styles of expression, each of which was intended as an experiment in the relationship between language and philosophy and each of which explored, tested, and challenged the conventional language of philosophical discourse. Thus, his writings are psychoanalytic, historical, polemical, and prophetic; and their form varies from the autobiographical to the aphoristic. As he wrote in his autobiographical essay, Ecce Homo: “I have many stylistic possibilities — the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man.”4 This choice of a variety of styles is Nietzsche’s way of taking the language seriously and, in what was a precursor to phenomenology, of illustrating how the choice of language affects the character of philosophy, most especially the character of a philosophy of existence. Questions about the proper role of language, as well as its form, continue to be a part of the debate over foundations 2. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, §5, 483, 482, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968). 4. “Why I Write Such Excellent Books,” in Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1993), §4, 39–48. For an excellent discussion of the many styles of Nietzsche, see Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), especially chap. 1, “The Most Multifarious Art of Style.”


and foundationalism, as some of the essays in this collection will illustrate. Moreover, this “multifarious” usage of language and style by Nietzsche is yet another affirmation of his perspectivism, in which knowing is never “objective” but is inextricably linked to consciousness and the power of human will. In a much neglected set of pronouncements, largely from Daybreak, Nietzsche anticipates Husserl and the phenomenologists. Rejecting the Cartesian separation of subject and object, consciousness and world, Nietzsche explored the interior of the psyche, the unconscious, and discovered its intimate relationship with the so-called exterior world. Consciousness of both of these phenomena represents a vast and often disconnected array of images, descriptions, and insights, as well as, of course, of a sense of the interactive relationship between these interior and exterior phenomena. In this eruptive and episodic journey of consciousness, Nietzsche made two important discoveries: first, intentionality. “What then are our experiences?” he asks. The answer: “Much more that which we put into them than that which they already contain! Or must we go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to invent?” Second, Nietzsche discovered that language was frequently insufficient to the task of describing the journey of consciousness. “Language and the prejudices upon which language is based are a manifold hindrance to us when we want to explain inner processes and drives: . . . We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words.”5 Nietzsche did not fully explore the implications of either of these discoveries, although he surely understood and celebrated their antifoundationalist character. The systematic task of exploring consciousness and intentionality fell to that other, more subtle voice, Edmund Husserl, although Husserl would not countenance philosophical uncertainty. Quite the contrary. The lack of a true philosophical science was a crisis of immense proportion, and Husserl spent his life addressing the weaknesses of a philosophy that could not deliver the truth. In 1935 Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures, “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.” Speaking in two 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §119, 76, §115, 71. See also a wonderfully evocative discussion of Nietzsche’s phenomenological explorations in Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Norton, 2002), especially chap. 9.

Introduction / 5

capitals of Europe, Vienna and Prague, Husserl gave summary voice to his life-long search for what Leszek Kolakowski called “the unshakable, the absolutely unquestionable foundation of knowledge.”6 The key word in that description is foundation. Husserl’s search for the foundation was the major preoccupation of his philosophical life and most likely dated at least to 1884 when, again in Vienna, he first attended Franz Brentano’s lectures on philosophy. True to his vocation and to his propensity for constant revision, Husserl turned the crises lectures into a major treatise, his final philosophical work of the same name, but with the added, and again typical, afterthought subtitle: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.7 Kolakowski argues persuasively that however foreordained to failure it was, Husserl’s “phenomenology was the greatest and the most serious attempt in our century [twentieth century] to reach the ultimate sources of knowledge.”8 No serious philosopher of the twentieth century could afford to ignore Husserl’s search for foundations. Heidegger, Arendt, Jaspers, Sartre, Ricoeur, and, most pointedly, Voegelin: all had to deal with Husserl’s “foundationalism.” What was the crisis and how was transcendental phenomenology supposed to answer it? Pointedly, it was the domination of the positive sciences, or what Husserl calls “philosophical and ideological positivism,” that had turned our attention away from “the specifically human questions” of everyday existence. Positivism had decapitated philosophy, most especially the “queen of sciences,” metaphysics. In fact, Husserl had such admiration for the renewing effort to found a primal philosophy, he would engage in such a venture himself. What he found most troublesome, however, in the efforts of positive sciences at least since Galileo was “the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable — our everyday life-world.” In language and thought that is a precursor to Heidegger’s marvelous phrase “the forgetting of being,” Husserl described Galileo as a “discovering and a concealing genius.” The use of technical methods of 6. Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 4. 7. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). It should be noted that this was Husserl’s fourth book on phenomenological philosophy and all were given the subtitle Introduction. 8. Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude, 4.


inquiry, the “methodical idea,” as Husserl calls it, leads to innumerable and impressive discoveries about the physical world. Yet, the concealment or denigration of the “intuited world of our life” as merely subjective in character leads to a condition wherein “all the truths of pre- and extrascientific life which have to do with its factual being are deprived of value.” In the midst of this crisis of the devaluing of the everyday lifeworld Husserl describes what his life work has been, namely, the restoration of the “naïveté of life” itself: “It will gradually become clearer, and finally be completely clear, that the proper return to the naïveté of life— but in a reflection which raises above this naïveté — is the only possible way to overcome the philosophical naïveté which lies in the [supposedly] ‘scientific’ character of traditional objectivistic philosophy. This will open the gates to the new dimension we have repeatedly referred to in advance.”9 This new dimension, of course, is Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The irony of Husserl’s search for a foundation lies not only or just in the fact that he finds it in a return to the “naïveté of life” or the world of everyday existence, but that he finds that foundation in subjectivity, or, more accurately, the subject’s intuitive consciousness of the “naïveté of life.” This intuitive consciousness Husserl called “transcendental subjectivity,” and he spent the last twenty-five years of his life exploring and trying to elucidate it in a precise and concrete fashion. By transcendental, Husserl meant both a knowing that transcends the objects of experience and a knowing that transcends individual subjectivities. As Quentin Lauer puts the matter: “Science, as Husserl conceived it, is possible only if the human mind can in fact intuit the essences of the objects it conceives. The human mind, in turn, can do this only if the essences it seeks are available to it in the experiences it has.” Husserl most assuredly believed that experience did yield knowledge of these essences and the phenomenological method was the appropriate device for apprehending and rationalizing that knowledge. That the world of experience is contingent was self-evident; that the individual subject’s apprehension of that world was laden with intentionality and therefore contingency was equally self-evident. Yet, transcendental subjectivity has the capability of discovering the essences that are given in the experience of reality and of taking that essentially intuitive knowledge that appears to the mind and expressing it in rational terms. Lauer describes this process very nicely: 9. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 7–9, 48–49, 52, 54, 59.

Introduction / 7

“The world of fact, the world we experience, is of course contingent, and so is every fact in that world. It is a world at all, however, only if the essences of what it contains are not contingent, and knowledge of the world is truly knowledge only if these essences, without contingency, are discernible by the human mind at work.”10 And work it is, for the mind’s temptation is to lapse into an individualistic subjectivity that apprehends only the immediacy of experience. Thus, Husserl spends considerable attention, indeed a lifetime, exploring, elucidating, and defending a process of inquiry, the phenomenological method, that will train the mind to recognize and make apparent the essence of what has been revealed in experience. This method of eidetic reduction, purifying our consciousness of the habits of accepting the conventional as true and of experiencing universals in the contingent world, is most controversial. As some argue, it may be a very useful form of criticism—indeed, in some ways it suffices as a radical form of self-criticism—but as a method in which universal truths are discovered and agreed upon, it has failed to deliver.11 What may be most troubling about Husserl’s search for certitude and the role of eidetic reduction is the nature of those truths, or foundations, for which it is suited. It may be the case that universals can be discovered in some experience (color, shape, even movement); it may also be the case that the essential character of those things that matter most to humans—the divine, freedom, purpose—are elusive to the phenomenological method. This is the core of Eric Voegelin’s objections to Husserl and the starting point for his own alternative theory of consciousness and foundations. In a well-known letter to Alfred Schütz, Voegelin comments forcefully on his reading of Husserl’s essay “The Crisis of European Sciences.” He was impressed with Husserl’s effort and described it as “masterful; the presentation of the problems of the Galilean world view and of the occlusions that led to physicalism is of unparalleled clarity; finally, the problem of transcendental subjectivity as the theme of philosophy since Descartes has never been revealed to me as clearly as in this case.” Nonetheless, Voegelin was disappointed in Husserl’s work, and he spent the rest of this illuminating letter to Schütz attacking Husserl’s conclusions. In 10. Quentin Lauer, S.J., The Triumph of Subjectivity: An Introduction to Transcendental Phenomenology, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978), xvi. See also xi–xxiii and 100–117. 11. See especially Kolakowski’s critique in Husserl and the Search for Certitude, 33–57.


particular, Husserl’s search for foundations was misplaced; most especially this was the case in his insistence that a foundation could be located in an epistemological critique. For Voegelin epistemology is not philosophy, certainly not the foundation of philosophy. More seriously for Voegelin, Husserl’s epistemology is itself limited and based upon an incomplete understanding and interpretation of Descartes. Because he could not move beyond the “grounding subjectivity of the ego,” Husserl was indifferent to questions of transcendence and thus “blocked for himself with the greatest care the path to philosophical problems of transcendence — which are the key problems of philosophy.”12 Voegelin deftly characterizes the dispute between his own perspective and Husserl’s as a fundamental difference in focus: “phenomenological philosophizing such as Husserl’s is in principle oriented to the model of the experience of objects in the external world; classical philosophizing about political order is equally in principle oriented to the model of noetic experience of transcendent divine being.” These two parallel approaches to reality were both important. Indeed, Voegelin was very appreciative of the efforts of some phenomenologists, most notably the aforementioned Alfred Schütz, to construct a theory of social action and political order. In his memoriam to Schütz, Voegelin writes of a common project in this regard and admits that his efforts were far more hesitant than Schütz’s. He attributes that hesitancy to the study of the classics, whose presuppositions about philosophy and political order are radically different from those of phenomenology. The great merit of Schütz’s phenomenology is that while it presupposed an intentional understanding of the everyday world and its intersubjective character, it moved beyond the “egological derivation”of that intersubjectivity. What motivated Voegelin to move beyond the notion of parallel views of social action and political order was his gradual awareness of the need for a theory that connected the experiences of everyday existence and the symbols that articulated those experiences. This led Voegelin to abandon his project on the history of ideas and to begin instead an inquiry into the philosophy of consciousness, or, as he put it, “on the experiences of order, on their symbolic 12. Eric Voegelin, “Letter to Alfred Schütz Concerning Edmund Husserl,” in Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, trans. M. J. Hanak, ed. David Walsh, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter, CW) (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 45–46, 60–61.

Introduction / 9

expressions, on the founding institutions, and finally on the order of consciousness itself.”13 “The positive starting point for describing the structure of consciousness is to be found in the phenomenon of attention and the focusing of attention.” With this assertion, Voegelin begins an early explication of his theory of consciousness.14 He writes of this “focusing of attention” as a center of energy and a process of inner illumination, thereby giving to philosophy the character of a meditative experience. Consciousness, then, is not something to be observed from without; rather, it is a participatory inquiry into the height and the depth of human experience that occurs on the boundaries between the finite and the infinite. It is precisely the tension between the finite and the infinite that causes human beings to construct symbols and myths that attempt to express notions of a ground and/or of transcendence. Voegelin gives this tension a name (borrowed from Plato and Aristotle)—the metaxy, or the In-Between—although it has its origins in the Heraclitean appreciation of the logos.15 The metaxy, or, more accurately, our consciousness of the In-Between, finds expression in a host of antinomies: for example, birth and death; knowledge and ignorance; perfection and imperfection; divine and human; and, in the context of Voegelin’s critique of Husserl, the “I” and the “other-thanI.”16 It is precisely in the “space” of the In-Between that the human stands and finds the “‘realm of the spiritual,’. . . the reality of ‘man’s converse with the gods,’ the mutual participation (methexis, metalepsis) of human in divine, and divine in human, reality.”17 13. Voegelin, “In Memoriam Alfred Schütz,” ibid., 43–44. Voegelin credits Schütz and their long philosophical dialogue with helping him clarify this mission. For his part, Schütz was particularly meaningful for Voegelin because of his willingness to acknowledge the existence, as well as the importance, of multiple and discrete realities. See especially Alfred Schütz, “On Multiple Realities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5 (June 1945): 533–76. 14. Voegelin, “On the Theory of Consciousness,” in Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, 68. 15. For a masterful “rediscovery” of the fragments of Heraclitus, see Richard Geldard, Remembering Heraclitus (Herndon, VA: Lindisfarne Books, 2000). 16. Glenn Hughes, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 22. 17. Eric Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 12, CW (1990; available, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 279. (Voegelin’s reference is to lines 202–3 of Plato’s Symposium.)


The task of understanding and giving expression to the tensional nature of human existence occupied Voegelin throughout his scholarly career and led him to emphasize an equally important tension between logos and mythos in our understanding of human consciousness, which is to say that consciousness is both “an illumination in reality and . . . part of a mysterious story being told by reality.”18 Voegelin’s theory of consciousness, then, inevitably leads to conclusions that are especially relevant to this collection of essays on foundations without foundationalism. First, consciousness as participation means that the human being stands in a very equivocal relationship with the ground of being, neither bound nor free. Attempts to concretize that consciousness either from the perspective of the human subject, as Husserl had attempted, or through a hypostatic appreciation of the divine, as is common in many religions, must be avoided. Both instances are modes of deformation, and both are dangerous. Similarly, identifying reality solely with the immanent world or the transcendent realm will result in deformations that reject both. Indeed, Voegelin spends a good bit of time and attention on the political manifestations of such a deformation, arguing for the “truth”—and the safety — of a balance of consciousness that does not reduce reality to either the immanent or the transcendent worlds. The human being is a consciousness of “both/and” not of “either/or.” Voegelin used other terms to discuss this imbalance, most notably gnosticism. Late in his scholarly career he seemed to fasten on the term imbalance.19 Second, the participatory tension of the metaxy requires that some attention be given to language, and in the final volume of Order and History Voegelin does just that. He writes: “There is no autonomous, nonparadoxic language, ready to be used by man as a system of signs when he wants to refer to the paradoxic structures of reality and consciousness.” Language is both conventional and natural. In the former sense it represents the “intentionality of consciousness” and corresponds to a “thingreality”; in the latter sense it represents a luminous reality to which we ought and do listen and corresponds to what Voegelin calls an “It-reality.” In the first instance of intentionality we are embedded in the language of 18. Hughes, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin, 22. We are especially indebted to this excellent account of Voegelin’s theory of consciousness. 19. See, for example, Glenn Hughes, “Balanced and Imbalanced Consciousness,” in The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experiences, ed. Glenn Hughes (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).

Introduction / 11

conceptual analysis attempting to make rational sense of the world. In the second instance of luminosity we are in the realm of myth, symbol, and revelation. “Where,” Voegelin asks, in the midst of this circle of meanings or “complex of equivocations do we find a beginning?”20 More succinctly, where do we find a truth, a foundation? We find the truth, or the foundation, in the metalepsis story; and that story, as Voegelin writes, “begins in the middle.” Indeed, “we encounter a plurality of middles, validating a plurality of quests, telling a plurality of stories, all having valid beginnings.” Yet, this story or truth, this foundation, is not an account of an event, an external object, that moves in the temporal dimension; nor is it a dimension of “a divine time out of time.” Rather, it is in the “In-Between of the two,” in the middle; and the foundation of which Voegelin speaks is the quest for the truth of existence that refuses to deny transcendence or immanence but rather seeks “the God who reveals himself in his presence in time and the God who remains the experienced but unknown reality beyond time.”21 Voegelin’s search for the truth of existence led him to be both a trenchant critic of modernity and an anticipator of much of what came to be called postmodern philosophy. In both scope and philosophic insight, there is no denying the significance of Voegelin’s five-volume Order and History to the philosophy of history. No thinker of his generation attempted so massive an undertaking, and the cultural diversity examined is extraordinary. Rejecting the intellectual and cultural snobbishness of the West without ignoring the contributions of Athens and Jerusalem, Voegelin produces a synthetic philosophy of history. Yet a key to Voegelin’s philosophy of history is determining the proper subject matter to be studied. Rejecting ideas as secondary representations, Voegelin relies on his theory of consciousness to penetrate the trail of experiencesymbolizations that are history. His philosophy of history, then, cannot be grasped without first understanding that largely phenomenological philosophy of consciousness described above. Furthermore, both his 20. Eric Vogelin, Order and History, vol. V, In Search of Order, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 18, CW (1987; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 31. Voegelin’s analysis of language in this final work bears striking resemblance to Heidegger’s notion of language as “the House of Being.” Indeed, Voegelin’s inquiry into consciousness and being has some rather close parallels in Heidegger, as well as some distinct differences. At least two scholars have commented on these parallels and distinctions. See Hughes, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin, and David Walsh, editor’s introduction to vol. 6, CW. 21. Voegelin, In Search of Order, 41–43, 124.


theory of consciousness and philosophy of history are intimately related to his theory of gnosticism, or his diagnosis of disorder. Voegelin points out that not all experiences of order are legitimate. Since the Enlightenment most symbols of order have been derailments of philosophy, complete with horrific social and political consequences. Although Voegelin’s theory of gnosticism is nuanced, ultimately it is based on ontological criteria. Legitimate symbols of order incorporate four levels or elements of being: God, man, world, and society. If experiences of order are proposed that truncate being or eliminate one of the elements of order, then that symbolization is deemed illegitimate or imbalanced. The other great twentieth-century ontological inquirer, Martin Heidegger, also described Being in terms of four elements: earth, sky, mortal, and divinities.22 Even though Voegelin would have recoiled at such a comparison, it is important to point out that despite their differences, which are many, the two were engaged in a similar ontological inquiry. A Voegelinian critique of Heidegger would center, not on the ontological focus, but on the lagging effects of Enlightenment thinking. Heidegger’s rejection of Plato, as the progenitor of metaphysics, is a case in point. Whereas Voegelin is sympathetic to the critique of metaphysics, he cautions against rejecting so much history as illegitimate. The willingness to elevate oneself to a privileged position, an Archimedic point, and reject thousands of years of human experience as wrong is a symptom, a lagging effect, of the Enlightenment. In short, Voegelin concurs with much of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, as well as his ontological orientation; he disagrees, however, with Heidegger’s historicism. Viewed in this light, Voegelin is an extension or refinement of Heidegger rather than a refutation. A further example of Voegelin’s prescience of postmodern questions is his focus on the aforementioned theory of language and representation. Even though it is too much to say that his work on language foreshadows someone like Derrida, Voegelin understood the importance of language. Although nowhere systematically, Voegelin deals with language and representation throughout his writings. Rather than characterizing language in an essentialist manner, with language referring directly and 22. Heidegger uses the term Geviert, “fourfold.” See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), for a discussion of the fourfold.

Introduction / 13

precisely to a specific object, Voegelin points out that language is meaningful only when it is enmeshed in a context. More specifically, he argues that words derive meaning, not in isolation, but when they are connected or in tension with their opposite. Thus, the term philosopher makes no sense by itself. It conveys meaning when it is juxtaposed or used in a context that understands its opposite, philodoxer. Furthermore, words, like ideas, are secondary representations. The substance of philosophy, the stuff that is to be studied, is experience. Given Voegelin’s understanding of experience as tensional, as best symbolized by the Platonic metaxy, this characterization of language and meaning as tensional is to be expected. Indeed, Voegelin’s thinking on language is important and interesting because it concurs in several important respects with postmodern criticisms of language. First, language is not a direct and unmediated representation of reality. There can be no “correspondence” theory of language and truth. Such theories are doomed to failure; they are metaphysical to the core and as such are deformations. Second, Voegelin recognized that as a secondary form of representation, language is susceptible to a particular form of philosophic derailment or deformation. Just as ideas can take on a “reality” of their own, complete with intriguing and complicated interrelations, words can mislead philosophic inquiry. Instead of penetrating the symbols to experiences, thinkers often focus on the “language games” in Derrida’s vernacular. Voegelin was aware of this tendency, which Alfred North Whitehead termed misplaced concreteness, and countered it by putting forth his tensional theory of language. This said, even Voegelin’s most sympathetic commentators admit that language was not a strong focus of his philosophic attention. In many ways, language is set aside as a subset of his more comprehensive analysis of symbols. Nevertheless, the “linguistic” turn within philosophy is not something that would have surprised Voegelin. Nor are the basic elements of such critiques alien or counter to Voegelin’s understanding of language. As a thoroughgoing critic of the Enlightenment and modernity, Voegelin uncovers and confronts many questions that are now deemed “postmodern.” While Voegelin certainly did not think of himself as a postmodern thinker, the subject/object dichotomy, the pernicious ramifications of metaphysical thinking, and questions concerning language and representation were all central elements to his thought. Voegelin’s response


to these elements differs from typical postmodern “solutions,” and as many of the contributors to this volume suggest, there may be other thinkers who offer more convincing arguments with regard to particular issues. But one is hard-pressed to find a twentieth-century political thinker who touched on so many issues with as much philosophic acumen as Voegelin. This collection of essays is an attempt to generate a dialogue between Eric Voegelin and other prominent twentieth-century thinkers, exploring some of the more perplexing issues in contemporary political theory. In particular, each essay focuses on an overarching question: how to construct or discover political foundations without resorting to metaphysical or essentialist constructs. In the wake of postmodern and post-structuralist critiques, political theory must go back to basics and establish how and why there can be limits to human actions. The excesses of the twentieth century are a clarion call to all but the dullest sensibilities; yet the philosophic questions unearthed by the scathing critique of Enlightenment thinking and modernity have proved to be problematic. Can thought get beyond language and avoid dichotomous conclusions? Does an “ontological” approach to philosophy so abstract philosophers from the world that theorists have little to say about everyday ethical and political issues? Is it possible to construct meaning without resorting to metaphysics? These are but a few of the troubling questions that have yet to be satisfactorily answered. Thus, each essay focuses on Voegelin and another twentieth-century thinker in an effort to address and illuminate what might be termed postmodern questions. It is hoped that through such a discussion certain shared realizations or conclusions can be reached to redress the uncertainty and timidity characteristic of so much contemporary political theory. In the end, this dialogue is an effort to establish foundations without foundationalism, and the form of a dialogue seems a particularly appropriate medium. Peter A. Petrakis’s “Voegelin and Ricoeur: Recovering Science and Subjectivity through Representation” argues that the critique of Enlightenment thinking and modernity unearthed troubling philosophic questions, which he terms aporias, none of which have been convincingly resolved. Prominent among these questions is, how might forms of representation either exacerbate or ameliorate philosophy and politics? The answer, according to Petrakis, is to be found in a discussion of the

Introduction / 15

importance and recovery of subjectivity. Husserl and Voegelin both play a pivotal role in that recovery, but critical to this endeavor is Paul Ricoeur. Husserl’s great contribution was demonstrating how truth is to be authenticated, not through objectivity or methods associated with the natural sciences, but rather through internal verification. Voegelin maintained that philosophy had become derailed because it did not understand its appropriate subject matter. Philosophy is not analysis of ideas, concepts, or even language; experiences are the true subject of philosophic inquiry. The problem is that experiences cannot be confronted immediately; hence Voegelin’s emphasis on the question of representation. Ricoeur’s contribution to this enterprise is to emphasize the role of language and narrative in that representation. Petrakis analyzes Ricoeur’s confrontations with Heidegger, Derrida, and others and points to the work on narrative as the culmination of years of inquiry. The key to narratives, it seems, is that one can achieve an experience of the unified self in them. Such a subjective experience of unity and cohesion, however, would be of little consolation if not for Husserl’s idea of internal verification. Narratives, then, provide an experience that cannot be obtained in the objective world. Therefore, the degradation of certain forms of narration, the so-called subjective disciplines such as fiction, poetry, and art, is a gross error. Indeed, the more aesthetic forms of narration may be less susceptible to misconstruction. Few individuals would perceive a fictional story to be an unequivocal presentation of reality; therefore, certain forms of representation—myth, symbols, and stories, for example—have distinct philosophic and political advantages. Indeed, it may be the case that Ricoeur’s narrative theory of representation gives rise to the possibility of foundations without lapsing into foundationalism. Murray Jardine draws our attention to another, unique possibility of representation and language by exploring the spoken character of language, as opposed to its literate character. In the process he characterizes Voegelin as a philosopher of speech. In “Sight, Sound, and Participatory Symbolization: Eric Voegelin’s Political Theory as an Attempt to Recapture the Speech-Dimension of Human Experience” Jardine maintains that Voegelin’s thought has much in common with recent works that have worked out the catastrophic effects of the literate perspective on contemporary politics and thought. The problem with literacy, it seems, is


that it promotes or engenders dichotomous thinking. This bifurcation is not all bad—indeed, it appears to have been necessary for the technological advances within the sciences and technology—but it has also resulted in moral and political degeneration. In particular, Jardine is concerned with the Western duality with regard to foundations; either there is a natural, transcendent order of truth, or there is moral relativism and political chaos. This is, of course, reminiscent of the classic nature-versusconvention argument. Jardine establishes the importance of recapturing an aural or speech dimension to philosophical and political discourse; and Voegelin is important to this recovery because he was one of the select few who attempted to construct a conceptual language of human experience and transcendence that went beyond the dichotomy. Literate cultures, Jardine argues, are likely to think of symbols as essentially visual phenomena, but Voegelin, especially when analyzing compact civilizations, emphasizes the importance of human action, of rite and ritual. Thus, the coherence and moral vigor of a community is dependent upon the reenactment of primary human experiences through ritual and symbol. One of the most important and intriguing issues in Voegelin’s thought is how and why symbols of order diminish and become unrepresentative. Jardine notes that Voegelin’s analysis, especially with regard to the most serious decontextualizations—gnosticism or rejections of transcendence—highlights psychological factors. Psychology no doubt plays a role; but according to Jardine, the gradual predominance of a literate perspective offers more insight. Literate societies will tend to take symbols of transcendence literally and thus misconstrue them. This explains why interpretations of Plato’s thought or Christianity, for example, have become increasingly narrow and dogmatic. Furthermore, Jardine maintains, it also explains why Voegelin’s interpretations are so nuanced. Sensitive to oral dimensions in Platonic and Christian symbols of order, he was less inclined to decontextualize, although even Voegelin was tempted by the discrete categories of the literate world. This led him to an awkward Augustinian view of history, where the sacred and secular came to be discrete categories and too often conclude in a rather static visual imagery of good and evil. Ultimately, Jardine suggests that the search for political foundations is based on a false premise and is the byproduct of a literature-visual orientation toward reality. Voegelin, among others, is one of the first political

Introduction / 17

thinkers to recognize these destructive tendencies. Indeed, Voegelin’s conception of political symbolization captures much of the ritual and aural character of a speech-based society. Jeffrey Bell’s essay, “Immanence/Transcendence: Deleuze and Voegelin on the Conditions for Political Order,” also focuses on the recovery of transcendence by Voegelin. Yet for Bell, the recovery of transcendence has significant pitfalls, and he juxtaposes Voegelin with more typical and identifiable postmodernists in an effort to illuminate the authentic conditions for political order. Foremost among those postmodernists is Nietzsche, and Bell contrasts Voegelin and Nietzsche on thanatos. For Voegelin death is portrayed not as something to be feared but as a liberating force, a moment when the uncertainty of life is replaced by judgment and meaning. By contrast, Nietzsche viewed such denials of life as decadent and degenerating. Supplicating one’s material existence to an indefinite and otherworldly end is precisely the sort of denial of life that Nietzsche sought to overcome. Voegelin interprets Plato’s Myth of Judgment as an effort to prompt spiritual regeneration. The urge to focus on the beyond has immanent effects, for the uncertainty of final judgment means that the struggle for virtue is never complete. Yet, thanatos is only one part of the existential equation. The experiential potency of thanatos can be properly understood only when it is joined with eros. One strives for excellence not solely out of fear but rather out of an intense desire to avoid the misconceptions and untruths of this world. Eros is, after all, the desire, the yearning, for truth. Bell interprets Voegelin’s emphasis on the existential significance of transcendence as an implicit critique of metaphysics; and he contrasts it with Nietzsche’s well-known immanentist critique of metaphysics. The former he calls a vertical transcendence, the latter a horizontal transcendence; and it is clear that Bell prefers the horizontal because, in his view, it is a more accurate description of reality and it is less dangerous politically. For Bell, Voegelin clearly embraces a primordial structure or order to being, and his openness only goes so far. Voegelin’s theory of gnosticism is a prime example of a hierarchical vision that culminates in an either/or vision of politics. The soul must be open to transcendent reality, to the divine source that judges it and gives it meaning. By contrast, Nietzsche and his twentieth-century proponents (Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan) present a horizontal both/and vision and create, in


the process, a different kind of political and social space. Bell argues that political foundations based on this horizontal transcendence avoid essentialism, yet they do not necessarily result in chaos or in social relativism; and the necessary limits to political action are not grounded in metaphysics but emerge out of the process of change. William Simmons’s essay, “Voegelin and Levinas on the ‘Foundations’ of Ethics and Politics: Transcendence and Immanence Revisited,” reflects a growing interest in the works of Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the relationship of Levinas’s thought to Voegelin’s. As the title indicates, this essay confronts the issue of the relationship between transcendence and immanence. Levinas and Voegelin are both harshly critical of the elimination of the summum bonum from philosophic and political thought; and both attribute the disastrous politics of the twentieth century to that elimination. Indeed, for Levinas, ethics not only precedes ontology, it precedes politics as well. Thus, the recovery of a more authentic understanding of transcendence is important for philosophy and politics. Yet the philosophic recovery of transcendence is no small task. Transcendence, by definition, cannot be understood rationally, nor can it be objectified. It is beyond; it is other. This means that Voegelin and Levinas must philosophize about something that defies philosophical analysis. Voegelin avoids objectification of the beyond by insisting that authentic reality is not objective but rather the content or experiences within human consciousness. Yet, according to Voegelin, even though philosophical language cannot describe the transcendent, the transcendent can order or structure human consciousness by means of certain experiences. Human consciousness is not solitary but participatory, and the experience of transcendence provides a pull, a direction, to the search for order. Voegelin’s analysis of history reveals that humans exist within the metaxy; we participate in a full range of experiences, from the apeiron to divine nous. Levinas rediscovers transcendence, which is ultimately the foundation of his ethical and political thought, through his phenomenological examination of the Other. Thus, transcendence, which cannot be objectified, can be experienced in the face-to-face encounter with the Other. This process is based upon the primordial or presupposed elements within the face-to-face encounter, which in turn leads to an an-archical arche. Perhaps the most intriguing element of Simmons’s paper is the man-

Introduction / 19

ner in which he develops these transcendental philosophies and then connects them with the world of politics. Expanding the phenomenology of the Other to a third person, the Third, he describes how Levinas moves from the face-to-face confrontation, which reveals transcendence, to the world of politics, of immanence. In short, when one goes beyond bipolarity to multipolarity, questions of justice and right emerge. Transcendence calls one to an ethical responsibility; but when two or more are encountered, troubling questions emerge. Which face, which Other, takes precedence? This situation calls for institutions and adjudication— in short, politics. Not surprisingly, Simmons finds more unity than disagreement between Voegelin and Levinas. As mentioned, both philosophers were sharply critical of contemporary political thought and agreed that the central reason for the disordered twentieth century stemmed from a rejection of transcendence. While their efforts at recovery took slightly different paths, ultimately there are few points of real disagreement. By comparing and connecting these complicated and abstract theories of transcendence to ethics and politics, Simmons strives to demonstrate how a nonessentialist foundation can ground ethical and political action. In the end, and in spite of his abstractionist tendencies, the essay sides with Levinas and maintains that while not guilty of quietism, Voegelin’s metaxical foundation lacks the urgency and vigor of Levinas’s. In “Politics, Metaphysics, and Anti-Foundationalism in the Works of Eric Voegelin and Jan Patocˇka,” Edward F. Findlay returns to the question of transcendence, and he does so through the comparison of Voegelin with the brilliant and courageous Czech philosopher Jan Patocˇka. Both Voegelin and Patocˇka agreed that the establishment of propositional metaphysics was the primary cause of the alienation of transcendence. Therefore, both thinkers engaged in careful but devastating critiques of metaphysics in order to recapture an experience of transcendence. Despite this important similarity, there are marked differences between the two thinkers. Whereas Voegelin essentially returned to the classical perspective in order to redress contemporary concerns, Patocˇka embraced postmodern techniques in an effort to recover classical figures and themes. The significance of these divergent approaches is best illustrated in their interpretations of the Western canon in general and the figures of Socrates and Plato in particular.


For Voegelin, Plato was not the creator of metaphysics. The transcendent was not, as it became in modernity, concretized in the symbolizations of Plato. Rather, the transcendent experience for Plato was not characterized as a separate reality. Transcendence was experienced as an integral part of human nature; it was not an objectifiable truth but an authentic experience. Patocˇka, on the other hand, focused on Socrates as a thinker distinct from Plato. He maintained that Socrates was a “premetaphysical thinker,” one who was engaged in a thoroughgoing questioning that could not provide positive knowledge of the whole. Thus, Socratic wisdom (or what some call Socratic ignorance) was the recognition of the limits of human rationality and as such Patocˇka referred to it as “negative Platonism.” Plato, according to Patocˇka, made the mistake of providing positive knowledge, secure foundations based on otherworldly ideas that were to be used as a model for human behavior. This concretizing of the transcendent drastically affected human existence, usually resulting in a perfectionist approach to politics. By focusing on Socrates, Patocˇka attempted to resurrect a “nonmetaphysical interpretation” of Platonic philosophy and thereby to join Voegelin in an attempt to recover the experience, the nonmetaphysical experience, of transcendence. Much like Voegelin, Patocˇka realized that the recovery of transcendence first required theorists to reengage classic texts and symbols. Patocˇka, however, felt that while Plato understood the dangers of an idealized conception of human existence, he was unable adequately to convey the character of a nonobjectified experience. Indeed, beginning with Plato and continuing throughout Western history, the Idea came to refer to a separate, ideal realm in which human beings could participate. Patocˇka’s negative Platonism was an effort to recast the Idea, to understand Socratic wisdom in terms of its liberating qualities, as an experience of freedom. Yet, Patocˇka is not postmodern in the sense of complete skepticism or an embrace of nihilism. His “Negative Platonism” is a critique of positive metaphysics, but there is, nonetheless, an appeal to something higher, to something that limits or constrains human activity. According to Findlay, the source of limits or foundations within Patocˇka is an “appeal to the power of deobjectification” and a “living in the awareness of transcendence that limits us.” Quite apart from illustrating the rich and variegated character of Eric Voegelin’s “conversation” with both the modern and postmodern worlds,

Introduction / 21

the common thread in these essays is remarkably similar to or reminiscent of the question of political theology. How can a society recover a sense of transcendence that provides meaningful guidelines for its politics, which at the same time embraces the inevitable limitations of human endeavors? Or, as we have put the question, Is it possible to have foundations without foundationalism? The answer we are given by our interlocutors is an equivocal yes. The implied caveat is that the tendency toward metaphysical certainty, or foundationalism, is likely a universal trait of human beings, certainly of human beings encapsulated within the modern project. Thus, an understanding of the question of foundations requires first and foremost an appreciation for the metaphorical character of our consciousness of transcendence. Indeed, in the Voegelinian understanding of human consciousness, that metaphorical character is expressed best in the aforementioned experience of the metaxy, or the “I” and the “Otherthan-I.” As Iris Murdoch has so eloquently formulated this matter: “The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision.”23 Murdoch is expressing an idea that is common to many thinkers, as we have seen in this collection, including not just Voegelin, but Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur, and Patocˇka, all of whom argue that some form of poetic utterance is perhaps the only appropriate method or expressive tool for discussing ultimate reality. Further, she seems to be suggesting that all forms of metaphysical or foundationalist thinking, if they wish to be true to the fundamental reality they purport to express, must be metaphorical in character. Foundations are elusive, complex, and ultimately not amenable to conceptual description. Metaphysical thinking as essentially metaphorical thinking is an expression of foundations without the concretization implicit in the variety of forms of foundationalism. The various essays in this collection point to the essential metaphorical character of foundational thinking. Levinas’s beckoning of the Other, Ricoeur’s insistence on the importance and power of narrative, speech-action as a mode of thinking, or Patocˇka’s negative Platonism: all are metaphors; and all are involved in a search for normative guidelines that respect the human need for freedom, freedom’s need for 23. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Shocken Books, 1971), 77.


tolerance, and the community’s need for justice. Perhaps, then, the essays in this dialogue collection reflect a renewed twenty-first-century desire to embrace foundations unashamedly, to witness to the limited understanding we have of those foundations, and to speak boldly about human existence and the political order.

1 Voegelin and Ricoeur Recovering Science and Subjectivity through Representation PETER A. PETRAKIS

T

he critique of Enlightenment thinking and modernity, begun at least with Nietzsche and continuing to date, has developed philosophic questions that have not been satisfactorily answered. The persistence of these apparent aporias has fashioned a climate of opinion that can best be described as uncertain or uneasy. It is in this sense that ours is a postmodern age. In no discipline is the current uncertainty more apparent than in the field of political philosophy. Despite the West’s “winning” the Cold War, there is no consensus among political theorists as to why, or how to proceed. A few basic queries make this clear. For example, should leaders and states pursue Kantian democratic systems or follow the social contract theorists? Are there universal human rights, and if so, from where do they emanate? What institution has the legitimate authority to enforce international rights? Is the nation-state a dying system of order? Aside from a nebulous consensus that democracy and a more-or-less free market are requisites of good government, no real agreement exists. And even though multiple systems of political order are the rule and not the exception, the fractious character of this age runs deeper; it is more philosophical. This discussion confronts two related aporias. The first is the question of establishing moral and political foundations without resorting to foundationalism or metaphysical thinking; for one of the central observations derived from the critique of modernity is the danger of metaphysics. One need not be Derridean to observe that a metaphysics of the 23


proper leads to ideological mass movements, be they religious or political. Indeed, one of Eric Voegelin’s most trenchant contributions to political philosophy — his diagnosis of ideologies as a modern form of gnosticism—derives from his critique of metaphysics. Yet despite some consensus regarding the dangers of metaphysics, a troubling issue persists. Can stable political foundations be established without essentialism? Is not everything permitted without a firm and stable ground? This overarching question, of establishing foundations without foundationalism, will be answered only after a secondary aporia is addressed. One of the enduring problems emerging from the critique of modernity is the question of representation and language. Indeed, much of what currently is described as “postmodern” is steeped in the linguistic turn exemplified by the work of Derrida but engaged in by so many others. Herein, then, is an examination of language and representation but with a slightly different focus than that of the typical standard-bearers of postmodernism. Language or forms of representation are created and altered by conscious human beings. Yet, human consciousness is itself shaped by previous forms of representation. Representation and consciousness, thus, are intertwined and interdependent. This is why it is one thing to eschew metaphysics yet quite another to avoid metaphysical thinking altogether. Indeed, this observation is a central element of the post-structuralist movement. Revealing the instability and ambiguity of language, many contemporary critiques assert that philosophy is little more than language games. Language is self-referential and has nothing to do with reality. A philosopher’s duty, in this environment, is to expose, to deconstruct, the myriad of fictions that most take as givens. Going against the grain of much “postmodern” thought, I would argue that the instability of language does not prevent theorists from speaking positively, authoritatively, about politics. On the contrary, it is the expectation that language can be univocal, that systems of representation can be generated that eliminate ambiguity, that delegitimizes language and destabilizes meaning. Frustrated by the inability to found a correspondence theory of language and truth, post-structuralists deny the existence of meaning and order. The work of scholars such as Voegelin and Ricoeur on language and representation has pointed out that it is only when essentialist expectations regarding language and representation are avoided that it is possible to see how meaning, order, and authoritative narratives are constructed. This rather ironic claim, that an acceptance of the instability and ambiguity of language is precisely what allows for the construction

Voegelin and Ricoeur / 25

of meaning, has obvious and important implications for the question of establishing foundations without foundationalism. Phrased differently, the either/or question regarding political foundations—either politics is grounded in an essentialist metaphysics or nihilism ensues—is a false dichotomy. The presentation of the issue of foundations in an either/or manner is so persuasive, so natural, because contemporary consciousness has been shaped by specific Enlightenment and modern forms of representation. When such tendencies are identified it becomes possible to discuss ethical and political foundations without resorting to essentialist thinking. The two aporias selected, foundations and the instability of language, are addressed by analyzing three twentieth-century critics of modernity, Edmund Husserl, Eric Voegelin, and Paul Ricoeur. Not only did each thinker’s critique of modernity confront the question of foundations, the meditations of all three led to language and representation. Indeed, by detailing the efforts of three such minds to establish a new science, one grounded in truth, it becomes clear that certain forms of language have unique qualities, characteristics that either ameliorate or minimize essentialist thinking. It is all the more intriguing because whether the goal was system building, establishing a definitive historical pattern to the emergence of authentic order, or absorbing the novel techniques of contemporary thought into a (largely) Kantian framework, each thinker began with modern intentions. Yet each philosopher was confronted with the problem of how to articulate or represent paradox. The unsuitableness of conventional language to express inscrutable philosophic insights is not new. What is intriguing about Husserl, Voegelin, and Ricoeur (particularly in light of Husserlian beginnings) is their increasing recognition of the potential and power of subjectivity and aesthetic elements of language. In the end, their writings lay the theoretical groundwork for a political science that incorporates the full range of human experience—subjective and objective. Furthermore, their works reveal that representation is not an ancillary concern but rather the proper focus of philosophy and politics.

