"The Attunement of the Soul" 

Eric Voegelin's Search of Order -Part 2

by Charles Embry

Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosoohy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This is offered in two parts and appears with permission.

We will recall that one of the motivations for Voegelin's philoso­phy — and for all philosophy — was the experience of political disorder and the desire to understand the nature of political disorder and, thereby, to search for the source of political order. In seeking to under­stand the political disorder that he experienced, Voegelin focused on the discovery made by Plato that the "state is man writ large." Voegelin called this the Platonic Anthropological Principle and developed Plato's insight by reflecting and meditating on what it means to be human. His meditations led him to focus on the nature of consciousness — as it is embodied in human beings who live in the metaxy, the In-Between. In the foreword to Anamnesis, Voegelin wrote that "the problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of conscious­ness.  Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a phi­losophy of politics."¹¹

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning  

§3. The Complex of Consciousness-Reality-Language 

There is indeed no beginning to be found in this or that part of the complex; the beginning will reveal itself only if the paradox is taken seriously as the something that constitutes the complex as a whole. This complex, however, as the expansion of equivocations shows, includes language and truth, together with consciousness and reality. 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. Words and their meanings are just as much a part of the reality to which they refer as the being things are partners in the comprehending reality; language participates in the paradox of a quest that lets reality become luminous for its truth by pursuing truth as a thing tended. This paradoxic structure of language has caused certain questions, controversies, and terminological difficulties to become constants in the philosophers' discourse since antiquity without approaching satisfactory conclusions.

UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH

from  The Growth of the Liberal Soul -Ch 3 Pt 1

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth" appears here in four parts.

Customary Liberal Silence

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 3

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

§ 3.  What is In Search of Order about?

The balance achieved by Anselm is never surpassed (as Voegelin's loving recollection of it implies), and the important implications can best be studied by the reader in the original. The stance of Voegelin at the end of his days is of a man living in responsive openness to the divine appeal. He finds that what is at stake is not God but the truth of human exis­tence with the persuasive role of the philosopher unchanged since antiquity, the persistent partisan for reality — experienced in the propa­gation of existential truth: This is the scholar's true vocation. If there is an "answer" given to the question of his unfinished meditation, it may be glimpsed in an affirmation of the comprehending Oneness of divin­ity Beyond the plurality of gods and things. At the end of Voegelin's long struggle to understand, Reality experienced-symbolized is a mys­terious ordered (and disordered) tensional oneness moving toward the perfection of its Beyond — not a system. ²⁷

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning     

 
§2. The Paradox of Consciousness

By now the Beginning has wandered from the opening of the chapter to its end, from the end of the chapter to its whole, from the whole to the English language as the means of communication between reader and writer, and from the process of communication in English to a philosophers' language that communicates among the participants in the millennial process of the quest for truth. And still the way of the beginning has not reached the end that would be intelligible as its true beginning; for the appearance of a "philosophers' language" raises new questions concerning a problem that begins to look rather like a complex of problems.