Eric Voegelin and Alfred Schütz
A Friendship That Lasted a Lifetime

–Part 2 of a two part book review

Part 1 may be read HERE.

by Arpad Szakolczai

A Friendship That Lasted a Lifetime: The Correspondence Between Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin. Edited by Gerhard Wagner and Gilbert Weiss, translated by William Petropulos, University of Missouri Press. (2011). 256 pp.,Hardcover, $44.95. Kindle Edition, $26.07. 

A Friendship Renewed

The conversation regained depth, and thus interest, only about four and a half years later, on 7 November 1949 (interestingly, another major political anniversary, this time of the Russian Revolution).

This occurred when–in the context of an exchange about the History of Political Ideas manuscript–Voegelin returned to some of the fundamental philosophical questions that were previously approached in the context of his Husserl reading experience.

The letter reiterates some of the main, and most controversial, themes of the previous correspondence, about the historicity of truth, due to the event-like character of the major transcendental experiences that are the basis of philosophising, and the necessary spiritual preconditions for a genuinely rational thinking, in contrast to the positing of individual reasoning power as some kind of anthropological foundation.

The letter contains one fundamental new idea, the importance of persuading power (peitho), whose appearance Voegelin traces to Aeschylus and Plato (p.130).

The appeal is to the spirit, assuming a fundamental likemindedness (the Aristotelian homonoia) as genuine anthropological foundation, in contrast to sheer force, political activism, or mere reasoning.

Without mentioning Descartes, Kant or Hobbes, though evidently implying them, Voegelin focuses his attack on Hobbes as the origin of modern psychology, which "emerged as the empirical science of the spiritually disoriented, merely motivated, human being" (p.131).

No reply came this time from Schütz, and–apart from a courtesy letter–no exchange of any substance takes place until April 1951, when on the 15^th Voegelin sends the Introduction to the New Science of Politics.

Schütz now replies quite quickly, on the 22^nd, though the letter is only finished and sent off on the 27^th, and starts by giving the reasons for his silence: he got the "impression’, from some of Voegelin’s earlier letters, that their "ways had parted" (p.135).

This could only refer to the 7 November 1949 letter; and the reason could only be that Schütz felt that a return to the controversial themes of 1943, left unanswered then by him, was a hostile act on the part of Voegelin, touching upon delicate aspects of Schütz’s identity (given that matters of ideas and identity for genuine thinkers, but to a large extent for any academic, can never be separated).

The letter is clearly conciliatory in tone, trying to re-build bridges on shared understanding, including a common hostility to "positivism" (an eternal means for social scientists–to bridge differences in the face of a common enemy), and the thinking of Max Weber as a fundamental and shared positive reference point, which of course recalls their formative experiences at the University of Vienna right after WWI.