Husserlian Beginnings Husserl did not grasp the depth, extent, and corresponding consequences of the failure of modernity until rather late. Indeed, by the time Husserl wrote The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy,


Heidegger and Jaspers seemed more timely and profound. Despite his book’s tardiness, Husserl is important as a critique of modernity for several reasons. First, Husserl made several technical philosophic advances that have changed philosophy. His contributions to phenomenology and epistemology alone, which stem from his innovative theory of consciousness, are enough to establish his greatness; but for the present discussion, Husserl’s recovery of subjectivity and his struggles to represent paradox are most important. Husserl’s writings are dense and diffuse; and although he deserves considerable praise for his contributions, his work lacks coherence. This was caused, in part, by his work habits. Husserl edited and reworked his manuscripts numerous times before allowing them to appear in print. Frequently, by the time a work was published, he had changed his philosophic position substantially. To complicate matters further, Husserl often utilized methods and techniques years before systematically discussing them. Thus, his early works often must be re-read in light of his later works. The main reason for the lack of coherence in Husserl’s work, however, lies in the character of phenomenology itself. Phenomenology is more a method than a doctrine, and as such, it is “a prolegomenon to a philosophy, but is not itself the undertaking of an established philosophy.”1 Furthermore, “all of phenomenology is not Husserl, even though he is more or less its center,” and numerous subsequent philosophers have used phenomenology as a tool without embracing all of Husserl’s conclusions. These elements make interpretations of Husserl complicated. Indeed, Ricoeur remarked that a careful study of Husserl reveals that he “abandoned along the way as many routes as he took. This is the case to such a degree that in a broad sense phenomenology is both the sum of Husserl’s own variations and the heresies issuing from it.”2 Despite these difficulties, there is one element that unites all of Husserl’s work: his desire to establish objective or verifiable truth.3 His notion of objectivity and verification, however, must be distinguished from the 1. Eric Voegelin, “Letter from Voegelin to Alfred Schütz on Edmund Husserl,” September 17, 1943, in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, trans. and ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1993), 20. 2. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 3–4. 3. For an interesting discussion of this topic, see Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).


natural sciences. For Husserl, “truth” cannot depend upon physical reality; after all, Descartes demonstrated the unreliable character of observations derived from the senses. Furthermore, the scientific method demands that observations be confirmed or verified by others. This, in turn, requires language and/or symbols. Husserl sought a purer form of knowledge, knowledge that was direct and unmediated. In Logical Investigations, Husserl strove to distinguish philosophy from psychology, and he did this by pointing out the latter’s increasing connection to the natural sciences. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when psychology was a sub-field of philosophy, psychology attempted to become more rigorous by adopting the techniques and methods of empiricism and the scientific method. For Husserl, this had the opposite effect and meant that psychology could only attain approximations or estimates of the mind. Husserl devotes the first section of Logical Investigations to refuting psychology as a method for discovering truths about the human mind. In contrast, he set out to establish pure logic — logic that, for Husserl, would separate out the general conditions or laws that govern deduction. Yet supplying the formal rules regulating and constraining logical thought was insufficient. In order to attain truth one must rely on “supplementary condition[s] [that] lie on the subjective side, and concern the subjective characteristics of intuitability, of self-evidence, and the subjective conditions of its attainment.”4 In short, logic for Husserl was two-sided; logic required objective rules and subjective verification. But how can the subjective side of consciousness serve to ground truth? This hinges on Husserl’s theory of consciousness. Husserl maintains that all consciousness is intentional, and by this he means several things. First, intentionality is a directional term. A subject’s consciousness is oriented toward some particular object. But Husserl intends another meaning by intentionality. Following Brentano, who in turn was guided by the Scholastics, intentionality also describes the content of consciousness. Intentionality refers to that which is immanent in a subject’s consciousness, and it is important to note that this content differs from that which is “real” or physically present.5 For Husserl, phenomenological reality is distinct from the natural world. One scholar 4. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, ed. L. Langrebe, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (London: Routledge, 1973), 17. 5. See Theodore De Boer, The Development of Husserl’s Thought, trans. Theodore Plantinga (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 7–9, 35–45.


argues that the most important contribution in the Logical Investigations is “Husserl’s rejection of mereological adequacy, and his adoption of a radically new account of intentionality. Far from allowing the content and the object of a mental act to coalesce, the hallmark of the new theory is that, with respect to any particular mental act, content and object never coincide.”6 This conception of consciousness has certain advantages, such as mediating some traditional philosophic dichotomies. For example, since the otherness of all objects can never be overcome, all objects transcend consciousness; yet when objects are the target of an intentional consciousness, they become immanent in the consciousness. When objects become immanent, they are an object of consciousness and as such have dual meanings. The first meaning is referential; it refers to the external object. Yet for Husserl, this sense is of secondary importance. The goal of phenomenology is to focus on how this content within consciousness also refers to that which is transcendent, a meaning that goes beyond the particular object but is nonetheless immanent within consciousness. Husserl uses the term noema to refer to this process, and this is the first step toward phenomenological seeing—a focus not on objective or external reality but on that which is immanent in a particular consciousness. In an effort to explain how consciousness interacts with a completely other natural world, Husserl asserts the primacy of perception over intentional acts. He contends that perception presents objects before consciousness immediately and without need of mediation. Perception is prior; it is presupposed. Paul Ricoeur notes that this position is more than a description of reality; it is a critique of Enlightenment influences. For Husserl, “the first truth of the world is not the truth of mathematical physics but the truth of perception; or rather the truth of science is erected as a superstructure upon a first foundation of presence and existence, that of the world lived perceptually.”7 Thus, what passes for objective and verifiable truth is secondary. Phenomenology requires philosophers or scientists to reject the “natural thesis or standpoint” and “see” the world phenomenologically. In other words, rather than focusing on physical objects, philosophers must concentrate on the activities and objects occurring within consciousness. Only these objects are unmediated and therefore true. This shift in focus is the famous phenomenological 6. David Bell, Husserl (London: Routledge, 1990), 115. 7. Ricoeur, Husserl, 9.


reduction or the reduction of all consciousness to the meanings and processes within consciousness. Put differently, the phenomenological method reduces, brackets, or suspends that which is immanent and focuses on it as an object of consciousness. Phenomenology thereby discloses the proper subject matter of science.8 Beginning from the assumption that truth must be stable, constant, and unchanging, phenomenology maintains the Cartesian doubt with regard to the natural world and observation, yet it allows for the establishment, the grounding, of truth. Ultimately, Cartesian Meditations endeavors to situate phenomenology within the history of philosophy. For Husserl, Descartes is the beginning of philosophy and the grounding of all other sciences, but Descartes did not go far enough. “Descartes betrayed his own radicalism for the doubt should have put an end to all objective externality and should have disengaged a subjectivity without an absolute external world.” Determined to extend Descartes, Husserl’s theory of consciousness becomes more than an epistemological study, it takes on ontological implications. “The world is not only ‘for me’ but draws all of its being-status ‘from me.’ The world becomes the ‘world-perceivedin-the-reflective life.’ ” In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl’s theory of consciousness becomes egological. “This is a philosophy where being not only never gives the force of reality to the object, but above all never founds the reality of the ego itself. Thus, as an egology it is a cogito without res cogitans, a cogito without the absolute measure of the idea of infinity.” In short, Husserl’s search for a fundamental science ends in solipsism; and, as with any form of solipsism, a major problem is accounting for others.9 Husserl attempts to account for others in his “Fifth Cartesian Meditation.” The fact that this essay is nearly as long as the previous four combined hints at the seriousness of the problem. Ricoeur notes that “according to common sense the other egos are not reducible to the representation that one has of them. They are not even represented objects, unities of sense. . . . Others are other than I; they are other egos.” Yet if Husserl is to remain faithful to phenomenology, others can be “real” only through and because of one’s consciousness. Husserl was aware of the problem, 8. See Jeffrey Bell, The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructuralism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 65–67. 9. Ricoeur, Husserl, 83, 11, 84.


and “this is why reduction to the sphere of ownness constitutes in no way a dissolution of the Other into me but rather the recognition of the paradox as paradox.”10 Husserl attempts to resolve this paradox — accounting for others—by means of analogy. Analogies allow Husserl to get others “into” the subjective consciousness by means of an originary and passive moment that occurs before intentionality. He describes the process of encountering another in the following way. Since in this nature and in this world, my animate organism is the only body that is or can be constituted originally as an animate organism (a functioning organ), the body over there, which is nevertheless apprehended as an animate organism, must have derived this sense by an apperceptive transfer from my animate organism, and done so in a manner that excludes an actually direct, and hence primordial, showing of the predicates belonging to an animate organism specifically, a showing of them in perception proper. It is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the “analogizing” apprehension of that body as another organism.11

Husserl distinguishes between analogies that “go from object to object in the same sphere of experience” and the type of analogy that accounts for others. The latter analogies function on “the level of ‘passive genesis,’ as when we understand a new reality with one already known: the new understanding proceeds from an antecedent experience that furnishes a sort of originary institution.” Although analogies are not the end of the procedure — they furnish the intentionality of the other, that must in turn be fulfilled in one’s consciousness by apprehension—they serve an important mediating function. Fulfilling a role much like perception, analogies account for others in a “process of prereflective, antepredicative, experience.”12 Analogies perform a vital function for Husserl. They ameliorate problems connected to his solipsism by conveying knowledge or a “new understanding.” This is significant. Voegelin and Ricoeur argue that certain forms of representation—myth, symbol, metaphor, and narrative—are 10. Ibid., 116–17. 11. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 110–11. 12. Ricoeur, Husserl, 126, 11.


the only way to express the inexpressible, to convey the experience of paradox. Yet Husserl is not using analogies in this manner. For Husserl, analogies are not to be thought of as a particular type of signification, whether semiotic or semantic. Husserlian analogies are contained within a single consciousness. Others are understood through reduction. I perceive that this other animate object appears to be similar to me, and therefore, via analogy, I attribute to it objectivity or immanence within my consciousness. In short, Husserl’s egology is maintained. Husserl’s inattention to the characteristics and potential of analogical representation is to be expected. He was still very much a child of Enlightenment thinking and/or modernity. Seeking an unequivocal foundation for his science, Husserl maintains that authentic knowledge must not be mediated. It must be pure and avoid the vagaries of language and representation. Such an essentialist desire is destined to be frustrated.

Voegelin Voegelin’s critique of modernity, at least initially, is similar to Husserl’s. In The New Science of Politics Voegelin argues that positivism is the primary obstacle to recovering an authentic political science, and his chief complaint, that “the intention of making the social sciences ‘scientific’ through the use of methods that as closely as possible resemble the methods employed in sciences of the natural world,” is analogous to Husserl’s earlier attack on psychology. He acknowledges as much when, in the midst of criticizing modern conceptions of history, he writes: “Husserl’s critique of psychologism and Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms were important steps toward the restoration of theoretical relevance.” For Voegelin, the problem with positivism goes beyond its inability to ground science sufficiently; he objects to its exclusionary tendencies. He points to the fact/value distinction as illustrative; it “was created through the positivistic conceit that only propositions concerning facts of the phenomenal world were ‘objective,’ while judgments concerning the right order of the soul and society were ‘subjective.’”13 By elevating facts and 13. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, with new foreword by Dante Germino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 11. Available in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter, CW), vol. 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political


denigrating values, positivism deems much of human experience as unimportant, even illegitimate. In contrast, Voegelin’s new science demands a reintegration of subjective experience. But what does it mean to say that authentic political science calls for a recovery of and reliance on subjective experience? The answer hinges on Voegelin’s theory of consciousness. Voegelin’s theory of consciousness and his connections to Husserl have been discussed at length elsewhere.14 The discussion here can be constrained to an analysis of internal and external verification. Husserl rejects the “natural thesis” perspective of truth and focuses on the contents and activities within consciousness. This means that objects are not reduced to content within consciousness but remain transcendental, completely other. In this way, Husserl’s phenomenology avoids traditional philosophic problems, such as subject/object dichotomies. Such an understanding of consciousness is similar to Voegelin’s notion of participatory consciousness. An individual psyche can and does participate in a reality that is beyond or transcendent, and the particular consciousness is altered by the experience. Yet, the mystery or beyond remains transcendent or incapable of being objectified; the ground of existence is not to be understood as an object within a specific consciousness. Despite this similarity, Glenn Hughes argues that Voegelin’s theory of consciousness has more in common with Heidegger than Husserl. Unlike Husserl, who focuses on a conscious “I” or “transcendental ego,” Voegelin stresses the enmeshed character of consciousness. Consciousness does not originate within a particular I; consciousness precedes the self-reflective individual. “Husserl presumed to elevate the notion of the I . . . to the status of a pre-experienceable, transcendental consciousness.” But “I”

Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. and intro. by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). Citations herein are to the 1987 edition. 14. Voegelin’s most sustained treatment of Husserl comes from two sources: Anamnesis and Voegelin’s correspondence with Alfred Schütz, in particular a letter written September 17, 1943. A good secondary examination of Voegelin’s theory of consciousness and Husserl’s can be found in Glenn Hughes, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993). For an overview of Voegelin’s relationship to Husserl and an exegesis of his correspondence with Schütz, see David Levy, “Europe, Truth, and History: Husserl and Voegelin on Philosophy and the Identity of Europe,” in International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin, ed. Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffery L. Price (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).


pertains to a specific individual, and as such it “is an ontologically derivative phenomenon.” Voegelin avoids such a mistake; “consciousness has the structure not only of an ‘I’ but also of an ‘other than-I.’”15 This awareness results in a critical difference. Given his presuppositions, Husserl’s thought leads to solipsism. Voegelin, in contrast, does not rely solely on internal verification. For example, when faced with experiences of order, how is one to “recognize [an experience-symbolization] to be true, so that by the recognition of its truth he is forced to reorder his existence?. . . . [It] will have no authority of truth unless it speaks with an authority commonly present in everybody’s consciousness.”16 The only way to determine whether experiences of order are valid is to see if such experiences are representative, not just of a single consciousness, but of human consciousness generally. For this Voegelin turns to history and examines previous experiences of order. Voegelin’s reliance on history allows him to avoid solipsism, and it provides insight into the shared characteristics of human consciousness. Yet a reliance on history alone is not enough to escape the tendencies of modernity. Voegelin’s initial effort at recovering political science prompted him to undertake his massive “History of Political Ideas.” But after compiling several thousand pages, Voegelin realized that ideas are not the proper focus of political philosophy. “Ideas turned out to be a secondary conceptual development, beginning with the Stoics, intensified in the High Middle Ages, and radically unfolding into concepts which are assumed to refer to a reality other than the reality experienced.”17 Rather than being the primary experience and representation of political order, ideas are subsequent representations. Shaped by rules of language, secondary forms of representation can constrain thought. Frequently, theorists become enthralled by the various connections, arrangements, and nuances among the ideas themselves and ignore the underlying reality. This tendency is what Whitehead called misplaced concreteness, and it is what drove Voegelin to abandon ideas and concentrate on symbols. Human experience is the proper subject matter of study, but the subjective 15. See in particular Hughes, Mystery and Myth, 13–40. 16. Eric Voegelin, In Search of Order, vol. V, Order and History, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 18, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 40. Emphasis added. 17. Eric Voegelin, “Autobiographical Memoir,” as quoted by Ellis Sandoz in The Voegelinian Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 80.


experience of particular individuals is unknowable. Thus, philosophy must concentrate on the symbols generated that articulate or represent human experience. Make no mistake, symbols are forms of representation and as such harbor many of the tendencies of ideas and other forms of secondary significations. Yet, symbols are a better form of representation in that they are not as prone to misplaced concreteness because they maintain a connection to experiences; put in other terms, they are better representations of the enmeshed character of consciousness. Furthermore, one engages symbols in a different manner, from a different perspective, than ideas. One “knows” a symbol by exploring the full interpretive dimensions. This involves a type of internal verification or assimilation of the meaning(s) contained within particular symbols. In an effort to emphasize the unique characteristics of symbols, Voegelin often hyphenates experience-symbolization. Voegelin notes the significance of this realization; it “led to the principle that lies at the basis of all my later work: i.e., the reality of experience is self-interpretive. The men who have the experiences express them through symbols; and the symbols are the key to understanding the experience expressed.”18 History is not a collection of facts or ideas but an accounting of the experience-symbolizations generated by human beings. Thus, political theory must “carry the inquiry beyond a description of the conventionally so-called representative institutions into the nature of representation as the form by which a political society gains existence for action in history.”19 But what actually constitutes a political society? Ellis Sandoz describes the “what” of Voegelin’s studies as “social reality” and notes that “social reality is not an object in nature to be studied by the theorist merely externally. Each society, Voegelin suggests, possesses not only externality but also an internal dimension of meaningfulness through which the human beings who inhabit it interpret existence to themselves.” The symbols to be studied, then, are those that express both the internal (subjective) and external (objective) dimensions of existence. Truly representative political symbols exemplify the existential and historical as well as factual aspects of both the individual and the community. Symbols are engendered from the experiences of 18. Ibid., 81. 19. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 1. Emphasis added.


the individuals who make up a particular community, but the community is not simply the aggregation of disparate experiences. Representative political symbols not only reflect individuals but also constitute something more grand—a whole, “a little world or a cosmion.” Individuals come to understand that they are not fully human unless they participate in “a whole which transcends [their] particular existence.” This process of self-illumination through symbols is not the exception but the rule: “every human society has an understanding of itself through a variety of symbols.”20 In addition, the study of symbols reveals certain shared experiences concerning the nature of reality and the structure of order. These experiences are not identical, but they are similar enough to be called equivalent.21 These equivalent experiences are the political fundamentals for which Voegelin was searching; and this is what he means by his statement that “the order of history emerges from the history of order.”22 What complicates the inquiry is the fact that while the act of representative symbolization is universal, the manner and/or form in which this self-illumination takes place is not. There are, in Voegelin’s eyes, various levels of sophistication among the symbolizations scattered throughout time and space, and the symbolizations themselves play a role in how reality is experienced. In other words, the relationship between experience and symbolization is interdependent. One cannot journey back to the arche, to experience a reality prior to any symbolizations; that desire is a modern flight of fancy. The beginning is just as mysterious as the end.23 Nor can it be said that experiences precede symbols or vice versa; all that can be known is that they exist in an integral and symbiotic relationship. Symbols and experiences are continually being rearticulated in 20. Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution, 3, 28. 21. Voegelin points out, in “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolizations in History,” that the urge to find identical experiences is another example of the essentialist tendencies within modernity. The essay is included in Published Essays, 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 12, CW (1990; available, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 115–33. 22. Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. I, Order and History, ed. Maurice P. Hogan, vol. 14, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 19. 23. For Voegelin’s discussion concerning the inability to know the arche, see his introduction to The Ecumenic Age, vol. IV, Order and History, ed. Michael Franz, vol. 17, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), especially the section entitled “The Beginning and the Beyond,” 51–56.


light of one another, and this is precisely what Voegelin’s five-volume magnum opus, Order and History, explores. Voegelin argues that within any social reality there are two sets of symbolizations of order: the symbols commonly accepted by the general populace and the symbols of political science. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin uses Heraclitus’s language and describes the former symbols as the xynon; and while these can be highly differentiated language symbols, they are not the symbols of political science. The latter are generated only when the commonly accepted symbols are taken by a philosopher who “order[s] and clarif[ies] the meanings by the criteria of his theory.”24 Even though Voegelin’s primary interest is on the symbols of political science, he is not dismissive of the xynon. Philosophers are part of the process; there is no Archimedean point outside the flux of existence and distinct from human experiences from which to theorize. This does not mean that previously accepted symbols maintain their representative character. Personal and historical experience reveals that commonly accepted symbols occasionally lose resonance. When this is the case, “new” symbolizations emerge. Sometimes these moments are pivotal, and entirely new orientations are required. This occurs when the traditional symbols of order have degenerated to a state where the people have lost faith in them. The only recourse, then, is for the generation of symbols that constitute an enormous change in perception, or a “leap in being” in Voegelin’s words. Such innovations are similar to Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in that they alter the way virtually everything is perceived; afterward, the world is understood in very different terms. The creation of “new” symbols, as well as the clarification of old symbols, takes place within the collective consciousness of a community. Both creative acts are rearticulations, and these acts of reinvigoration are essential to the health of symbols and social reality. There are legitimate and illegitimate rearticulations, however, and Voegelin proposes to provide the tools to discern which ones are authentic. His corrective involves two essential elements: the recovery of language and history. Language, according to Voegelin, had degenerated considerably during the Enlightenment and modernity. Indeed, the distortion of language was one of the chief culprits of the derailment of philosophy. In the fifth 24. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 28.


and final volume of Order and History, In Search of Order, Voegelin stressed that “the confusion of language in the wake of the millennial movements is the syndrome of a disorder that has grown in contemporary Western society. . . . If we want to break out of the public unconsciousness, we must analyze it and thereby raise it into consciousness.” Yet, because language is intricately and inextricably connected to consciousness, “we must [always] remember the paradoxic complex of consciousnessreality-language.” For his purposes, there was no point in delving into the detailed structures of various forms of representation until theorists had recovered an adequate theory of consciousness. “Only when the complex of reflective distance-remembrance-oblivion is sufficiently differentiated and articulated will it be possible to rescue the symbols that have been historically developed to describe the phenomena of oblivion from their historiographic burial as ‘ideas,’ ‘opinions,’ or ‘beliefs.’” This attitude, expressed numerous places in his writings, explains why Voegelin did not write a careful philosophy of language. This deficiency should not be characterized as an oversight. Rather, given the interrelatedness of language and consciousness, Voegelin’s philosophy of language corresponds to his philosophy of consciousness. For example, even in volume 5, where he presents perhaps his most sustained treatment of language, he stresses the limits of language to convey the paradox of consciousness. Voegelin argues that consciousness has two primary components, intentionality and luminosity, that correspond to human experiences of thingreality and It-reality; yet “contemporary philosophical discourse has no conventionally accepted language” to represent such structures. However, if “the quest succeeds in finding the symbols that will adequately express the newly differentiated experience of order, . . . it can . . . become . . . a new social field.”25 Luminosity is achieved when an experience of the In-Between character of consciousness, participating in both thingreality and It-reality, is palpable enough to generate new symbols of order. Even though the terminology in his late writings became more philosophical, more differentiated, the substance of Voegelin’s position on consciousness and language appears to be quite similar to views expressed elsewhere in his writings, even back to the reliance on Heraclitus’s language used in The New Science of Politics. 25. Eric Voegelin, In Search of Order, 59, 30, 39.


Unlike Husserl, who rejects the “empirical” sciences, Voegelin utilizes archaeological and historical evidence as a guide. Voegelin notes that the overwhelming majority of symbolizations of order share certain characteristics in that they convey a quaternarian structure to existence. Most symbols of order, at least until the deformations of modernity, include four fundamental elements: man, society, world, and god. Although the depiction of and relations between these realms differs, these dimensions of existence are predominant in symbols of order. Yet it is not enough that these elements be present. What is crucial to legitimate symbolizations, according to Voegelin, is that human beings assume the proper role or place within the hierarchy of being. Man, perhaps best described by Aristotle as neither beast nor god, exists in the In-Between, or metaxy. In other words, humans are part of this world while, at the same time, they transcend it. The tremendous benefit of symbols is, that by their very form, they are illustrative of this condition. While preserving a connection to experience, symbols nevertheless transcend this world. They can embody elements of human experience, such as history, that are both of and not of this world. In this way, symbols display a fecundity that is analogous to abstract ideas and concepts, yet they are always limited in that they are bound by human experience. In effect, symbols represent or articulate the In-Between character of human existence. They mirror human creativity and potential in that they are, in Ricoeur’s words, both bound and free. Legitimate rearticulations of experience-symbolization maintain an openness to the full range of human experience. They do not artificially truncate the realm of being for some human purpose, and they insist on a sense of limits. Thus, symbols of order can be generated or rearticulated that ground the political order but do not absolve chaos. The mystery remains. Indeed, the clearest sign that a symbol is deformed is if it claims to resolve the mystery. Symbols, if they are sensitive to the limits of human knowledge, always maintain an awareness of mystery. Further, it is impossible, or at least untenable, to assert a single unassailable interpretation of a symbol or myth. Their very form ensures ambiguity and preserves contingency. Symbols only maintain their efficacy if they are continually reinvigorated by sensitive participants; they must be perpetually revisited. And because individuals always bring with them specific concerns and


dilemmas endemic to their period, the symbolic horizon is always in a state of flux; it changes with the concerns of the times. While ideas, theories, or concepts are not excluded from this sort of updating, the inherent ambiguity of symbols makes renewal of this sort easier. This ability to adjust more readily to the times is a crucial advantage.

Ricoeur Whereas Voegelin illuminates the relationship between experience and symbolization, Ricoeur focuses on the interpretative dimensions of myths, symbols, metaphors, and narratives. Ricoeur describes his philosophical project as an attempt to meld three distinct philosophical traditions. Although the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology are clear, at least to their origins and primary authors, the reflexive tradition is ambiguous. Realizing this, Ricoeur explicitly discusses what he means by “reflexive” philosophy. He states that in an attempt to understand the internal dimensions of human thought “reflexion is that act of turning back upon itself by which a subject grasps, in a moment of intellectual clarity and moral responsibility, the unifying principle of the operations among which it is dispersed and forgets itself as subject.”26 Ricoeur’s association with the reflexive tradition, which he identifies as Descartes, Kant, and French post-Kantian thought, is limited. Gabriel Marcel taught Ricoeur “a profound respect for the mystery of being,” and this in turn fostered “a deep distrust for any simple reductive explanation of man or culture.” However, Ricoeur’s dissatisfaction with the reflexive tradition does not stem simply from a respect for the mystery of being. Ricoeur realized that the reflexive tradition was complicated by the emergence of certain contemporary philosophical techniques, such as phenomenology and hermeneutics. From divergent beginnings, these two disciplines reveal that disclosure of identity is a much more complicated affair than the reflexive tradition implies. Ricoeur notes that “the great discovery of phenomenology, within the limits of the 26. Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 12.


phenomenological reduction itself, remains intentionality, that is to say, in its least technical sense, the priority of the consciousness of something over self-consciousness.”27 Phenomenology reveals human existence to be one of integral participation. Humans are not always self-conscious but frequently perceive the world through conscious or even unconscious perspectives. Responding to this, phenomenology takes the inattentive as well as the attentive into account in an effort to offer a more conclusive perspective of human consciousness. However, a more descriptive and accurate account of human consciousness is not phenomenology’s goal; its ultimate aim is the transparent self. Ricoeur notes that “Husserl . . . conceives of phenomenology not only as a method of description, in terms of their essences, of the fundamental modes of organizing experience . . . but also as a radical self-grounding in the most complex intellectual clarity.”28 Husserl and phenomenology never achieve this clarity because it “reveals—by way of regression—levels, always more and more fundamental, at which the active syntheses continually refer to ever more radical passive syntheses. Phenomenology is thus caught up in an infinite movement of ‘backward questioning’ in which its project of radical self-grounding fades away.” The phenomenological search for foundationalism, in the end, discredits foundations, and “it is this that gives to Husserl’s work its tragic grandeur.”29 Ricoeur attempts to remedy this situation by combining phenomenology and hermeneutics. He asserts that modern hermeneutics, albeit by analyzing texts instead of consciousness, is driven by the same overriding goal as phenomenology: the disclosure of the authentic self. Yet as hermeneutics expanded from biblical exegesis to the analysis of classical, juridical, and literary works, it changed from an analysis of specific texts or genres to an exposition of what it is to understand, or Verstehen. This new focus—one that Ricoeur feels had the significance of a “Copernican reversal”—leads hermeneutics to inquiries concerning “the relation between sense and self, between the intelligibility of the first and the reflexive nature of the second.”30 However, interpreting a text, any text, is not 27. Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 8. 28. Ibid.,13. Emphasis added. 29. Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 15, 14. 30. Ibid., 14.


a simple affair. Upon close examination, it is not possible to say that the text “originates” or is “created” by the author; and it is equally incorrect to say that a text “originates” or is “created” by the reader. Hermeneutics shows that reader, writer, and text are inextricably linked to one another. Interpretation must take into account the interrelations of these various entities. Hermeneutics demonstrates that textual existence is, like human existence, one of participation. Thus, both phenomenology and hermeneutics present similar findings about human beings and their relations to the world. Just as phenomenology reveals that the pursuit of a self existing in unobstructed self-consciousness — escaping all passive syntheses—is an endless and ultimately fruitless endeavor, the hermeneutical analysis of texts and their relation to authors and readers results in logical circles of a similar character. Ricoeur’s position is that both phenomenology and hermeneutics fail to realize their initial goal—attaining the immediate and direct correlation between sense and self—because they do not realize that human participation is not a development but always presupposed. “It is because we find ourselves first of all in a world to which we belong and in which we cannot but participate that we are then able, in a second movement, to set up objects in opposition to ourselves, objects that we claim to constitute and master intellectually.” Acts of interpretation or awareness of self are secondary developments; presupposed by the condition of participation, they are responses to the human condition. “Verstehen . . . is the response of a being thrown into the world who finds his way about in it by projecting onto it his ownmost possibilities.” With regard to hermeneutics, “interpretation . . . is but the development, the making explicit of this ontological understanding, an understanding always inseparable from a being that has initially been thrown into this world.”31 In epistemological terms, the self cannot disclose itself immediately to itself but has to first take into account its preconditions. This is precisely what Heidegger attempts to do in Being in Time, and Ricoeur greatly admires his contributions. However, Heidegger tries to comprehend authentic human existence too directly. In contrast, Ricoeur focuses on interpretation as the response human beings have once they realize their ontological status—they set out to interpret the world or project their possibilities. Heidegger dismisses such activities as ontic, and therefore 31. Ibid., 14–15.


not the target of his inquiries, and proceeds to investigate Dasein at the most fundamental level. Ricoeur counters that hermeneutics and phenomenology teach that such quick and direct paths to unity are impossible. One cannot simply return to an authentic experience of ontology but must first wade through the various “projections” of human beings. This is referred to as Ricoeur’s “long way” to being, as opposed to Heidegger’s “short way” to Being. The significant “justification of the long way over the short way to ontology [involves] the[ir] underlying differences in the fore-comprehension of human being. For Ricoeur, the unity of man can only be a regulative idea, not achieved in existence and not easily accessible to an ontology worked out too quickly.”32 Unity of sense and self, complete understanding, is never achievable. It provides the impetus for the philosophic search, but its actual attainment is beyond human possibility. Ricoeur is not asserting a telos. He contends that by combining phenomenology and hermeneutics into a critical method, it is possible to gain insight into being, to glimpse but never attain unity. In Voegelinian language, by participating in the search for being, the ontological status of human existence qua participatory existence is revealed. For Ricoeur, the only path to this insight, however, is through a hermeneutical phenomenology. He states: “Moreover, it is only in a conflict of rival hermeneutics that we perceive something of the being to be interpreted.”33 For Ricoeur, the only way to approach genuine Verstehen is by taking stock of rival interpretations. One must dwell in the ontic and search for the ontological. Like Voegelin, Ricoeur contends that access to human experience is never direct but always mediated. He states: “Mediation [occurs] by signs: that is to say, it is language that is the primary condition of human experience.” Even more directly stated: “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts.”34 For Ricoeur, the path to truth and understanding leads to examinations of symbols, metaphors, myths, theories, and narratives.35 In contrast, Heidegger’s statement that 32. Patrick Bourgeois and Frank Schalow, “Hermeneutics of Existence: Conflict and Resolution,” Philosophy Today 31 (Spring 1987): 46. 33. Ricoeur, “The Conflict of Interpretations,” 19. 34. Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 14–15. 35. Several scholars disagree with Ricoeur’s assessment of Heidegger and the efficacy of the long over the short route to an authentic ontology. For an interesting discussion concerning the advantages of both, see Bourgeois and Schalow, “Hermeneutics of Existence.”


“the metaphorical exists only within the metaphysical” reveals a more suspicious attitude toward language and representation.36 Heidegger believes that certain forms of language are deleterious. Clinging to dichotomies engendered by post-Socratic philosophy, metaphors and analogies obfuscate the path back to unity of Being and beings. He tries to avoid this tendency by “allowing language to, in his words, ‘speak itself’ (Sagen).” To this aim, Heidegger “explores how, in this ‘thoughtful saying’ (Sagen), poetry (Dichten) and thinking (Denken) have a type of mutually dependent relationship whereby both are essential to the process, yet remain distinct.”37 Heidegger’s late works try to resolve this conflict between literal and figurative language without lapsing into the old dichotomies of metaphysical thinking. Ricoeur also addresses the incongruities between literal and figurative language, but he does so precisely through an analysis of symbols and metaphors. In fact, for Ricoeur, it is the unique function of certain forms of figurative language that actually beget rival interpretations. Stated another way, metaphors and symbols precede phenomenology and hermeneutics. Symbols are “an effort to bypass the thorny problem about the starting point of philosophy.” Ricoeur’s effort to avoid such problems is indicative of his rejection of modern presuppositions; for it is a modern notion that philosophers can rise above and somehow avoid the fact that we are born into the midst of language. “A meditation on symbols starts right out with language and with the meaning that is always there already. . . . [I]t gladly embraces thought with all its presuppositions. Its big problem is not to get started, but, in the midst of words, to remember once again.”38 One of the keys to this passage is the call to “remember once again,” because, as Ricoeur points out, “we raise the problem of the symbol now, at this period of history, . . . because of certain characteristics of our modernity—and as a rejoinder to modernity.” Symbols address a fundamental malady of modernity, the increasing sterility of language. Ricoeur comments: “In this very age when language is becoming more precise, more univocal, [and] more technical . . . it is in this very age that we seek 36. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfulligne: Gunther Neske, 1975), 89. 37. Morny Joy, “Derrida and Ricoeur: A Case of Mistaken Identity (and Difference),” Journal of Religion 68 (January 1988): 508, 510. 38. Paul Ricoeur, “The Symbol . . . Food for Thought,” Philosophy Today 4 (1960): 196.


to recharge language, to start out again from language in its fullness.” And symbols are the means by which we rejuvenate language because “the symbol provides food for thought.”39 The reason symbols are productive, or, more precisely, regenerative, is because they are multivocal or have a double sense. Ricoeur states: “I define symbol as any structure of signification in which a direct, primary, literal meaning designates, in addition, another meaning which is indirect, secondary, and figurative and which can be apprehended only through the first.”40 The “double sense,” inherent in symbols, is due to more than ambiguity and duality. The fecundity of symbols lies in the fact that they allow for hermeneutics. “Interpretation has to do with a more complicated intentional structure: a first meaning is set up which intends something, but this object in turn refers to something else which is intended only through the first object.” Interpretation, then, hinges on the specific structure of symbols. Acknowledging Ferdinand de Saussure, Ricoeur admits that signs also have dualities; in fact, they have dual dualities. He states: “First, there is the structural duality of the sensory sign and the signification it carries (the signifier and signified); second there is the intentional duality of the sign (both sensory and meaningful, signifier and signified) and the thing or object designated.” However, the duality inherent in signs is more basic than the duality found in symbols because “in a symbol the duality is added to and superimposed upon the duality of sensory sign and signification as a relation of meaning to meaning; it presupposes signs that already have a primary, literal, manifest meaning.”41 Signs refer to the signified, whereas symbols refer to the meaning generated by the sign. Signs are intended to be transparent and technical; they “say only what they want to say by indicating the thing signified, [but] symbols are opaque. The first obvious literal meaning itself looks analogically toward a second meaning which is found only in the first meaning. . . . This opaqueness is the symbol’s very profundity, an inexhaustible depth.”42 This opaqueness or ambiguity occurs because 39. Ibid., 97, 196–97. 40. Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 98. 41. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 12–13. 42. Ricoeur, “The Symbol . . . Food for Thought,” 199.


the second meaning is not comprehended along rational lines. Ricoeur states that “in the symbol I cannot objectivize the analogous relation that binds the second meaning to the first. . . . [T]he symbolic meaning is constituted in and through the literal meaning, which brings about the analogy by giving the analogue.” This process is not objective in the sense that, “unlike a comparison that we look at from the outside, symbol is the very movement of the primary meaning that makes us share in the latent meaning and thereby assimilates us to the symbolized, without our being able intellectually to dominate the similarity. This is the sense that a symbol ‘gives’; it gives, because it is a primary intentionality that gives the second meaning.”43 “Knowing” a symbol is achieved only by sharing and assimilating with it; verification takes place at the internal or existential level. This form of knowing differs from rational comprehension because humans do more than grasp a meaning: they participate in and beyond symbols. Through this participatory experience a figurative and nonrational meaning emerges; “the symbol yields its meaning in enigma.”44 What does it mean to say that new meaning is generated out of itself? “The problem is how thought can be both bound and free, how the immediacy of the symbol can be reconciled with the mediacy of thought,” argues Ricoeur. “The crux of the problem lies in the relationship between symbols and hermeneutics. Every symbol gives rise to comprehension by means of some interpretation. How can this understanding be both in and beyond the symbol?”45 His attempt to answer this question prompted him to expand his inquiry from symbols, to metaphors, and eventually to narratives. Initially, he set out to explore these questions under the assumption that the symbol was the key to hermeneutics. He states: “I even went so far as to reduce hermeneutics to the interpretation of symbols; that is to say, to the making explicit of the second—and often hidden— sense of these double-sense expressions.” Given this belief, Ricoeur analyzed the symbol in three stages: phenomenology, hermeneutics, and (speculative) thought as emanating from language. However, Ricoeur increasingly became dissatisfied with this approach. He discovered that a 43. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection,” International Philosophy Quarterly 11 (1962): 194. 44. Ricoeur, “The Symbol . . . Food for Thought,” 199. 45. Ibid., 202.


focus on symbols was too narrow. Signs and symbols are too unstable. In order to stabilize language, to reduce the polysemous character, Ricoeur moved from semiotics to semantic analysis; stated another way: “no symbolism . . . can display its resources of multiple meanings (plurivocite) outside appropriate contexts, that is to say, within the framework of an entire text, of a poem, for example.”46 The key to understanding Ricoeur’s transitions, then, is to realize that he was searching for the appropriate site for interpretation. The productive faculty of symbols hinges upon the existence of stable or shared meaning. In order for a figurative image to be both bound and free there must be some basic meaning from which to begin. Ricoeur began his search at the semiological level and distinguished signs from symbols. However, after encountering post-structural critiques, especially Derrida’s, which argued that all signs were polysemous and hence unstable, Ricoeur amended his conclusions. By turning to the semantic level and exploring the structure of metaphors, Ricoeur refutes Derrida.47 Even though Ricoeur eventually put the question of univocal and multivocal to rest, that alone is not enough to break the circle of language. In order for thought to emerge out of symbols and metaphors, thought must go beyond language. But if all experience is mediated by language, how can thought go “beyond” language? The insights of hermeneutics again point the way. Ricoeur argues that there is no sense looking for a beginning in the traditional linear sense. The process is better described as a circular affair. Ricoeur states: “metaphor does not produce a new order except by creating rifts in an old order. . . . [C]ould we not imagine that the order itself is born the same way it changes?” This approach obviates traditional problems, such as “oppositions between proper and 46. Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 16. 47. It is important to note that Derrida and Ricoeur essentially engaged in a published debate over the role of metaphor. The debate began with Derrida’s White Mythology (1971), which was countered by Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor (1975), followed by Derrida’s “The Retrait of Metaphor” (1978). In addition to the discussion in these primary sources, a lively debate exists within the secondary literature. See Bourgeois and Schalow, “Hermeneutics of Existence”; Joy, “Derrida and Ricoeur”; Douglas McGaughey, “Ricoeur’s Metaphor and Narrative Theories as a Foundation for a Theory of Symbol,” Religious Studies 24(1988): 415–37; Leonard Lawlor, “Dialectic and Iterability: The Confrontation between Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida,” Philosophy Today 32 (Spring 1988); and Lawlor, Imagination and Chance: The Difference between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).


figurative, ordinary and strange, order and transgression.”48 This is what he earlier argued takes place with symbols: they give rise to thought. In the beginning, Ricoeur did not focus on the structure of language and therefore failed to realized that the semiological unit was too unstable to be the site of generation. Ricoeur’s work on metaphors explicates the semantic structures of metaphor in order to establish that enough stability exists, at the level of the sentence, to allow for regeneration. Ricoeur does not stop at the semantic level but expands his inquiry into narrative for three specific reasons. He states that his “inquiry into storytelling responds first of all to a very general concern . . . that of preserving the fullness, diversity, and irreducibility of the various uses of language.”49 By examining the various modes, Ricoeur hopes to recover and preserve the various “non-rational” varieties, such as poetry, fiction, and myth, as legitimate conveyors of meaning and truth. Ricoeur’s second reason for studying narrative is his desire to gather and compare the divergent varieties of storytelling. The promulgation of forms itself is not a problem; but because it has been accompanied by a false hierarchy, certain forms are privileged, whereas others are demeaned. He notes that a sharp dichotomy exists between “history and the related literary genres of biography and autobiography — and, on the other hand, fictional narratives such as epics, dramas, short stories, and novels, to say nothing of narrative modes that use a medium other than language: films, for example, and possibly painting and other plastic arts.” Descriptive forms of discourse, such as history, biography, autobiography, and, to an even greater degree, certain social science disciplines, are seen as embodying truth-telling or objective modes of narration. Fictional narratives, however, are dismissed as subjective and thus unimportant. Ricoeur challenges this delineation by asserting that there is a functional unity underlying all forms of narrative. “My basic hypothesis, in this regard, is the following: the common feature of human experience, that which is marked, organized, and clarified in the act of storytelling in all its forms, is its temporal character.”50 This means there is no significant difference between fiction and history. Ricoeur’s interest in relegitimizing 48. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 22–23. 49. Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 1–2. 50. Ibid., 2.


fictional narratives is not driven by facile motivations. Quite the contrary. Striving for Verstehen, he accepts Heidegger’s assertion that temporality is a fundamental characteristic of Dasein but argues that we understand or perceive time in and through narratives. Ricoeur’s third reason for studying narratives is that he believes the text is the best site for interpretation. The text is “the appropriate medium between temporal experience and the narrative act,” writes Ricoeur. “A text is, on the one hand, an expansion of the first unit of present meaning which is the sentence. On the other hand, it contributes a principle of trans-sentential organization that is exploited by the act of storytelling in all its forms.”51 The text, then, is the only linguistic form that provides for enough stability both to allow for the regeneration of thought as well as to mark, order, and make explicit the human experience of temporal existence. But is every text a narrative? More pointedly, exactly how does a text mark, order, and make explicit time? Relying on Aristotle, Ricoeur identifies muthos as the key ingredient to narratives. He maintains that Aristotle meant muthos to apply to more than the static structure of a narrative; “rather[, he intended] an operation (as indicated by the endings -sis, as in poiesis, sunthesis, sustasis), namely, the structuring that makes us speak of putting-into-the-form-of-a-plot. The emplotment consists mainly in the selection and arrangement of the events and the actions recounted, which make of the fable a story that is ‘complete and entire’ with a beginning, middle and end.” Plots make narratives intelligible. In other words, the power of plot, and therefore narrative, is its ability to provide unity to “those ingredients of human action, which, in ordinary experience, remain dissimilar and discordant. . . . From this intelligible character of the plot, it follows that the ability to follow a story constitutes a very sophisticated form of understanding.”52 The common response to this assertion is that fiction has no reference. Unlike history, or even biography, fiction does not have to deal with or reference actual events. Perceived as entirely a work of the imagination, fiction is dismissed as purely subjective and therefore nonconsequential. Ricoeur counters that this is a complete misunderstanding of what constitutes fiction and narrative. Emphasizing that the fable is “an imitation of an action,” he states: 51. Ibid., 3. 52. Ibid.

Voegelin and Ricoeur / 49 In one way or another, all symbol systems contribute to shaping reality. More particularly, the plots that we invent help us to shape our confused, formless, and in the last resort mute temporal experience. . . . This is why suspending the reference can only be an intermediary moment between the preunderstanding of the world and the transfiguration of daily reality brought about by fiction itself. Indeed, the models of actions elaborated by narrative fiction are models for redescribing the practical field in accordance with the narrative typology resulting from the work of the productive imagination. Because it is a world, the world of the text necessarily collides with the real world in order to “remake” it, either by confirming it or by denying it. However, even the most ironic relation between art and reality would be incomprehensible if art did not both disturb and rearrange our relation to reality. If the world of the text were without any assignable relation to the real world, language would not be “dangerous,” in the sense in which Holderlin called it so before both Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin.53

Thus, narrative, when properly understood, not only provides the stability for the generation of thought but also allows for the intelligible reordering of human existence and experience. Narratives are not fictions in the sense that they have no relation to reality, but rather they are fictitious because they allow the intelligible ordering of discordant events; they provide unity where there is, perhaps, none. Narratives provide articulation to human experiences that are otherwise inexpressible. Ricoeur cites Saint Augustine’s query: “‘What is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is; if someone asks me, I no longer know.’”54 The plot, by way of narrative, gives expression to the mute experience of time.

Conclusion: Foundations through Narrative A critical consequence of modern and postmodern thought has been a loss of self. This destabilization of the subject is due to many factors, but the root causes can be traced to Cartesian epistemology. Inspired by mathematics, Cartesians reject the material world as too malleable and unstable to ground knowledge. Seeking a basis that was fixed, stable, and 53. Ibid., 6. 54. Ibid.


enduring, Descartes grounded thought on his own consciousness. Ironically, this epistemology based on the cogito has resulted in a loss of self. The subject, which has been explored rigorously, has proven impossible to disclose fully. And while this has been worked out in careful detail by thinkers such as Freud, Foucault, and Derrida, Nietzsche was aware of the problem in 1886. “When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, ‘I think,’ I find a whole series of dangerous assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove.”55 Such indeterminacy is significant. In the absence of a stable self, the “immediate certainty” that served as both the foundation and springboard for thought disappears. A key to revitalizing philosophy, then, involves the recovery of the self. To this end, Husserl’s work is crucial. He argues that authentic reality exists not in the material world but as the content within human consciousness. Developing the noema and phenomenological seeing, Husserl maintains that truth is not that which can be verified by observation or duplication; rather, since reality exists within human consciousness, truth must be verified internally. Yet truth is not relative. The key to Husserl’s theory is that when the subject directs consciousness toward a particular object, the experience has objective status. Unlike objects in the material world, this form of objectivity is unchanging and universal, and these objects are not akin to psychological states. One does not feel a particular way about such objects; rather, experiences that obtain objectivity, noemas, are bound by universal and timeless rules. In one sense, this insight is Husserl’s great contribution; the rest of his corpus was devoted to explaining how this process worked. Even though significant problems were never satisfactorily resolved (paradoxes such as solipsism), Husserl’s theory of consciousness and notion of the noema are important theoretical steps toward the recovery of the self. Internal verification of truth within human consciousness is a major component of Voegelin’s thought as well. Indeed, in an important sense, it is essential to comprehending his thought. His rejection of ideas and embrace of symbols is illustrative. The problem with ideas is not that they are representations. That cannot be avoided. The malady of ideas is that they are susceptible to abstraction from the real matter to be studied, human experience. According to Voegelin, reality is not that which exists 55. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 23.


in the material world but the experiences of conscious human beings, and, as such, the truth of previous experience-symbolizations is to be authenticated by internal verification. This is what Voegelin means when he says that reality is self-interpretive. Yet, Voegelin goes beyond Husserl and recognizes that truth cannot be based on the consciousness of a single human being. Turning to history for guidance, Voegelin points out that there is a vast amount of archaeological and historical data to take into account. An important element to Voegelin’s historical corrective, however, is to resist the temptation to constrict history. Many thinkers, even some Voegelin felt contributed to the recovery of science, such as Husserl and Cassirer embrace history. The problem is that at least since the Enlightenment, most modern thinkers discard or dismiss vast amounts of human experience as either unimportant or false. Husserl’s contention that the true beginning of philosophy is Descartes is a case in point. There is no denying Descartes’ importance, but to dismiss all that has come before him as false is a monumental act of hubris. Voegelin is particularly wary of thinkers who truncate human experience and maintains that theorists must take stock of all the materials available. According to Voegelin, history is not a collection of events or facts, meticulously described and verifiable by objective criteria, but rather the representative experiences humans have had of order. The theorist does not catalogue historical data but must engage the experiences behind the representations. These experiences, however, must not be treated as external objects. “It is not given as a whole to any human subject with an Archimedic point outside history. . . . The inquiry, if it is to be undertaken at all, must be conducted inside the object, so that, strictly speaking, there is neither an object nor a subject of cognition.”56 Symbols are not studied externally but as the content or objects within a particular consciousness. One must penetrate symbols to the engendering experience. Yet no theorist, if he be true to the search for truth, is free to pick and choose. For Voegelin, “the validating question will have to be: Do we have to ignore and eclipse a major part of the historical field in order to maintain the truth . . . as the fundamentalist adherents of this or that 56. Eric Voegelin, “What Is History?” in What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, vol. 28, CW (1990; available Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 9.


ideological doctrine must do. . . . The test of truth . . . will be the lack of originality.”57 In terms of the recovery of self, Voegelin’s great contribution is demonstrating how the subjective side of consciousness serves to “ground” truth by relying on internal and external criteria for verification. Yet, how does this work? Why are particular theorists able to authenticate experiences as valid whereas other seemingly sensitive thinkers are incapable? Utilizing ideas most frequently associated with Christian philosophers, Voegelin embraces the symbols of open and closed souls as an explanation. Some theorists, and Voegelin points to Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche among others, have deformed souls and as such are incapable of properly engaging the symbolic horizon. This dullness is crucial because it is precisely through this process of internal verification that the orientation or direction of the search is disclosed. Even though Voegelin is careful to avoid language that might objectify this activity, there is the sense of an external force. The open soul is drawn toward the beyond, and it is through this yearning for participation with a beyond that can never be realized that the existence of order is made “known.” Closed souls are not attracted to this mysterious pull, this divine cord, and therefore, one might say quite sensibly, they deny the existence of this experience. Even though he spends considerable time and space analyzing the diseased souls, referring to pneumapathological disorders and libido dominandi, Voegelin sidesteps the question of why some souls are deformed and others are receptive. Why was Hegel driven by megalomania, whereas others were not? One element of Voegelin’s answer lies in his continued reliance upon history. In most symbols of order, there is a discussion of those who either cannot or will not perceive the truth. This struggle, symbolized by Plato as a contest between philosophers and philodoxers, can sometimes be dealt with by political means. At other times, especially during periods of intense crisis, persuasion gives way to more philosophic forms of resistance. After all, “the quest for truth is [itself] a movement of resistance to the prevalent disorder.” Experiences of disorder, whether mundane or pivotal, share characteristics. For example, the history of order suggests that any pursuit of order will encounter closed or deformed souls, individuals resistant to the divine pull. Thus, part of the 57. Eric Voegelin, “Experience and Symbolization in History,” in Published Essays 1966–1985, 122.


explanation for open and closed souls is justified by pointing to the past. Despite the logical coherence, there is no denying mystical overtones. Some theorists are the appropriate vessels for the experience of order, whereas others are not. Philosophers engaged in authentic quests begin in response to disorder, but as Voegelin’s examination of Hegel contends, not all efforts to retheorize disorder are valid. Experience-symbolizations that reflect the true nature of consciousness begin in “his experience of disorder, of the resistance aroused in him by the observation of concrete cases, of his experience of being drawn into the search of true order by a command issuing from the It-reality.”58 In short, Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness is less phenomenological and more revelatory. The attempt to disclose the self is at the center of Ricoeur’s work as well. Even as he studied and adopted aspects of phenomenology and hermeneutics, he never relinquished the goal of reflexive philosophy. Yet Ricoeur recognized that the full disclosure of the self was a fruitless endeavor. And unlike Voegelin, Ricoeur felt that thinkers who exposed the fractious nature of the self contributed greatly. Space does not permit a thorough examination of this issue. Suffice it to say that Ricoeur delineates two kinds of hermeneutics, “one which aims at the restoration of meaning and the other at the reduction of illusion.” He refers to the latter as a hermeneutics of suspicion, and praises Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for illuminating the processes by which false consciousness develops and shapes thought and society. In the wake of the dominance of rationalism following Descartes, this is important in itself. But Ricoeur goes further and maintains that there is more than unmasking taking place in the work of these “masters of suspicion.” Intent on avoiding simplistic summaries of their work, he emphasizes “their positive contributions to several types of liberation, the liberation of praxis, the restoration of human power, and the enlargement of human consciousness.”59 For our purposes, their great contribution is demonstrating the instability of the cogito. All three, in different ways, reveal that the transparent self is unattainable. Ricoeur’s work on narrative is important in several respects. In terms of his confrontation with post-structuralist critiques of language, narratives are significant because they allow for enough stability within 58. Eric Voegelin, In Search of Order, 39, 40. 59. See John E. Smith, “Freud, Philosophy, and Interpretation,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, vol. 22, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Library of Living Philosophers, 1995), 147.


language for shared meanings to be conveyed. Consenting that signs are not univocal, Ricoeur nonetheless demonstrates that enough stability exists within semantics and narratives for shared meaning to be conveyed. Whereas the sign is multivocal, the context of sentences and stories reduces or constrains pluralities. Signs never become univocal, but instability can be corralled sufficiently to convey meaning. In a similar vein, narratives are important for the recovery of self; for although the self cannot be disclosed completely and transparently in a single consciousness, narratives can convey the experience of a unified self. Unlike in life, in a story one experiences a beginning, a middle, and an end. Thus, narratives not only provide stability, they confront and ameliorate certain paradoxes, such as but not limited to experiences of unified subjectivity. It is important to point out that narratives “resolve” paradoxes by means of mimesis. Ricoeur’s notion of mimesis, however, is not to be confused with Plato’s. It is not “a copy of some preexisting reality” but a “creative imitation. . . . Artisans who work with words produce not things but quasi-things; they invent the as-if.”60 This ability to go beyond lived experience allows narratives to convey an experience of a unified self where there is not one. The key to grasping the significance of this experience of a unified self hinges on Ricoeur’s embrace of internal verification. Relying on Husserl’s notion of the noema, this experience of unity is real; it is immanent as an object of consciousness. Put in less technical terms, this experience affects one’s consciousness; it shapes consciousness by providing a resolution to the paradox that is the self. Ricoeur is not suggesting that this is a simple or enduring affair. Indeed, influenced by the masters of suspicion, Ricoeur knows that this is not a recovery of the Cartesian self, a supposed firm and stable ground. Rather, the experience of the unified self is regulative. One experiences a unified self but realizes that it is more an awareness of possibility than a description of reality. Stories are a salve to our determined desire for self-knowledge, but we are not fooled into believing that the self can be laid out once and for all. Furthermore, hermeneutics provides a check. For although narratives provide some stability, meanings within a story are not fixed or transparent. The hermeneutical circle makes clear that no text is self-contained. 60. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pelauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 36.


One must always be aware of others. There are writers and readers, and meaning is constructed out of the interplay between various participants. This does not mean that a text can mean anything. There are limits. Yet no matter how hard interpreters try, no text can be reduced to single or univocal meanings. This is made all the more clear when the potential of certain analogical modes of representation is made manifest. Symbols and metaphors extend thought beyond a particular narrative. Symbols are reservoirs of meaning; they are explosive in that they can transport readers to other texts. Hemlock and the cross are two prominent Western examples; they may have particular meanings within any given text, yet they also evoke the deaths of Socrates and Christ. Both Voegelin and Ricoeur address the issue of foundations without foundationalism by exploring the power and potential of myth, symbols, and narrative. Rejecting ideas and focusing his inquiries on symbols, Voegelin presents history as a trail of experience-symbolizations concerning the nature of order. And even though history does not reveal identical experiences of order, there are enough similarities to establish the existence of specific guidelines or foundations. The truth of any experience is attained by both internal and external verification. It is significant to note that one must not expect experiences of order to be identical. Such essentialist expectations are a modern deformation; symbols of order should reveal equivalent experiences. Thus, Voegelin establishes foundations without resorting to foundationalism. Arguing that the experience of a unified self can only be found in narratives, Ricoeur also relies on internal verification or the subjective side of consciousness to establish a foundation. Yet this grounding is checked by both an appreciation of the powers of delusion as well as the processes of hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s foundations resist foundationalist tendencies in that one can have the experience of a unified self but only through the experience of narratives. In the end, Voegelin and Ricoeur resolve or ameliorate the aporia of foundations by eschewing essentialist or metaphysical forms of representation and relying on myths, symbols, and narratives. And the “truth” of symbols and stories is not to be deduced by objective criteria only. Indeed, Husserl, Voegelin, and Ricoeur realize that the bifurcation of reality into objective and subjective categories is the chief culprit obscuring philosophy and thought. The power and potency of analogical forms of representation requires the recovery of subjectivity. Authentic philosophic and political foundations can only be achieved by embracing the


full range of human experiences as valid. French novelist and critic of modernity Albert Camus remarked that “whereas Plato incorporated everything — nonsense, reason and myths — our philosophers admit nothing but nonsense or reason, because they have closed their eyes to the rest. The mole is meditating.”61 Voegelin and Ricoeur do more than awaken modern moles; they show how symbols and stories serve to ground politics and ethics. But unlike most recent theorists, their work is unlikely to result in metaphysical constructs. They establish foundations for political order without lapsing into foundationalism.

61. Albert Camus, “Helen’s Exile,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 150.

2 Sight, Sound, and Participatory Symbolization Eric Voegelin’s Political Theory as an Attempt to Recapture the Speech-Dimension of Human Experience MURRAY JARDINE

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ric Voegelin has been described as a political philosopher who in his attempt to establish a foundation for political practice became a philosopher of history and ultimately of consciousness. He might also, or perhaps better, be understood as a philosopher of speech. That is, Voegelin’s political philosophy can be at least partly understood as an attempt—probably not even conscious on his part—to recapture dimensions of oral/aural experience that have been largely lost in the modern world’s heavily visual orientation. This argument will be made herein by examining aspects of oral/aural and visual experience, by relating these to the dominant modern conception of knowledge and political order, and then by showing how several issues central to Voegelin’s political theory can be better understood using this framework. This framework will then be used to examine some tensions in Voegelin’s work and, in so doing, possibly to clarify what would be involved in constructing foundations without foundationalism.

Eric Voegelin’s Political Theory in the Context of Late Modernity We begin by relating these issues to contemporary political debate. In recent years the idea that the United States and other Western societies are 57


experiencing some kind of moral or cultural crisis has received considerable attention in public debate and popular discussion. This perception is correct; and in fact, this moral crisis is far more profound than most of the combatants in the current “culture wars” realize. The best way to characterize this moral crisis would be to modify slightly Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous formulation and say that what humanity lived through in the twentieth century was the death, not of God, but of nature. This statement can best be understood by placing the current world situation in a longer-term historical perspective. Over the past five centuries and especially the past two hundred years, human beings have discovered that they have a much greater capacity to understand, control, and even change their environment than they had previously recognized. The modern age has thus been characterized by a series of technological revolutions that have profoundly changed the conditions of life for people in Western (and, more recently, non-Western) societies: the invention of the printing press and the corresponding expansion of literacy at the beginning of modernity; the first industrial revolution in steam power, steel manufacture, and textile production in the eighteenth century; the second industrial revolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, based on electricity and the internal combustion engine; and now what is sometimes called the third industrial revolution in computers and related technologies. These technological revolutions certainly hold out the possibility of improving human life, and undoubtedly in certain ways they have, but it must be admitted that their overall effect has been rather ambiguous. Aside from the fact that these technological capacities have actually created the possibility of humanity’s destroying itself — either through nuclear war or through some kind of ecological catastrophe—every one of the modern technological revolutions has been followed by social dislocations and political upheavals that have caused horrifying destruction, suffering, and loss of life: more than a century of religious wars following the invention of the printing press; another wave of revolution and war after the first industrial revolution; and the unprecedented mayhem of the two world wars following the second industrial revolution. A continuation of this pattern would lead us to expect another round of disturbances as the current revolution in computers and biotechnology takes effect—and indeed, if the pattern just described holds, these disturbances would be more violent and destructive than ever. It seems that whatever benefits modern technology

Sight, Sound, Participatory Symbolization / 59

might offer, humanity has had great difficulty establishing political, economic, and social institutions that can use that technology in constructive ways. Of course, it has been argued that the pattern just described will not continue, because the worldwide triumph of liberal capitalist democracy (or at least something approximating it) has resolved the class and national conflicts that led to the upheavals of the past and will usher in a new era of peace, freedom, and prosperity based on the spectacular productive capacities of the new computer technologies. This view is most famously associated with Francis Fukuyama and his writings on the “end of history.”1 We will argue that the “end of history” thesis is incorrect. First, however, some additional background is necessary. The pattern of upheaval just described can, in fact, be understood in terms of the basic structure of Western moral and political reasoning and practice. Specifically, one of the most fundamental dichotomies in the history of Western moral and political thought and indeed in the entire Western conception of reality is that either there exists an unchanging natural order independent of human agency from which moral and political principles can be derived or else all conceptions of morality are merely arbitrary human conventions. This conception is normally understood to have been developed prototypically in Plato and can be seen, in different forms, all through the history of Western thought. As modern technological capacities have increasingly destroyed the idea of an unchanging natural order—that is, have destroyed the idea of a fundamental reality independent of human agency or interpretation — modern moral and political theory and practice have been characterized by an ever-growing confusion about how to establish any kind of limits on human action. More specifically, modernity has tended to transform the nature/convention dichotomy into epistemological terms. For the Enlightenment, valid knowledge must take the form of exact, exhaustively specifiable, impersonal “facts.” Such “objective” knowledge can be obtained only if the knowing subject—the human being who ascertains facts—ruthlessly 1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest (Summer 1989): 3–35. It should be pointed out that Fukuyama’s position is considerably more nuanced than the various popularizations of his ideas might indicate; indeed, he himself shares many of the concerns about the moral condition of present-day societies discussed here. See Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).


eliminates all unexamined assumptions and prejudices from the mind and uses well-defined logical procedures to derive truth, i.e., facts, from an unbiased examination of the relevant experiential evidence. Any knowledge claims that do not meet this rigid test of validity are dismissed as merely “subjective.” As has been extensively documented in the twentieth century, the modern project of obtaining exact, impersonal, objective knowledge has failed, mainly because it is impossible for the subject to obtain the independence from context required by this epistemological model. Human beings inescapably approach any cognitive task from within the confines of a “paradigm,” or particular set of presuppositions, and cannot subject their assumptions or methodology to full critical assessment. The application of the Enlightenment model of acceptable knowledge has thus had the effect of progressively shrinking the domain of intelligible human experience. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what is now called religious belief conflicted with the model of exact, impersonal knowledge and was relegated to the realm of mere opinion; by the late nineteenth century, morality, which the Enlightenment philosophers had thought could be placed on a firm, secular footing by skeptical rationalism, was rapidly becoming a matter of subjective value; and by the mid-twentieth century it had become an open question whether even the hardest sciences could meaningfully be described as objective. This potential disintegration of even scientific knowledge into a thoroughgoing subjectivism is, at one level, what has caused the breakdown of any limits to human action in late modernity, as it has become difficult, if not impossible, to determine the relative validity of competing truth claims and thus rule out any belief system and its practical implications as unacceptable. From a specifically political standpoint, in the classical conception of political order as articulated paradigmatically by Aristotle, reality is understood as a given, hierarchical order independent of human agency in which every being has a place and a function. Human happiness comes from participating in this natural order by fulfilling the purpose appropriate to one’s place. The political community is concerned with teaching individuals the virtues appropriate to their places in the community and thus in nature. Individuals achieve happiness by virtuously fulfilling their naturally ordained role. As modern technology breaks down the idea of a natural order independent of human agency, extreme confusion about the individual and collective roles of humans, and therefore of the


virtues necessary to fulfill those roles, results. The modern age can be understood as a series of increasingly frantic attempts to understand what it means to be a human being in the face of the collapse of the natural order that had previously established human identity. Modern liberalism, of course, attempts to deal with the modern age’s increased realization of the extent of human agency by taking as its basic principle the idea of individual freedom. Liberal political theory and practice try to sidestep the issue of the natural role of humans by simply attempting to maximize the freedom of each individual person compatible with an equal level of freedom for every other person, or, to put it differently, by establishing neutral rules (in the form of rights) that limit individual actions in a manner that does not favor any individual or group over any other. Unfortunately, if the subjective human agency that is the basis for the liberal idea of freedom is taken with full seriousness, it ultimately becomes impossible to determine any common standards for, or limits upon, human actions. The limitation that individuals should be free to pursue their own goals as long as they respect the equal freedom of others to do the same is ultimately of no help, since two individuals may, precisely because of their subjective freedom, have radically different understandings of what this actually means. The conception of autonomous individual agency upon which liberalism is based leads logically to a situation where individuals can have utterly different, incompatible perceptions of reality and therefore of what constitutes an imposition on the rights of others. Early liberalism could only appear to have resolved this issue by understanding human agency in a very narrow manner, that is, essentially in terms of economic productivity, and indeed by retaining elements of premodern social order, such as the patriarchal family. To put it another way, the neutral rules of liberal theory simply turn out to be remnants of the classical conception of nature, and as such will break down into a clash of subjective wills once the full extent of human agency is apparent. Nietzsche, writing a little more than one hundred years ago, was the first to recognize this situation, which he called the “advent of nihilism.” He understood that the collapse of the classical conception of nature (which is what he seems to have meant when he talked about the “death of God”) would leave humans with increasing power to control and destroy but with no moral constraints on the use of that power and indeed no clear understanding of the purposes that power should be used for. It


could be argued that since Nietzsche wrote there have been two manifestations of this moral crisis. The first of these was the wave of totalitarian movements in the first half of the twentieth century with their stated goal of using modern technology fundamentally to transform human beings and human society and their utter ruthlessness in attempting to do so. The second, and, in the long run, potentially even more dangerous manifestation, is present-day global capitalism, which leaves the deployment of the new and truly awesome computer and biological technologies, especially genetic engineering and cloning, entirely up to the market, with absolutely no moral regulation —or rather, it would be more correct to say, perverse moral regulation. The basic cultural ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism, which might be described as aesthetic self-expression, or, to use Robert Bellah’s term, expressive individualism,2 which superficially appears to create tolerance for diverse “lifestyles,” in fact bears a very strong resemblance to Nietzsche’s ethos of artistic selfcreation, which Nietzsche understood as the only logical possibility following the collapse of nature and which he recognized would lead, in the long run, not to tolerance and diversity but to ruthless domination of the strong (the truly creative) over the weak. In this sense, Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis could be understood as partly correct, except that the end of history looms as a ghastly free-market version of the Brave New World. If, then, the current moral crisis results from the death of the classical conception of nature, or rather from the nature/convention dichotomy— which leaves no alternative to the idea of a natural order but arbitrary human will, or, more specifically, Nietzschean self-creation—is there any way to construct an alternative model for ethical and political practice? It can be argued that Voegelin and other theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Alasdair MacIntyre have indeed, in different ways,3 2. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 3. The following works are basic: Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, with new foreword by Dante Germino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), and Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).


begun to construct a conceptual vocabulary to describe human action that, when applied to morality and politics, can move beyond the dichotomy of nature and convention. The theorists just mentioned differ significantly, but it can be said that the model of moral and political reasoning emerging from their work implies that human communities can order themselves, not through a natural hierarchy, as in classical political theory, or through neutral rules, as in modern liberalism, but through communicative activities, or, in other words, through speech. These theorists, in different ways, seem to be saying that the human capacity for speech contains the resources for constructing a new understanding of moral order. They can be understood as attempting to articulate aspects of the human speech act that can provide a model for human roles and corresponding virtues that does recognize the extent to which humans can change their environment and the extent to which reality is more generally subject to human interpretation. This is most obvious in the cases of Habermas and Arendt, whose theoretical work has focused explicitly on the role of speech in constructing and maintaining political communities, and it is a fairly clear implication of MacIntyre’s attempt to ground human virtues in communal narratives, but it can also be found, at a more subtle level, in Voegelin’s analysis of the symbolic basis of political community. Let us examine how Voegelin’s political theory can be partly understood as an attempt to recapture the speech-dimension of human experience.

Orality, Literacy, and Consciousness The necessary starting point for this argument is that there does exist, in fact, a body of literature—largely unknown to political theorists—that can give some indications why the approach just mentioned may be able to transcend the nature/convention dualism and that, indeed, can give at least a partial explanation of where this dualism came from in the first place. Over the past two generations, anthropologists, psychologists, and rhetoricians have written extensively about the differences between what are called oral cultures, which have little or no writing, and modern literate cultures, in which, thanks to the printing press (which dramatically increases the availability of books), all or most people have at least basic


reading and writing skills.4 One implication of these examinations of the two types of cultures indicates that the superordination of visual experience brought about by literacy provides a very powerful experiential source for the nature/convention (or objective/subjective) dichotomy. Recall that the essential idea in both the classical and modern conceptions of nature is that reality ultimately consists of some kind of eternal, impersonal structure, independent of human agency. Classical philosophy conceived this natural structure in functional terms, while modernity has conceptualized it mechanistically, but the core idea is the same in both cases. Such a conception of reality is precisely what the stasis, impersonality, and independence of the written, and especially the printed, word tends to encourage. Before it can be explained in more detail, this claim must be qualified. First, the argument that follows does not claim that literacy is the only source of the nature/convention (or objective/subjective) dichotomy. It can, however, be regarded as an important source because it affects human thought processes in very subtle ways at very fundamental levels. Second, 4. The basic textbook in the field is Walter J. Ong, S.J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). Other important works by Ong include Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), and Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). Eric A. Havelock ranks with Ong as a preeminent scholar in the field. See Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), Origins of Western Literacy (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1976), The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), and The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). A crucial early study in this field was Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963): 304–45. This article appeared later in Jack Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 27–84. Other studies by Goody include The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also J. C. Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word,” Psychiatry 22 (1959): 307–20; Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).


it will not argue that there is an inevitable chain of causation from literacy to the nature/convention dualism; literacy only makes this dualism probable. That is, literacy creates an experiential context in which this dichotomy becomes more likely. The claim made here is certainly not deterministic. Finally, the fact that this discussion will emphasize some of the ways in which literacy can restrict the human imagination should not be taken as a romanticization of oral cultures, much less as advocating anything so absurd as returning to a nonliterate state. Its purpose is to point out some potential limitations imposed on thinking by literacy, so that an awareness of these limitations can be used as a starting point for further reflection. With these caveats in mind, the claim made above can now be elaborated: the crucial connection between literacy and the nature/convention dichotomy is that with literacy, people tend to take objects in threedimensional visual space—that is, objects similar to the written or printed word—as their model of what is “really real” (that is, “natural” or “objective”) and tend to regard other kinds of experience and other forms of knowledge as derivative or even unreal (that is, “conventional” or “subjective”). (This, incidentally, partly explains why oral cultures are more “spiritual” and modern literate cultures are more “materialistic.” Religious symbolisms, which draw on oral motifs and address experiences that cannot be reduced to objects in visual space, tend to be opaque or even unintelligible to literate individuals with a heavily visual orientation.) More specifically, with literacy, people tend tacitly (or even explicitly) to conceive of reality as a large but finite “text” and thus think that language gets its meaning by somehow “corresponding” to this text, so that each word has a specific, contextless “meaning-in-itself.” (This conception is sometimes referred to as “language realism.”) Adequate knowledge thus consists in constructing statements that correspond correctly to discrete states of affairs in the objective world (that is, which correspond correctly to the text). This, of course, is what is entailed in the classical conception of nature and its modern modifications: knowledge claims must have an exact correspondence to specific objects in the eternal, independently existing “real world.” It further follows that if such correspondence cannot be established, then linguistic statements become mere conventions and are, as such, arbitrary. In contrast to the understanding of language and knowledge just described, recent philosophies of language and science have argued that


language gets its meaning, and knowledge is generated, from specific, concrete contexts of human action. On this understanding, perhaps the single most important feature of the Western philosophical conception of nature or the specifically modern model of objective knowledge is that it attempts to abstract meaning and knowledge from concrete contexts. This is the main point in recent criticisms made by language philosophers of the correspondence model of language described above. Similarly, recent philosophers of science have pointed out that one of the principal failings of positivism (the most prominent modern version of the objectivist model of knowledge) was its tendency to understand science in terms of the static, completed body of knowledge making up classical mechanics rather than in terms of the actual process of scientific discovery at the leading edge of various scientific disciplines, which is to say that it attempted to understand knowledge abstracted from the context of discovery. What recent investigations of oral and literate cultures indicate is that the central difference between oral and literate/visual orientations is the vastly greater capacity for abstraction from context brought about by literacy, illustrated paradigmatically by the correspondence theory of language just mentioned. Hence by examining this principal difference between oral and literate orientations it can be argued that the nature/convention dualism may be something (at least partly) generated from the heavily visual orientation produced by literacy. To make this argument complete, some further qualification is necessary. It has already been indicated that literacy tends to superordinate visual experience over oral experience and in so doing can cause people to think in terms of a dualism between the “real” uninterpreted reality “out there” and mere human convention. In fact, this is a simplification. As Walter Ong, probably the most well-known scholar in this field, points out, literate people do not use their eyes more than nonliterate people; people in “primitive” cultures are generally much better at visually detecting details than highly “civilized” people. What is different is that writing, and particularly printing, links a particular kind of visual experience to verbalization and communication, a situation quite different from what prevails in oral cultures. Specifically, for the literate person, the relative stasis of the written or printed word—its status as an object in threedimensional space — becomes paradigmatic for visual experience, so that through vision the dynamism of the world can be stopped and subjected to detailed description and analysis. Nonliterate people, lacking


the paradigm provided by the written word, cannot abstract themselves from the world’s dynamism, which results in the apparently paradoxical situation that, although they are usually very good at noticing visual details, they have a difficult time giving accurate verbal descriptions of visual phenomena. Hence the fundamental difference between the oral and literate noetic situations is the centrality of a particular mode of visual experience for literate perception, communication, and thought processes.5 Because of the limitations on visual experience peculiar to the nonliterate, that is, because visual experience is not linked closely to verbalization, the crucial feature of an oral culture is the centrality of sound to all thought and communication. Sound is irreducibly dynamic. Although other kinds of perception, especially vision, can be conceived in static terms, this is impossible with sound, because the dynamism of sound (and specifically the spoken word) is not that of an object moving through three-dimensional space but rather the dynamism of continuously passing into and out of existence. An oral culture can hardly conceive of words as labels of some sort, as literate people tend to do, since spoken words are not “things” that can be picked up and “attached” to other things; a word must be an event or an action. Sound for oral peoples is dynamic also in the sense that it is linked to power: it must be driven by power from a source of some kind, which is why words (that is, dynamic actions or events) themselves are understood to have great, even magical, power.6 Another fundamental implication of sound-based communication is that, since words are always produced by a concrete person, oral cultures generally conceive the world in personal terms. At the same time, this feature of sound-based communication means that oral cultures will be highly communal, with more highly externalized, less introspective personality types.7 Eric Havelock points out that the dynamic nature of sound has perhaps its most fundamental effect in that, lacking any way of storing information outside of actually existent persons (since spoken words are not things that can be picked up and put away somewhere), oral cultures must rely on memory and direct communication to organize existence. Thus the thought processes of oral cultures will be structured by these 5. See Ong, Presence of the Word, 49–50. 6. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 31–33, 71–74, and Presence of the Word, 111–75. 7. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 68–69, and Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word,” 311–12, 314–16.


features. Speaking, and thus thinking, in oral cultures must always be closely related to actual existential contexts (especially in the form of narrative), will tend to be rhythmically oriented, and will tend to be highly formulaic in content. All of these features aid memory.8 In considering the question of literacy’s relationship to the nature/ convention dualism, the discussion can be limited to the most fundamental phenomenological feature of oral communication just mentioned. Since oral cultures communicate mainly through sound, which is irreducibly dynamic, they lack the capacity to “stop” the dynamism of the world and subject it to abstract analysis. Oral thought processes, in other words, are always highly contextual. Only literate people, using the relatively fixed written or printed word as a paradigm, can conceive the world as a kind of “snapshot” and abstract elements of this world from their context and analyze them. Oral cultures have only minimal capacities for abstraction and decontextualization. A. R. Luria’s classic study of peasants in the Soviet Union illustrates this point well. In one case, subjects were presented with drawings of four objects, such as a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet, of which one fitted into a different category than the other three, and asked to group them. Although the subjects with some reading ability were able to group the objects “correctly,” that is, according to abstract conceptual categories, the illiterate peasants attempted to group the objects according to how one would use them in actual everyday situations. In the example just mentioned—the hammer, saw, log, and hatchet — the illiterate subjects were baffled, since all the items seemed to go together: one might chop the log with the hatchet, saw it with the saw, and so forth. Separating the log from the tools made no sense, since then there would be nothing on which to use the tools. Similarly, the illiterate peasants resisted giving abstract definitions of such objects as trees, instead expressing surprise that anyone should ask such a bizarre question as What is a tree? The fundamental difference between the literate and nonliterate peasants was that the literate peasants were capable of abstracting the items from concrete situations and understanding them in terms of conceptual groupings, while the nonliterate peasants could understand the items only in terms of concrete, specific actions.9 8. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 33–36, and Presence of the Word, 22–35. 9. Ibid., 49–57.


This examination of oral cultures, then, provides some definite evidence for the claim that literacy can be a prime source of the nature/ convention distinction by virtue of the capacity it brings about for abstraction. Oral cultures necessarily think in highly contextual terms and hence would appear to be much less likely to conceive knowledge and reality generally in the decontextualized manner characteristic of the Western philosophical tradition. Before discussing how this investigation of oral and literate consciousness can deepen our understanding of Voegelin’s theory, however, it will be necessary to explain further how literacy restructures thought processes. It has already been noted that it is a simplification to say that literacy superordinates visual experience over oral/aural experience; the crucial aspect of this superordination is the way a particular aspect of vision is linked with verbalization. But even this simplifies, since different types of literate media link vision and verbalization differently, or to different degrees. Early forms of writing, such as hieroglyphics, which employ picture-symbols, do this only to a limited extent. Pictographic writing systems such as this still retain a great deal of the sound dimension of words because they must represent each word with a picture of some concrete thing or event which exists or occurs in the oral world, so that the meaning of the word can only be understood by reference to its existential context, which in turn means that words will still tend to be understood as events rather than signs or referents.10 The really fundamental change in this regard comes with the invention of the alphabet, or, to be more exact, the Greek alphabet, which contains vowels as well as consonants. Since each letter represents only one sound (or at most a few related sounds) rather than entire words, the crucial connection with the oral world is broken or, rather, drastically attenuated; a written word as written word has no obvious connection to anything in the lifeworld. With its connection to existential events broken, an alphabetically written word becomes a set of abstract symbols in static space rather than a dynamic event. The context that is so important to oral communication and still relevant to pictographic writing and even the Semitic alphabet tends to recede greatly into the tacit or even unconscious background. Once this happens, situational thinking will tend to 10. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 83–93, and Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy, especially 9–43.


be replaced by abstract thinking, and modes of expression will be less closely linked to the oral world and more oriented toward abstractions. For example, as has already been noted, oral people inevitably understand the world in personal terms, since for them communication is always tied to an actually existent, and present, person. Writing dissolves the immediate link between a person and his or her words and allows the reader to understand words, and thus reality generally, in an impersonal fashion, that is, abstracted from the personally spoken words that give reality meaning. At the same time, separated from actually existent persons and locked into abstract visual space, words themselves can tend to take on a life of their own in a way they cannot in an oral culture. Specifically, with literacy comes the possibility of what was earlier termed language realism, that is, the idea that reality is in some way a large but finite “text” and that language gets its meaning by somehow “corresponding” to this text. Such a correspondence or referential understanding of language would be inconceivable in an oral culture.11 The discussion so far has begun to indicate how the decontextualization brought about by literacy can be an important factor in bringing about the Western philosophical conception of nature and the modern conception of objective knowledge. The effects of literacy remain relatively limited, however, as long as writing remains the most advanced method of communication. There are several reasons for this. First, literacy itself will continue to be relatively limited. In societies where pictographic writing systems are employed, very few people can learn to read and write because of the huge amount of time and effort necessary to learn these complicated systems. The alphabet makes reading and writing much easier to learn, but as long as reading material remains in relatively short supply because it must all be produced by the slow process of writing, much of the population will remain nonliterate and thus still tied to the oral world. Further, the literate elements of the population will remain in contact with illiterates and thus in contact with the oral mentality.12 11. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 88–93, 101–3; Ong, Presence of the Word, 35–47; Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy, 22–50; Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies, 38–44. 12. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 93–101, 103–16, and Presence of the Word, 53–63, 76–87.


Printing, then, is the final step necessary for the complete triumph of a literate mentality, and for the reasons just indicated. It makes reading material readily available, thus encouraging universal literacy and more general use of literate artifacts. This in turn can allow greater accumulation of information through such things as encyclopedias. The uniformity of printed items makes indexes possible, so information can be found faster. (Indexes would make little sense if only written manuscripts were available, since all the labor of creating an index would have to be repeated for every single book produced.) The accumulation of information made possible by printing is the crucial step in destroying the memoryoriented features of an oral or partly oral culture. Knowledge can be remembered — or rather, stored — even when it is abstracted from its existential context, so the highly contextual, formulaic, rhythmic, and narrative-oriented approach to knowledge characteristic of oral cultures tends to whither. In terms of the perceptual effects discussed earlier, the uniformity of print also makes silent reading much easier, and its elimination of personal idiosyncrasies (that is, different writing styles) from the text decontextualizes words more relentlessly than ever, thus intensifying the crucial effects of literacy already mentioned. The spatialization of language, begun by pictographic writing and accelerated by the alphabet, takes a quantum jump with printing. In terms of the history of Western culture, then, although classical Greece shows the definite effects of a significant level of alphabetic literacy, it is not until after the invention of the printing press that literacy exerts its full force on the Western mind.13 Not coincidentally, modernity has made the nature/convention distinction even more rigidly than premodern philosophy—for classical philosophy, conventional knowledge claims, or opinions, can at least be a starting point for finding the truth of the natural order, while for modern positivism, opinion and the facts of nature are conceptually incommensurate. With this recognition of the extent to which various communications media push humans in the direction of a literate/visual orientation, it should now be much clearer how literacy can facilitate the over 13. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 117–35, and Presence of the Word, 47–53, 63–76. See also the discussion in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).


abstraction that may be the primary cause of the nature/convention and objective/subjective dichotomies. The essential problem is that a literate culture provides a subtly pervasive environment of decontextualized knowledge, vocabulary, and, most important, everyday visual experience that can cause people to forget context entirely. Although the capacity for abstraction is in many ways very enabling (since systematic analysis of any kind requires a certain degree of abstraction, and it would be impossible to do science without the abstraction involved in an impersonal vocabulary), it will become quite possible, if one’s vocabulary has been formed by intense immersion in the relatively decontextualized experience of a literate culture, to forget, when reflecting upon thought and knowledge processes, and how they relate to social activities such as ethical behavior, that knowledge is always derived from a specific context. Indeed, in the extreme case, decontextualization can result in utter fragmentation of knowledge and thus of the world. The literate world has a tendency to become a jumble of mutually unconnected, reductively conceived “facts.” This is precisely the logical outcome of the nature/convention distinction. We have already examined a specific example of this particular pitfall, the (explicit or tacit) language realism that results when one starts to imagine that words have a life of their own, that is, that they can be abstracted from the context of speech (or writing), something that can only happen to a literate person. Similarly, such a high level of abstraction can cause us to commit the error of mistaking the impersonal vocabulary of physical science for an actual description of what the scientist is doing when he or she does science, or to conceive of morality as a set of abstract rules rather than as the ongoing story of living responsibly in a community of other people.14 It should be briefly mentioned at this point that there is also beginning to develop a literature which argues that recent media such as television and computers dramatically intensify our visual orientation and are bringing about what might be best described as a postliterate visual culture of images. In terms of primary perceptual effects, the available evidence seems to strengthen, or perhaps extend, the thesis presented here. Briefly, it appears that a postliterate visual orientation offers the 14. For a more detailed discussion of the visual basis of the nature/convention dichotomy and its relationship to issues in political theory, see my Speech and Political Practice: Recovering the Place of Human Responsibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).


worst of all possible worlds — that is, it embodies the worst aspects of both oral and literate cultures. Neil Postman argues that as passively received images replace the text that the reader must actively examine, analytical capacities decrease. At the same time, however, the capacity of television to present a rapid succession of often very different images intensifies the literate tendency toward abstraction from and fragmentation of the world. People in a postliterate electronic image culture lose the capacity for analytical thought brought about by literacy while retaining—indeed, enlarging—the literate tendency to see the world in fragmented, reductionistic terms. It might be said that if a literate culture is characterized by a naturalistic or objectivist rationalism, a postliterate visual culture, consisting of a chaos of unconnected emotive images, can be best described as one of conventionalist irrationalism. Just as subjectivist relativism is derivative of the nature/convention dichotomy, the new electronic media are derivative of literacy, so the developing postliterate conventionalist orientation can be seen as the logical culmination of the earlier literate conception of nature.15

Orality, Literacy, and Political Theory With these basic features of visual and oral orientations developed, the discussion can now return to its original context—the alternative speechbased model of ethical and political practice, which, it was argued, can be discerned in the work of at least some contemporary political theorists. To the extent that theorists such as Voegelin and others focus on human speech-capacities as an alternative to the traditional Western philosophical conception of nature, the literature on oral/literate differences can show two things. First, if the abstraction of the nature/convention dichotomy is caused at least partly by the visual orientation produced by literacy, a consideration of human speech-capacities may allow us to escape that dichotomy and its nihilistic results in ethical and political theory. Second, as a more directly practical application, if the tendency to think in 15. A good overview of the subject can be found in a conversation between Camille Paglia and Neil Postman, “She Wants Her TV! He Wants His Book!” Harper’s, March 1991, 44–55. Postman has written extensively about television in a variety of contexts. See especially Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985).


terms of the nature/convention dualism is the result of pervasive decontextualized visual experience in our everyday lives, then rebuilding ethical and political practice would require at least a partial redirection of our everyday experience away from vision and toward speech and hearing. If the analysis so far is correct, a sense of virtuous action that contributes to meaningful human communities cannot be regained without redressing somewhat the current extreme imbalance in Western culture’s sensory orientation and thus at least partially recapturing a sense of faceto-face oral/aural experience. It should be evident that MacIntyre’s conception of local communities based on oral narrative traditions and Arendt’s and Habermas’s different but related models of debate about the common good could accomplish this goal. Voegelin’s analysis, however, may provide an even better path to recovering a sound-orientation as a basis for political community. This is manifest in two ways: first, in his understanding of the role of symbolization in establishing political order, and second in his general conception of reality as a dynamic but ordered process. Each of these issues will now be examined. The starting point for Voegelin’s entire political theory is his argument that every political society is ultimately based upon a specific cosmology, or symbolization of the order of reality as experienced by human beings. The fundamental symbols of a political society order the individual and collective existences of its members by providing them with paradigms of their own fundamental experiences, thus providing exemplars for behavior and allowing the community to articulate itself in history. Every political society, says Voegelin, is “a little world, a cosmion, illuminated from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization. It is illuminated through an elaborate symbolism, in various degrees of compactness and differentiation—from rite, through myth, to theory—and this symbolism illuminates it with meaning in so far as the symbols make the internal structure of such a cosmion, the relations between its members and groups of members, as well as its existence as a whole, transparent for the mystery of human existence.”16 Every political society, that is, 16. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 27. Available in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter, CW), vol. 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The


can be understood as a community of individuals living out the practical implications of their experience of cosmic order through ritualistic, mythical, and theoretical symbolizations of that order. Since humans are limited, finite beings, however, no symbolization of order can be fully adequate, that is, no set of symbols can ever fully capture all the dimensions and mysteries of reality or all the possible experiential manifestations of fundamental order. Hence, at some point in the development of any tradition, the limitations of its founding symbolisms will become manifest, at which point the symbols become opaque, losing their ordering capacity, and the political order begins to decay. As this happens, when the order that had for generations or centuries been taken as a given disintegrates, the underlying questions of political order, which the old order had thought it had answered, once again surface. “In an hour of crisis, when the order of society flounders and disintegrates, the fundamental problems of political existence in history are more apt to come in view than in periods of comparative stability.”17 The task of the political theorist, confronted with a disintegrating political order, is to determine what inadequacy in its founding symbolization of order has brought about the current decay and to resymbolize the fundamental human experiences of order in a way that overcomes the hitherto unsuspected inadequacies of the now collapsing cosmology and thus establishes the grounding for a new political community—realizing, however, that this resymbolization is limited, flawed, and may even lose some of the insights of the older symbolization. With regard to the crisis and breakdown of the modern age, Voegelin’s original characterization of modernity was that it was a (partial) revival of the ancient phenomenon of “gnosticism.” By gnosticism, Voegelin means the attempt to escape human finitude and achieve a realm of perfection through esoteric knowledge, or gnosis. The relevant knowledge in the ancient world was mystical in nature, whereas the modern version bases its hopes of progress toward historical perfection on immanent knowledge, as in scientism, revolutionary Marxism, etc. Voegelin reached

New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. and intro. by ManfredHenningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). Citations herein are to the 1987 edition. 17. Ibid., 1–2.


this conclusion from an analysis of the major symbolic complexes underlying modern political ideologies and movements that demonstrated their similarity to various earlier gnostic symbolisms. Modern gnostic symbols were different from those of the ancient world in two respects: first, the historical element derived from Christianity, and second, the specifically modern immanentism. In his later work, Voegelin changed his conceptualization somewhat, largely abandoning the term gnosticism and speaking more generally of the modern attempt to deny human limitations and abolish the structure of reality. Whatever terminology or precise conceptualization he used, however, the fundamental feature of modernity, as Voegelin saw it, was alienation from and resistance to the human condition as it is given, i.e., the refusal to admit the reality of human finitude manifested in sin and mortality. In this regard, his analysis is quite congruent with the more generic analysis summarized above, i.e., that late modernity could be characterized as the triumph of a thoroughgoing conventionalism or subjectivism. The discussion of orality and literacy presented here can bring about a better understanding of Voegelin’s analysis of symbolic order in several ways. To begin with, although there is a tendency—no doubt partly because of the literate/visual orientation of modernity — to think of symbols as essentially visual phenomena, Voegelin’s analysis indicates that the symbols which order human societies can be—and indeed normally are—oral/aural in nature. Voegelin discusses “rite,” or ritual, as the most compact type of symbolization, and in fact the most important ordering force in any political society is the store of common rituals that establish its collective identity. This is true even in the most “advanced” societies, where activities such as voting are probably best understood, not as the actions of independent rational actors (from which standpoint they in fact become unintelligible), but as rituals of democratic citizenship. Myth and theory are derivative from ritual, and ritual seems to be more fundamental than debate about the common good and even the narrative traditions of a community, since these are ultimately based on paradigmatic experiences of order. No community can remain coherent without ritual reenactment of the primary experiences shared by its members, and at the same time the rhythmic, formulaic structure of ritual most completely reproduces the central features of primary orality. Voegelin’s political theory, then, points to a critical component of any community based on face-to-face communication and thus can contribute to an


understanding of what would be involved in reconstructing and sustaining such communities. The discussion of oral and literate orientations can also contribute significantly to understanding the central issue in Voegelin’s analysis of political order: how and why the symbols that order individual and collective existence decay, both as a general issue and as a specific issue in the case of modernity. Specifically, oral/literate differences can at least partly explain one particular type of symbolic decay with which Voegelin is particularly concerned: the tendency found in modernity to tear symbols of transcendent human experience out of their experiential context and take them “literally,” as referring to objects in the immanent world, thus flattening their meaning to the level of the merely doctrinal or even reducing them to utter nonsense.18 Voegelin attempts to explain this phenomenon in essentially psychological terms, and there may be a psychological aspect to it, but the literature on oral/literate differences indicates how an individual or an entire society might quite innocently slip into this mistake. As has already been seen, there will be a strong tendency for literate people to take symbols of transcendent experience “literally,” as referring to objects in three-dimensional space, and thus misunderstand them. Therefore there would be a very strong tendency for the Christian symbolic complex to become generally opaque and specifically subject to literalist deformations in the period following the invention of the printing press and the development of mass literacy. Although this is certainly not the only reason, the decay of the Christian symbolic context could be partly understood as resulting from the phenomenological effects of print literacy. To the extent that a literate/visual orientation contributes to symbol deformation, the analysis so far can also indicate how this tendency might be combated. Since, as has been already mentioned, the rhythmic, formulaic structure of ritual most completely reproduces the experiential features of primary orality, ritual reenactment of fundamental human experience may be the best method of preventing doctrinal or even literalist deformation of the symbols that articulate such experience. From a concrete historical perspective, the importance of ritual for preventing the detachment of symbols from their experiential origins could explain 18. See Voegelin, Order and History, vol. III, Plato and Aristotle, ed. Dante Germino, vol. 16, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 273–79.


the much more rapid breakdown of Christian symbols in Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism, and especially in those branches of Protestantism that most completely abandoned liturgical tradition. The second way that Voegelin’s apparent reliance upon residual orality might help to recover a sound-orientation as a foundation for political community is his understanding of reality as a process rather than as a static state. Voegelin’s political theory takes as its starting point the experience of reality as a dynamic, but still ordered, process and examines the historical attempts to articulate this experience, with the understanding that such an examination can reveal a better understanding of the process while recognizing that, since it is an ongoing process, no absolute knowledge can be attained. This understanding of reality is stated by Voegelin at the very beginning of The New Science of Politics: The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history. The following lectures on the central problem of a theory of politics, on representation, will, therefore, carry the inquiry beyond a description of the conventionally so-called representative institutions into the nature of representation as the form by which a political society gains existence for action in history. Moreover, the analysis will not stop at this point but will proceed to an exploration of the symbols by which political societies interpret themselves as representatives of a transcendent truth. And the manifold of such symbols, finally, will not form a flat catalogue but prove amenable to theoretization as an intelligible succession of phases in a historical process. An inquiry concerning representation, if its theoretical implications are unfolded consistently, will in fact become a philosophy of history.19

It is important to understand here that Voegelin is not claiming to discover a completely knowable structure of history that would be determinative for future events. Such a claim would be an example of the type of gnosticism that Voegelin thinks characterizes modernity and indeed, in light of the foregoing discussion of the effects of literacy, can be seen as precisely the type of essentially static ordering principle that the literate mind is prone to construct. Voegelin clarifies his position in Order and History: “While there is no simple pattern of progress or cycles running through 19. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 1.


history, its process is intelligible as a struggle for true order. This intelligible structure of history . . . is . . . a reality to be discerned retrospectively in a flow of events that extends, through the present of the observer, indefinitely into the future.”20 In the same work he likens the human condition to the situation of an actor playing a part in the drama of being without knowing what it is.21 This metaphor is remarkably congruent with Ong’s description of oral/aural experience. Since sound can be apprehended from any direction, the hearer experiences himself or herself as being situated in the center of an acoustic field, instead of in front of it, as with vision.22 As a result, a sound-orientation is much less likely to lapse into the gnostic assumption that reality, or the process of history, can be beheld in its entirety from a vantage point outside it. Voegelin recognizes the possibility of an ongoing process that cannot be grasped in its entirety but that nevertheless can be experienced as ultimately ordered — which is precisely the sense of reality experienced through sound. In both of these ways, then, Voegelin’s work can help to show how a recovery of oral/aural orientation can contribute to the theoretical and practical project of building foundations without foundationalism.

Nature, Speech, and Modernity Although the discussion so far has focused on the ways in which Voegelin’s political theory seems to rely upon a residual orality to escape some of the dilemmas of modern thought, the argument can be most fruitfully concluded by indicating one place where Voegelin may have partly lapsed into a visual orientation and by showing how the literature on oral/literate differences might clarify some of the tensions in his thought. This is specifically in his treatment of Christianity and its relation to modernity. Voegelin appears to have consistently regarded modernity as essentially the declining stage of Christian civilization.23 For Voegelin, the symbols 20. Voegelin, Order and History, vol. I, Israel and Revelation, ed. Maurice P. Hogan, vol. 14, CW (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2001), 19. 21. Ibid., 39–40. 22. Ong, Presence of the Word, 162–67. 23. Actually, this characterization may oversimplify, at least in light of Voegelin’s later work, where he argues that some of the typical features of modernity can be found even in the third millennium B . C . See Order and History, vol. IV, The Ecumenic Age, ed. Michael


of modernity are decayed or deranged versions of the Christian symbolisms developed during late antiquity. That is, the typically modern conceptions of cosmic and political order (that were earlier characterized as gnostic or simply subjectivist) are perversions of Christian symbolizations when these had ceased to order Christian experience itself. Christian revelation, as Voegelin understands it, achieved the maximal truth about the order of being by fully differentiating its fundamental elements — the world-transcendent God, the natural world, human society, and the individual human being—that had been comprehended only in relatively undifferentiated form by the ancient pagans and even the Greek philosophers. Its symbolization of these elements, however, like any other symbolization, eventually exhausted its existential possibilities and decayed into the symbolic complex of modernity. As a general thesis, this interpretation of modernity may itself be problematic, but an examination of this issue is beyond the scope of this argument. If this basic assumption is accepted, however, the brief description earlier given of the political theorist’s task should indicate how Voegelin conceives his problem: What is the fatal flaw in Christianity, or at least in the conventional interpretation of orthodox Christian symbols, that led to the decay of the Christian symbolic order? In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin appears to argue that the Augustinian philosophy of history, with its sharp separation of sacred and profane history and its understanding of sacred history as essentially completed with Christ, is actually the source of the gnostic nature of modernity, or at least the source of the tensions that have produced modern gnosticism. As we already have seen, Voegelin argues that every political society must have a civil theology that gives meaning to its existence, and the Augustinian conception of political life as nothing more than an instrumental device to maintain the secular order necessary for salvation tends to reduce politics to the meaningless rise and fall of empires, thus depriving the emerging post-medieval societies of Western Europe of a meaningful civil theology within the limits of Christianity: Christianity had left in its wake the vacuum of a de-divinized natural sphere of political existence. In the concrete situation of the late Roman Franz, vol. 17, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 45–107 and especially 108–66. Ultimately, however, this is probably the best way to understand Voegelin’s perception of modernity.

Sight, Sound, Participatory Symbolization / 81 Empire and the early Western political foundations, this vacuum did not become a major source of troubles as long as the myth of the empire was not seriously disturbed by the consolidation of national realms and as long as the church was the predominant civilizing factor in the evolution of Western society, so that Christianity in fact could function as a civil theology. As soon, however, as a certain point of civilizational saturation was reached, when centers of lay culture formed at the courts and in the cities, when competent lay personnel increased in royal administrations and city governments, it became abundantly clear that the problems of a society in historical existence were not exhausted by waiting for the end of the world. The rise of gnosticism at this critical juncture now appears in a new light as the incipient formation of a Western civil theology.24

Modernity can be understood as the result of the attempt to find a civil theology for the developing national states of Western Europe in a situation where the Augustinian theology of history could supply none, with the eventual result that the modern nation-state came to be understood as the vehicle through which humanity would achieve immanent perfection, a situation which in turn, of course, led to the destructive wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. Elsewhere, Voegelin states that “if the church is not able to see the hand of God in the history of mankind, men will not remain peaceable and satisfied but will go out in search of gods who take some interest in their civilizational efforts.”25 With this analysis Voegelin seems to imply that ultimately Christian theology must be fundamentally revised. More specifically, Voegelin seems to be saying here that there is a sense in which orthodox Christian theology made a major mistake in regarding public revelation as complete with Christ, since it is this doctrine that ultimately appears to lie at the basis of the sharp Augustinian split between sacred (i.e., completed) and secular (incomplete and ultimately meaningless) history. Or, to put it another way, a meaningless secular realm is something generated by regarding sacred history as completed, since without the possibility of future revelation, human existence becomes nothing more than waiting for the end of the world. The entire concept of a separate, essentially meaningless, secular existence could be abolished by the recognition that 24. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 162–63. 25. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. VI, Revolution and the New Science, ed. Barry Cooper, vol. 24, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 56.


humans living since the time of Christ have something more meaningful to do with their lives than just wait for the end of the world: they might actually receive new revelations. The search for meaningful human existence would not mean a redivinization of political society if humans still had the possibility of opening themselves to further divine revelation rather than merely waiting for the results promised by that (completed) revelation. What is crucial about Voegelin’s analysis is that it points to the possibility that the attempt to abolish the tension of existence is something that may be very deeply rooted in Christianity itself. Specifically, Voegelin argues that whereas the Greek philosophers understood that reality has a definite structure, recognizably moving beyond itself, Saint Paul and Christianity have, in saying that the transfiguration of reality began with Christ, attempted to abolish that structure. Voegelin states that “since the exodus from reality is a movement within reality, the philosopher has to cope with the paradox of a recognizably structured process that is recognizably moving beyond its structure. While this structure is static enough to outlast the philosopher’s life between birth and death — in fact it lasts through the millennia of known history to this day—it is dynamically alive with theophanic events that point toward an ultimate transfiguration of reality.” But with Paul “the vision of the Resurrected is . . . more than a theophanic event in the Metaxy; it is the beginning of transfiguration itself.”26 Christianity has mistakenly identified the theophanic event of Christ’s resurrection as the beginning of the transfiguration of reality rather than as the most fully differentiated theophanic event pointing toward that transfiguration. From this “metastatic expectation” can follow both the millennarianism that has periodically surfaced throughout the history of Christianity and the immanentized millennarianism of modernity. This analysis can clarify how the (flawed) Augustinian philosophy of history was derived. From this perspective, the sharp dualism of sacred and secular found in Augustine would appear to result from attempting to reconcile the idea that the transfiguration of reality began with Christ with the fact that the mundane reality of everyday life retains an unchanging structure. The transfiguration of reality manifests itself not in a 26. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 291, 313.


transformation of mundane existence but in the completion of the revelatory process. This symbolism, somewhat ironically, had the effect of turning revelation into a closed matter, thus setting the stage for the tensions in medieval Christianity that have issued forth in the crises of modernity. Here is where it could be argued that Voegelin has partly slipped into a static visual orientation that confuses his analysis. The critical issue is that he conceives of reality as an ongoing process, but then largely transcendentalizes this process by claiming that the reality of mundane existence retains an unchanging structure—or at least a structure that changes so slowly as to be imperceptible. Although, as he makes clear in numerous places in his writings, Voegelin does ultimately understand all levels of reality to be implicated in the transfigurative process of history, his conceptualization of mundane existence at this key point in the analysis seems to come perilously close to the visually based Platonic conception of an unchanging natural order and thus may be the critical flaw in his theory. William H. Poteat has offered an analysis that, if extended somewhat, may be able to give an explanation of the origins of modern subjectivism that does not fall back into the nature/convention dichotomy and, in so doing, may clarify the critical point where Voegelin’s analysis seems to be confused. Poteat’s analysis implies that the critical difference between the biblical understanding of humanity and the pagan anthropology is that the biblical model implies that humans have a creative power—that is, a power to actually change the world — in their capacity for speech, something that is unrecognized in the pagan worldview. The synthesis of Greek and Hebraic formulations (using this conceptual move as a shorthand for the political and social consequences of the importation of Greek philosophical concepts into Christian theology in late antiquity and the practical compromises with paganism made by the medieval Church) might result in a situation where the biblical concept of human creativity would be repressed by the Greek elements in Christianity, causing— as repressions always do—its reemergence in distorted or even demonic forms or, more specifically, in the subjectivism of modernity, that is, in the breakdown of any “natural” limits to human actions. Applying the insights of the literature on the differences between oral and literate cultures, Poteat argues that the fundamental model of reality


for the ancient Hebrews was the spoken word (as indicated, most obviously, in Genesis 1),27 while the Greek philosophers understood the world on the model of the written word. What is critical to this analysis is his discussion of the properties of the spoken word. For Poteat, the spoken word has two properties that are essential to understanding the biblical model of reality and humanity. First, the spoken word is dynamic: reality, then, if like the spoken word, must be some kind of ongoing, dynamic process. Second, and even more important, the spoken word is creative: for Poteat, J. L. Austin’s claim that words create a world is true in the most direct sense possible. The world as humans articulately experience it is created by speech acts. This is true not only of social institutions and conventions, but even of nature. “And the world of nature,” asks Poteat, “insofar as it is a reflected reality among men, does it have its existence other than by the utterance of the words of common sense, of physics, chemistry, biology, geology?”28 If the spoken world is taken as the basic model of reality, as the ancient Hebrews did, then reality itself will be an ongoing, dynamic, creative process, with infinite possibilities, like the spoken word; and humans, since they have the creative capacity of speech, actually have a role to play in this creative process, though human creativity is of course limited, since humans are also creatures (that is, created beings). This is to say that humans can not only understand but can actually change the world, and indeed do so with every speech act. Human words create a dynamic succession of worlds. At this point it might seem that Poteat is saying something quite similar to various postmodernists who argue that all knowledge is socially constructed. There is, however, a crucial difference. While postmodernists regard socially constructed knowledge claims as radically contingent, that is, without any necessary grounding, and thus as ultimately tools of domination created by constellations of power, Poteat argues that the worlds created by speech acts are indeed subject to necessity. This is because in 27. This could be a highly controversial claim, given the importance of the written word in the Jewish tradition, but a full defense of it is beyond the scope of this essay. Poteat would argue that the earliest Hebraic symbolizations of order certainly employed the spoken word as their basic metaphor and that the later focus on the written word may have confused certain issues. See also the discussion in Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, trans. Jules C. Moreau (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960). 28. William H. Poteat, Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 117.


any given speech context, although the speakers may say an infinite number of things, only some things will be appropriate to that speech context, since human creativity is limited and the speech context is therefore connected to, or limited by, previous speech contexts. This formulation is of course similar to Austin’s argument that in order for a performative speech act to have its effect, certain felicities, or conditions, themselves derived from previous speech acts, must exist. In other words, the speech act in relation to its context is an example—in fact the paradigmatic example—of how an epistemological and ethical foundation can be established without resorting to the foundationalism of the concept of nature.29 In this situation, the biblical concept of God is, in a sense, a kind of logical deduction from the model, or, rather, what is necessary to complete the “picture” implied by the basic metaphor. Although particular speech acts often fail to be faithful and thus create disordered worlds, humans nevertheless proceed with a tacit confidence that reality is ultimately ordered every time they speak (something that might be termed a kind of absolute necessity inherent in world-creating speech acts), which implies that speech acts tacitly assume something like a world created (that is, spoken into existence) by an ever-faithful speaker—one who never breaks promises. In the biblical anthropology, this is indeed the only real human place: as a responsible speaker before God. Whereas individuals in Aristotle’s political theory have a place in the natural order and therefore in the hierarchical social order derived from nature, the key characters in the biblical narratives are wanderers, with no fixed geographical place and even no place in society. The biblical model further implies a fundamental equality among humans, since all have the creative capacity of speech, or, more specifically, all have the capacity to be faithful to their words — that is, all have the same ultimate place. It also implies the possibility of modern inductive, experimental science, since if the world is spoken into existence by an ever-faithful speaker, worldly phenomena will be consistent in time. An experiment performed at T1 will be comparable with one performed at T2, an idea that never occurred to the Greek philosophers, who assumed that the world’s true order must exist beyond mere appearances.30 29. Ibid., 116–24. 30. See ibid., 104–32. See also M. B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Science,” Mind 43 (1934): 447–68.


By contrast with the biblical model, the Greek philosophers, according to Poteat, understood the world as being like the written word. Here Poteat follows Ong, Havelock, and others in arguing that if one’s perceptions are strongly (even if only tacitly) influenced by the experience of literacy, then one will tend to conceive reality as being like a written word— that is, a finite, ultimately unchanging structure, the particulars of which can be (at least in principle) beheld at once, like a written text. Nature, that is, the fundamental structure of reality, as conceptualized by both Plato and Aristotle (whatever differences they may have had), is understood according to this model. Necessity for the Greeks is given not by the faithfulness of speakers but by the unchanging structure of the natural order, which humans, although they can (partly) understand, cannot change. Political order will thus tend to be understood hierarchically, since some individuals understand the natural order better than do others.31 If Poteat’s formulations are accepted, then, it can be seen that if the speech-based biblical model is modified, or corrupted, by the visual Greek model, a thoroughgoing subjectivism—that is, a breakdown of the nature/ convention dichotomy into pure conventionalism—is a very likely result, since one possible outcome of such a corruption would be the retention of the biblical model of humans as creative speakers but—if the visual Greek model of necessity becomes predominant—the loss of the speech-based necessity of this model. Print literacy would be precisely the experience that could make this visual model dominant. Before this line of thought is pursued further, however, it will be necessary to indicate one crucial place where Poteat’s analysis should be modified. Poteat contrasts the Hebraic model of reality as a spoken word with the Greek philosophical concept of nature, which he assumes is derived from literacy. But the prephilosophical (that is, preliterate) Greeks, and, indeed, all the pagan cultures, had something like a concept of nature — that is, the various gods who represented, or who actually were, what we moderns would reductionistically call “natural forces.” The major differences between the Greek philosophical concept of nature and the pagan gods is that nature is more abstract, impersonal, and orderly— differences that can be understood as results of literacy. But both the pagan gods and the philosophers’ natural order share one absolutely critical feature: they are ultimately unaffected by human agency. The 31. See Poteat, Polanyian Meditations, 109–16.


crucial difference here then would seem to be not between the Hebraic oral orientation and the Greek visual orientation, but rather between the fundamental Hebraic model of reality, the spoken word, which implies a (limited) human creative capacity, and the fundamental pagan model of reality, the rhythms and processes of the natural world (whether understood as personal and unpredictable, even chaotic, as with the pagan cultures lacking an internalized literacy, or as relatively impersonal and orderly, as with the literate Greek philosophers), which implies no human creative capacity, only a capacity to discover and perhaps rearrange what already exists. From this point it will be argued that the conceptual incoherence of modernity derives ultimately from the incomplete victory of Christianity over paganism, that is, from a situation where residual elements of paganism in Christian theology and practice distorted the biblical model of human agency in such a way that the subjectivism of modernity could emerge. Specifically, to state the matter a bit crudely, the importation of Greek philosophical terms into Christian theology and the various practical compromises made by the medieval Church with paganism could result in a situation where humans were conceived of neither as natural beings (as in paganism) nor as simultaneously creators and creatures (as in the biblical model) but rather as creators and natural beings, that is, as creators in the sense of creating a world through speech and also as natural beings in the sense of being parts of an ultimately finite, unchanging natural order. But this conceptualization is obviously incoherent. Humans cannot be both. Hence it can only be resolved either through some kind of mind/body dualism or through conceiving of humans as creators only—that is, the radical subjectivism of late modernity. This is indeed what happened in medieval and modern thought and practice. Medieval Catholicism tended to conceive of humans as creators and natural beings in that humans were free to act righteously or to sin, but only within the context of an unchanging natural order, where human ends were given and unchanging, so that humans are still in effect primarily natural beings. This is clearly implied in Augustine’s conception of free will, and Thomas Aquinas’s conception of reality generally embodies the same incoherent synthesis: God creates an unchanging functional natural order. As a result, the medieval political and social order, despite the biblical concept and even the explicit Christian doctrine of fundamental human equality, had much the same structure as the hierarchical


pagan societies, although some movement did take place in the direction of working out some of the biblical worldview’s implications, such as the slow progress toward democracy in the English constitutional tradition and the beginnings of modern science in the monasteries. The Protestant Reformation had the effect of shifting the balance of this dualism, so that early modernity also understood humans as creators and natural beings, but now with the emphasis on the element of creativity. This can be seen in a somewhat negative way in the concern of Martin Luther and John Calvin with sin, that is, the misuse of human freedom. It can be seen even more obviously in John Locke’s extension of the Protestant work ethic in his theory of property: for Locke, humans can actually create new wealth (an idea never developed in any systematic way in the ancient world) through their labor on the natural order. The incoherence of Locke’s position is immediately obvious, since if an immutable natural order really exists, it cannot be possible for humans systematically to transform it using labor. Karl Marx is the key transitional figure in the development of the thoroughgoing subjectivism of late modernity. Marx begins with Locke’s incoherent conceptualization of humans, i.e., that we are creators who are nevertheless part of the natural order, and then makes the conceptualization coherent by understanding human history as an evolutionary process in which humans gradually become completely free of natural necessity— that is, in which humans become creators. Nietzsche merely pushes Marx’s logic to its final conclusion, regarding humans as always having been radically creative but only recently having discovered the fact. The logical progression can be captured in the following diagram: Creator/Creature Natural Being ↓ ↓ Creator/NATURAL BEING ↓ CREATOR/Natural Being ↓ CREATOR From a Voegelinian standpoint, for this analysis to have any validity it will be necessary to explicate this highly schematic conceptual model in terms of concrete human experience. Specifically, three things must be explained: (1) why, experientially, Christianity developed the initial


incoherent “creator/natural being” anthropological metaphor; (2) why, experientially, the Reformation and early modernity shifted the emphasis in this metaphor; and (3) why, experientially, nature disappeared from the equation in late modernity. The first and third questions can be answered relatively easily. The tendency to introduce Greek philosophical concepts into Christian theology and for the Church to engage in numerous practical compromises with paganism can probably be understood in terms of the fact that in any preindustrial social order, “nature” — understood as an order independent of human agency — is, or, rather, seems to be, such an overwhelming feature of everyday life that its existence is almost impossible to question. (To put it in terms more appropriate to an oral culture, in an agricultural society with limited technology, faced with the daily experience of relative human powerlessness before the forces of nature, the symbolization of order in terms of the pagan gods is all but inevitable, a fact that indicates how amazing the breakthrough achieved by the ancient Hebrews really was.) Similarly, late modernity’s complete destruction of any concept of nature, and therefore—within the basic framework of modern thought—any limits to human action, can be understood as the consequence of the full recognition of the extent of human agency wrought by modern technology. The second, and most important, question is the most difficult. It could be argued that the shift toward a greater sense of human agency found in the Reformation can be understood as a result of the gradual recognition of the extent of human freedom implied in the biblical model, and certainly the reformers understood themselves as attempting to recapture the original biblical formulation. If this is the case, though, why did they not succeed but only shift the emphasis of the incoherent medieval model? Here literacy would appear to play a critical role. A more thoroughly internalized literacy might have the negative effect of preventing the complete abandonment of the concept of nature for the same reason that it helped to establish the concept of nature among the Greek philosophers in the first place: its tendency to create a perception of reality as an eternal finite text. Thus, the reformer’s attempt to break out of the incoherent medieval synthesis—or to put it differently, to eliminate the pagan elements in medieval Christianity—could be (partly) thwarted by the effects of literacy. The analysis can be made more concrete by sketching out very roughly an understanding of the practical effects of the Reformation’s shift in the


balance of the creator/natural being model. The anthropological ambivalence of the Reformation appears in Luther when he argues that the highest manifestation of Christian ethical life is not monasticism, with its withdrawal from the world, but rather service to one’s neighbor, but then understands Christian service largely in terms of labor, that is, activity directed toward the natural order. What is critical to the Protestant ethic as it later developed, especially in Calvinism, is that although it contains a greater sense of human agency in the idea that labor can improve the human material condition, it still contains remnants of the pagan concept of nature, so that the world is tacitly conceived both as abundant (as the biblical model implies) and stingy (as the pagan model implies), which means that humans can produce abundance, but only at the price of an intensely disciplinary attitude toward themselves, an intensely competitive attitude toward their neighbors, and an intensely confrontational attitude toward their environment. The possibility that abundance could be achieved with less discipline, less competition, less confrontation, and more joy is never really considered in Calvinism or the capitalist system that derives from it. The eventual result of this incoherent understanding of the human situation is that since the world is indeed abundant, capitalism quickly develops a problem of overproduction, which, since it is unresolvable in terms of the Protestant ethic, can be dealt with only by the creation of a consumer economy in which consumption actually becomes a kind of work requiring intense discipline. Consumer capitalism, which advertises commodities as necessary tools for creating one’s own life as a work of art,32 can be understood as the final manifestation of radical subjectivism that results from Christianity’s mixed metaphor. In any case, this discussion indicates that Voegelin’s analysis of modernity may be flawed to the extent that he locates the ultimate source of modernity in the Christian understanding of Christ as beginning the transfiguration of reality rather than merely pointing toward that transfiguration, an understanding that closes revelation and thus creates the spiritual vacuum of a meaningless mundane sphere of existence instead of one that could be the context for future and further revelation. The problem may instead be the pagan concept of an essentially unchanging sphere of mundane existence that represses the human creativity implied 32. See Juliet Schorr, The Overspent American (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).


in the biblical model of reality and thus eventually causes it to reemerge in distorted form. This concept may have crept into Christianity because of the concrete sociohistoric situation of the medieval Church and may have survived the Reformation’s attempt to purge pagan elements because of the effect of print literacy. If this is the case, then it could be said that Voegelin’s analysis was similarly partly thwarted by residual visually based conceptualizations in his own thinking.

Conclusion Obviously the above analysis is extremely sketchy and would have to be made in vastly more detail to have any general theoretical validity, but it may well indicate where there is a critical tension in Voegelin’s work and show more clearly what would be involved in understanding human speech capacities, something that would be essential to escape the nature/ convention and objective/subjective dichotomies of modernity. Voegelin’s political theory can be understood as an escape from the overwhelming visual orientation of modernity to a more oral/aural orientation and as such provides a starting point both for a more thoroughgoing reconstruction of political theory on the basis of a more balanced sensory orientation and, to the extent that it points to ritualistic experience as a source of political order, for the development of communities of virtue. Nevertheless it does still contain remnants of a visual orientation in its tendency toward a dualistic transcendentalization of the process of reality and its consequent misinterpretation of the origins of modern subjectivism. But this partial failure can lead to a more adequate understanding of what a retheoretization of political order would require: if the source of the nature/convention dichotomy and its eventual degeneration into the thoroughgoing subjectivism of late modern is simply an extreme visual orientation, as writers such as Ong suggest, then the obvious task would be to recover a more oral orientation. But if, as the discussion of Voegelin’s theory indicates, the problem is more complicated—if literacy only exacerbates, or activates latent perverse possibilities already existing within, an incoherent worldview—then the solution is also more complicated. To escape the rampant subjectivism of late modernity and its political manifestations, that is, to establish foundations without foundationalism, it would not be enough to reorient ourselves toward speech


and hearing; establishing limits on human action when the true extent of human creative capacities has become manifest would require that the fundamental metaphors that we use to comprehend our world would have to be more systematically, and more self-consciously, reconstructed. Specifically, our religious, philosophical, scientific, ethical, and political concepts, and their practical social embodiments, would have to more accurately articulate the source of that creative capacity—the spoken word.

3 Immanence/Transcendence Deleuze and Voegelin on the Conditions for Political Order JEFFREY A. BELL

E

ric Voegelin’s efforts to restore pride of place to political theory offer a focused and well-reasoned attack upon many of the important philosophical figures whom he believes to be responsible for diminishing the importance of theory. In particular, Voegelin will charge much of the modern philosophical tradition as being under the spell of gnosticism. To be under the spell of gnosticism is for Voegelin to assume that one can, in this world, identify the truth of this world. For Voegelin, following Plato, the truth of this world is ultimately beyond it, a transcendent reality that can be experienced but cannot be studied and analyzed as an external, worldly fact. These experiences can only be expressed symbolically, and thus for Voegelin political theory ought to study the symbols that are used in an attempt to express these experiences. But under the sway of gnosticism, such transcendental realities are shunned and replaced with the experience of the externalities of this life and this world, and hence of a truth regarding this life and world which it is believed can be adequately and nonsymbolically expressed. In turning away from what Voegelin sees as the contemporary fascination with the analysis and categorization of external, worldly facts as the key to understanding political societies and their institutions (i.e., the gnostic tendencies associated with behaviorism, statistical modeling, etc.), Voegelin instead argues in The New Science of Politics that one should give closer scrutiny to the symbols and experiences that are, in his view, ultimately at the heart of, and are responsible for, the order of these societies. 93


We will not retrace arguments and territory that are quite familiar to most scholars of Voegelin. What we will do is compare and contrast Voegelin’s critique of the gnostic tradition of modern philosophy with the contemporary Continental critique of metaphysics. More precisely, we will examine Voegelin’s project within the context of Nietzsche’s and Gilles Deleuze’s projects. Such a discussion would seem, on the surface, to lead to a simple listing of disagreements. After all, in The New Science of Politics Voegelin not only accuses Nietzsche of being a gnostic but goes so far as to say that Nietzsche’s insanity was itself one of the tragic consequences of having taken gnosticism to the extreme.1 A Voegelinian, on hearing that Deleuze’s work is itself largely an extension of key concepts within Nietzsche and Artaud, would likely charge Deleuze of gnosticism and move on. Such a dismissal, we argue, would be hasty. And although Voegelin’s warnings against the dangers of gnosticism should be taken seriously—in particular, the dangerous tendency for gnosticism to truncate a nonidentifiable mystery and allow for a world-based ideology and symbolism that can be manipulated to found a totalitarian, authoritarian political regime based upon the belief that they have the truth — there is an equal danger in Voegelin’s claim that a political order should be modeled upon the experience of transcendence. Such a modeling can in turn encourage or allow for a hierarchical, totalitarian power regime with an elitist, exclusionary control of the symbols that legitimate political authority. In Deleuze’s work, we will find an approach that avoids the dangers Voegelin correctly sees as a possibility of the “immanentist metaphysics” of gnosticism as well as the dangers we claim are still present within Voegelin’s approach. To set up our analysis and discussion, we will, in the first section, compare and contrast Nietzsche’s and Voegelin’s views on how Socrates faced his own death. This will lead us to the theme of the next section— imanence and transcendence. In this section we will find that Deleuze’s critique of transcendence and Voegelin’s critique of gnosticism (i.e., the immanentizing of transcendence) are similarly motivated—they both 1. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, with new foreword by Dante Germino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 174. Available in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter, CW), vol. 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. and intro. by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). Citations herein are to the 1987 edition.

Immanence/Transcendence / 95

reflect an implicit and/or explicit effort to overturn certain tendencies in traditional metaphysics. In the third section, we will show how, with concepts such as “dynamical systems,” “edge of chaos,” and “body without organs,” Deleuze is able, unlike Voegelin, to maintain the criticism of traditional metaphysics without falling prey to the very tendencies being criticized. And in the final section we will sketch some of the consequences of Deleuze’s theory as they come to bear on contemporary political theory.

Thanatos Nietzsche and Voegelin could hardly disagree more in their interpretations of Socrates’ attitude toward his own death. In discussing Plato’s dialogue the Phaedo, Voegelin argues that the theme of death, or Thanatos, is important, for it illustrates the point that “life is comparable to a submarine existence with only a glimmer of the world above. Death is the liberating force.” Moreover, Voegelin adds that “Thanatos is the force that orders the soul of the living, for it makes them desirous of stripping themselves of everything that is not noble and just.” The reason for this latter claim is that Plato, and following him Voegelin, believes that our life’s significance and value is only truly judged by that which transcends this life, or it has true value only by virtue of what is beyond this life. This is the reason for the significance of what Voegelin refers to as the Myth of Judgment as found in the Gorgias and the Republic.2 Death is therefore not something to be feared, or an evil to be avoided, but rather something to look forward to, for only upon one’s death will one attain the certainty of judgment regarding the meaning of one’s life, a certainty one lacked while living. With Nietzsche we find a completely different reaction to Socrates. Nietzsche accepts Voegelin’s reading of events — i.e., Socrates is looking forward to dying, for he will then have stripped himself of “everything that is not noble and just”; far from seeing this as something positive, Nietzsche regards this attitude as a denial of life, as a judgment on life as something that is not good, and this for Nietzsche is a sign of decadence. It is the knee-jerk reaction of the weak and degenerate to claim that “life 2. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. III, Plato and Aristotle, ed. Dante Germino, vol. 16, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 66, 67.


is no good.” More precisely, Nietzsche argues that it is the “equation of reason, virtue, and happiness” that is symptomatic of the denial of life, for such an equation ultimately denies natural life-enhancing instincts. Nietzsche is clear on this point: “To have to fight the instincts — that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.”3 Voegelin diverges sharply on this point. Far from seeing Socrates’ attitude toward death as a symptom of decadence and degeneration, Voegelin believes that with the Myth of Judgment in the Gorgias (and elsewhere) Plato is setting forth “a radical call for spiritual regeneration.” This call is so radical and revolutionary, as Voegelin understands it, because Plato is not looking for one worldly regime to revolt and replace another, but rather is calling upon the citizens of Athens to look beyond this life to the true source of order. As Voegelin puts it, “The fundamental raison d’eˆtre of a people, that it goes its way through history in partnership with God, has disappeared [for the Athenians],” and Plato is trying precisely to recall the significance and importance of this “partnership with God.” Voegelin likely believed he was issuing a similar call to the behaviorists and gnostics who were his contemporaries.4 To recall that one’s “raison d’eˆtre” is to acknowledge one’s ongoing “partnership with God” involves, for Voegelin, entering “the community of those whose souls have been liberated by death and who live in the presence of the judgment.” Such a community, as Voegelin is quick to point out, is not one with a dogma, a community that knows what the judgment of life after death will be or that the judgment (à la Calvinism) has been predetermined and one needs simply to wait until after death to find out what it is—salvation or punishment. For Voegelin, “If the symbol of punishment in afterlife were misunderstood as a dogmatic hypothesis, the not-so-good souls might arrive at the conclusion that they will wait for afterlife and see what is going to happen then.”5 In other words, they will stop trying to become better, nobler persons if they assume the judgment to be an already achieved fact. Rather, to live in the presence of judgment is for Voegelin an “existential” matter and not a “dogmatic” one. To experience the presence of judgment is not to 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 473, 475, 479. 4. Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 93. 5. Ibid., 98.


know the judgment but to feel the call to become better, or to become experientially aware of the Good that ought to infuse and motivate our actions. It is on this issue that Voegelin complements his discussion of Thanatos with a discussion of Eros. If Thanatos entails a recognition of the judgment that transcends this life, Eros entails not settling for any answers or judgments of this life as the final and ultimate answer—in short, Eros, as the counterpart to Thanatos, involves the impassioned critique of dogmatism and the never-ending desire to become as good as we possibly can while also fostering the same tendencies in others.6 What is key here is the experiential basis for Eros and for the actions that follow upon it. This, as we will see in even greater detail below, forms the basis of Voegelin’s implicit critique of metaphysics. If metaphysics involves mistaking symbols for truths, then Voegelin’s call to restore the dignity of the experiences that give rise to the symbols which are then misidentified with being true representatives of reality is in the final analysis a critique of representationalism and metaphysics, much in line with arguments put forth by Deleuze and others. Consequently, Voegelin turns the metaphysical quest for foundations into an empirical study of symbols, but a study aware of its limitations (i.e., aware of the impossibility of attaining, in this life, the ultimate foundations and truth). As Voegelin puts it: “the search for the constant in history has been referred back from the symbols to the experiences, and from the experiences further back to the depth of the psyche . . . by yielding to the persuasion of the logos in the psyche to become the logos of the discourse, we have enacted a descent to the depth.”7 This descent to the depth does not result in a dogma; rather, such a descent will undermine the truth of any dogma and show it for what it is: a surface effect, or a symbolic approximation of the experience. At this point, however, an interesting and significant congruence between Voegelin and Nietzsche emerges, for Nietzsche too will speak of the depth, or of what he calls the abyss; and the externalized representations of the experiences of the abyss are seen, as with Voegelin, to be merely 6. See ibid., 67: “Thanatos orients the soul toward the Good by relieving it from the sickness of appearance; Eros is the positive desire for the Good.” 7. Eric Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 12, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 128.


symbolic approximations. In the Birth of Tragedy, for example, while reworking Schopenhauer’s argument that music is a more fundamental language than spoken language, Nietzsche argues, “Assuming that music has been correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world, we may say that he [the Dionysian artist] produces a copy of this primal unity as music,” and from here, under what Nietzsche refers to as the “Apollinian dream inspiration,” “the inchoate, intangible reflection of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in mere appearance, now produces a second mirroring as a specific symbol for example.”8 This argument will be found in different forms throughout Nietzsche’s writings. For example, in his late work Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche, in a vein similar to Voegelin, notes the discrepancy between language as symbolic representation and the experiences these symbols strive to capture: “We no longer esteem ourselves sufficiently when we communicate ourselves. Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried. That is because they lack the right word. What we have words for, that we have already got beyond. In all talk there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for what is average, medium, communicable.”9 Nietzsche will then use this same argument in undermining dogmatism, for dogmatism, he argues, is simply the result of turning away from the uniqueness and ineffability of our individual, unique perspectives, by stamping them with the mediocrity and commonality of symbolic representations that can then be communicated to one another.10 Despite these similarities between Nietzsche and Voegelin, we must not lose sight of their profound differences. For Voegelin, as we saw, the experience of the depth is ultimately understood to be an experience of one’s existence as an immanence leading “toward transcendence.”11 Nietzsche, however, is extremely critical both of any notion of a transcendent beyond and of an immortal soul (both key elements in Voegelin’s system). Nietzsche presents the following criticism of these two terms in his 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 49. 9. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 530–31. 10. See, for example, Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 354, 179, 355, among many others. 11. Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 418.


work Antichrist, a criticism that dovetails with our earlier discussion regarding the judgment of life lying in the afterlife or beyond: “When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the ‘beyond’— in nothingness—one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts—whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future now arouses mistrust.”12 This rejection of a “beyond” to this life, to a “nothingness,” relates directly to one of Nietzsche’s more direct statements regarding the impossibility of judging life in its entirety. To judge life, Nietzsche claims, “one would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.” In short, Nietzsche agrees with Voegelin that one cannot judge this life unless one can get beyond this life, but it is precisely this beyond that Nietzsche rejects. Any judgment of life, therefore, is from Nietzsche’s perspective only a judgment made within life: “A condemnation of life by the living [e.g., Socrates] remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life.” To judge life entails “judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole.” And the whole, Nietzsche adds, is not “a unity either as a sensorium or as ‘spirit’—that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored.”13 In other words, Nietzsche understands the whole as process, or as a flux and becoming which is whole in the sense that it contains all that there is, but it is not a whole that forms a completed totality (i.e., either as perceived totality, sensorium, or as “spirit” à la Hegel). Nietzsche appears, therefore, to be a thoroughgoing naturalist; or, as Heidegger argued, in reversing Plato Nietzsche seems simply to have reversed Plato’s emphasis upon the suprasensuous by emphasizing the sensuous. As a result, Heidegger contends, Nietzsche failed to move beyond the dichotomy of the true and false worlds. Heidegger does believe that Nietzsche finally recognized the need to move beyond this duality but says that he failed ultimately to think through the consequences of what such a move would entail. 12. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, 618. 13. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 490, 500–501.


Voegelin would likely have agreed with Heidegger’s criticism of Nietzsche. Moreover, in Voegelin’s view, Nietzsche’s apparent naturalism and claim that “one is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole,”14 robs human reality of any dignity and significance: “Man has become a nothing; he has no reality of his own; he is a blind particle in a process of the world which has the monopoly of real reality and real meaning.”15 This criticism, we feel, would be a valid and damning one if Nietzsche were indeed putting forth a notion of what we shall call naïve naturalism. By paying especially close attention to Nietzsche’s understanding of becoming, however, and with critical attention to the numerous places where he makes statements such as the following—“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves”16 —we shall see that Nietzsche, and Deleuze as he extends Nietzsche’s concepts, is setting forth a theory of the whole that is ordered, but ordered without reference to a final telos or model. Before turning to a discussion of this theme, however, we must first examine Voegelin’s theory of immanence and transcendence and place this theory into the context of the contemporary critique of metaphysics.

Voegelin Turning our attention again to Voegelin, we should point out that although Nietzsche and Voegelin appear to make similar claims regarding the relationship between experience and language, and they even seem to be in agreement in prioritizing experience over language, the difference between them is crucial: i.e., whereas Nietzsche stresses the perspectival and unique character of individual experiences, Voegelin argues that there is a fundamental commonality to the experiences that engender symbols. Voegelin thus argues: “we know that the sameness which justifies the language of ‘equivalences’ does not lie in the symbols themselves but in the experiences which have engendered them.”17 And what precisely is this “sameness” of experience that gives rise to an equivalence 14. 15. 16. 17.

Ibid., 490. Voegelin, “On Hegel,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, 221. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, 129. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 115.


of symbols? In his essay on Hegel, though in many other places as well (including the essay just quoted), Voegelin states that it is the experience of quest-ioning, or as Voegelin puts it, “The equivalence of symbolisms as the expression of man’s search of truth about himself and the ground of his existence is the principle, established by Aristotle, that guides the philosopher’s inquiry.” The search and quest for truth, and the experience of being within the presence of a truth that can only be expressed symbolically (i.e., our “partnership with God”), is not a failing to be overcome but rather the essence of being human, and hence the reason for the commonality of these experiences: “To imagine the search for truth not to be the essence of humanity but an historical imperfection of knowledge to be overcome, in history, by perfect knowledge that will put an end to the search, is an attack on man’s consciousness of his existence under God.”18 The mistake, what Voegelin calls gnosticism, is to confuse the open-ended experience of our “existence under God” with the experience of externalized, nonsymbolically represented facts and beliefs. When this occurs, Voegelin believes, the “engendering,” founding experience of what it means to be human becomes distorted and deformed: “This field of experiences and symbols . . . is the time dimension of existence, accessible only through participation in its reality . . . [and finding one’s way depends on] intellectual discipline in openness toward reality, or deformed by his uncritical acceptance of beliefs which obscure the reality of immediate experience.”19 It is this deformation that Hegel, Nietzsche, and the tradition of gnosticism promotes and causes. Hegel, for example, replaces the love and quest for wisdom with the worldly attainment of wisdom (i.e., Spirit comes to self-completion and self-realization with Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge), and for Voegelin, Hegel thus suffers from “the spiritual disease of refusing to apperceive reality, and of closing one’s existence through the construction of an imaginary Second Reality.”20 As a consequence of this disease, a disease he will often label as a “pneumopathological confusion,” Voegelin feels that one’s own lust for power and control (a lust Voegelin calls libido dominandi) results in an imaginative construction (i.e., “Second Reality”), which is imposed upon primary, engendering 18. Voegelin, “On Hegel,” 226. 19. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 116. 20. Voegelin, “On Hegel,” 232.


experiences of “First Reality.” The result of this pneumopathological confusion is that one now believes reality can be controlled and manipulated. One’s salvation, in other words, is in one’s own hands. This self-salvation is for Voegelin the extreme consequence of gnosticism and the cause of Nietzsche’s tragic fate. But although Voegelin believes Nietzsche was a gnostic (Voegelin labels Nietzsche, along with Marx, as successors to Hegel),21 is this belief justified? On the one hand, Nietzsche clearly adopts a form of what one might call naturalism—i.e., there is nothing beyond this life, this life is the whole. On the other hand, Nietzsche, as we saw, is quick to set apart this view of life as “the whole” from Hegel and others who would complete it, or who would see the whole as a closed totality. And it is the issue of closure, the closure of the soul, that seems to be the source, for Voegelin, of the gnostic tendency to externalize for the sake of manipulative control. In other words, by closing the soul off to transcendence, and to a partnership with the Divine and eternal, Voegelin feels that the result is a “pneumopathological confusion” with its attendant danger of believing that humans can do it on their own rather than through dependence upon divine grace and judgment. The properly ordered soul, therefore, is for Voegelin a soul that is open to the transcendent, the divine: “Man, existentially ordered by the experience of transcendence, becomes the model of order for man and society.” This experience of transcendence as a model for the ordering of society is crucial for Voegelin, and he will repeat this point on a number of occasions. For example, “Man thus can be the model of paradigmatic order in society only when he himself has been ordered by divine being, when as a consequence he partakes of divine substance, when he has become theomorphic. The theomorphism of the soul, we may say, is the supreme principle of the conception of order that originates in the experience of transcendence and leads to the discovery of history.”22 To close off this experience of transcendence, therefore, which is what Voegelin believes Hegel, Nietzsche, and the gnostics do, is to close us off from the true model for an ordered society, and thus for Voegelin it is 21. Ibid. 22. Eric Voegelin, “What Is History?” in What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, vol. 28, CW (1990; available Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 21 (emphasis added), 22.


not a coincidence that the rise of gnosticism in Western culture has been accompanied by a decline in the spiritual life of Western society.23 The naturalism Voegelin attributes to Nietzsche, however, is what we call naïve naturalism: i.e., a naturalism that believes that all truths are externalized and can in principle be grasped and nonsymbolically expressed. Nietzsche’s form of naturalism, however, is one that both rejects viewing the whole as closed (as we have seen) and gives great emphasis to the flux, becoming, and nonidentifiable character of what he often calls chaos. Voegelin, too, will lay great stress upon the fluxlike nature of the experience of transcendence. In The Ecumenic Age, for example, Voegelin discusses the experience of transcendence as the experience, not of some transcendent thing that can be clearly and definitively expressed, but of transition, flux, and tension between the worldly and the divine (what he also calls the Apeiron): “The Apeiron and the things are not two different realities in a static relationship one toward the other; they are experienced as modes of being, or as poles of a tension within the one, comprehensive reality. Reality in this comprehensive sense is experienced as engaged in a movement of transcending itself in the direction of eminent reality.”24 The comprehensive reality, the whole, is experienced as becoming, or as a flux and tension of movement from the immanent toward the transcendent. This comprehensive reality is “directionally structured,”25 as Voegelin puts it. This “directionally structured” reality is most often referred to by Voegelin as the reality of the In-Between, or, in borrowing a term from Plato, as the metaxy. We can now gain a deeper understanding of Voegelin’s critique of gnosticism. What the gnostics do, according to Voegelin, is to simplify and externalize the experience of metaxy, an experience that is both immanence and transcendence. This is why symbols are best used to express this experience, for with the use of symbols one can capture the ambiguity and tension between the two poles. In using nonsymbolic, 23. Voegelin makes this potentially controversial claim in The New Science of Politics, 165: “And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.” 24. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. IV, Order and History, ed. Michael Franz, vol. 17, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 278–79. 25. Ibid., 278.


representational language (e.g., scientific language), one inevitably externalizes the experience into two identifiable poles—into an either/or. And it is with this theme of criticizing the tendency to refer to reality in terms of an identifiable either/or, rather than an experienced, nonidentifiable both/and, that places Voegelin solidly within the tradition of the contemporary critique of metaphysics, for from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida, Deleuze, and a host of other philosophers, an important argument has been precisely the one found in Voegelin.26 Thus, in introducing the project he is about to undertake in The New Science of Politics, Voegelin sees his task as one where he is to “carry the inquiry [into political science] beyond a description of the conventionally socalled representative institutions into the nature of representation as the form by which a political society gains existence for action in history. Moreover, the analysis will not stop at this point but will proceed to an exploration of the symbols by which political societies interpret themselves as representatives of a transcendent truth [i.e., as both immanence and transcendence].”27 Voegelin will then contrast his project with those who would understand politics in terms of a thoroughgoing naturalism; and with Nietzsche clearly in mind, Voegelin argues that in searching for a “theoretical understanding of the source of order and its validity,” we may not want to base this order on Plato’s Agathon, an Aristotelian Nous, Stoic Logos, or Thomistic ratio aeterna; but, he adds, “we know that we are in search for an answer of this type. If, however, the way should lead us to the notion that the social order is motivated by will to power and fear, we know that we have lost the essence of the problem somewhere.” What has been lost, as we have seen, is the openness of the soul to the transcendent, to the reality beyond this world and time. Thus, while Voegelin’s critique of gnosticism may bear some similarities to those in the contemporary Continental tradition and their critique of metaphysics, we must not lose sight of the fact that while many in the latter tradition deny (or are ag26. For a more thorough and complete discussion of this theme, see Jeffrey Bell, The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructuralism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). In this work I detail how the contemporary Continental critique of metaphysics is largely a critique of the tendency to reduce a fundamental, nonidentifiable both/and into an identifiable either/or. 27. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 1.


nostic regarding) the existence of a fundamental reality, Voegelin clearly accepts such a reality: “The closure of the soul in modern gnosticism can repress the truth of the soul, as well as the experiences which manifest themselves in philosophy and Christianity, but it cannot remove the soul and its transcendence from the structure of reality.”28 If Voegelin offers a critique of metaphysics, it is only a critique of certain tendencies within metaphysics — i.e., the tendency to hypostatize the metaxy and flux of existence. He will not deny the validity of the project of metaphysics, if such a project is understood to be an inquiry into the symbols engendered by experiences of the transcendent, eminent reality. Voegelin’s call for a reinvigoration of symbols, for an eros of becoming better or striving for the Good, is therefore a call founded in a metaphysical understanding of the soul. The soul is and ought to be, in Voegelin’s view, opened to the transcendent, eminent reality, to the divinity that judges it and gives it meaning. Naturalism, behaviorism, etc., close the soul into the immanence of the world where one can control one’s own meaning and value (i.e., self-salvation). Thus, unlike Nietzsche, who says we cannot get beyond life to judge life, Voegelin says yes indeed we can, and in engendering experiences one taps into an eminent reality that is beyond life, beyond the immanent time of this life and world, and a reality that bears the judgment (i.e., it is the “logos in the psyche”)29 of this life. This is a beyond, however, that is not to be confused with a Platonic beyond wherein the “beyond” is an identifiable place. For Voegelin the beyond is rather the experience of a mystery that limits our very efforts to name and describe it. Moreover, Voegelin would argue that denying such a beyond opens us to dangerous forms of manipulation whereby one believes to have the truth of this world and can then justifiably use this truth to order and structure the world as he or she sees fit (e.g., the dangers of millennialism, fascism, and the self-salvation of gnosticism). But again we would be too hasty if we simply were to dismiss Voegelin as yet another metaphysician susceptible to the critique of metaphysics, or, vice versa, if we were to dismiss Deleuze and others for failing to grasp that there is a fundamental, eminent reality. As we turn now to Deleuze, and in particular to his critique of transcendence, we will see that despite 28. Ibid., 165. 29. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 128.


the clearly different approaches between Deleuze and Voegelin, there are some significant parallels.

Dynamism The first and most obvious parallel between Voegelin and Deleuze is that they both place great stress upon the flux and becoming of existence, and the in-between nature (i.e., both/and nature) of this existence. As Deleuze begins Logic of Sense, for example, he immediately stresses the two-sided, both/and nature of becoming: “She [referring to Alice from Through the Looking-Glass] is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once.”30 Becoming is not to be identified with an externalized “present” (it “elude(s) the present”), nor is becoming to be hypostatized into being a future present-to-be that becomes present on its way to becoming a present-that-passed. Becoming “does not tolerate” such a distinction or either/or dichotomy. This point becomes even clearer when Deleuze sets forth one of his crucial concepts, the “event”: “With every event there is indeed the present moment of its actualization, the moment in which the event is embodied in a state of affairs, an individual, or a person, the moment we designate by saying ‘here, the moment has come.’ The future and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect to this definitive present, and from the point of view of that which embodies it. But on the other hand, there is the future and the past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither general nor particular, eventum tantum.”31 30. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1. 31. Ibid., 151.


One could, using Deleuze’s terminology, say Voegelin’s experience of transcendence is an event. On the one hand, the experience occurs to an identifiable person at an identifiable time and place. One can say, “here, the experience has come.” On the other hand, this experience also eludes the measurable time of the present and is in some sense beyond it, or at least is not to be confused with the externalized, identifiable time of the present (what Voegelin would refer to as immanent time). However, Deleuze goes to great lengths to argue that this “beyond” is not to be confused with being transcendent (nor does Deleuze even use the term beyond in this context). In what is frequently used by Deleuze as a clarifying example, he claims that the sense or meaning of a proposition has the same both/and structure as an event: “Let us consider the complex status of sense or of that which is expressed. On one hand, it does not exist outside the proposition which expresses it; what is expressed does not exist outside its expression. This is why we cannot say that sense exists, but rather that it inheres or subsists. On the other hand, it does not merge at all with the proposition, for it has an objectiveness (objectité) which is quite distinct.”32 In saying “this is hot,” for example, the sense of the proposition (the expressed) is neither to be strictly identified with the expression or proposition that expresses it, for the same sense could be expressed in another language; nor is the sense to be strictly identified with the state of affairs being described (i.e., the proposition being understood to be nothing more than a representation of an attribute of a state of affairs, e.g., hotness). As Deleuze will put it, “Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs.”33 Sense inheres in both the expressed and the attribute of the state of affairs, and it is not to be confused with either one; in this manner one could say sense is “beyond” them. Voegelin also points out that the metaxy is the one comprehensive reality. In other words, the transcendent beyond is not to be distinguished from the immanent reality as something identifiably separate (i.e., the traditional understanding of transcendence); rather, the metaxy is simply the comprehensive reality that is the tension between the two poles 32. Ibid., 21. 33. Ibid., 22.


(i.e., both/and) which allows for the possibility of distinguishing and separating them (i.e., either/or). Nevertheless, by understanding the metaxy and the experience of transcendence in terms of a fundamental logos in the psyche, Voegelin ultimately reduces the fundamental difference and both/and nature of becoming and flux to the identity of the logos.34 As Deleuze would put it, Voegelin, despite his great advances with the notion of the metaxy and In-Between to think difference, or to think the source of political order without reducing it to a fundamental identity and either/or, nevertheless reduces the metaxy to a fundamental identity — the Logos. To understand why Deleuze is so critical of advancing the notion that there is such an identity or logos that is, for example, to serve as the model for any justifiable social order, we must first discuss Deleuze’s critique of transcendence. Deleuze’s critique of transcendence is present in one form or another throughout his various works, though in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza one can find perhaps his most developed and sustained critique of transcendence. In a chapter focused on the historical manifestations of immanence and transcendence, Deleuze begins, logically enough, with Plato, and more precisely with Plato’s “problem of participation.” As Deleuze understands Plato’s theory, Plato himself proposed three different versions of what it means to participate in the Ideas (Eidos): 1) to participate in the ideas is to share materially in the ideas, or to be a part of the Idea; 2) to participate is to imitate the ideas in some way; 3) to participate is to be modeled and crafted by some demon according to an Idea. In all three cases, however, there arise certain difficulties, difficulties that Deleuze believes “have the same root: the principle of participation has always been sought by Plato on the side of what participates.” In other words, Plato began with what participates in the Ideas and then attempted to explain how the Ideas, the participated, gave rise to it. The Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Proclus especially, “invert the problem,” according to Deleuze. Rather than “start from the characteristics of what participates (as multiple, sensible and so on), asking by what violence participation becomes possible,” the Neoplatonists attempt “to discover the internal principle and movement that grounds participation in the 34. For Deleuze’s arguments in this regard, see especially Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 32 ff.


participated as such. Plotinus reproaches Plato for having seen participation from its lesser side.”35 As Plotinus and later Proclus develop their theories to account for the principle of participation by beginning with the participated, they ultimately and “necessarily,” as Deleuze sees it, “find it [the participated] ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ participation.” More precisely, the participated (Plotinus’s One) allows for participation but is “above” and “beyond” participating in itself: it is “imparticipable” as Proclus would come to understand it. A consequence of this argument is the well-known Neoplatonic theory of emanation, which in many ways is similar to Deleuze’s own theory of immanence; for as Deleuze states the similarity, “Their common characteristic is that neither [immanent cause or emanative cause] leaves itself: they produce while remaining in themselves.” However, there is a significant difference, which Deleuze is quick to point out: “While an emanative cause remains in itself, the effect it produces is not in it, and does not remain in it.” Put in other words, the emanative cause is above and beyond its effects and is fundamentally different from its effects. On the other hand, “a cause is immanent . . . when its effect is ‘immanate’ in the cause rather than emanating from it . . . its effect is in it.” To recall and restate Nietzsche: there is nothing beyond what participates, no imparticipable One that is the superior cause that transcends and is beyond what participates; instead, the participated, to refer to our earlier discussion of the “event,” inheres or subsists in what participates much as the sense of a proposition inheres or subsists in the proposition. And with this we get to Deleuze’s important conclusion concerning the theory of participation: From this viewpoint [of immanent cause] the distinction of essence between cause and effect can in no way be understood as a degradation. From the viewpoint of immanence the distinction of essence does not exclude, but rather implies, an equality of being; it is the same being that remains in itself in the cause, and in which the effect remains as in another thing. . . . Emanation serves as the principle of a universe rendered hierarchical; the difference of beings is in general conceived as a hierarchical difference; each term is as it were the image of the superior term that precedes it. . . . 35. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1992),169, 170.

110 / Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns [I]mmanence requires as a principle the equality of being, or the positing of equal Being: not only is being equal in itself, but it is seen to be equally present in all things.36

It is precisely this hierarchical view of being that can be used to justify hierarchical power and an exclusionary politics. For Deleuze, moreover, when one understands becoming and flux in terms of a fundamental identity, a Plotinian One for example, one ultimately comes to view Being hierarchically: the identity of the transcendent One is superior to the flux and transitory nature of immanence, which is then taken to be a degraded and diluted form of the identifiable One. Even more sinister, for Deleuze, is that the notion of a superior, transcendent Identity can be manipulated and used by political regimes to block change and transformation, or it can be used as a tool to suppress divergent and nontraditional thought.37 In short, Deleuze’s concerns regarding the philosophy of transcendence largely mirror Voegelin’s fears of gnosticism. Yet because Voegelin continues to adhere to a notion of Logos that is to serve as a model for legitimate social order, Deleuze would argue that Voegelin puts forth a hierarchical conception of reality: there is the true, superior, transcendent reality, the eminent reality, which is the source of “proper,” legitimate order only when the “logos in the psyche” is faithfully modeled; and then there is the degraded, deformed reality, the reality of immanence, which has lost sight of its transcendent grounding. Granted Voegelin would claim that the transcendent and immanent realities are all part of the same comprehensive reality—the metaxy; nevertheless, Deleuze would argue, by privileging the “logos in the psyche” Voegelin reduces the nonidentifiable difference and flux of metaxy to the identity of Logos. Or, to state this criticism in other terms, Voegelin has prioritized Being over Becoming, whereas for Deleuze, following Nietzsche, there is nothing beyond becoming—no transcendent One or Logos. This last claim, however—that there is nothing beyond becoming — brings with it its own host of problems. In particular, how do you account for order if you have denied a privileged and transcendent ordering principle? Deleuze was well aware of this problem and sought, on 36. Ibid., 170, 171, 171–72, 172–73. 37. Much of Deleuze and Guattari’s two-volume work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1987), is dedicated to detailing and elaborating upon the arguments sketched here.


many occasions, to supply the concepts that would resolve it. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze recognizes that if one posits the “Univocity of being” (in this case the univocity of being as becoming), then the problem is to show “how individuation properly precedes matter and form, species and parts, and every other element of the constituted individual.”38 If one begins with a univocal understanding of being as becoming, or as nonidentifiable difference (what Deleuze calls here “individuation” or individuating difference), then the problem is to account for the identities, forms, etc., that populate our perceptual and conceptual worlds. The concepts Deleuze uses in his late works (those done with Félix Guattari) to approach this problem are “chaos” and “body without organs”; and to further clarify Deleuze’s approach I shall add the concepts of a “dynamical system” and “edge of chaos.” Chaos emerges as a crucial concept within Deleuze’s work, and we could say it is the concept he puts forward in counterpoint to Voegelin’s notion of the “logos in the psyche.” In the depth of the psyche there is not a logos but chaos; or as Nietzsche put it: “I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.” What exactly Deleuze means by chaos has been the source of much debate, despite the fact that Deleuze explicitly defines the term: “Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.”39 It would take us too far afield to unpack this definition adequately and explain the various terms within it (e.g., infinite speed, virtual, consistency). To summarize briefly, however: in following upon his earlier work when he discussed the “event,” Deleuze in this work argues that the Event (he uses capital letters) is a “paradoxical instance,” a “both/and,” which allows for the emergence of form by being paradoxically both form and content, just as sense was both proposition (form of the expressed, or how the expressed is said) and an attribute of a state of affairs (content of the expressed, or what is being referred to). In generalizing this theory, 38. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 38. 39. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),118.


Deleuze argues that Univocal Being is the Event, the process whereby what Deleuze calls nomadic points are given consistency and form. To picture this, imagine chaos to be the random scattering of points on a Cartesian graph. The use of differential equations would allow one to plot the points on the graph, and the integration of these differential equations results in a solution or formula that enables one to draw an integral curve and determine where the next point, or any point, will be. For Deleuze, the points on the graph correspond to the virtual and the integral curve and the solution corresponds to the actualization of the virtual. The Event, or paradoxical both/and, allows the points to be drawn into relationship with one another such that a consistency emerges that in turn allows for the emergence of form and order, or for the integral curve and solution. In short, what Deleuze was formulating is a theory that can account for the emergence of order out of chaos, and for this reason the concepts of chaos theory (e.g., “edge of chaos” and “dynamical systems”) are fruitful in expounding upon Deleuze’s own work.40 A dynamical system, such as an organism, an evolving ecosystem, or even the fusion processes within a star, is constantly in flux, or is in transition between two potential poles. On one hand, a dynamical system must avoid, if it is to maintain its identity and integrity, slipping into excessive chaos and disorder. On the other hand, a dynamical system must avoid an excessive and rigid order, for in this case a dynamical system would fail to adapt and change in response to the dynamics going on around it. Christopher Langton has referred to the balance that must be struck as the “edge of chaos,” a concept he developed while creating computer simulations to study evolutionary process and the emergence of new forms. When he programmed a computer to simulate an ecosystem subject to random mutations, Langton found that if he set the rate of change (i.e., the mutation rate) too high, the ecosystem would soon collapse, and all life would die because of a lack of consistency and order. However, if the mutation rate was set too low, the life forms would not change enough and ultimately would settle into an unchanging, maladapted stasis. What Langton concluded was that for new forms to emerge, 40. Deleuze makes reference to chaos theory in his final work with Guattari, What Is Philosophy? and he sees great overlap between the concepts they utilize and those he has used.


for order to be maintained and created within the context of flux and becoming, a delicately balanced tension between these two poles needed to be achieved. Langton calls this balanced tension “edge of chaos.”41 With this concept of edge of chaos in dynamical systems, we can return to Deleuze and further clarify his notions of univocity and Event. Deleuze defines univocity in this way: “If Being is the unique event in which all events communicate with one another, univocity refers both to what occurs and to what is said. Univocity means that it is the same thing which occurs and is said: the attributable to all bodies or states of affairs and the expressible of every proposition.”42 The paradoxical both/ and, or Event, is the immanence presupposed by all actual entities, whether states of affairs or propositions, while it is also the immanent outside of (though not transcendent to) every state of affairs and every proposition. It is not to be confused with the identities and actualities it makes possible (whether of perceptual entities or Voegelin’s Logos), for it is nonidentifiable, and it is also the condition of impossibility that must remain outside the integrations which allow for the actualization of a given identity; for without doing so the system would collapse into nonsense and cease functioning altogether. All actualized entities, all identities, therefore, are systematically interrelated in that they immanently and univocally express their immanent cause—the Event—as their condition of both possibility and impossibility. This does not mean, however, that there is just a single system, or an identifiable whole that contains all things; on the contrary, there is a multiplicity of systems, and more precisely there is a multiplicity of dynamical systems. It is these dynamical systems that presuppose and express the Event as the condition of possibility for a system that is constantly changing and in flux, i.e., dynamic. At the same time, such dynamical systems in turn express the Event as the limit to be avoided (their condition of impossibility), if they are to remain dynamic, functioning systems. Deleuze has thus replaced Voegelin’s concept of a transcendent Logos that is the source of order with the concept of Event as immanent condition of possibility/impossibility, or by what we have called the “edge of chaos.” With Deleuze’s notion of the Event, 41. Christopher G. Langton, Artificial Life, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity 6 (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1989). 42. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 180.


therefore, and with our explanatory addition of the terms edge of chaos and dynamical systems, we have done two important things. First, we have given an accounting of the emergence of order which does not depend upon any notions of a transcendent model, telos, or identity, the consequences of which imply a hierarchical and ultimately equivocal view of order. Second, though related to the first, we have, by avoiding a hierarchical, transcendence-based explanation of the source of order, also managed to avoid the abuses Voegelin correctly cautions us against when he warns us of the dangers of gnosticism. One could say Deleuze’s theory is a form of naturalism, but it is not a naïve naturalism in that the paradoxical both/and of the Event as immanent cause is not something that can be identified in an externalizing, scientific manner, even though, as we have seen, it is inseparable from external states of affairs and propositions. The Event eludes all attempts to be accounted for in a reductionist and scientific manner. To clarify further the implications of Deleuze’s theory, we will examine the extent to which it is relevant to Deleuze’s political theory and to the works of other theorists whose ideas can be illuminated by (and illuminate) Deleuze’s “immanentist metaphysics.”43

Deleuze on Politics As Deleuze applies to political and social realities his understanding of Event as a paradoxical both/and that serves as a source of order (à la edge of chaos in dynamical systems), he will frequently utilize conceptual pairs such as rigid/supple segmentarity, mass/class, macropolitics/ micropolitics, and molecular/molar. These pairs are used to capture, in various ways, the sense in which political reality, as a dynamical system, is one that both involves elements that are supple, elusive, and evade rigid classification and control and includes an element of control, structure, and order. Deleuze is explicit in arguing for the both/and nature of these conceptual pairs: “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a 43. This phrase is from Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, chap. 10, §2, “The Failure of Immanentist Metaphysics.” It is hoped that we have shown not only that such a metaphysics is not a failure but, more important, that it is able to address many of the concerns that led Voegelin to be critical of it in the first place (i.e., the manipulative externalizations of gnosticism).


micropolitics.”44 Is Deleuze then simply weighing in on the contemporary debate between centralized versus decentralized political structures? To some degree, yes, but again Deleuze would caution us not to assume that decentralized planning is an alternative that excludes centralized planning. Deleuze is arguing that at a deeper level, at the level of immanent cause, there are both centralized and decentralized tendencies, or that centralized and decentralized systems presuppose as a condition of possibility a fundamental both/and (i.e., edge of chaos, event, metaxy, etc.). Losing sight of this fact risks overlooking and hence allowing for the immanent possibility that a decentralized system becomes a system of centralized control; similarly, if one does not acknowledge the immanent possibility that a system of centralized control presupposes a tendency for certain elements to elude and escape such centralized control, one in turn risks a system that becomes overly decentralized and anarchic. Let us briefly examine two examples Deleuze offers as a way of illustrating this point. First, Deleuze argues that monetary flows and the stock market give “a better image of flows and their quanta than does the State.”45 In other words, monetary flows illustrate the tendency to elude control, to become other and move elsewhere, in a manner both unpredictable and unable to be captured. At the same time, however, an immanent possibility of such flows is to be structured, segmented, and controlled. The Federal Reserve Board, for example, attempts to use its power as central banker to control the flows of money. To avoid rampant inflation, the board will raise interest rates in the hopes of reducing the supply of money and/or by cooling the economy; and to spur economic growth and the supply of money the board will lower interest rates and increase the money supply. However, as anyone who studies the stock market crash of 1929 and the collapse of the Tokyo stock market since 1989 soon discovers, such measures of centralized control are often limited in their success (e.g., Japan has had a 0 percent interest rate for years without being able to spur consumers to buy and hence jump-start the monetary flows necessary for economic growth and expansion). Marxists, Deleuze argues, may be correct in pointing out that capitalists control surplus value, but what is of equal importance, though often ignored by 44. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 213. 45. Ibid., 226.


Marxists, is that capitalists have little control over the flows “from which surplus value derives.”46 In our second, though related, example, Deleuze argues that the traditional understanding of class needs to be supplemented with the notion of what Deleuze calls mass. With Marxist analyses clearly in his sights, Deleuze argues that “from the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular,” as opposed to being defined by its contradictions between classes, which is true for Deleuze “only at the macropolitical level.” Marxist analyses, which stick to the macropolitical level, are overly simplistic, for they ignore the fact that “there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations.”47 More important, for Deleuze revolutions begin, not as the result of a class struggle that has become self-conscious, but from a line of flight, a mass (as opposed to class) movement that eludes and challenges the established order and its institutions.48 For such a mass movement to bring about successful change—i.e., to transform political institutions, structures, and relations between classes—it must combine with class elements, or with what Deleuze also calls the molar and macropolitical elements: “molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes, and parties.”49 46. Ibid. Giovanni Arrighi is a notable exception. In his book The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1994), Arrighi argues that one of the reasons the textile industry in Bruges, Ghent, and other places collapsed after the fourteenth century was that it became too dependent on capital flows by way of the Genoese. When the Genoese found more profitable outlets for their capital, it flowed into other areas (e.g., Spain). The Genoese, however, eventually succumbed to the capital flow that began to funnel into England and Amsterdam. The point to stress here is that the monetary flows are neither completely uncontrollable—for the Genoese, English, Federal Reserve Board, etc., are able to affect and at times redirect monetary flows—nor completely captured by such actions (because of the fundamental both/and of the event as immanent cause). 47. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 216. 48. It should not be surprising to learn that Deleuze, along with Guattari, developed this theory soon after the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris — a clear mass movement as they see it and not one based on class or class antagonism, although of course certain elements of class came into play once the movement was under way. The point, however, is that such class awareness is not a necessary and sufficient condition to precipitate revolutionary movements and change. Such awareness must be coupled with a mass movement, though such mass movements may in turn take on a life (or flow) of their own that escapes centralized and controlling organizations (e.g., the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution). 49. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 216–17.


This last claim has also been made by Theda Skocpol in her analysis of the social revolutions in France, Russia, and China. In her important book States and Social Revolution, Skocpol is critical of many of the explanations often given to explain social revolutions. The Marxist account, for example, is inadequate, according to Skocpol, for although there may indeed be class conflict and class struggle, most Marxist accounts fail to show “how and when class members find themselves able to struggle effectively for their interests.” To correct this error, others will stress the psychological components of a revolution and argue that a certain threshold of anger must be reached in order for a revolutionary, mass movement to take hold. Skocpol argues that this interpretation is itself inadequate in explaining why some revolutions succeed while others fail (e.g., revolution in Germany of 1848). To restate her criticisms in Deleuze’s terms, the Marxist interpretation stresses the molar, class struggle while ignoring the necessity of having a mass movement; and the psychological explanations overlook the necessity of having mass movements, or molecular flights, join up with molar structures in order to transform and change these structures. In fact, Skocpol largely states Deleuze’s thesis, though in different terms: “Social revolutions are set apart from other sorts of conflicts and transformative processes above all by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political with social transformation.”50 Transformations at the molecular level, if they are to take hold, must join up and establish synergy with transformations occurring at the molar level if a social revolution is to be successful. Revolutions are thus a repetition of, or another expression of, the univocal immanent cause of the Event (i.e., the fundamental both/and, metaxy, edge of chaos). As Deleuze and Guattari put it, there is a fundamental “undecidability” immanent to every system, political or otherwise, and by “undecidable” they are “referring . . . to the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable. The undecidable is the germ and locus par excellence of revolutionary decisions.”51 50. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 13, 4. 51. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 473.


Ernesto Laclau, in the political theory he has developed, has made a strikingly similar argument. In discussing the “social” in much the same way that Deleuze and Guattari understand “masses,” Laclau argues that the discourses (Voegelin would say symbols) used to establish order entail two contradictory things. First, there is, for Laclau, the “impossibility of fixing meaning,” or of establishing an “essentialist vision” regarding the social. This would be, to use Deleuze’s terminology, to confuse the molar with the molecular. The second, contradictory task of a discourse “consists in the attempt to effect this ultimately impossible fixation.” Laclau will then conclude that the social therefore implies both the fixation of meaning and the impossibility of fixing meaning; and thus there is a necessary “undecidable” with respect to societies, which is the “germ and locus” of political transformations (e.g., social revolutions). As Laclau puts it: “The social is not only the infinite play of differences. It is also the attempt to limit that play, to domesticate infinitude, to embrace it within the finitude of an order. But this order — or structure — no longer takes the form of an underlying essence [i.e., logos] of the social; rather, it is an attempt—by definition unstable and precarious—to act over the ‘social’, to hegemonize it.”52 In Laclau’s book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (written with Chantal Mouffe), he argues for a notion of a “radical democratic politics,” which largely incorporates this idea of an “undecidable” both/and (i.e., both infinite/finite, impossible to fix meaning/fixed meaning, etc.), an idea we have also found in Deleuze’s work. Furthermore, Laclau and Mouffe offer a political theory that rejects efforts both to establish an essentialist foundation and to appeal to a transcendent “beyond.” The latter attempt, according to Laclau, ultimately reduces to essentialism. And with these arguments in place, Laclau and Mouffe set forth their notion of a “radical and plural democracy.” They define this democracy as follows: “the notion of radical and plural democracy—which will be central to our argument from this point on—finds the first conditions under which it can be apprehended. Only if it is accepted that the subject positions cannot be led back to a positive and unitary founding principle—only then can pluralism be considered radical. Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the 52. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Verso, 1990), 91. Preceding quotes are from this page as well.


principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent or underlying ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy.”53 Voegelin, as we saw, does indeed base the legitimacy of identity and meaning, not within the terms themselves (to this Voegelin would decry the dangers of self-salvation and gnosticism), but rather in the transcendent “logos in the psyche.” But Laclau and Mouffe would not claim that they have found the truth, or that their theory implies the possession of a privileged knowledge that can guarantee the “immanent actualization” of human perfection and potential. To the contrary, a radical plural democracy has no privileged truth, no hierarchy of meaning; or, to restate Deleuze, a radical plural democracy implies the univocity and equality of Being. And it is this equality that, for Laclau and Mouffe, makes of the radical pluralism a democracy: “this radical pluralism is democratic to the extent that the autoconstitutivity of each one of its terms is the result of displacements of the egalitarian imaginary.”54 Consequently, political struggles are not struggles to restore a lost identity (e.g., the true self alienated under capitalism), nor are they an effort to hasten the achievement of some historical destiny; rather, the struggle is to establish and maintain identity itself. This accounts for Laclau and Mouffe’s criticism of traditional political theories. For example, they reject traditional liberal theories, which argue from the premise of individual, inalienable “rights”; and they are critical of conservative theories, which begin from the assumption of an individual with certain entitlements (e.g., Nozick’s libertarianism). These presupposed identities, according to Laclau and Mouffe, already express the constitution of meaning within the political sphere, or they reflect the already achieved effort “to domesticate infinitude, to embrace it within the finitude of an order.” In short, they presuppose rather than explain an already accomplished hegemonic practice. And this hegemonic practice to do the impossible—i.e., to “finitize” the “infinite,” to fix a meaning that cannot be fixed—is forever balanced in a tension between totalitarian fixation of meaning and anarchic loss of meaning. Both extremes are to be avoided, and yet there are no guarantees. On 53. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001), 167. 54. Ibid.


this point, Laclau and Mouffe are clear: “Between the logic of complete identity [totalitarianism] and that of pure difference [anarchy, nihilism], the experience of democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics along with the necessity of their articulation. But this articulation should be constantly re-created and re-negotiated, and there is no final point at which a balance will be definitively achieved.”55 With this last point we can return to Voegelin. Voegelin, too, appreciated the transient and fluxlike nature of the metaxy, of the tension between two poles. Similarly, Voegelin justifiably argues against the tendency on the part of gnosticism to assume a completed, realizable truth in this world. Such a tendency can be, and has been, the source of many political atrocities. In avoiding these tendencies, however, Voegelin, as we have shown, ultimately relied upon a notion of transcendence that entails a hierarchy of Being, and thus although Voegelin’s lack of political programmatics could be interpreted to be in line with the radical democracy of Laclau, Voegelin’s tendency to envision a political discourse that is true to the “model” of the “logos in the psyche” ultimately undermines Voegelin’s efforts. Such a hierarchy sets the stage for repeating the very errors and dangers Voegelin was so intent on uncovering and eliminating. To carry Voegelin’s project one step forward, therefore, we have shown how Deleuze, Laclau, and others can argue for a political theory that avoids the dangerous tendencies Voegelin believed to be an essential component of gnosticism; and we have begun the process of sketching a theory that also avoids essentialism and transcendence. Such a theory, of course, will, as Laclau and Mouffe pointed out, be necessarily incomplete; or it must continually be renegotiated, reworked, and re-created. Otherwise, this theory, or any theory, risks becoming either meaningless to the social-historical circumstances of the time (i.e., unable to fix meaning and hence respond effectively to concrete realities) or totalitarian and dogmatic in its approach to the nuances and differences of political realities (i.e., it fixes meaning rigidly and dogmatically). To maintain an effective and creative balance, therefore, a political theory needs to be a theory at the edge of chaos.

55. Ibid., 188.

4 Voegelin and Levinas on the “Foundations” of Ethics and Politics Transcendence and Immanence Revisited WILLIAM PAUL SIMMONS

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ecently, several scholars have begun a dialogue between the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Eric Voegelin.1 This dialogue is especially important because it helps to shed light on the relationship between transcendence and immanence in a postmodern world. The dialogue between these two thinkers can be expanded by comparing the political consequences of their differing formulations of immanence and transcendence. Levinas’s and Voegelin’s philosophies share many commonalities. Both philosophers reacted to the totalizing philosophies and totalitarian political systems of their days. Each, following Bergson, believed that the predominant philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been based on all-encompassing, “closed” systems that seek to explain all 1. See, for example: Marie L. Baird, “Eric Voegelin’s Vision of Personalism and Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics of Responsibility: Toward a Post-Holocaust Spiritual Theology?” Journal of Religion 79 (2): 385–403; Marie L. Baird and Steven R. McCarl, “Transcendence and Subjectivity: A Comparison of Eric Voegelin and Emmanuel Levinas” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, 1998); Marie L. Baird, “Human Subjectivity as a Partnership in and beyond Being: A Dialogue between Eric Voegelin and Emmanuel Levinas” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1997); Paul Caringella, “Eric Voegelin and Emmanuel Levinas” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 1996).

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of reality. Nothing can escape the grasp of the “world-historical” philosopher. These systems have destroyed all transcendence by reducing all of reality to a neuter term, like Being, Spirit, or History. According to Levinas, theologians even subordinate the divine to a neuter term “by expressing it with adverbs of height applied to the verb being; God is said to exist eminently or par excellence.”2 The divine has lost its transcendental quality by being reduced to an object. According to Levinas and Voegelin, these totalizing systems have severe political consequences, namely, they tend to lead to totalitarianism. Nothing can escape the grasp of the autocrat. Along with their “postmodern” distrust of traditional ontologies and their concomitant political certainties, Voegelin and Levinas share a distrust of the modern liberal political solutions offered by Hobbes and Locke. These contract theorists founded their political philosophies on the greatest evil, the summum malum, and disregard the greatest good, the summum bonum. Voegelin argues that “if there is no summum bonum, however, there is no point of orientation that can endow human action with rationality. Action, then, can only be represented as motivated by passions, above all, by the passion of aggression, the overcoming of one’s fellow man.”3 According to Voegelin and Levinas, this reduction of human motivations is insufficient to found a politics because it neglects major parts of human reality. In exploring Voegelin’s and Levinas’s political thought in relation to their distrust of ontology and traditional political thought, I argue that each, in a way, is trying to create an an-archical politics — that is, a politics founded, not on the summum malum, but on a summum bonum, specifically one that is transcendent, or, in Levinas’s terms, beyond being. Of course, the major distinction between the two thinkers is the route to transcendence, or the “site” of the summum bonum. For Voegelin the summum bonum is experienced through individual mysticism or meditation.4 2. Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 168. 3. Eric Voegelin, “Ersatz Religion,” in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968), 102. Available in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter, CW), vol. 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. and intro. by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). Citations herein are to the 1968 edition. 4. For a discussion of the importance of the transcendent in Voegelin’s philosophy, see Jürgen Gebhardt, “The Vocation of the Scholar” and Frederick G. Lawrence, “The

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For Levinas, transcendence is found in the concrete ethical response for the Other. This essay ends by examining the political significance of this difference.

The An-Archical “Archai” Both Voegelin and Levinas strove to revive a genuine transcendence, one that could escape the grasp of philosophy by not being reducible to an object. This transcendence for both is rooted in philosophical ignorance, in other words, that which philosophy cannot know, that which escapes the grasp of knowledge. Of course, this will lead to major epistemological difficulties; namely, how does one philosophize about something that cannot be grasped by philosophy? Before discussing the epistemological difficulties of an an-archical foundation or arche, the core tenets of their philosophies must be presented. VOEGELIN AND PARTICIPATION IN THE METAXY

In the posthumously published In Search of Order, Voegelin argues that the story [of philosophy] must begin in the middle; after all, humans are finite beings that cannot know the end or the beginning. Humans participate in the metaxy, the In-Between of existence.5 They can only be Problem of Eric Voegelin, Mystic Philosopher and Scientist,” in International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin, ed. Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L. Price (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997). As Eugene Webb points out, “Levinas shares Voegelin’s wariness of traditional scholastic metaphysics [sic]. However, in order to avoid the risk of drawing the transcendence into ontology by using the analogy of height and speaking of ‘eminence,’ Levinas prefers himself to speak of God as ‘antecedent to being’” (“Eric Voegelin at the End of an Era: Differentiations of Consciousness and the Search for the Universal,” ibid., 178n24). Because of Derrida’s forceful criticisms of Husserl, Levinas is also much more aware of the language of presence when discussing the transcendent. For additional accounts of Levinas’s writings on transcendence, see Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, Adriaan Peperzak, Platonic Transformations: With and after Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), and Pierre Hayat, “Preface: Philosophy between Totality and Transcendence,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 5. For a discussion of the metaxy in Voegelin’s thought, see William Paul Simmons, “The Platonic Metaxnv in the Writings of Eric Voegelin and Simone Weil” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1995).


known to themselves through their participation in reality; therefore, there is no human nature as such that can be observed from an objective, Archimedean point. Human existence in reality is discovered by participating in all aspects of reality. Any attempt to define human beings without including all levels of participation (divine nous, noetic psyche, passions, animal nature, vegetative nature, inorganic nature, and the apeiron) is an incomplete account.6 The specie differentia, however, of human beings is reason, or “nous,” and it is through active use of reason that we order ourselves in the cosmos. The Greek discovery of reason as an ordering force, in Voegelin’s terms, the “noetic differentiation,” was based on a constellation of experiences felt by the concrete human. These experiences include a consciousness of our ignorance in the cosmos and a feeling of being pulled toward a higher plane (of knowledge). Thus, the classic conception of reason, with its experience of ignorance and pull (helkein), demands an openness toward the divine ground (arche) of being.7 The human is In-Between life and death, or in classical terms, the human is between the divine nous and the apeiron. When philosophers discovered the noetic core of our being they also discovered our potential for immortality. No longer purely mortal, the human could, by nursing its highest nature, become immortal, as far as it is possible. As Plato writes in the Timaeus: when the human “has earnestly cultivated his love of knowledge and true wisdom, when he has primarily exercised his faculty to think immortal and divine things, he will—since in that manner he is touching the truth—become immortal of necessity, as far as it is possible for human nature to participate in immortality.”8 The human, aware of its existence in questioning unrest, is given direction by that which is divine within itself. Thus, the human feels itself drawn, as in Plato’s image of the puppet player, to pull either the golden cord of reason or the barren cords of the passions. This call for a response 6. See Eric Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” in Published Essays, 1966– 1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 12, CW (1990; available, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 267–73, 289–91, for his discussion of the synthetic nature of the human. 7. See, for example, Eric Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation,” and “Reason: The Classic Experience,” ibid. 8. Plato, Timaeus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1961), 90b.


is not a game (paignon) or morality play but the choice between life (immortality) and death (mortality). Voegelin’s philosophy emphasizes the mutual attraction between human and the divine. “Without the kinesis of being attracted by the [divine] ground, there would be no desire for it; without the desire, no questioning in confusion; without questioning in confusion, no awareness of ignorance.”9 LEVINAS’S AN-ARCHICAL ARCHE: THE ETHICS OF THE OTHER

Levinas, too, seeks to revive transcendence against the totalizing philosophies of the past two centuries. Instead of a direct relationship, either meditative or mystical, with the divine as in Voegelin, however, Levinas finds transcendence in the face-to-face relationship with the other person, the Other. The original one-to-one relationship is not antagonistic as in Hobbes’s philosophy, but ethical. In Levinas’s account, when confronted by the face of the person, the Other is no longer concerned primarily with itself, nor does it follow an abstract set of rules derived by reason. Instead, the ego is “called” by the Other to a concrete, asymmetrical, and infinite responsibility. In the confrontation with the Other, the ego (the for-itself) is called out of its autonomous lair to respond to the Other’s vulnerability. The Other assigns the for-itself to respond as a unique, irreplaceable individual. “In its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business.”10 The self is obliged to respond, as if no one else has been called. The foritself, in the face-to-face relationship, becomes for-the-Other. The ego must respond concretely to the Other: “to give, to-be-foranother, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself, is to take the bread out of one’s mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one’s own fasting.”11 “To feed” is no mere metaphor in Levinas’s writing; the ethical relation is concrete and must be “enacted with full hands.”

9. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 149. 10. Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 83. 11. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 56.


Levinas often quotes Chaim of Volzyn: “the other’s material needs are my spiritual needs.”12 Levinasian responsibility is radically for-the-Other, but it does not annihilate the ego. Without the ego, without separation, responsibility is meaningless. The self is two parts of a unicity. It is both for-itself and forthe-Other, but in Levinas’s formulation, the for-the-Other is primordial. Transcendence plays two roles in this face-to-face relationship. First, the commandment to respond to the Other’s face does not come from the realm of Being or synchronous time. Instead it comes from an immemorial past, what Levinas will call the trace of the divine. This transcendence can best be understood through a brief examination of Levinas’s distinction between “the saying” (le dire) and “the said” (le dit). The said is the realm of ontological language: it includes the speaker, the addressee, and the content of the communication. In the realm of the said, each of these can be categorized, encapsulated, brought to presence, etc. The saying, on the other hand, is the expression before the speaking, even before the speaker. It is the original, primordial relationship that Levinas “labels”“proximity” between the speaker and the addressee. Proximity defies all ontological categories. It is “otherwise than Being.” “The signification of saying goes beyond the said. It is not ontology that raises up the speaking subject; it is the signifyingness of saying going beyond essence that can justify the exposedness of being, ontology.” The ethical responsibility for the Other comes from the realm of the saying: the ego is called to respond from a pre-ontological command. “In proximity is heard a command come as though from an immemorial past, which was never present, began in no freedom.”13 Transcendence also is manifest in the response for the Other. In this response, in this disinterestedness (or, in the Levinasian parlance, “disinter-est-edness”), the ego is testifying to that which is beyond Being. Levinas writes that “saying Thou is not an aim, but precisely an allegiance to the Invisible, to the Invisible thought vigorously not only as the nonsensible, but as the unknowable and unthematizable per se, of which one can say nothing. The saying of Thou to the Invisible only opens up a 12. Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 24. See also Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 229–54. 13. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 37–38, 88.


dimension of meaning in which, contrary to all the other dimensions of thought, there occurs no recognition of being [essence] depicted in the Said.”14 To summarize, Levinas clearly differentiates his philosophy from Heidegger and Hobbes (and most of Western thought) in this way: “Heidegger says at the beginning of Being and Time that Dasein is a being who in his being is concerned for this being itself. That’s Darwin’s idea: the living being struggles for life. The aim of being is being itself. However, with the appearance of the human—and this is my entire philosophy—there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.”15 AN-ARCHICAL ARCHAI?

Earlier, it was claimed that each thinker “founds” his or her philosophies on an an-archical arche. This statement deserves some clarification because of its prima facie absurd character. Both Voegelin and Levinas are seeking to philosophize about transcendence, about that which escapes the grasp of philosophy, but is this possible? Derrida, in an early essay devoted to Levinas’s thought, claims that it is not. Derrida stresses the resilience of philosophy, or as he and Levinas label it, the Greek tradition. Only by using philosophy’s concepts can we attempt to move beyond philosophy. This attempt is doomed to fail, but it is an attempt that must be made. Derrida concludes his analysis by citing “A Greek”: “If one has to philosophize, one has to philosophize; if one does not have to philosophize, one still has to philosophize.”16 14. Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and Philosophy,” in Outside the Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 34. 15. Emmanuel Levinas et al., “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 172. Emphasis added. 16. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 152. One wonders whether Derrida has changed his tune on the possibilities of transcending philosophy. After all, his recent writings have been obsessed with the gift that he claims is the “very figure of the impossible” (Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]), 7. Based on Derrida’s analysis one could conclude that the giving of the gift, like Levinas’s proximity of the Other, must be an-archical. Derrida seems to have found a way to philosophize about that which is non-philosophical. One wonders further if his method is similar to the Levinasian method that he had critiqued so forcefully years ago.


Derrida claims that this inevitable failure to break out of the grasp of philosophy is due to the reliance on the onto-theological language of philosophy. “If one thinks, as Levinas does, that positive Infinity tolerates, or even requires, infinite alterity, then one must renounce all language, and first of all the words infinite and other.”17 Levinas and Voegelin, in their later writings, became acutely aware of this problem. In fact, many of their later works, such as Otherwise than Being and In Search of Order, can be read as attempts to rewrite their main propositions without slipping into the philosophical language of intentionality and objects or relying on arguments that are merely oppositional to ontology. Ultimately, both agree with Derrida, that philosophical language is incapable of adequately expressing the transcendent, and both find a model of this inadequacy in the “hyperousian” character of the agathon in Book 6 of Plato’s Republic. As Voegelin writes, “What is the Idea of the Agathon? The briefest answer to the question will best bring out the decisive point: Concerning the content of the Agathon nothing can be said at all. That is the fundamental insight of Platonic ethics.”18 Further, “neither an immanent world nor a transcendent being ‘exist’; rather these terms are indices that we assign to areas of reality of the primary experience.”19 So, the Good as “primary experience” can be “known” at least in a peculiar way. As Eugene Webb writes, it is known, “to the extent that it can be known at all, not as a fact in the realm of objectivity but as the mystery of a life that engages our subjectivity and makes demands on it that draw us beyond ourselves.”20 Although this transcendence cannot be grasped by philosophy, it is capable of ordering human existence through its direct effect on the human soul. Voegelin writes, “The vision of the Agathon does not render a material rule of conduct but forms the soul through an experience of transcendence.”21 Levinas’s thought also moves us to that which is beyond philosophy. The “knowledge” of the ethical relationship can be known, but not through the ontological discourse of philosophy. Instead, Levinas (and 17. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 114. 18. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. III, Plato and Aristotle, ed. Dante Germino, vol. 16, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 166. See also Webb, “Eric Voegelin at the End of an Era,” 180–81. 19. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 176. 20. Webb, “Eric Voegelin at the End of an Era,” 177. 21. Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 167.


Derrida) often uses the concept of the “trace” to show how the infinite can affect the finite without being com-prehended through ontological language. The trace refers to the approach of the Other, to the an-archical saying, that affects the objective world without leaving any imprint. Levinas qua phenomenologist follows the traces of the infinite, just as the hunter follows the traces of the game or as a detective studies fingerprints. However, this trace is an exceptional sign; it leads to a signifier who cannot be found, who in fact was never “present.” The trace is the only evidence from the perfect crime; it is unrectitude itself. The trace is accompanied by its own effacing; that is, it is wholly ab-stract, a drawing away. “To be qua leaving a trace is to pass, to depart, to absolve oneself.”22 Voegelin uses remarkably similar language when discussing the mystery of existence. He writes, “The human intentionality of the quest is surrounded by the divine mystery of the reality in which it occurs. The mystery is the horizon that draws us to advance toward it but withdraws as we advance.”23 For Levinas, the trace is an absence that was never present. It belongs to the diachronous time of saying. It is an absence, which can never be re-presented. A trace, which affects the phenomenal order, and was not present, is an unreasonable concept. It defies logic and philosophy. How is such a non-concept known? Perhaps it is only known by a “bastard reasoning,” just as Plato describes the receptacle in the Timaeus. The receptacle “is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible.”24 As beyond com-prehension the trace breaks down the sovereignty of the ego. In fact, it points to the otherwise than Being. Levinas writes, “How could one understand the conatus of being in the goodness of the Good? How in Plotinus, would the One overflow with plenitude and be a source of emanation, if the One preserved in being, if it did not signify from before or beyond being, out of proximity, that is, out of disinterestedness, out of signification, out of the-one-for-the-other?”25 According to Levinas, divinity is experienced through the trace. The enigmatic trace could not have been left by objects of this world; it is 22. Emmanuel Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 105. 23. Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” 326. 24. Plato, Timaeus, 51ab. 25. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 95.


beyond the sphere of cause and effect. The trace was left by “he” who was not caused but is origin itself. Levinas coins the term illeity, or “he”-ness, to refer to this divinity. “Illeity is the origin of the alterity of being in which the in itself of objectivity participates, while also betraying it.” In contrast to Voegelin’s formulation, this illeity is not experienced directly but by responding to the Other. “To be in the image of God does not signify being the icon of God, but to find oneself in his trace. . . . He shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33. To go toward Him is not to follow this trace which is not a sign; it is to go toward the others who stand in the trace of illeity.”26 Thus, the archai that “found” Levinas’s and Voegelin’s philosophies are, strangely enough, an-archical. In philosophical thought, an arche usually serves two functions. First, an arche is posited as a first cause or origin of the world, such as the unmoved mover in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In this way, philosophizing about an arche is an ontology, the reduction of all beings to a starting point, an origin. Archai also serve as principles that guide human affairs. In this sense, archai would include Plato’s good beyond being, Locke’s state of nature, and even Marx’s historical materialism. In this second sense, Levinas’s ethical relationship with the Other and Voegelin’s conception of the metaxy are archai. Both “foundations” offer guides for ethics and politics. However, the Voegelinian metaxy and Levinasian ethics are archai unlike most others. They are an-archical archai. The face-to-face relationship with the Other may be the principle by which to guide human actions, but it is not a first cause or an origin that can be grasped. It is a guiding principle that disturbs all first causes or origins. Indeed, Levinas’s arche undermines the very language of first causes. As Levinas claims, the obsession of the Other “undoes thematization, and escapes any principle, origin, will, or arche, which are put forth in every ray of consciousness.”27 To summarize, according to Levinas and Voegelin, the transcendent affects the immanent world of ethics and politics, but it cannot be grasped by philosophy. In his memorable formulation, Levinas said, “No philosopher (qua philosopher) has ever stood there [on Mount Sinai].” Levinas responds to Derrida, “It is not always true that not-to-philosophize is 26. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 359. 27. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 101.


still to philosophize. The forcefulness of the break with ethics does not evidence a mere slackening of reason, but rather a questioning of the validity of philosophizing which cannot lapse again into philosophy.”28

Voegelin’s Ontology of Ethics Levinas’s phenomenology of the Other is obviously the “foundation” for his ethical writings; but not as apparent is that Voegelin’s conception of the metaxy and the good beyond being serves as a “foundation” for his ethical thought or, in his terms, an ontology of ethics. This section examines this often neglected aspect of Voegelin’s philosophy by focusing on Voegelin’s 1963 essay “Right by Nature” in which Voegelin offers a unique reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to derive an ethical thought that can best be described as a fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian ethics.29 Voegelin’s main antagonists in this essay are those who have hypostatized natural law into an “object” that is used to claim universal and eternal norms of conduct. To counter this tendency, Voegelin attempts to retrieve the experiential origins of the Aristotelian symbol “right by nature.” In so doing, he re-discovers an ethics grounded in individual experience that is both transcendent and immanent. In the first section of the essay Voegelin unpacks and contextualizes one of the most difficult passages in Aristotle’s works of practical philosophy, Book 5, section 7, of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle distinguishes 28. Emmanuel Levinas, “Ideology and Idealism,” in The Levinas Reader, 247, 238. 29. Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, trans. M. J. Hanak, ed. David Walsh, vol. 6, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 140–56. For an excellent discussion of Voegelin’s essay and his critique of natural law see David A. Nordquest, “Voegelin and Dogmatism: The Case of Natural Law,” Modern Age 41, no. 1 (1999): 32–40. By emphasizing the exegesis of Jeremiah, Baird, in “Eric Voegelin’s Vision of Personalism and Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics of Responsibility,” 385–403, gives too much credit to mercy, justice, and righteousness in Voegelin’s philosophy. In Levinas’s terms, Voegelin’s ethics strikes me as much more Greek or Aristotelian than Hebraic. In other words, it is based more on reciprocity than on an asymmetric response to the concrete Other. Voegelin’s analyses of Aristotle’s ethical and political writings are also disregarded by Aaron L. Mackler, “Universal Being and Ethical Particularity in the Hebrew Bible: A Jewish Response to Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation,” Journal of Religion 79 (1999): 19–53. Although the account in this paper stresses the noetic differentiation of Plato and Aristotle, Voegelin often wrote of the pneumatic differentiation of the Christian vision. The differences between the visions stem from the different questions in relation to the divine presence (see Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” 367–71).


justice by nature and justice by convention. First, Aristotle claims that, unlike popular opinion, there is a justice by nature, which “has the same force everywhere and does not depend on what we regard or do not regard as just.” However, Aristotle seems to quickly contradict himself when he writes that justice by nature is changeable (kineton): “in our world, although there is such a thing as natural justice, all rules of justice are variable (kineton).”30 To resolve this seeming contradiction and to understand the relationship between justice and the changeable (kineton), Voegelin first places this passage in the context of the discussion of justice from Politics. From this analysis it becomes apparent that Aristotle’s conception of physei dikaion only refers to the justice found in the ideal polis, that is, a polis made up of free and equal citizens ruled by nomos and not man. Since Aristotle’s physei dikaion only refers to the ideal polis, the one that is right by nature, Voegelin writes, “there can be no natural law conceived as an eternal, immutable, universally valid normativity confronting the changeable positive law. This is so because the justice of the polis, its nomos, insofar it constitutes the rule of law among men free and equal, is itself right by nature.”31 The ideal poleis of Aristotle and Plato did not develop in an intellectual vacuum; rather, they were the cravings of philosophers, conscious of the metaxical structure of reality, searching for order to counteract the prevailing disorder of their times. The “problem” of what is right by nature is not universal but is only known by the person who is open to the divine. Therefore, the measure of ethical action is the mature man (spoudaios) who is “himself as it were the standard and measure of the noble and pleasant.”32 Aristotle continues with what might be a surprising claim to many, that concrete actions “possess a higher degree of truth” than do universal principles. In this context, Voegelin introduces his phrase “the ontology of ethics.” At first glance, it seems that an ethics based on concrete facts and not grounded on some sort of ultimate “being” is precisely not ontological. Nonetheless, Voegelin can write of an ontology of ethics because ethics is based on an individual person’s participation in concrete 30. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1134b8, 1134b20, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 31. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 58–59; Aristotle, Politics 1253a38, in Basic Works. 32. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1113b3.


existence. Ethics is known, not in the abstract, but in concrete action — but only through the concrete action of the spoudaios, who is the person who participates in the metaxy, with his or her soul ordered by the transcendent. Voegelin characterizes Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics: “there would be no end of deliberation, he thinks, if reasons after reasons were to be considered and the deliberating reason (nous) did not have an absolute origin and beginning (arche) of its reasoning—the beginning of God. The reasoning about concrete action is part of a movement in being, which issues from God and ends in human action. Just as God moves (kinei) everything in the universe, the divine also moves all things in us.” So, now we see another meaning of ethics being changeable (kineton). Ethics is discovered in the soul of the person who “is moved cosmically by the cause of all movement.”33 Aristotle uses the term phronesis to refer to the existential virtue of the spoudaios that “translates” the wisdom of the ordering of man into concrete action. The human, at its highest, partakes in “a form of existence that ambiguously oscillates between the primary experience of the cosmos, transcendental orientation, and immanent purposes.”34 The mediation between transcendence and immanence is concretely played out in the soul of the spoudaios. A similar oscillation between transcendence and immanence must be played out in Levinas’s and Voegelin’s politics.

The “Foundations” of Politics What role does their an-archical archai play in their political thought? The most noticeable role is as a criticism of deformed regimes. By insisting on transcendent “foundations,” Voegelin and Levinas have developed a “trans-historical” standard that can be used to judge regimes. Voegelin often invites the reader to play the “parlor game” of placing different ideologies and philosophies into his comprehensive “realm of man.” Those that fail to take into account some aspect of the synthetic nature of the human are accused of being gnostic, second realities, etc. For example, a legitimate politics cannot look merely to corporeal nature, as Voegelin claims Hobbes and Locke did. Levinas refers to this ability to judge 33. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 63, 64. 34. Ibid., 66.


trans-historically as a “return to Platonism.” For him, this Platonism is epitomized by the agathon of Book 6 of the Republic, which serves as a transcendental standard by which to judge humans and regimes. Levinas writes, “To state that the Other, revealed by the visage, is the first intelligible, before all cultures with their alluviums and allusions, is to affirm also the independence of ethics with regard to history. . . . It is a return to Platonism.”35 Can a positive political thought be found in their writings? The answer to this question hinges upon the possibility of heeding the call of the transcendent and realizing it in the immanent world of the political. This oscillation between the transcendent and the immanent for each is played out in the concrete individual human being. For Voegelin, it is the mature man who is pulled toward the divine; for Levinas, it is the ego that is pulled out of itself by the infinitude of the Other. This crucial difference will be the point of diversion for their political thought. Grounding an immanent order on an an-archical arche poses some unique problems. Such a “foundation” cannot be known, is difficult to express, difficult to explain, and difficult to codify. Therefore, it is especially difficult for use in creating a positive politics. Most people have the potential to “perceive” the arche but will refuse to do so. Therefore, attempts to point out the “obvious” will likely fail. Alternative means are necessary. Voegelin will bank on the residue of noesis, what Thomas Reid called “common-sense,” while Levinas will rely on the examples of the saintly. For each, education and coercion will have to play a role for those who refuse to heed common sense or follow the examples of the saints. In addition, each will rely on the insights of Aristotelian politics. VOEGELIN’S POLITICAL THOUGHT

Any elaboration of Voegelin’s political thought will have to take into account the existential tension of reality in the metaxy, the measure of ethical action in the person of the spoudaios, and the existential virtue of phronesis. Therefore, the basics of a Voegelinian political thought must be found in Aristotelian political science. Voegelin points out that Aristotelian political science is not complete, however, so we need something much more comprehensive than the ancient Greek experience. Voegelin 35. Peperzak, Platonic Transformations, 121.


lists several limitations of classical political theory: 1) classical noesis is bound by the political reality of the polis; 2) “the question of a society of spiritual substance detaching itself from the decaying organized society is not pushed to the point of a theory of spiritual revolution and society”; 3) “the experience of universal humankind is not embodied in suitable symbolic expression”; 4) the classical philosophers are not aware of the subsequent pneumatic differentiation “expressed in prophesy, metastatic faith, apocalypse, and gnosis”; and finally, 5) they did not experience the rebellion, mass movements, and philosophies of history that pervade the modern disorders of consciousness.36 Voegelin’s political thought does adhere to Aristotle’s proposition that in the practical sciences, specific actions have more truth than general theories. In fact, “there are no principles of political science, because there are no propositions. Rather, the ‘propositions’ of political science are common-sense insights into correct modes of action concerning man’s existence in society.”37 These common-sense insights will include the necessity for a separation of powers, specific decision-making rules, and the relative strengths of the state and federal government; but these insights are bound by the time and place of history. These are not universal rules for all poleis throughout history. But “if we go beyond the commonsense level we get to the insights into order of consciousness, by which commonsense insights receive their direction.” These political insights, again, are not universal rules but the insights of the individual conscious of the hierarchy of being, including its place in the metaxy. These insights are not even societal truths; rather, they are discovered in the realm of individual people responding to the transcendent. So in any type of society, the best that can be hoped for is a small group of free and equal mature men (spoudaioi) who will be the politically dominant group. This group will best “actualize the ethical and dianoetic excellences in their persons.” This group will be bound by philia, in the specific sense of an existential virtue, that only spoudaioi are capable of possessing. Human beings cannot participate in philia unless they are in agreement with themselves, and this agreement involves a proper ordering of the self toward the divine nous. Thus, “the specifically human order of society is the order created through the participation of 36. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 207 ff. 37. Ibid., 210 ff.


man in the divine nous; just order in society will be realized to the degree in which the potentiality of noetic order becomes actualized in the souls of men who live in society.”38 Voegelin was well aware of the Platonic lesson that “men having reason” will not always be in power, but this does not necessarily leave a retreat to a quietism or monasticism to save philosophy from the heathens. Voegelin finds hope for the polis in Thomas Reid’s discussion of common sense. According to Voegelin, for most people the highest form of reason is common sense, which he defines as “the habit of an Aristotelian spoudaios with lesser luminosity of his knowledge of the ratio as the source of his rational judgment and conduct.”39 This common sense can be developed through education. However, teaching should be done not by coercion but by persuasion (peitho). Peitho is only effective when it is in the direction that a person wants to go; and by nature, people are drawn, by eros, to the beautiful and the good. Thus, society must nurture this desire in the individual through education. LEVINAS’S MOVE TO POLITICS: THE THIRD

Levinas moves from the an-archical ethics for the Other to the realm of politics with his phenomenology of the third person, the Third.40 In the “eyes of the Other” the ego is confronted, not only with the Other, but with the Third, who also demands an infinite responsibility from the ego. All of humanity, all “Thirds” demand a concrete and infinite response from the ego. “Then comes the question, the political question: Who’s the first?”41 With his phenomenology of the Third, Levinas moves 38. Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 385, 375. 39. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 212. 40. For more elaborate discussions of the Third and Levinas’s politics, see William Paul Simmons, “The Third: Levinas’ Theoretical Move from An-Archical Ethics to the Realm of Justice and Politics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, no. 6 (September 1999): 85–106; William Paul Simmons, “Zionism, Place, and the Other: Toward a Levinasian International Relations,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 7, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 21–26; Roger Burggraeve, “The Ethical Basis for a Humane Society according to Emmanuel Levinas,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 57 (1982): fasc. 1, 5–57; and Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 41. Emmanuel Levinas and Florian Rötzer, “Emmanuel Levinas,” in Conversations with French Philosophers, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 59–60.


from the one-to-one relationship based on transcendence to the immanent world of justice, politics, consciousness, intentionality, and even egoism. “Here is the hour and birthplace of the question: a demand for justice! Here is the obligation to compare unique and incomparable others; here is the hour of knowledge and, then, of the objectivity beyond or on the hither side of the nudity of the face; here is the hour of consciousness and intentionality.”42 When confronted by the Third, the ego can no longer prioritize those in proximity; it must give attention to all. In order to respond concretely to all Others, especially those far away, the ego must rely on political institutions. Further, political institutions and the scales of justice are needed to weigh these in-finite responsibilities. And when one Other makes war on another Other, the ego must defend the Other against attacks from anOther. The ego must use violence, even, perhaps, in extreme cases, kill an-Other in defense of the Other. Levinas sees the necessity of the state, but the state must be constantly reminded of the inherent violence it does to the incomparable Other. Levinas finds just such a self-critical state in the modern liberal state. The liberal state “always asks itself whether its own justice really is justice.” The liberal state must always be held accountable by the original ethical relationship with the Other. Even in the perfectly functioning liberal society, injustice will remain. There will be those who are ignored by the machinations of institutional politics; and in its dispensation of justice, the state is merciless. The face-to-face relationship with the Other can soften the verdict. “Once justice has been rendered, there is in fact a moment of personal contact which can soften the penalty, or the pain of it: it can soften the cruel, or the hard side of justice.”43 Although the Third universalizes the an-archical relationship with the Other, it does not supplant the original ethical relationship. Instead, there is a never-ending oscillation between ethics and politics.44 Both ethics and politics must have their own justifications. The justification for ethics 42. Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 106. 43. Emmanuel Levinas and Raoul Mortley, “Emmanuel Levinas,” in French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1991), 19. 44. Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 233– 49, 263–75.


is found in the face-to-face relationship with the Other. The justification for politics is to restrain those who follow Cain’s position and ignore the responsibility for the Other. Politics does not subsume ethics but rather serves ethics. The world of institutions and impersonal justice must be held in check by the an-archical responsibility for the Other. Levinas calls for an oscillation between the an-archical ethics of the Other and the totalizing world of justice and politics. Levinas sees the real possibility of a progressive liberal society; a society that constantly aims to improve its institutions, or, in Derrida’s phrase, “a democracy-to-come.” Such a society always works toward the ethical in order to balance the violence of institutions. Derrida writes, “when I speak of a ‘democracy to come’ I don’t mean a future democracy, a new regime, a new organization of nation-states (although this may be hoped for) but I mean this ‘to come’: the promise of an authentic democracy which is never embodied in what we call democracy.”45 Such a democracy will only be possible by individuals heeding the transcendent responsibility for the Other and serving as examples for others. “Yes, there is a possible harmony between ethics and the state. The just state will come from just men and woman and saints rather than from propaganda and preaching.”46

The Christian, the Judaic, and the Greek: Voegelin, Levinas, and the Political Both Voegelin and Levinas rely on the Greek world of Aristotle for their political thought. This is readily apparent in Voegelin’s exegesis of the Nicomachean Ethics, but it is also part and parcel of Levinas’s move to the Third. With the Third comes the world of comparison; the Other is now seen as a member of a species. As Levinas writes, “from this moment on, I think of the other in the genre. I am Greek, it is Greek thought. The thought of comparison, of judgment, the attributes of the subject, in short the entire terminology of Greek logic and Greek politics 45. Jacques Derrida, “Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida,” 6, Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex, December 1, 1997, http:// www.susx.ac.uk/Units/frenchthought/derrida.htm. 46. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” in Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 120.


appear.”47 Although both rely on the formulations of the Greeks for their political thought, both agree that there is something even more primordial; there is something that transcends practical science. It is the route to transcendence on which to “found” this Greek politics that remains the most pronounced distinction between Voegelin’s and Levinas’s thought. For Voegelin it lies in individual attunement to the divine ground of being; for Levinas transcendence is “found” in responding to the ethical face of the Other. It can be argued that this distinction is due to the difference between the “Christianity” of Voegelin and the “Judaism” of Levinas. Levinas makes a sharp distinction in his writings between Judaism and Christianity. According to Levinas this distinction is based on the route to transcendence. He was once asked, Is morality possible without God? Levinas replied: “I answer with a question: is divinity possible without relation to a human Other? . . . The direct encounter with God, this is a Christian concept. As Jews, we are always a threesome: I and you and the Third who is in our midst. And only as a Third does He reveal Himself.”48 Earlier in the same question-and-answer session he had said, “The passage from the Other to divinity is a second step, and one must be careful to avoid stumbling by taking too large a step.”49 For Levinas, though, the terms Christianity and Judaism serve as symbols or metaphors. Thus, he is able to find many Jewish moments in Christianity. On the practical level, one Jewish moment was found in Catholic churches offering asylum to the Jews during the Holocaust. Scripturally, the Jewish moments include Matthew 25, where God seems to be known through the good deeds done for the poor. For Levinas, however, Christianity, purged of its Jewish moments, is left “merely” as a religion of faith, a religion of the individual, a religion that “prefers the joy of solitary salvation.”50 For those who are unhappy with Levinas’s simplification of Christianity, Voegelin has been accused of missing the boat on Judaism. Mackler, for example, argues that Voegelin’s reading of Judaism in Order and History is through a Christian lens. While Voegelin does an impressive job of analyzing the background sources for the Old Testament, he “fails at 47. Levinas and Mortley, “Emmanuel Levinas,” 18. 48. Levinas, “Ideology and Idealism,” 247. 49. Ibid., 246. 50. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 101.


times to sufficiently appreciate both particular religions, such as Judaism, and particular persons and their ethical responsibilities for particular neighbors.”51 In short, Voegelin overemphasizes personal faith in Judaism and underemphasizes the ethical responsibility for the Other. To clarify this distinction between Judaism and Christianity, Levinas often told a story about Hannah Arendt. The Christians attach great importance to what they call faith, mystery, sacrament. Here is an anecdote on that subject. Hannah Arendt, not long before she died, told the following story on French radio. When she was a child in her native Konigsberg, one day she said to the rabbi who was teaching her religion: “You know, I have lost my faith.” And the Rabbi responded: “Who’s asking you for it?” The response was typical. What matters is not “faith”, but doing. Doing which means moral behavior, of course, but also the performance of ritual. . . . What do we believe with? With the whole body! With all my bones (Psalm 35:10)! What the rabbi meant was: “Doing good is the act of belief itself.”52

This distinction between “Christian” faith and “Jewish” ethics has important political consequences. By beginning with the ethical responsibility for the Other, Levinas is theoretically able to make more positive contributions to politics; and yet, neither thinker discusses specific political proposals in detail. Nevertheless, the key difference in their political thought is the imperative of politics. For Levinas, political institutions must be created to reach the concrete third person and these institutions must be held in check by the ethical responsibility for the Other. Levinas knows that a perfect politics will never be achieved, but the individual must work toward what he labels a messianism or an eschatology, or, in Derrida’s terms, a “democracy-to-come.” Individuals must work toward improving the world, toward concretely changing the world. As Peperzak says, “My responsibility for you extends itself necessarily to all human others; it implies my responsibility for social justice and worldwide peace.”53 It is on this point that there is much debate among Voegelinian scholars, stemming from ambiguity in Voegelin’s own writings. At what point 51. Mackler, “Universal Being and Ethical Particularity in the Hebrew Bible,” 20. 52. Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Christianity,” in In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 164. 53. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 167.


does “changing the world” become a gnostic forgetting of the In-Between nature of existence? Is there a distinction to be made between seeking to respond to the face of the Other and a gnostic reconstruction of reality? Was Levinas a gnostic who forgot about the limits of human participation in the metaxy? John Ranieri does an excellent job of seeking a standard by which to answer these questions in Voegelin’s writings. While many of Voegelin’s critics and some of his students have claimed for Voegelin a sort of quietism, Ranieri convincingly points out that Voegelin would usually not settle for a withdrawal from the world. Ranieri quotes Voegelin: “What do we have to offer by way of guidance or leadership in this world-wide transformation of society? The answer is: everything and nothing. We know what the life of reason and the good society are; we can cultivate the former and try, by our actions, to bring about the latter. We can restate the problem: the formation of the psyche by encouraging participation in transcendent reason. . . . And that is all one can do; whether or not this offer is accepted depends on the Spirit that blows where It pleases. Collectively, as a society, there is at the moment little, if anything, we can do.”54 While Voegelin is not embracing quietism, in this passage there is nothing of Levinas’s urgency to change the world. Levinas’s thought, on the other hand, demands that the transcendental be translated into the political. Moreover, Levinas, by deriving politics from the original ethical relationship, has created a permanent theoretical bond between ethics and politics. Politics must answer to ethics. For Voegelin, on the other hand, ethics and politics both receive their justification from the individual’s existential participation in the metaxy. Ethics and politics can sever their ties in good faith. This is most apparent in Voegelin’s discussion of the dropping of the atomic bomb to end World War II. He said, “An atomic bombardment is not a moral matter but depends on politics and questions of existence. And when a social process is involved, we 54. Voegelin, quoted in John J. Ranieri, Eric Voegelin and the Good Society (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 201. Emphasis added. Compare “The Vocation of the Scholar,” 19–20: “It is therefore obvious that a ‘Geschichtsstufe’ that explicates itself by the Christian ‘language of the Gods’ can no longer serve as the spiritual foundation of a modern philosophy of politics. . . . Voegelin is, however, reminiscent of the Platonic paradigm in that the Voegelinian science offers a paradigm of the city that is perhaps ‘laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen.’” See, for example, James V. Schall, “Transcendence and Political Philosophy,” Review of Politics 55, no. 2 (1993): 247–65.


cannot, in the name of morality, refuse to use certain types of weapons and make certain types of decisions.”55 Such an embrace of a Thucydidean realpolitik would be abhorrent to Levinas, who claims that “for men purely as men, independently of all religious consideration issuing from a denomination and a set of beliefs, the meaning of the human, between peoples as between persons, is exhausted neither in the political necessities that hold it bound nor in the sentiments that release that hold.”56 Finally, the distinction between the “Judaism” of Levinas and the “Christianity” of Voegelin is apparent in their motives for moving from the transcendent to the immanent. For Voegelin, the purpose of education is not necessarily to improve the material conditions of the world, but rather to orient the souls of the “students” toward the transcendent. For Levinas, on the other hand, the purpose of education and politics is twofold: to protect the life of the Other and to respond to Other(s) in a material way.

Conclusion and Suggestions for Furthering the Dialogue Voegelin often made predictions about a “revolution in the human sciences,” and there is abundant evidence to suggest that this change is occurring. Voegelin wrote, “One can say that we are living in one of the great epochs of Western science. . . . Future historians may well date the spiritual and intellectual regeneration of the West from this flowering of science.”57 By this Voegelin meant that there would be a reawakening of the transcendent and a realization of human existence in the metaxy, and after a century of Marxism, Nietzscheanism, existentialism, and behaviorism, there seems to be a growing consensus of the proper place of the human in the cosmos. This is all the more remarkable when we consider how iconoclastic Voegelin’s Order and History and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity seemed when they were first published in the Cold War era. Now even Derrida has embraced Levinas’s formulations on transcendence. Even more surprising, a sense of skepticism and fallibility

55. Voegelin, quoted ibid., 185. 56. Emmanuel Levinas, “Politics After!” in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 189. 57. Voegelin, “Ersatz Religion,” 5–6.


has emerged in the natural sciences. We have lost a sense of radicality, of grandiose visions. In addition, the world we live in has changed; most noticeably, the Cold War mentality of “us versus them,” a world of stark dichotomies, has faded. If Aristotle is correct that political justice is kineton (changeable), then how must our political philosophies change to fit the multipolar times? Levinasians need to answer the question, what is the “definition” of politics in a transcendental world? Levinas has recently been criticized for denigrating the political, for reducing politics to social Darwinism or the war of all against all of Hobbes. Levinas wrote at the beginning of Totality and Infinity, “Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naivete.”58 Is politics, left to itself, war? Or is there an “ethical” moment in politics itself? The question is not whether the greatest good can be achieved through a marketplace of ideas or if each pursuing their own self-interest will lead to a stable polis à la Madison, but whether something like a community can be established that does not stem from the ethical face-to-face relationship with the Other. Levinas, writing in reaction to wars, revolutions, and pogroms of the twentieth century, had reason to denigrate the political. But is there something between radical ethics and radical politics? and if there is, how does this modify Levinas’s move from ethics to politics?59 A second question that might lead to a further dialogue between Voegelin and Levinas is suggested by Eugene Webb’s recent essay on the uses of Voegelin’s thought in a multipolar world. Webb argues that Voegelin’s writings were influenced by the milieu in which Voegelin was writing, namely, a bipolar world based on the agon between “good” and “evil.” According to Webb, this bipolarity is an inevitable part of the myth-making process. Myths determine who we are by providing us with a sense of self-identity. During the bipolar era of the Cold War, this mythic struggle was necessary; but now, with “multiple polarizations,” “the mythic vision will become increasingly dangerous.”60 Now is the time 58. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21. 59. This is the gist of the questions posed by David Wood in “The Old and the New” (talk presented at Levinas conference, “Addressing Levinas: Ethics, Phenomenology, and the Judaic Tradition,” Emory University, Atlanta, 1999). John Drabinski quite correctly calls for a radical (Levinasian) phenomenology of the political sphere to provide a more balanced and nuanced account of the political. Drabinski, “The Possibility of an Ethical Politics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 26, no. 4 (June 2000): 49–73. 60. Webb, “Eric Voegelin at the End of an Era,” 161–62.


to demythologize this polarizing effect. At this point, Levinas’s thought, especially as it has been interpreted recently by Derrida, through the lens of hospitality and the gift, may be very helpful.61 Does not hospitality when it is seen as the an-archical welcoming of the stranger break down the mythic polarizations of “us and them”?

61. In fact, there have been several recent scholarly attempts to address the concept of hospitality. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas; Jacques Derrida et al., “Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999); and Thomas W. Ogletree, Hospitality to the Stranger: Dimensions of Moral Understanding (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).

5 Politics, Metaphysics, and Anti-Foundationalism in the Works of Eric Voegelin and Jan Patocˇka EDWARD F. FINDLAY

I

n 1953 the philosopher Jan Patocˇ ka wrote and privately circulated a manuscript entitled “Negative Platonism: Reflections concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics—and Whether Philosophy Can Survive It.” Despite being the foremost Czech thinker of the day, Patocˇ ka had been barred from publication by the recently installed communist government. His essay on metaphysics began by contending that current philosophical thought was ruled by “the sense that the metaphysical phase of philosophy has come to an end and that we are living at the end of a grand era, or perhaps even after its end.”1 The prevailing paradigm, in other words, evoked a post-metaphysical age. Yet it was not modern philosophy that had finally made metaphysics irrelevant, despite its claim to that effect. Enlightenment humanism, positivism, Hegelianism—all were guilty of simply transferring the goals of metaphysics to the realm of human reason. So when the Czech philosopher reflected on the rise and fall of metaphysics, his inquiry had to do, not with the modern, but with the postmodern. With “Negative Platonism,” Patocˇ ka sought the precise nature of that which postmodernism 1. Jan Patocˇ ka, “Negative Platonism: Reflections concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics — and Whether Philosophy Can Survive It,” in Jan Patocˇ ka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. Erazim Kohak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 175.

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had finally overcome. What exactly do we mean by metaphysics, he asked, and could philosophy survive its demise? At roughly the same time as Patocˇ ka was considering these questions in the stultifying air of communist censorship, the émigré philosopher Eric Voegelin had begun a course of analysis that would lead to similar reflections. Voegelin also sought the essence of metaphysics, the urge that led humans to seek to understand that which transcended them. Like Patocˇ ka, Voegelin knew that a genuine understanding of metaphysics must recognize that the human experience of transcendence could not be grounded in the existence of a second realm, a “transcendental” reality beyond our own that served as an objective model for humans to imitate or, even better, appropriate. It was the misunderstanding of our relationship to the transcendent, as well as the misguided attempt to banish metaphysics from philosophy, that was at the root of not only the philosophical crises of the twentieth century but also the political crises. The failure to understand the nature of that which limits him, which conditions his freedom, has led man toward the most destructive political movements of modern history. A genuine attempt to deal with the philosophical and the political problems of the age, then, required that we not accede to the death of metaphysics but instead investigate its essence, its experiential core. This investigation, in turn, demanded an examination of the central component of metaphysics: the concept of transcendence. An awareness and understanding of transcendence as something non-propositional and non-objective, Voegelin and Patocˇ ka both argue, must be renewed in human consciousness. Yet what, exactly, is meant by the invocation of transcendence, if not a second, objectively metaphysical realm of being? This essay will answer this question through a critical comparison of Voegelin’s and Patocˇ ka’s analyses of the problem of a metaphysical foundation for human reality. While each philosopher argues for resuscitating transcendence without descending into propositional, or “positive,” metaphysics, they each approach the problem from distinctly different perspectives. Though they seek the same goal, Voegelin and Patocˇ ka favor competing approaches, for they differ distinctly in how they evaluate the classical philosophical tradition that gave birth to metaphysical philosophy. Specifically, they disagree over what in the classical philosophical tradition

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should be criticized and what should be defended and salvaged from misinterpretation and misuse. Voegelin argues that the content of classical and medieval philosophy is not metaphysical in the reductive or foundational way it is often said to be (by postmodernists, in particular); he thereby seeks to “restore” the principles of classical science for use in the contemporary era. Patocˇ ka, on the other hand, relies on principles developed in the contemporary period (by Husserl and Heidegger, principally) in order to restore the “spirit” of classical thought without getting enmeshed in its specific doctrines. Patocˇ ka’s approach can be characterized loosely as a contemporary perspective that embraces the classical, while Voegelin reflects a classical perspective informed by the contemporary critique of metaphysics. Yet Patocˇ ka’s direct invocation of the anti-metaphysical principles that underlie postmodernism, it is important to note, does not contradict Voegelin’s more subtle and complex interpretation of classical texts. By illuminating the problem of transcendence in the work of these two thinkers, then, we will find that Patocˇ ka offers to Voegelin scholars a reason to consider more seriously contemporary, even postmodern, philosophy, and that Voegelin may persuade postmodernists to again pick up the classical works they long ago discarded. Both Voegelin and Patocˇ ka want to excavate the experiential depths of the concept of metaphysics. Part and parcel of this effort is the explication and rejection of metaphysical reductionism, meaning the reduction of the reality of transcendence into a metaphysical system that takes on the form of concrete knowledge. Voegelin is convinced that the ancient and medieval philosophers are, by and large, not guilty of metaphysical reductionism, and so he explains precisely just how the symbolisms of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, and others are to be understood — i.e., as reflecting the human condition of fundamental uncertainty, the view of life as a quest. Patocˇ ka, in contrast, finds that metaphysical reductionism begins with Plato (and Democritus). Unlike Voegelin, Patocˇ ka differentiates between a Socratic mode of action that is non-metaphysical, and a more “positive” Platonic vision that contains the seeds of a metaphysical system —seeds that provided the ground for the metaphysical philosophies that have characterized Western thought since Plato. While Plato himself resisted a concretized metaphysics, his doctrines are responsible for creating a foundation for the descent into the systematization of metaphysics that followed. Metaphysical systems have characterized


Western thought since Plato; even as it turned toward Enlightenment rationalism and positivism, philosophy in the West retained the image of metaphysical reductionism. For Patocˇ ka, then, the place to start is not with an exegesis of Plato’s doctrines as experiential and non-reductive (which Voegelin undertakes); instead, one must single out Socrates, who represents a mode of life and activity that epitomizes the philosophical pursuit of truth prior to its decline into metaphysics. With his attempt to define a distinctly Socratic mode, Patocˇ ka seeks to retain the essence of Platonic philosophy (as the experiential analysis of reality that Voegelin describes) yet sets into starker contrast than Voegelin a point of rupture, a point when philosophy began to decline into a caricature of itself (in propositional form). Classic Platonic philosophy therefore contains both the spirit of Western civilization—in Socrates and the form of the polis—and the seeds of its decline. Voegelin, in contrast, defends the Platonic symbolism and characterizes the decline of philosophy into propositional thinking as largely a modern phenomenon. Patocˇ ka’s characterization of Socrates and “Negative Platonism” is therefore an alternative to Voegelin that is not a defense of classical philosophy so much as an interpretation that ties the insight of Socrates to contemporary analysis. What Patocˇ ka attempts is a recovery of classical insight—with its crucial connection to the foundations of politics and ethics in the West—via contemporary analysis. The result is a theory of politics that offers the possibility of foundational order without foundationalism. It is closer to the postmodern than Voegelin, yet it fulfills Voegelin’s most fundamental requirement: it recognizes the reality of transcendence in human life and the political significance of our recognition of its fundamental character. To demonstrate this point, let us first take up Voegelin’s understanding of metaphysical reality, which he presents succinctly in the late essay “The Beginning and the Beyond,” and then turn to Jan Patocˇ ka’s “Negative Platonism” and its depiction of Socrates and of metaphysics.

Voegelin’s “Beyond”: The Reality of Transcendence, Not a Transcendent Reality The contemporary reader of Voegelin, in all likelihood, will be struck upon first reading by the author’s self-confident use of language that in-


vokes a metaphysical reality, as in the contention that the human psyche exists in tension toward the “divine ground of being.”2 A contemporary reader may further assume that a theorist who posits the “divine” as an eternal pole of human reality should be classified as metaphysical, as a thinker who believes in a transcendental reality as the objective foundation for our moral and philosophical self-understanding. A careful reading, though, will dispel this misperception and show that Voegelin is in fact a critic of metaphysical foundationalism. The basis for this conclusion can be found throughout Voegelin’s writings; to delineate precisely what Voegelin means when he invokes divine reality, however, it will suffice to focus on his analysis in “The Beginning and the Beyond.” This important essay, unpublished during the author’s lifetime, analyzes the human “quest” for understanding but also contains a precise “meditation” on the content of the object of that understanding: the “divine Beyond.” When Voegelin uses metaphysical language in this way, he is not ignorant of the controversy over “metaphysics” that pervades contemporary thought. To the contrary, he is acutely aware of the historical efforts to free philosophy of the deadening effects of foundationalism — the tendency to transform metaphysical symbolism into foundational doctrines. The problem with the historical reaction to metaphysical foundationalism, as Voegelin sees it, was that it did not help to clarify the human experience that originally prompted the use of divine symbolism but instead led to a blanket rejection of not only the symbolism but also the experience that engendered it. In this way, modern reason, with its disavowal of metaphysical bases for human understanding, shut itself off from human experience in as dogmatic a way as had the propositional metaphysics that it sought to replace. Voegelin writes, The appearance of the term ontology in particular marks a phase in the Western effort to extricate philosophy from its bondage to a dogma that had degenerated, in the wake of the Reformation disputes about a true theology, to the conception of an autonomous doctrine. This effort was necessary, and it is still necessary today, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth 2. Eric Voegelin, “The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth,” in What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, vol. 28, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter, CW) (1990; available, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 184.

150 / Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns centuries it miscarried with unfortunate consequences. Although ever since Locke one of the declared purposes of the effort was the recovery of experience, the experiential basis of symbolic language, “metaphysical” or “theological,” was in fact not recovered. On the contrary, the effort threw out, together with the degenerative doctrinism of the fides, the ratio fidei that had been Anselm’s concern, without regaining even the erotic tension toward the divine ground that had been the moving force in the noetic quest of Plato and Aristotle. As a result, far from recovering the reason of the quest, the effort set “reason” free to become the instrument for “rationalizing” the ideological irrationality of doctrinalizing experiences of alienation.3

Voegelin, then, starts from the contention that traditional metaphysical philosophies had, in many instances, lost touch with human experience by becoming enmeshed in an attempt to turn symbolism into doctrine. Enlightenment philosophies that reacted to this phenomenon, however, made matters worse by excluding all experience of transcendence from the practice of reason. Drawing on this argument, we can delineate three aims in Voegelin’s essay: first, clarifying the nature of the transcendent or “divine” element of the human experience (as something non-objective and therefore not subject to propositional or systematic argumentation); second, renewing the correct understanding of the classical and medieval philosophers who, in most cases, understood transcendence (as experiential); and third, critiquing those modern philosophies that responded to the dogmatization of the divine by eliminating transcendence from their purview altogether. Although much of Voegelin’s work is concerned with the second and third tasks (and with the various philosophical and political “derailments” that resulted from the reduction of the scope of modern reason), this essay will focus primarily on the first task. To pin down Voegelin’s sense of the divine Beyond I need to clarify his contention that our understanding of it has been distorted. The Beyond, in Voegelin’s usage, is a symbol for the experience of transcendence inherent to human consciousness. Consciousness, he argues, is structured in terms of experiences that belong to the material world, but 3. Ibid., 198. Voegelin precedes these remarks by noting that “the term ontology, meaning a ‘science of being,’ was devised as a more precise synonym for metaphysics; this latter term had been introduced by Saint Thomas into the Western languages in order to denote the conceptual area of the transcendentia” (197).


also in terms of experiences that transcend that world.4 Thus we speak of a body and of a soul, of a mortal and of a divine. For Voegelin, the greatest philosophers have expressed human experience in terms of symbols and analysis that reflect two poles of reality: an immanent pole and a transcendent pole. The contemporary controversy over metaphysical foundationalism is evidence of a significant distortion of these concepts. The nature of this distortion becomes clear as Voegelin examines the modern understanding of the term transcendent and compares it to the concept as it was understood when it first became a part of the philosophical lexicon, in ancient Greece. “I have deliberately spoken of the Beyond as the ‘transcendent’ pole of the experience in order to bring the problem arising from the ‘modern’ use, or misuse, of the term transcendence to attention. For in today’s conventional usage we let ‘transcendent’ refer to a divine reality beyond the reality of a de-divinized ‘world.’”5 The modern misunderstanding consists in this: that when modern thinkers refer to “divine reality” or the “transcendent,” they refer to it as to a thing. The realm of the transcendent is understood as a second, objective realm that contrasts with the realm in which we live, the realm of the human and the material. The reason for this development, Voegelin claims, is the modern fixation on intentionality as the determinative element of human consciousness. When intentionality becomes the model of consciousness, man increasingly comes to speak in terms of things, including when he speaks of transcendence. “The difficulty . . . arises from the intentionalist structure of language: our inclination to think in thingly propositions about experiences which are not experiences of things. The primary structure of the divine-human encounter must be distinguished from the reflective symbolization of the poles of the tensional encounter as thingly entities.”6 So it is that the structure of human reality, which Plato discussed in terms of an encounter between a material reality and a divine, radically nonmaterial transcendence, is reduced to a facile schemata of two objective realms: the realm of the human and the realm of the divine. Both are considered equally tangible, despite the utter inaccessibility of the divine. 4. Ibid., 207. 5. Ibid., 217–18. 6. Voegelin, “Quod Deus Dicitur,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 12, CW (1990; available, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 381–82.


Voegelin takes on the goal of correcting this mistake. He argues, in agreement with the postmodern critics of metaphysics, that no “transcendent reality” exists as an entity in and of itself. To speak of “the transcendent,” then, can easily mislead if the term is understood to imply an objective presence that is metaphysical in a reductive way. When Voegelin—and, in his judgement, Plato—speak of the Beyond or the divine, they do not speak of a realm separate and distinct from the human being who experiences the pull of transcendence, who experiences the sense that he can “rise above” material existence. As he puts it, “the indiscriminate language of ‘transcendent reality’ tends to obscure the problem of the Beyond in several respects. In the first place, there is no ‘transcendent reality’ other than the Beyond experienced in the ‘rise.’ If it is torn out of the experiential context, it suffers the intentionalist reduction to an object in whose existence one can believe or not.”7 While the Beyond has validity as a symbolic expression of an experiential reality, it cannot be expressed or understood as an objectively real entity or realm. Despite lacking independent, objective status, the Beyond is not a hopelessly amorphous symbol that defies any attempt to speak about it in rational terms. To the contrary, the symbols of divine reality are open to analysis through reason and reflection, and their relevance can thereby be judged. But the truth of that reflection and those symbols is not an objective truth. The divine and the Beyond are symbols that attempt to express a genuine aspect of human experience, but there exists nothing that is beyond human experience such that it can act as a criterion for us to judge the truth of our understanding in objective terms: “since neither the original nor the reflective symbols refer to an object outside of the metaleptic experience from which they emerge, there is no external criterion by which the truth of the one or the other, or the truthfulness of transition from one to the other, can be measured; the procedure thus assumes the criterion of truthful transmission from the first to the second set of symbols to be internal to the process itself. . . . Reflection is not an external act of cognition directed toward the process as its object, but part of a process that internally has cognitive structure.”8 It must be the case, therefore, that there is no external truth by which all things can be simply measured; the truth of symbolizations of reality 7. Voegelin, “The Beginning and the Beyond,” 218. 8. Ibid., 189.


must be judged from within the human experience of reality in which those symbols — our reflection upon them — arise. Thus far, Voegelin can be said to agree in many respects with the primary contentions of the postmodern era. No objectively metaphysical grounding of human experience is possible. Yet it would be inaccurate to describe Voegelin as a postmodern. For postmodernism implicates the great metaphysical philosophers (Plato and the Christian mystics, for instance) as guilty of setting up a second objective realm of being that stands in contrast to our primary human realm; Voegelin argues, to the contrary, that their work accurately expresses the human condition and in no way reduces transcendence to an objective entity or doctrine. These philosophers describe an existence in uncertainty, “In-Between” the known and the unknown, the worldly and the extra-worldly, the mundane and the divine. Where the contemporary critique of metaphysics faults Plato and his successors for inspiring the misunderstanding of transcendence as objective reality, Voegelin argues that Platonic and Aristotelian symbolizations of metaphysical reality do not equate to objective entities. From a contemporary perspective the Beyond is an object realm; but in Platonic usage, Voegelin writes, “the Beyond symbolizes the goal of a meditative act that transcends the divinely permeated reality of the ‘cosmos.’”9 The Beyond symbolizes the goal of our reasoning reflection on reality, which takes the form of an ascending pathway. In reductive or doctrinal formulations, it is the goal itself that becomes the all-important object; in Plato and Voegelin, the goal as pathway shows that we can never grasp the totality of what is, that we are always on a journey toward increasing understanding, and that it is this journey or way that is all important. Voegelin stresses the importance of the symbolic formulations that dominate Western history, to include the language of myth and revelation in addition to philosophy. Yet he admits, significantly, that certain formulations in Western history seem to transgress the limits of a conceptual framework that denies an objectively metaphysical reality. The most famous example may be Aristotle’s: the prime, or “unmoved mover,” who is central to his Metaphysics. It is necessary, Voegelin recognizes, to consider such historical symbolizations seriously. To discount them, as would the postmodern thinker, is not permissible. So, though 9. Ibid., 218.


he recognizes it as a problematic formulation, Voegelin nonetheless requires that we take up metaphysical symbols such as the Aristotelian “first cause,” contending that we will find in them a core of truth to be salvaged. He writes: At first hearing, I presume, these formulations will sound as strange to you as they did to me. There is talk about a first mover of the universe— who must be assumed to be an intellect — from whom emanates somehow an order of being that is at the same time an order of truth. Why should we be concerned with a prime mover and his properties?—you will ask. . . . We can no longer express the truth of existence in the language of men who believed in such a cosmos, moved with all its content by a prime mover. . . . Nevertheless, if we admit all this, does it follow that Aristotelian and Thomist metaphysics must be thrown on the scrap heap of symbolisms that once had their moment of truth but now have become useless? You will have anticipated that the answer will be negative. To be sure, a large part of the symbolism has become obsolete, but there is a solid core of truth in it that can be, and must be, salvaged by means of some surgery.10

Even as he recognizes that such elements of classical or medieval philosophy are no longer valid for us—a recognition grounded in the contemporary critique of metaphysics—he still finds value in them and a “solid core of truth” such that their relevance is preserved. In this way Voegelin remains a classical thinker, but one whose work is clearly informed by the critique of metaphysics that dominates contemporary theory. With this discussion, I hope to have clarified the limits Voegelin places on the term transcendence. Yet despite these limits, I have also tried to show, Voegelin firmly contends that human reality does not lack intelligible order or structure. It was the great achievement of the Greek philosophers — and this is what makes that achievement an “epochal event in the history of existential order”11 — to discover and analyze both Being and Reason, that is, “structure in reality and its intelligibility.”12 Philosophy is properly directed toward an understanding of being as structured reality and reason as our mode of exploring it; and yet this 10. Voegelin, “On Debate and Existence,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, 40. 11. Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” ibid., 267. 12. Voegelin, “The Beginning and the Beyond,” 209.


understanding is set within a context of transcendence that means that no exploration of being can ever fully resolve it as a question. In this sense, no authentic historical attempt to symbolize being is superfluous, although not all are equally relevant. The discovery of reason did not dissolve or replace the essential mystery of being, and it is a mistake characteristic of modernity to believe that it did. It is Voegelin’s conclusion, then, that classical metaphysics loses none of its relevance, despite its examples of symbolism that accord evidently objective status to non-objective experience. It is with this contention that Voegelin contrasts most distinctly with twentieth-century thinkers such as Jan Patocˇ ka. For though similarly critical of metaphysical reductionism and similarly attentive to Platonic philosophy, Patocˇ ka differs with Voegelin on the best way to attempt to illuminate the uncertain nature of human reality. Voegelin seeks to articulate the “authentic” understanding of classic Platonic texts and demonstrate their grasp of reality; the Czech philosopher, in contrast, contends that a new approach is needed to uncover the experiential core of metaphysics. Patocˇ ka’s approach is to use contemporary insight to formulate an interpretation of Socrates as distinct from and in contrast to Plato — a “negative Platonism.”

Metaphysics and Jan Patocˇ ka’s “Negative Platonism” Patocˇ ka’s interpretation of the problem of metaphysical foundationalism can be found in his writings on “negative Platonism.” The Czech philosopher is influenced by the contemporary critique of metaphysics, like Voegelin, but unlike him Patocˇ ka refers explicitly to Heidegger and existential phenomenology as the source of this insight. Patocˇ ka’s analysis of the Greeks — and of the history of European philosophy — is firmly grounded in an understanding of the fallacy of systematic metaphysics. His “negative” approach to Platonism focuses on Socrates and contends that the Socratic “care for the soul” reflects a fundamentally different view of reality than the metaphysical Platonism from which Western philosophy and science took its lead and to which it has been indebted since Plato. The Patocˇ kan critique, as I noted, draws on Heidegger at the same time as it lines up on the side of Voegelin—and yet it stands in distinct contrast to both. Whereas Heidegger’s attempt at a post-metaphysical


philosophy rejects Plato outright, and Voegelin takes the opposite path by returning to Plato, Patocˇ ka threads his way between the two by focusing specifically on the figure of Socrates as a premetaphysical thinker. The Socratic dialectic, he argues, represents the motive core of philosophy; it is the living essence of what later became metaphysics. With his essay on “Negative Platonism,”13 Patocˇ ka takes what I will call a postmetaphysical approach to Socrates and Platonism, and so to the foundational thinking that underlies Western political theory. Patocˇ ka notes at the beginning of “Negative Platonism” a common consensus in philosophical and intellectual circles that the “metaphysical phase of philosophy has come to an end.” Metaphysics as philosophy is said to be fatally unclear, a “surpassed, obsolete science,” and little more than a “secularized theology.”14 Like Voegelin, though, Patocˇ ka recognizes that such a blanket condemnation of traditional philosophy is selfdelusional —it will result not in more clarity but in less. Modern philosophy of course loudly trumpeted the death of metaphysics — in positivism and Hegelianism, for instance. In fact, however, these systematic philosophies merely took over, rather than dispensed with, the fundamental question of metaphysics, which is the question of the whole. Modern reason, with its clear and purposeful movement away from the transcendent and toward the objective, did not discard the problem of the whole. Instead, as it shifted toward an integral humanism it merely absorbed the notion of a transcendent whole into its own, anthropocentric understanding of human reality. The shortsightedness of this perspective, as well as the stridency with which philosophy in this century continues to deny metaphysics, prompts Patocˇ ka to ask, in “Negative Platonism,” about metaphysics as such. Of what is it really composed and how does it relate to philosophy? Exactly what it is that is supposed to have died is unclear, he argues, because the question itself has yet to be posed adequately. An examination 13. Sebrané Spisy Jana Patocˇky, sv. 1, Pécˇe o dusˇi I: Soubor statí a prˇednásˇek o postavení ˇcloveˇka ve sveˇteˇ a v deˇjinách [The Collected Works of Jan Patocˇ ka, vol. 1, Care for the Soul I: A Collection of Articles and Lectures on the Position of Man in the World and in History], ed. Ivan Chvatík and Pavel Kouba (Prague: OIKOYMENH, 1996). See especially “Negativní platonismus” [Negative Platonism], “Veˇcˇnost a deˇjinnost” [Eternity and Historicity], and “Problém pravdy z hlediska negativního platonismu” [The Problem of Truth from the Perspective of Negative Platonism]. Translations are mine. 14. Patocˇ ka, “Negative Platonism,” 175.


of metaphysics should begin with pre-Socratic “protophilosophy,” for though we lack a good history of earliest philosophy, it is clear that here an as yet undifferentiated theory began to take shape. This theory took on a form distinguishing itself from other forms of inquiry with the philosopher whom Patocˇ ka calls “the last representative of this primordial form of thought”: Socrates. The figure of Socrates, whether or not a historical reality, is distinct in that he represents and personifies the “philosophical protoknowledge” that offers a pre-metaphysical and ontological insight into reality.15 Socrates is not to be understood as the tradition sees him, as “a mere introductory chapter of Platonism.” He is not, therefore, a witness for the humanism that ensued from the classical tradition of metaphysics; to the contrary, he is opposed to it.16 While separating out Socrates for special consideration, Patocˇ ka agrees with Heidegger, but not Voegelin, that Plato is largely responsible for developing the systematic approach to transcendence that became the foundation for propositional metaphysics. His thesis departs from Heidegger with its conviction that the Socratic dialogues and their depiction of the polis and the role of the philosopher in it are too insightful to be disregarded. Despite this difference, Patocˇ ka claims to remain in basic agreement with the approach to metaphysics of which Heidegger is a representative —termed the “new” critique of metaphysics. Unlike humanist philosophy with its attempt to negate metaphysics and deny the relevance of, as in the case of positivism, questions about human reality not grounded in quantifiable fact, this “new” or contemporary critique recognized the deadening effects of metaphysical systematization without negating the genuine insight into humanity at the core of the human desire to look beyond the given in search of the whole. The basic outline of this critique of metaphysics, Patocˇ ka argues, emerged separately and for different reasons in two disparate disciplines, theology and the philosophy of existence, and precisely at the time when 15. Ibid., 175, 179–80. In referring to “protophilosophy,” Patocˇ ka has in mind such pre-Socratic philosophers as Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans. As to the question of whether Socrates was a historical reality, Patocˇ ka writes: “Whether Socrates the philosopher is a literary myth or a historical reality— personally, I continue to favor the second possibility—it seems certain that in the figure of Socrates we have before us, in Plato’s writings, a special active, anthropologically oriented version of this philosophical protoknowledge.” 16. Patocˇ ka, “Eternity and Historicity,” in Pécˇe o dusˇi, 1:142.


anthropocentric humanism was reaching its height. It arose in theology “seeking to free itself from the metaphysical and so also the anthropological habit” and in existentialism, “insofar as it [was] an expression of a revolt against anthropologism, against integral humanism.”17 Patocˇ ka’s own perspective on metaphysics, notwithstanding its distinctness from the Heideggerean critique, also claims to reflect this approach. As he puts it, “The purpose of these reflections is now to show that this new way of overcoming metaphysics, unlike the older attempts, does not limit itself to mere negation and does not impoverish humans by taking away any essential aspect of their being. . . . For that very reason, this new way can understand even metaphysics itself, taking from it, in a purified form, its essential philosophical thrust and carrying it on.”18 It is not a simple rejection of metaphysics that Patocˇ ka is after, but a genuine understanding of its internal history, its experiential essence and the way in which it abandoned that essence in attempting to encapsulate it into a system. The focal point of Patocˇ ka’s “Socratic” conception of philosophy is the distinction drawn between the figures of Socrates and Plato. While Socrates, of course, cannot be fully separated from Plato’s presentation of him, a focus on the Socratic mode of activity and the Socratic form of knowledge as questioning does enable one plausibly to differentiate this from the more positive approach to knowledge associated with Plato. For Patocˇ ka, therefore, while Plato is the creator of metaphysics, he still “remains rooted in this premetaphysical soil” through his focus on and description of Socrates.19 The story of metaphysics that Patocˇ ka traces thus begins with the form of knowledge represented by Socrates, contrasted to a more positive and systematic form characteristic of Plato and Aristotle. Socratic knowledge, of course, is commonly described as Socratic ignorance, or, as Patocˇka notes, as “learned ignorance, that is, as a question.” Socrates continually challenges his interlocutors through questions — questions that skeptically analyze assertions based on finite knowledge. The finite, earthly knowledge of particulars commonly thought to constitute wisdom is shown to be faulty and insufficient. It is knowledge 17. Patocˇ ka, “Negative Platonism,” 188. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 180.


that relates only to things directly present and so neglects to relate to the whole. While the Socratic mode of questioning directly concerns life as a whole, it is unable, in keeping with its skeptical nature, to capture the essence of that whole in words. This, Socrates knows, is a human impossibility, and he unveils this reality as “one of the fundamental contradictions of being human, that between the relation to the whole, intrinsic to humans, and the inability, the impossibility of expressing this relation in the form of an ordinary finite knowledge.”20 This self-understanding is characteristic of the figure of Socrates. Patocˇ ka contends that Plato, however, went beyond the limits of the Socratic model by effectively laying out a plan for overcoming this situation of fundamental uncertainty. In doing so, in formulating a conception of ideal forms and considering a means to reach them, Plato laid a groundwork for the development of a form of knowledge that is not uncertain and intangible but objective and certain. Here Patocˇ ka stands in contrast to Voegelin, for whom Plato and Socrates represent one and the same view of reality. Socrates is distinct from the core of the Platonic project in that the “premetaphysical soil” on which he stands is far from a secure foundation. Through questioning, Socrates casts into doubt the naïve security of those with whom he speaks; he acts so as to “shake” the simple foundation upon which they thought they stood safely. He conceives of life as a question without a simple answer—an inherently unsettling formulation. In contrast to this is the approach of metaphysics: “the essence of metaphysics as Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus formulated it consists in offering an answer to the Socratic (or pre-Socratic) question, one which the philosopher seeks to derive from the question itself.” Plato, as Patocˇ ka describes him in this article, took that step by describing philosophy not only as a movement transcending the sensible but as one seeking to reach the transcendent Being. It was a movement from the “apparent” to the “real” that took place via a dialectical process, a system by which one sought the unconditional, the indubitable. Patocˇka locates this movement toward a metaphysics first in the theory of the Ideas and then in the presentation of a conceptual systematics, a dialectic “that permitted an ascent from the sensible to the suprasensible as well as a descent in the opposite direction.” This was, Patocˇ ka argues, “the first adumbration of 20. Ibid.


a positive (rationalistic) metaphysics” that contributed not only to a philosophy of metaphysics but to positive science as well, offering a paradigmatic example of a “conceptual systematics” from which Western science took its lead. It was a movement toward a positive form of knowledge distinct from the negative, skeptical approach of Socrates. What was ignorance becomes a form of knowing, “a true knowledge more secure than anything on earth and in the heavens.”21 This development changes the face of the fledgling project of philosophy at its very outset. Both Plato and Aristotle, Patocˇ ka notes, moved from a conception of the Idea as “rigorously transcendent” to a consideration of “mundane, astronomic hierarchies.” The results of this movement toward ideal being, toward an absolute form of knowledge and a solid, stable foundation upon which humanity could rest and from which it could take comfort, are summed up by Patocˇ ka in no uncertain terms: Finally, human comportment, the meaning of human life, too, receives its formation from ideal being. The integrity of human life is broken. Man becomes one of the beings ruled by ideas; ethics and politics as a grand unity take on the task of discovering the inner ideal law of a humanly perfect life. Thus all these metaphysical disciplines, bequeathed to us by the inspired protooriginators and preserved for us by a long tradition, manifest the fundamental substitution of a transcendent, nonexistent Being for the perennial existents [beings], a substitution bound up with the crucial conception of what-is [beings as a whole] as perennial. Thus the living force of transcendence is replaced by an image of reality which may be harmonious, “spiritual,” but is rigid and lifeless; so in place of the living reality of Socrates’ struggle against the degeneration of life we now have the imitation of the eternal world of Ideas. The absolute claim of truth now appears guaranteed by an invincible conceptual system and actualized in the form of the perfect state. The Idea, the source of absolute truth, becomes at the same time the source of all that is and of all life within it.22 21. Ibid., 181, 195. In Plato, see, for example, the discussion of the “divided line” in the Republic 508e–511e. 22. Ibid., 182. Note: In those instances where the translator, Erazim Kohák, uses the terms existents and what-is to refer to different forms of the Czech jsoucno, I have noted the alternate translation of “beings” or “beings as a whole.”


Politics and ethics reflect this substitution of the static for the motive, the concrete for the intangible, as much as does philosophy itself. The striving for the perfect state, for perfection on earth, relates directly to the positing of what is essentially a concrete and eternal world of Ideas, the notion being that no activity is more worthy of man than the attempt to replicate that perfection. Despite his critique of Plato, Patocˇ ka’s goal here is still to illuminate a “Platonism.” What Plato has done is to conceptualize a ground, a soil, from which metaphysical thinking could spring. He did not construct a philosophy that could stand solidly on that ground. There is much in the Platonic corpus to make clear that the metaphysical problem had not in any way been resolved, and Patocˇ ka recognizes this fact. It is for this reason, in the end, that he shifts much of the responsibility for the project of metaphysics onto the shoulders of the more systematic and scientific approach taken by Aristotle. It is Aristotle who becomes the standard, the “philosopher,” who inspires Western philosophy as well as science. The result is that “the attempt to build a science of the absolute, objective, and positive whole crowds out all other motifs and becomes the point of contention for the next two millennia.”23 Modern humanist thinking, as I noted, tended to replicate anthropologically the goal of “a global understanding of the whole” embodied in metaphysics even as it decried metaphysics itself. It was not until the relatively recent, twentieth-century attempts to dominate social reality on the basis of a radical humanism, however, that this form of thought, newly emboldened by advances in technology, came to its fully mature form.24 Modern politics, which Patocˇ ka describes as embodying a “rule of Force,” is grounded in this anthropocentric transformation of metaphysics.25 At the heart of Socratic teaching was an experience of freedom that Patocˇ ka seeks to illuminate. It began with the oracle’s injunction to “know thyself.” In the understanding of logical positivism, this would mean looking only to “external experience” to fulfill this requirement. The injunction itself, however, urges us to understand, not only the experience we have, but the experience we are. In the case of Socrates, the 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 182, 188. 25. Patocˇ ka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák, ed. James Dodd (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 117.


experience that we are is the experience of freedom. Socratic knowledge (or ignorance) is absolutely free; the philosopher frees himself from the material and objective limitations to which his interlocutors remain bound and can thus master them in the course of the dialectic. “He could not be that masterful contestant if he were not wholly free, if he were bound to something finite in heaven or on earth. Socrates’ mastery is based on an absolute freedom; he is constantly freeing himself of all the bonds of nature, or tradition, of others’ schemata as well as of his own, of all physical and spiritual possessions. That is an immensely audacious philosophy.” It is a philosophy characterized not only by its audacity but also by its freedom. This is the experience articulated by the character of Socrates in the dialogues. It is “negative” in the sense that, rather than positing some positive content, it takes on “the negative character of a distance, of a remove, of an overcoming of every objectivity.” Establishing a distance from the concrete and positive objects of the world enables one to view them, for the first time, in the context of the whole.26 The experience of freedom enables one to make decisions from a perspective of some remove, which is a perspective of clarity. In articulating this “negative” experience of transcending the objective realm through freedom, Socrates does not enter into metaphysics. Patocˇ ka contrasts “positive” Platonism with his own interpretation of Socratic freedom. This “negative Platonism” is a nonmetaphysical interpretation of Platonic philosophy that will serve as a basis for a more authentic approach to human experience. Negative Platonism bases itself, not on an ahistorical metaphysical realm, but on the concrete historical experience of human beings in the given world; in much the same way as Voegelin, Patocˇ ka is also a philosopher of history: “The interpretation of our human experience, the experience of historical beings, is something in principle different from metaphysics. While metaphysics discovers a new universe, taking it as its starting point and transcending it, the interpretation of experience discovers, uncovers, sheds light on this, our given life-world, uncovering what had been hidden in it, its concealed meaning, its intrinsic structure, its internal drama.” Negative Platonism, Patocˇ ka maintains, is an approach to mankind’s historical reality that is neither metaphysical nor an anthropocentric humanism. While it rejects the objectivized notion of a transcendent realm separate from 26. Patocˇ ka, “Negative Platonism,” 192, 180, 196.


the human, it significantly does not seek to reject the experience of transcendence. To the contrary, for Patocˇ ka as for Voegelin, it is precisely the experience of transcendence that needs to be preserved and clarified. It is this experience that is the abiding core of metaphysics to which traditional philosophy refers. Humanity’s yearning for transcendence is not an irrational folly, and the goal here is to understand this desire and to describe its source in human experience — to explain why “the human spirit returns to metaphysics ever again, . . . in spite of its being indefensible, even meaningless from the standpoint of objective rationality.”27 Negative Platonism presents itself as a philosophy that is in the “precarious position” of not having anything to lean against for support. It affirms the experience of transcendence, but not as a distinct realm with positive contents. It argues that, in a certain sense, humans are subject to both a degree of relativity determined by context, and certainty determined by the truth of man’s search for something that transcends his own particular objective context. [Negative Platonism] preserves for humans the possibility of trusting in a truth that is not relative and mundane, even though it cannot be formulated positively, in terms of contents. It shows how much truth there is in man’s perennial metaphysical struggle for something elevated above the natural and the traditional, the struggle for the eternal and the supratemporal, in the struggle, taken up ever again, against a relativism of values and norms—even while agreeing with the idea of a basic historicity of man and of the relativity of his orientation in his context, of his science and practice, his images of life and the world.28

Negative Platonism interprets and affirms ancient philosophy in light of the insights of twentieth-century thought. It is not a “new” philosophy in itself, but it does rely on the new as a means to understand the classical.

Transcendence The appeal to Socrates notwithstanding, Patocˇ ka’s philosophy takes off from a contemporary perspective. And yet it makes extensive use of the 27. Ibid., 197. 28. Ibid., 205–6.


language of classicism, a use that leads one to question whether a claim for a nonmetaphysical philosophy can be sustained while one speaks of a “life in truth” and a movement toward “good.” Patocˇ ka insists that these symbolizations of transcendence are intrinsic to philosophy by virtue of their reflection of the human experience of reality, but his own philosophical perspective precludes the argument that they refer to objective essences. Here Patocˇ ka also stands with Voegelin. For while contemporary theorists often dismiss any text that relies on such terminology as hopelessly traditional, he and Voegelin persuade us that these concepts can and must be understood nontraditionally, that is, nonmetaphysically. Patocˇ ka’s “Negative Platonism” is a reinterpretation of classical thought in line with a specific conception of Socrates. This requires a rejection of certain classical symbols, such as Plato’s “Idea,” that supported the historical search for an objective reality beyond the human and, when that failed, a search for a human reality that would be as ideal as the transcendent reality that was beyond our reach. Like Voegelin in this regard, Patocˇ ka seeks to present Platonic symbolism as referring to a nonobjective transcendence; unlike Voegelin, however, he feels that Plato himself was unable to make this presentation and that the historical progress (or regress) of Western philosophy stemmed from this failure. In “Negative Platonism,” Patocˇ ka contrasts the conception of the Idea as it was left to us in Plato’s wake with that of an Idea that does not refer to any tangible object. In the course of this presentation, he illuminates an understanding of transcendence as grounded in human historicity, in the fact that man thinks historically. It is in thinking historically that one projects beyond the present into the past and, perhaps, the future. Not only the historian but also the common man is capable of distinguishing between that which is present and that which is no longer present. This is, Patocˇ ka argues, the very power of freeing oneself from the present that is implicit in the Idea. “A historical being,” he writes, “leans on the past, using it to open up the horizon of the given, with its help overcoming the given and the present. He can do that, however, only if the power of dissociation is available to him, the power of dissociation from mere givenness and presence, the power of liberation from the purely objective and given—in Platonic usage, that is, the power of the Idea.”29 The core of the Platonic Idea, then, is akin to the freedom to 29. Ibid., 199.


reach beyond the given to embrace even that which is not there in front of us. This is an understanding of freedom30 that Patocˇ ka was to apply politically in his devastating critique of ideology and of the pursuit of politics as a technology in his late Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History from the 1970s. As befits a student of Edmund Husserl, Patocˇ ka’s philosophy is distinctly phenomenological; it draws in particular on the phenomenological insight that a thing in general or “as a whole” is necessarily transcendent to its perception.31 It is argued, through the lens of classical Greek philosophy, that European civilization is, or was, characterized by the recognition that life is fully human only to the extent that it can recognize those values, that sense of the whole, that explicitly transcend the directly given objects of our present perception. This insight is, according to Patocˇ ka, encapsulated in the notion of the Idea. “Thus the Idea,” he writes, “is the pure supraobjective call of transcendence.” It is in no way an object but rather a “deobjectifying power”32 — the singular human ability to perceive the transcendental and to act upon it, thereby preserving the possibility of a life in truth. The Idea as it came out of Plato developed so as to present itself to man positively, as an absolute ideal in which he could participate. It became something obtainable, and mankind, uniquely capable of obtaining it, was thus challenged to demonstrate this uniqueness by dominating his world. Understood in this way, “positive” Platonism urged man to conceive of himself as a being without limits, a being capable of anything, unrestricted. This is precisely the self-understanding, Patocˇ ka argues, that has justified a politics of force driven by ideology (the metaphysical dream of knowledge and security distilled into a political system

30. In articulating what could be called a “philosophy of freedom,” Patocˇ ka takes care to distinguish his own endeavor from that of German idealism. The interpretation of the Idea presented here has the advantage of avoiding subjectivism: “The philosophy of freedom is usually identified with the doctrines of German idealism; undoubtedly, it is most closely linked to them historically, yet German idealism is a philosophy of an absolute, sovereign subjectivity, of the supremacy of the humanly historical ‘I’ to whom it attributes the significance of absolute substance. As a subjectivism, German idealism is metaphysical. . . . By contrast, the Idea . . . has the advantage that, if stripped of metaphysical encrustations, it stands above both subjective and objective existents” (ibid., 200). 31. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1931), 118. 32. Patocˇ ka, “Negative Platonism,” 204, 203.


or slogan) and resulted in “the twentieth century as war.”33 Because of its importance, the relevant text deserves to be cited at length: The Idea, as we understand it, is not the power of absolute objectification—as the historic Plato’s Idea promises to be. As the absolute object, Plato’s Idea is a challenge to man to place himself at the center of the universum and to dominate it, the way he finally does dominate the entire intelligible and sensible cosmos through the Idea, through participation in the ideal universum. This tendency of Platonic metaphysics did not have its full effect and flowering in Plato’s own philosophy or in antiquity and the Middle Ages since there it was still blanketed by the overall mythical or theological orientation of the men of the time. Modern metaphysics, however, with its anthropologism and its will to total supremacy of men over object beings, with its naturalism, constructivism (technicism), and will to power represents the full unfolding of a tendency which is potentially present already here. By contrast, Platonism as we here interpret it shows forth not only man’s dignity but also the limits he cannot transcend. It approves the rule humans are instituting over object being but shows that man’s calling is not so to rule but to serve. It shows that there is something higher than man, something to which human existence is indissolubly bound and without which the most basic wellsprings of our historical life dry up.34

When Voegelin speaks of the “immanentization of the eschaton” and the deformed political regimes that result from it, then, Patocˇ ka might respond that it is precisely the presentation of an eschaton, accompanied by a theoretical framework for reaching it, that had a hand in this result. With this, the Czech philosopher reaches a profound conclusion: the supremacy of force and the destruction of morality in the contemporary world are not a result of our abandonment of metaphysics; they are, rather, caused by our addiction to it. “Negative Platonism” is a text inspired by a critique of positive metaphysics, yet it concludes with an appeal to something that is “higher” than both man and his government, something that limits man morally 33. See Patocˇ ka’s fascinating and controversial essay, “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War,” chap. 6 (119–37) of his Heretical Essays. Here Voegelin’s critique of the “gnostic” political regimes of this century is echoed in even more dramatic terms. 34. Patocˇ ka, “Negative Platonism,” 204–5.


and reins in his desire to rule. This is not an appeal to an objective morality; it is rather an appeal to the power of “deobjectification.”“Negative Platonism” rejects the notion of a higher Being that defines our limits for us; yet it does this in the course of pointing out that we do have limits. It is not a metaphysical entity but rather our living in the awareness of transcendence that limits us; our common dignity stems from our ability to transcend the present, objective realm and thereby take account of the world as a whole. With this argument the groundwork is laid for an approach to the concrete problems of human ethics, and of politics.

Conclusion Like Eric Voegelin, Jan Patocˇ ka is both a critic of metaphysics and a defender of transcendence. Both philosophers argue forcefully that any attempt to understand the full scope and complexity of the human condition will require that we grasp its core possibility: the ability of human beings to transcend their immediate and simply given context. It is in reaching beyond the limits of given reality, in questioning and in seeking the whole that encompasses our world, that we begin to live according to our potential as human beings. This is also, according to Patocˇ ka, the basis for our freedom. Yet just as the existence of freedom implies the possibility that it can be lost, so the notion of transcendence provides man a conceptual set of shackles with which to bind himself. Humanity loses its freedom, somewhat paradoxically, just at the point when it seeks to ensure that freedom by setting it in concrete. This occurs when the uncertainty of a transcendence that is impalpable proves to be insufficient, and man succumbs to the temptation to transform it into the concrete idea of “the transcendent,” of an objectively metaphysical reality, an absolute knowledge, or a meaning of history. It is at this point that man loses touch with his being and, as Patocˇ ka and Voegelin both point out, also with the sense of order and limitation in human society that precludes the development of political movements seeking the absolute. Renewing our understanding of transcendence, an understanding that both philosophers find at the core of the spirit of Western civilization, is the most fundamental step on the path to the recovery of existential order in society.


While Voegelin argues that metaphysics must be preserved through the authentic articulation of the meaning of its original symbolisms, Patocˇ ka suggests that a new interpretation is needed, one that differentiates between the seeds of propositional metaphysics in Plato and the “protophilosophical” and nonmetaphysical figure of Socrates. These are different means to a similar end. Understanding them both, it seems to me, offers the best hope for eventually achieving that end.

Epilogue PETER A. PETRAKIS AND CECIL L. EUBANKS

God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community . . . is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only for the perspective of participation in it. —ERIC VOEGELIN, ISRAEL AND REVELATION

F

rom Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault to Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Rorty, postmodern thought is characterized by its critique of essentialist thinking, most especially of Enlightenment rationalism, liberal capitalism, and socialist Marxism; and for the most part, it abandons notions of transcendent values, as with some irony it appears to have embraced the secularism of the Enlightenment. In the absence of foundations and foundationalism, and as far as a theory of politics is concerned, postmodern thinking offers a rather uncertain embrace of pessimism, and relativity; and in the wake of a newfound cynicism, or outright nihilism, it exhibits considerable disenchantment with the utopian systems of the twentieth century, such as notions of universal rights or the welfare of the working class. Indeed, many postmoderns counsel a simple withdrawal from politics altogether. On the other hand, other postmodern thinkers seem to have retreated into a politics of localism and diversity, exhibiting a rather familiar adherence to liberal democratic values. This latter stance has sometimes resulted in the vaunted politics of identity, in which groups searching for identity eschew broad social 169


reform and become part of a pluralist network of association and influence. Perhaps the most consistent political stance of the postmodern movement has been a politics of suspicion, nicely captured in Foucault’s famous dictum: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.”1 Given the dubious success of the Enlightenment project, the tendency of postmodernism to be chronically pessimistic is perfectly understandable. Yet, there is the disquieting notion that in its desperate attempt to abandon metaphysical thinking, postmodernism has abandoned one of the most powerful and human of experiences, namely, transcendence, and with it any defensible notion of value. Indeed, it was this observation that led us to conceive of this project on foundations without foundationalism, in which value and transcendence are placed yet again at the center of political discourse, and with Eric Voegelin in dialogue with the postmoderns. Voegelin characterized the philosophic stance as a meditation on transcendence. True to that calling, he spent his scholarly life attempting to renew and refine our understanding of transcendence and discern and illuminate its presence in human existence. In his final, posthumously published work, In Search of Order, Voegelin focuses almost entirely on these matters. He carefully and judiciously writes of three structural characteristics of human consciousness—intentionality, luminosity, and reflective distance—that serve to elucidate our understanding of the intimate relationship between transcendence and immanence. Whereas intentionality refers to an individuated consciousness that is “located in human beings in their bodily existence,” luminosity connotes a more expansive horizon in which “consciousness occurs as an event of participation between partners in the community of being.” Intentionality is a subject, for whom reality acquires a “touch of external thingness.” Luminosity is a predicate, in which consciousness is a complex matrix of what Voegelin calls an “It-reality,” wherein the world, human beings, and society all participate in the beckoning of transcendence. Most important, Voegelin 1. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 231–32.

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insists, it is necessary to view these categories as “metaphors,” or as paradoxical and ambiguous poles in the “tension of existence.” Indeed, Voegelin uses a classical metaphor to describe that tension between the human and the divine, the metaxy or “In-Between” of existence. Plato’s gift to our understanding of human consciousness was his illustrative use of “conceptual analysis and mythic symbolization as complementary modes of thought in the quest for truth.” The capacity to recognize and analyze the dimensions of consciousness, and to articulate that analysis in both conceptual and metaphorical language, is what Voegelin means by the phrase “reflective distance”; and this cannot be achieved with any degree of understanding unless it is recognized that we are dealing with the mystery of being. That mystery is best apprehended—and the hypostatization of it is best avoided—through the use of “reflective symbols.”2 Voegelin’s lifelong meditation on transcendence, then, led him to search repeatedly and consistently for appropriate symbolizations that provide an understanding of the ground of being without resorting to rigid and dangerous concretizations. We have called that a search for foundations without foundationalism. For Voegelin it had theological, philosophical, and political manifestations: he often warned against the pernicious influence of dogmatic religious thinking, of the self-defeating quality of metaphysical systems, and of the destructive capacities of political ideologies. In all of these endeavors, as we have attempted to illustrate in this collection of essays, Voegelin has much in common with many postmodern thinkers; yet, he is far more positive in his appreciation of the past, especially of classical and medieval foundations. Indeed, as Findlay’s essay points out, Voegelin engaged in a massive rehabilitation project with respect to classical (i.e., Plato and Aristotle) and medieval thought (i.e., Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas), attempting in the process to persuade the modern world that their respective views of transcendence were experientially based and were not essentially reductionist or foundationalist in character. In the case of Plato in particular, as Findlay also illustrates, Jan Patocˇka’s emphasis on Socrates as the paragon of a “negative Platonism” illustrates an important truth: that the predominance of force and the destruction of morality in the modern and postmodern 2. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. V, In Search of Order, ed. Ellis Sandoz, vol. 18, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter, CW) (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 29, 32, 58–59.


worlds is not due to the breakdown of metaphysical systems but rather is the result of the human addiction to metaphysical systems. Patocˇka becomes a poignant defender of freedom in the twentieth century; and he reminds us that the very notion of transcendence, when coupled with our addiction to systematization, threatens to endanger the very freedom it purports to value. As Findlay argues, it may be the case that from the Voegelinian perspective, scholars, students, and practitioners of politics would do well to reconsider the classical perspective, particularly in light of Voegelin’s nuanced interpretations of it; but Voegelin scholars and other critics of postmodernity would do just as well to consider Patocˇka’s and other postmodern thinker’s attempts to explore the depths of the experiential basis of transcendence. Jardine’s essay on the speech dimension of human experience does this in a most unusual fashion and illuminates many postmodern concerns with the hierarchical, classical models of ordering and value. In place of those hierarchical systems of value, Jardine and the orality theorists suggest that alternative communities of speech can also provide opportunities for the articulation of human roles and human virtues that reveal the extent to which human beings both interpret and change their world. Voegelin’s analysis of the symbolic dimensions of political community may provide a subtle basis for communities of communicative action, but the work of Habermas and Arendt (on the role of speech persuasion and debate in forming a notion of the common good) and of MacIntyre (with his emphasis on the oral narrative traditions of local communities) provide substantial amplification of that analysis. Whichever is the case, a recovery of the role of oral/aural debate and persuasion in the articulation of important community values can contribute, both in theory and practice, to the project of building foundations without slipping into the overly conceptualized and hardened perspectives of a typical literate/visual culture. More important, perhaps, is the fact that Voegelin, Arendt, Habermas, and MacIntyre (among others) all point to the importance of political ritual, in this case the ritual of debate and persuasion, as a vital ingredient in the development of communities of virtue. Voegelin broadens the symbolic realm of politics well beyond the ritual of discourse, however, and in doing so reinforces the importance of symbols, particularly those that articulate the In-Between character of human existence and insist upon an openness to all dimensions of human experience. Such symbols ground political order without suggesting that

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they have solved the mystery of being. Indeed, the history of political order is the history of the reinvigoration of those symbols — particularly, for Voegelin, those symbols that represent the experiences human beings have had of order. Voegelin prefers the Aeschylean/Platonic anthropological principle in elucidating these symbols of order, with its emphasis on the ordered soul, city, and cosmos, and in pursuit of that formulation offers the well-known assertion that some political philosophies, e.g., Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, are representative of disordered souls. As Petrakis points out in his essay on language and representation, Paul Ricoeur is more charitable. Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche are valuable because they represent a hermeneutic of suspicion, wherein they reveal how false forms of consciousness arise and develop in societies; moreover, as masters of suspicion they make positive contributions to our understanding of freedom and power. In a more complementary and positive sense, both Voegelin and Ricoeur are involved in the recovery of self. Voegelin’s phenomenological and revelatory theory of consciousness, relying as it does on symbolic expression, is less likely to fall prey to the dangers of misplaced concreteness and is therefore a better form of representation. The history of order is the history of the “trail” of these symbolic representations. Moreover, symbols are evocative of the full range of human experience and, thus, express both the subjective and the objective dimensions of existence. Ricoeur, however, moves beyond symbols to metaphor and narrative, arguing that narratives provide greater stability and coherence. In both cases, these analogical forms of representation assist in the recovery of subjectivity without abandoning internal and external forms of verification. The implications of this insight are significant: political truths are elusive, to be sure, but they are not merely subjective, any more than they are overtly objective. Jeffrey Bell raises several important questions about the symbols of order Voegelin sees as critical to our understanding of human existence. The first of these is whether, despite his critique of metaphysics, Voegelin is not, after all, a metaphysician who has a particular view of what the soul is and ought to be. In other words, Voegelin’s critique of metaphysics is limited to those systems that fail to include an appreciation for the mystery of the divine and/or to the flux of human existence. Bell presents Deleuze, over and against Voegelin, as one who doubts the existence of any transcendent realm of truth. Indeed, Deleuze makes a familiar


argument against Voegelin that has a ring of validity to it, namely, that Voegelin’s insistence on the admittedly unknowable but legitimate realm of transcendence versus the potentially deformed reality of immanence serves to create such a dramatic tension between the transcendent and the immanent that in fact the immanent is diminished in importance. Politics is diminished in importance. Perhaps even more seriously, Deleuze contends that the truth of the psyche lies not in logos but in chaos. Thus, Voegelin has privileged order; and following Nietzsche, Deleuze has privileged chaos; or at least Deleuze has argued that what appears to be order is in fact an “event” on the “edge of chaos.” Voegelin’s theory is a transcendent metaphysics; Deleuze’s is an immanentist metaphysics. Despite these differences, however, both Voegelin and Deleuze are wary of totalizing political systems. It may be the case, however, that Deleuze and those who embrace his Nietzschean perspective, such as Ernesto Laclau, are much more favorably inclined toward radical democracy or a radically decentralized political system. The challenge presented to Voegelin’s politics is whether privileging order necessarily leads to a conservative, hierarchical political system. The challenge to Laclau and Deleuze is whether a radical decentered system, which avoids essentialism and transcendence, has any basis in it for the humane work of re-creation it must always undertake. This is precisely the point of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical ontology. Like Voegelin, Levinas argues that the history of Western philosophy is the story of the denial of transcendence. Unlike Voegelin, however, Levinas argues that a return to transcendence is not to be found in an ontological, meditative relationship with the divine; rather it is found in the ethical beckoning of the Other, the face-to-face relationship with other human beings. This “trace of the divine” is the primordial relationship for Levinas, and it places the divine squarely in the midst of immanentist politics. As Simmons illustrates in his comparative analysis of Voegelin and Levinas, Voegelin’s politics is firmly rooted in the classical world, most especially in the Aristotelean image of the mature, moral human being (the spoudaious) who feels the beckoning of the divine and is capable of acting virtuously. In Levinas, on the other hand, we see the egocentric individual pulled outside of itself by the call of the Other. The question remains for both Voegelin and Levinas, as for any system of foundations, especially one without foundationalism: in what form of institutionalized politics can the spoudaious emerge, or, conversely, what institution-

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alized arrangements are necessary for the ego to be drawn into a politics of care? Voegelin is admittedly more quietist in his attitude toward politics —some would argue too quietist. His generation is understandably and powerfully suspicious of politics. Thus, perhaps the best that can be done is to appeal to transcendent reason and to recognize with that modern Christian Aristotelean, Reinhold Niebuhr, that democratic politics in particular is the search for “proximate solutions for insoluble problems.”3 As Simmons points out, Levinas is more urgent in his demand that the transcendent calls for political expression, even though politics must always be limited by the transcendent. Voegelin’s dialogue with the postmoderns reveals the lasting strength of the critique of the Enlightenment project, as well as the dangers of essentialist, metaphysical thinking. Both he and the postmodern thinkers share a profound distrust of a politics based upon foundationalism. Somewhat less apparent, but nonetheless clear in the dialogue between Voegelin and the postmoderns in this collection, is a growing consensus on the need for foundations. This can clearly be seen in Ricoeur’s call for a return to the sacred narratives of the community, in the claim that recovering the speech dimensions of human experience can be a creative ground for articulating both the limits and the ethical dimensions of political life. It is even present in Deleuze’s and Laclau’s efforts to teach us that the tension between immanence and transcendence should not be characterized as “either/or” but “both/and.” As mentioned, this “nonessentialist” formulation ultimately leads them to an evaluative embrace of radical and plural democracy. Levinas’s reliance on the human response to the ethical demands of the Other(s) is firmly and unequivocally a call for a renewed commitment to foundations, as is Patocˇka’s insistence that human freedom is inextricably linked to the paradoxical uncertainty of Socratic ignorance. Even among the most avid voices against foundationalism not included in this dialogue with Voegelin, such as Derrida’s embrace of “hospitality” and “gift” or Rorty’s call for the “imagination of solidarity,”4 one can discern a renewed concern for foundations. In the midst of this renewed interest in foundations there is another 3. Reinhold Niebuhr, Children of Light and Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 118. 4. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).


constant, the attempt to reformulate those foundations in language that avoids the essentialism of metaphysical thinking and yet speaks to a politics of value. The frustrating character of this attempt is perhaps best addressed by Albert Camus, who was well aware of the nihilism of postmodernism, long before the term became fashionable. In his notebooks there is a telling account of a gathering in October 1946, at the home of André Malraux, and in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre and Arthur Koestler. On that occasion, Camus put forth a simple but profound question: “Don’t you believe that we are all responsible for the absence of values? And that if all of us who come from Nietzscheism, from nihilism, or from historical realism said in public that we were wrong and that there are moral values and that in the future we shall do the necessary to establish [preserve] and illustrate them, don’t you believe this would be the beginning of a hope?”5 As we have seen in this collection and the commentary on it, Voegelin’s attempt at reformulation was a lifelong pursuit of the full range of human experience, including most prominently articulation of transcendence and its relationship to the immanent world. In its final iteration, this reformulation took shape and form in the phenomenological language of consciousness with a particular emphasis on “thing-reality” and “It-reality” or “intentionality” and “luminosity.” As its emphasis on “reflective distance” implies, Voegelin’s representations do tend to privilege transcendence over immanence, but they also iterate a paradoxical and dynamic intersection of the two poles of existence. After all, given Voegelin’s enmeshed theory of consciousness, “formative presence or parousia must and can only happen on the level of immanence — where the latter is no longer simply the opposite of transcendence.”6 As Voegelin himself recognized: “There is no ‘external’ or ‘immanent’ world unless it is recognized as such by its relation to something that is ‘internal’ or ‘transcendent.’ Such terms as immanent and transcendent, eternal and internal, this world and the other world, and so forth, do not denote objects or their properties but are the language indices arising from the Metaxy in the event of its becoming luminous for the comprehensive reality, its structure and dynamics. The 5. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), 145–46. O’Brien notes that the “word [establish] in the manuscript might be read as garder (‘to preserve’).” 6. Fred Dallmayr, “Voegelin’s Search for Order,” Journal of Politics 51, no. 2 (May 1989): 426.

Epilogue / 177

terms are exegetic, not descriptive.”7 In spite of these assertions, Voegelin has been repeatedly criticized for treating the intersection between the transcendence and immanence as much too ephemeral. Yet, one of his more convincing and existentially based formulations of that intersection, the dynamic presence or parousia, can be found in his commentary on Plato’s Gorgias. Pathos, human suffering, and with it a sense of care (as opposed to apathos or apathy), are the keys to understanding the potential for human community. Voegelin describes the condition and its potentiality as follows: “Behind the hardened, intellectually supported attitudes that separate men lie the pathemata that bind them together. However false and grotesque the intellectual position may be, the pathos at the core has the truth of an immediate experience. If one can penetrate to this core and reawaken in man the awareness of his conditio humana, communication in the existential sense becomes possible.”8 An effort to symbolize the “politics of pathos” can be found in the works of the French novelist Albert Camus. Indeed, there is some evidence that Voegelin was sympathetic to Camus’ efforts. In the midst of a speculative positioning of Camus within the framework of a Platonic, perhaps even Christian, periagoge (ascent), Voegelin wrote approvingly and admiringly of the meditative journey Camus chronicles; and in the process, Voegelin seemed to imply that the reconstruction of symbols may be more successful in the hands of novelists than philosophers. Whatever the case, Camus’ meditative journey, Voegelin contended, was most instructive. In Anamnesis, Voegelin traces it from a recognition of the absurdity of existence, as discussed in The Myth of Sisyphus, to rebellion, wherein “he accepts the endurance in uncertainty about the meaning of life as his burden and seeks to keep the tension free from dogmatic ersatz realities, be they theological, metaphysical, or ideological.” Ultimately, it moves to a moment of creative freedom and recognition, what Voegelin calls a “vision of healing,” in which there is a “new rule of ethics,” a new foundation perhaps, which Camus characterizes as “the only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.” Finally, it culminates in what Camus calls “not 7. Eric Voegelin, “The Beginning and the Beyond,” in What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, vol. 28, CW (1990; available, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 185. 8. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. III, Plato and Aristotle, ed. Dante Germino, vol. 16, CW (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 83–84.


morality but fulfillment” a “dying to the world” or “love,” and Voegelin describes as “an active life, ordered by the loving tension of existence to the divine ground.”9 Camus’ reconstruction, particularly as a prototype for a politics of foundations without foundationalism, is perhaps best portrayed in his novel The Plague, where Dr. Rieux, its indefatigable hero, is a symbol for authentic political action. Dr. Rieux personifies the concrete, immanent struggle against human suffering, which is intuitive as well as rational and which, by awakening a community of resistance against injustice, transcends subjectivity. It recognizes the limits of human endeavors, both intellectual and practical; refuses to embrace reductive theological, metaphysical, or ideological explanations of human experience; is willing to live in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity at the intersection of transcendence and immanence; and realizes that the struggle against suffering is perpetual. At the conclusion of The Plague, Camus places a touchstone on a politics of foundations without foundationalism by describing Dr. Rieux’s thoughts in the wake of the exultant but impermanent victory over the plague. “He knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”10

9. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 170–71; Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 306; Camus, Notebooks, 1942–1951, 243; Voegelin, Anamnesis, 172. 10. Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Modern Library, 1948), 278.

Contributors PETER A. PETRAKIS is associate professor of political science at South-

eastern Louisiana University. His publications include several articles in a variety of academic journals, including the Journal of Politics, the American Review of Politics, and the Journal of Applied Sociology. He also has published essays on southern politics in edited collections, most notably “Populism Left and Right: Politics of the Rural South,” in The Rural South since World War II, edited by Douglas Hurt. CECIL L. EUBANKS is alumni professor of political science at Louisiana

State University. His publications include Marx and Engels: An Analytical Bibliography, articles in a variety of journals, including the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics, and contributions to edited collections on political mythology and popular fiction, contemporary southern politics, and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. He was coeditor of the Journal of Politics from 1988 to 1993 and chair of the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University from 1990 to 2000. MURRAY JARDINE is associate professor of political science at Auburn

University. His publications include Speech and Political Practice: Recovering the Place of Human Responsibility and The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity from Itself, articles in the Review of Politics and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and contributions to edited collections on communitarian theory. JEFFREY A. BELL is associate professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. His publications include The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructuralism, Industrialization and Imperialism, 1800–1914 (editor), and numerous essays on Deleuze, Nietzsche, and the philosophy of film. He is currently at work on developing a Deleuzean philosophy of history in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment.

179

180 / Contributors WILLIAM PAUL SIMMONS is assistant professor of political science at Ari-

zona State University West, in Phoenix. His book An-Archy and Justice: An Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas’s Political Thought was published in 2003. He also has published articles on Emmanuel Levinas’s political thought and coauthored articles on African American voting behavior and public opinion. His current research explores the nexus between postmodern political thought and human rights. EDWARD F. FINDLAY received his Ph.D. in 2000 from Louisiana State

University. He is the author of Caring for the Soul: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patocˇka and has published articles in the Review of Politics and Philosophy Today. As a Fulbright Fellow in the Czech Republic, he conducted research on the politics of the Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patocˇka, which he continued as a Bradley Fellow at Boston College and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. He is currently a foreign affairs officer for the U.S. Department of State, working to promote democratic development in Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union.

Index

Body without organs, 95, 111 Both/and: as event in Deleuze, 107, 111– 13, 117, 175; as vision of politics, 17– 18. See also Bound and Free; Either/or Bound and Free: Ricoeur on, 38. See also Both/and; Either/or Brentano, Franz, 27

Abyss: as depth in Nietzsche, 97 Agathon: Voegelin on, 128 An-archical archai: in Levinas and Voegelin, 127–31 Anthropocentrism, 156, 158 Apeiron: Voegelin on, 103 Apollinian/Dionysian: in Nietzsche, 98 Archai: 35; an-archical, 123–31; functions of in Levinas and Voegelin, 130 Arendt, Hannah: on communicative activities, 62–63, 74, 140, 172 Aristotle: Patocˇka on, 159–61; on political order and human happiness, 60; responsible for development of metaphysics, 161; on spoudaios, 132–33; Voegelin’s interpretation of, 131–33, 153–54 Augustine, Saint: and closure of revelation, 83; dualism of sacred and secular, 82; Voegelin on, 80–83 Aural cultures. See Oral cultures

Calvin, John: on sin and freedom, 88; world as abundant and stingy, 90 Camus, Albert: Dr. Rieux as prototype for politics of foundations without foundationalism, 178; meditative journey of, 177–78; periagoge of, 177; on Plato, 56; on responsibility for absence of values, 176; Voegelin on, 177–78 Chaos: as counterpoint to Voegelin’s logos in the psyche, 111; Deleuze on, 111 Christianity: character of in Voegelin’s thought, 139; Voegelin on relation to modernity, 79–91 Civil theology, 80–82 Classical conception of political order, 60–61 Classical philosophical tradition: evaluation of by Voegelin and Patocˇka, 146–48, 171 Closed souls, 52–53 Collective consciousness of the community: Voegelin on, 36 Common sense: Thomas Reid and Voegelin on, 134–36 Conditio humana: Voegelin on, 177 Consciousness: Nietzsche on, 4; paradoxic structures of, 10; phenomenological philosophy of, 11; Ricoeur on, 54; Voegelin on, 9–10, 53, 32. See also Gnosticism

Becoming: Deleuze and Voegelin on, 106–8 Bellah, Robert: expressive individualism, 62 Bergson, Henri: closed systems, 121; influence on Voegelin and Levinas, 121 Beyond/transcendence, 107; Deleuze’s critique of, 108–10; as eminent reality, 105; human experience of, 146; and literal symbols of order, 77; meditation on, 170–71; modern understanding of, 150–51; as non-propositional and nonobjective, 146, 152; Patocˇka on, 146, 154, 163–67; politics based upon as hierarchical and totalitarian, 94; reawakening of, 142; as symbol, 152–53; Voegelin on, 93–94, 148–55

181

182 / Index Consumer capitalism: as aesthetic selfexpression, 62; as final manifestation of Christianity’s subjectivism, 90 Cosmion, 35, 74 Cultural crisis, 58–63; two manifestations of, totalitarianism and global capitalism, 62 Deformation. See Gnosticism Deleuze, Gilles: on absence of a telos, 100; avoidance of immanentist metaphysics, 94; on balance of centralization/ decentralization in monetary systems, 115, 116n46; on chaos, 111, 112n40; critique of traditional metaphysics, 95; critique of transcendence, 94, 108–10; critique of Voegelin, 110, 119, 174; defines univocity, 113; on immanentist metaphysics, 114n43; on Neoplatonists, 108–9; parallels with Voegelin, 106–8; on transcendence as degradation of immanence, 110; use of conceptual pairs (macropolitics/micropolitics, molecular/molar, mass/class) to analyze politics of change, 114–16, 116n48; on univocity of being, 111–14 Democritus: Patocˇka on, 159 Depth: as abyss in Nietzsche, 97; Voegelin on the descent into, 97–98 Derrida, Jacques: dangers of ontotheological language of philosophy, 128; interpretation of Levinas on gift and hospitality, 144, 144n61, 175; philosophical language incapable of expressing the transcendent, 128; on the possibilities of transcending philosophy, 127n16 Descartes, René: on doubt, 29; and the loss of the self, 49–50; Nietzsche on, 50 Dionysian/Apollinian: in Nietzsche, 98 Divine. See Beyond/transcendence Dynamical systems, 95, 113–14; and avoidance of hierarchical systems, 114 Edge of chaos, 95, 113–14, 120 Education: purpose of in Voegelin and Levinas, 142 Eidetic reduction, 7, 26 Either/or: regarding political foundations, 25, 175; as vision of politics, 17. See also Both/and

Enlightenment: critique of, 14; model of acceptable knowledge, 60 Enmeshed theory of consciousness, 32, 176–77 Equivalences of experience: in Voegelin, 100–101 Eros, 17; critique of dogmatism, 97; as desire to be good, 97; Voegelin on, 97, 105 Ethics/ethical responsibility: as an archai for Levinas, 130; Aristotle on, 131–33; as concrete action, 133; Levinas on, 19; phronesis and, 133; spoudaios as reflection of, 132; Voegelin and Levinas compared, 131n29; Voegelin’s ontology of, 131–33 Event: both/and, structure of, 107, 111; Deleuze on, 106, 113–14; as edge of chaos, 113; as a paradoxical instance, 111; as Univocal Being, 112 Experience-symbolization, 33–34, 53, 55; legitimate rearticulations, of 38 Foucault, Michel: on politics of suspicion, 170 Fukuyama, Francis: on end of history, 59, 59n1 German idealism: Patocˇka on, 165n30 Gnosticism: ideologies as modern form of, 24; as self-salvation, 102; Voegelin on, 10, 12, 17, 75–76, 93–95, 101, 103, 166 Greek alphabet: attenuates connection with oral world, 69–70 Habermas, Jürgen: on communicative activities, 62–63, 74, 172 Havelock, Eric: on dynamic nature of sound in oral cultures, 67 Hebrews: ancients and the spoken word, 84–87, 84n27 Heidegger, Martin: on Geviert or fourfold, 12, 12n22; on Nietzsche, 99–100; Patocˇka on, 155–57; Ricoeur on, 41–42; and Voegelin on language, 11n20 Helkein, 123 Hermeneutical phenomenology: Ricoeur on, 39–47 Hermeneutics: Ricoeur on, 41, 53–54 History of order: Voegelin on, 35, 51

Index / 183 Hobbes, Thomas, 122, 127, 143 Husserl, Edmund: on analogies, 30; as critic of modernity, 26; critique of Descartes, 29; critique of positivism, 5; distinguishing philosophy from psychology, 27; egological theory of consciousness, 29, 31; on eidetic reduction, 7; on goal of phenomenology, 28, 32; on intentionality, 27–28; on naïveté of life, 6; on natural thesis or standpoint, 28; on noema, 28, 50, 54; and Patocˇka, 165; on phenomenological reduction, 28– 29; on primacy of perception, 28; on pure logic, 27; on the recovery of the self, 50; search for foundations, 5; on transcendental ego, 32; transcendental phenomenology, 5–6; on truth, 26–27; Voegelin’s critique of, 9–10 Hypostatization: of the metaxy, 105 Illeity: Levinas on, 130 Imbalanced consciousness. See Gnosticism In-Between/metaxy, 124; as an archai for Voegelin, 130; as existence in uncertainty, 153; Voegelin on, 9, 11, 13, 18, 37–38, 103, 107–8, 123–24, 131–36, 176 Intentionality: Brentano on, 27; Husserl on, 27–28; Nietzsche on, 4; Voegelin on, 37, 151, 170, 176 Interpretation: Ricoeur on, 41–44, 46 Instability of language, 24–25 It-reality: Voegelin on, 10–11, 170, 176 Judaism: of Levinas, 139; Voegelin’s Christian reading of, 139–40 Judgment: Nietzsche on impossibility of judging life, 99; Voegelin on living in the presence of, 96–97 Kineton, 132 Laclau, Ernesto: on impossibility of fixed meaning, 118; on radical plural democracy, 119–29, 174 Langton, Christopher: on edge of chaos, 112 Language: correspondence theory of, 65; differences between Nietzsche and

Voegelin on relationship to experience, 100; as a form of representation 24, 33; language realism, 65, 70; Nietzsche on, 3, 98; onto-theological language, 128; Ricoeur on, 43–44; Voegelin on, 10– 11n20, 12–13, 36–37 Leap in being, 36 Levinas, Emmanuel: and the an-archical archai, 127–31; commonalities with Voegelin, 121–23; distinction between the saying and the said, 126; distrust of liberalism, 122; on ego, 125–27, 137; on ethical responsibility, 19; ethics as an archai, 130; on face-to-face relationship with the Other, 125–27, 174; on Heidegger and Hobbes, 127; on illeity as the divine, 130; through the lens of hospitality and gift, 144, 144n61; phenomenology of the third person, the Third, 136–38; on politics, 136–40; purpose of education, 142; on recovery of transcendence, 18, 123, 125; and the self-critical state, 137; on the summum bonum, 122; summum malum, 122; the trace as the approach of the Other, 129– 30, 174; the trace of the divine, 126–27 Liberalism: modern and individual freedom, 61; and the self-critical state in Levinas, 137 Libido dominandi: 52; as lust for power, 101 Literacy: and advent of abstract thinking, 69–70; and language realism, 65, 70; and political theory, 73–79; as source of nature/convention (or objective/ subjective) dichotomy, 64–65 Literate cultures, 15–16; capacity for abstraction from context, 66–68; compared to oral cultures, 63–73; materialism of, 65; and printing as final step in triumph of literate mentality, 71; and symbols of transcendence, 77 Locke, John, 122; protestant work ethic and wealth, 88 Logos, 9–10, 97, 108, 110, 113; Voegelin reduces both/and, nature of, 108 Luminosity: Voegelin on, 11, 37, 170, 176 Luria, A. R.: study of literate and nonliterate peasants, 68 Luther, Martin: highest Christian ethical life as labor, 90; on sin and freedom, 88

184 / Index MacIntyre, Alasdair: on communicative activities, 62–63, 74, 172 Marx, Karl: history as process of freedom from natural necessity, 88 Metaphors: and metaphysics, 170–71 Metaphysics: ancient and medieval philosophers not guilty of metaphysical reductionism, 147; critique of, 94, 104– 6; end of, 145; and metaphors, 170–71; metaphysical reductionism begins with Plato, 147, 157; modern addiction to, 166, 172; non-propositional and nonobjective nature of, 146; rise of, located in Plato’s theory of Ideas, 159; search for experiential essence of, 158; traditional metaphysical philosophies turn symbolism into doctrine, 150 Metaxy/In-Between, 124; as an archai for Voegelin, 130; as existence in uncertainty, 153; Voegelin on, 9, 11, 13, 18, 37–38, 103, 107–8, 123–24, 131– 36, 176 Mimesis: Ricoeur’s notion of, 54 Modernity/modern age: as advent of nihilism and the collapse of natural order, 61; as declining stage of Christian civilization, 79; and gnosticism, 103; and idea of individual freedom, 61; reason and human experience, 149; relationship to Christianity, 79–91; as series of technological revolutions and social dislocations, 58; spiritual decline of, 103, 103n23; on transformation of nature/convention dichotomy, 59; Voegelin’s flawed analysis of, 90 Mouffe, Chantel: on radical plural democracy, 119–29 Murdoch, Iris: on metaphorical thinking, 21 Myth of Judgment: as call for spiritual regeneration, 96; Voegelin on, 95–96 Mythos/muthos, 10; Ricoeur on, 48–49 Narrative: Ricoeur on, 45–49, 53–55, 173 Natural thesis or standpoint, 28 Nature/convention dichotomy, 59–60, 64; Aristotle on, 132–33, as dualism, 65, 66, 68, 71–74, 91 Negative Platonism: Patocˇka on, 20, 145, 148, 155–64, 166–67, 171–72

Neoplatonists: Deleuze on, 108–9; theory of emanation, 108–9 Niebuhr, Rinehold: as Christian Aristotelean, 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on absence of a telos, 100; on the beyond, 99; on consciousness, 4; on Descartes, 50; emphasizing the whole as process, 99; ethos of artistic self-creation, 62; on impossibility of judging life, 99; insanity as gnosticism, 94; on instinct, 99; on intentionality, 4; on language, experience, and symbols, 4, 98, 100; modernity as advent of nihilism, 61; naïve naturalism of, 100, 103; on participation and the beyond, 109; perspectivism, 2–3, 100; on radical creativity of human beings, 88; similarities with Voegelin, 98; skepticism of, 2; on thanatos, 17, 95; Voegelin’s critique of, 100; will-to-power, 2 Noema, 28; Husserl on, 50, 54 Noesis: and common sense of Thomas Reid, 134; Voegelin on, 134 Nomos, 1, 132 Ong, Walter: on oral/aural experience, 79; on the stasis of written word as paradigmatic for visual experience, 66–67 Ontology: Ricoeur on, 42; origin of term, 150n3 Open souls, 52–53 Oral cultures, 16; centrality of sound to thought and communication, 67–68; differences from literate cultures, 63– 73; as more spiritual, 65; printing destroying memory-oriented features of, 71; reliance on memory and direct communication to organize existence, 67; thought processes as highly contextual, 68 Orality: creative power of speech, 83–87; and political theory, 73–79. See also Oral cultures Order of history: Voegelin on, 35 Other: in Levinas, 125–27, 174 Paignon: as game, 124–25 Parousia: Voegelin on, 177 Pathemata: Voegelin and Plato on, 177

Index / 185 Patocˇka, Jan: on Aristotle as responsible for project of metaphysics, 158, 161; begins with exegesis of Socrates as experiential mode of philosophical activity, 148; embraces classical thought from contemporary perspective, 147; on the end of the metaphysical phase of philosophy, 145; evaluation of classical philosophical tradition, differences from Voegelin, 146–48; on German idealism, 165n30; on Heidegger, 155– 57; on historical being, 164; on Husserl and phenomenology, 165; locates metaphysics in Plato’s theory of the Ideas, 159; metaphysical reductionism begins with Plato, 147, 157; on modern addiction to metaphysics, 166, 172; on modern politics as “rule of Force,” 161; negative Platonism, 20, 148, 155–64, 166–67, 171–72; phenomenological character of, 165; on Plato and Aristotle, 159–61; on recovery of transcendence, 19–20; search for experiential essence of metaphysics, 158; on Socrates, 157, 157n15, 158–59; on Socratic dialectic, 156; on Socratic ignorance, 20, 162; Socratic teaching as experience of freedom, 161–62; on transcendence, 163–67; understanding transcendence as non-propositional and non-objective, 146 Peitho, 136 Perspectivism: and individual experience in Nietzsche, 100; Nietzsche on, 2–3 Phenomenological method, 7, 26, 29 Phenomenological reduction, 28–29 Phenomenology, 26, 28, 32; Ricoeur on aim of, 40 Philia, 135 Philodoxers: Voegelin on, 52 Philosophers: Voegelin on, 52 Philosophy of history: as history of ideas, 8; Voegelin’s, 11 Phronesis: existential virtue of spoudaios, 133–36 Plato: image of the puppet player, 124; on love of true wisdom, 124; notion of the “receptacle” compared to Levinas’s trace, 129; Patocˇka on, 147–48, 157–61; responsibility for propositional meta-

physics, 157, 161; on the truth of the world as beyond it, 93 Platonic philosophy: according to Patocˇka, contains spirit of Western civilization and seeds of its decline, 148 Platonic symbolism: Voegelin defends, 148, 153 Plotinus: on the One as a source of emanation, 129; on participation, 109 Pneumopathology, 101–2. See also Gnosticism Political society, 34; serving ethics in Levinas, 138 Political theory: ethical imperative of Levinas’s, 140; Voegelin’s based on metaxy, spoudaios, and phronesis, 134– 36; Voegelin’s reconstructed on oral/ aural orientation, 91–92 Positivism: Voegelin’s critique of, 31–32; failings of, 66 Postliterate visual orientation, 72–73 Postman, Neil: postliterate cultures and the loss of capacity for analytical thought, 73 Postmodern thought, 11–14, 169–70, 172 Poteat, William H.: on ancient Hebrews and the spoken word, 84–87; on the creative power of speech, 84; on Greek hierarchical political order, 86; on origins of modern subjectivism, 83 Printing: and triumph of literate mentality, 71–73 Psychology, 27 Reality as process, 78–79 Realpolitik: Voegelin on, 142 Recovery of the self: Husserl on, 50; Ricoeur on, 173; Voegelin on, 52, 173 Recovery of transcendence: and Deleuze, 17; and Voegelin, 17–19 Reflective distance: Voegelin on, 37, 170–71, 176 Reformation: anthropological ambivalence of, 90 Reid, Thomas: on common sense, 134–36 Representation: and consciousness, 24; and language, 33; as myth, symbol, metaphor, and narrative, 30 Resymbolization of order, 75–76 Revelation: Augustine on closure of, 83

186 / Index Ricoeur, Paul: aim of phenomenology the transparent self, 40; on appropriate site for interpretation, 46; on consciousness, 54; critique of Husserl, 40; on Heidegger, 41–43; 42n35; on hermeneutical phenomenology, 39–47; on hermeneutics, 40–42, 53–54; on hermeneutics of suspicion, 53, 173; on interpretation, 41–44; on language and representation, 43; on mimesis, 54; on muthos, 48–49; on narrative, 15, 47– 49, 53–55, 173; on ontology, 42; on recovery of self, 173; respect for the mystery of being, 39; on signs, 44–46; on storytelling, 47–48; on symbols, 43–46 Ritual: as basis for reconstruction of political theory, 91–92, 172; as compact type of symbolization, 76–77 Rorty, Richard: on imagination of solidarity, 175 Schütz, Alfred, 7–9 Skocpol, Theda: analysis of social revolutions, 117 Socrates: offers pre-metaphysical and ontological insight into reality, 157; Patocˇka on, 157n15; as representative mode of philosophy, 148 Socratic dialectic: Patocˇka on, 156 Socratic ignorance, 20, 158–59, 162 Socratic teaching: as experience of freedom, 161–62 Soul: properly ordered in Voegelin, 102 Spoudaios: Aristotle and Voegelin on, 132–36, 174 Storytelling: Ricoeur on, 47–48 Symbolization of order, 36, 38, 74–77 Symbols: benefit of, 38; as forms of representation, 34, 38; literate/visual contributions to deformation of, 77; oral/ aural in nature, 76; reinvigoration of, 105, 173; Ricoeur on, 43–46; Voegelin on, 37–38, 93, 104 Summum bonum, 18, 122 Summum malum, 122 Thanatos, 17; Nietzsche on as denial of life, 95–96; Voegelin on, 95–96 Trace: Levinas’s development of 129–30

Transcendence/beyond. See Beyond/ transcendence Transcendental phenomenology, 5–6 Univocity: Deleuze on, 111–14; defined by Deleuze, 113 Voegelin, Eric: on the agathon, 128; and the an-archical archai, 127–31; ancient and medieval philosophers not guilty of metaphysical reductionism, 147; on apeiron, 103; on the arche, 35; on Aristotle, 131–33, 131n29, 153–54; on Augustine and the closure of revelation, 83; on Augustinian philosophy of history, 80–81; on civil theology and Christianity, 80–82; on classic conception of reason, 124; on common sense, 134–36; commonalities of with Levinas, 121–23; on consciousness, 9, 32, 37; on the cosmion, 35, 74; critique of Heidegger, 12; critique of Husserl, 7– 8; critique of positivism, 31; on descent to the depth, 97; distrust of liberalism, 122; embraces classical perspective informed by contemporary critique of metaphysics, 147; on eminent reality, 105; enmeshed theory of consciousness, 32, 53, 176–77; on Eros 17, 97, 105; on equivalences of experience, 100–101; evaluation of classical philosophical tradition, differences from Patocˇka, 146–48; on experience symbolization, 33–34, 53, 55, 93; on fact/value distinction, 31; on Gnosticism, 12, 75–76, 93, 101–3, 133, 166; on God, man, world, and society, 12, 38, 80; on Hegel, 101–2, 173; and Heidegger on language, 11n20; on the history of order, 35, 51; on the history of political ideas, 33; on immanentist metaphysics, 114n43; on In-Between/ metaxy, 9, 11, 13, 18, 37–38, 103, 107, 131–36, 176; In-Between/metaxy as archai, 130; on intentionality, 37, 151, 170, 176; on It-reality, 10–11, 170, 176; on language, 10–11n20, 13, 33, 36–37; on leap in being, 36; on the libido dominandi, 52, 101; living in the presence of judgment, 96–97; on logos and mythos, 10, 108; on luminosity, 11,

Index / 187 37, 170, 176; meditation on transcendence, 170–71; on metaxy/In-Between, 9, 11, 13, 18, 37–38, 103, 107, 131–36, 131–36, 176; on modern understanding of transcendence, 151; on modernity as declining stage of Christian civilization, 79n23; mystery of the horizon similar to Levinas’s notion of the trace, 129; and mysticism, 122; on the Myth of Judgment, 95–96; on Nietzsche, 94, 100, 102, 173; on noesis, 134; on the ontology of ethics, 131–33; on open and closed souls, 52–53, 104; and origin of the term ontology, 150n3; paradigm of the city in heaven, 141n54; parallels with Deleuze, 106–8; on parousia, 177; on the pathemata, 177; and peitho, 136; and philia, 135; as a philosopher of speech, 57; on philosophers and philodoxers, 52; on philosophy as meditative experience, 9; on philosophy of history, 11; on phronesis, 134–36; on Plato, 124–25, 131, 151– 55; on pneumopathology, 101–2; on political society, 34; and political theory as an escape from visual orientation of modernity, 91; and purpose of education, 142; quietism of, 141; on

reality of process, 78; realpolitik of, 142; reconstruction of political theory using oral/aural orientation, 91–92; recovery of a sound-orientation as basis for political community, 74; and the recovery of self, 52, 173; on recovery of transcendence, 17–19, 123, 171; on reflective distance, 37, 170, 176; on reintegration of subjective experience, 32; on representation, 15, 33; on rite and ritual, 16, 76–77; on Schütz, 8–9, 9n13; similarities with Nietzsche, 98; on the summum bonum, 122; on the summum malum, 122; on symbolizations of order, 36, 74–77; on thanatos, 17, 95; traditional metaphysical philosophies turn symbolism into doctrine, 150; on transcendence, 94, 102, 146, 148–55; treatment of Christianity and its relation to modernity, 79–91; on xynon, 36 Webb, Eugene: on the Good as beyond philosophy, 128 Whitehead, Alfred North: and misplaced concreteness, 13, 33–34 Xynon, 36

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