Commentary by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003), and numerous essays.  He is also poetry editor here at VoegelinView.

I have learned more from this book, philosophically, than from any book in years. I do find its central hypothesis persuasive. And not only does it often speak beautifully about love, it was clearly written from and with enormous love.

Professor Walsh’s book is masterful in its erudition, depth, and importance. The book’s purpose is announced in its Preface: it aims to do what has scarcely been attempted before, which is to present the era of philosophy from Kant to the present as a whole and as a continuity. It does this by following the “interpretative hypothesis”  that  “philosophy, since Kant, has explicitly”  and ever more rigorously  “shifted from an account of entities and concepts to an existential meditation on the horizon within which it finds itself” (p. xiii).

Thus the modern philosophical revolution, as the book’s Epilogue puts it, has entailed an ever-deepening “meditation on the priority of existence over all reflection,” and a “reversal of the priority of the subject in intentionality to include the luminosity of existence that precedes it” (394). As such, the development traced in the book is that of an evermore expansive exploration of the many consequences of the fact that “[human] knowledge always fails to account for its source” (222); and that the truth of the transcendent origin of human existence cannot be said or known, or theoretically attained or contained, but only lived in a continual striving of existential openness within and toward it (449). Walsh offers up many pithy formulae for summing up this key point. For example: “The truth of life [is] forever exceeding the life of truth” (225).

The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence    

Commentary  by Henrik Syse

Henrik Syse is on the faculty of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (Prio). He has written a number of books on war and peace. His most recent book is Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives.(2007)

This is a great book. Period. But it is also a difficult book, much like the term post-modernity, with which this book certainly deals (although it mainly prefers to use modernity as an encompassing term). I will never forget my philosopher colleague who was invited to a group of politically active labor unionists to lecture. These eager unionists wanted enlightenment in the challenging field of political theory. My colleague had given them, for this purpose, a lecture on the postmodern, whereupon a listener commented afterwards that he truly appreciated this topic being raised, since he so much disliked the way the post office had been modernized.

Hard to understand, indeed…

The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence  

Commentary by Thomas Heilke

Professor Heilke  is Professor of Politcal Science at the University of Kansas and is Director for Special Projects , the International Program. He is the author or co-author of  a several works, including Eric Voegelin: The Quest for Reality, and is the editor of  three volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  He is also Book Reviews editor here at VoegelinView.

Professor Walsh has written an unsettling, unusual, and in some ways audacious book. We all are used by now to the many tellings and re-tellings of the story of modernity, from the admiring yet critical analyses and histories of Leo Strauss and his students to the more laudatory work of Hans Blumenberg and beyond¹. More narrowly, we have come to appreciate the history of modernity as a story of the growth of nihilism,² as a story of the birth of new and sometime terrible regimes,³ as an idiot’s tale told in a Gnostic mode,⁴ as an age of unrelenting revolution.⁵

We all know by now that the story of modern philosophy is not about the growth of freedom, but about coming to terms with limitations (Kant), of egophanic gnostic derailment (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche), of power after power that ceases only in death (Hobbes and Foucault),  and so on. And yet, it is also the story of deep psychological insight (Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard), the story of astonishing technological achievement, and, indeed, of the growth of political freedom, and even a story of spiritual freedom in some quarters,⁶ all the murderous disasters of the twentieth century notwithstanding. Now Professor Walsh has added his own unsettling but edifying “and yet” to this never-ending story. Professor Walsh proposes to a lead us on a “raid on the inarticulate” (p. 7), to furnish his readers with a “meditation on the priority of existence over all reflection” (p. 461), or at least to show how such a meditation might be undertaken, and to “chronicle” a modern existential turn (p. 161). But what is the problem? What is the question that animates such a raid, that leads us to believe we require such a meditation? Professor Walsh begins his book, as many others do, with a reflection on the so-called “crisis” of modernity. That crisis has been identified in a variety of ways, to the point of becoming a common-place, and nearly a cliché.

The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence    

Commentary  by Rouven J. Steeves

Rouven Steeves, Major, USAF, is Assistant Professor of political science and foriegn laguages at the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs.  He has written on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and the psychology of evil, among other topics.

Aware that our chair and at least one or two panelists would provide an overview of not only the manner in which Prof. Walsh (David) unfolds his argument in his newest book but also its place as the final volume in a trilogy, I want to focus on several themes and issues that I think reside at the heart of David’s project and which require our consideration as we contemplate how we shall live in light of the illumination of existence revealed to us in the paradigmatic lives disclosed for us by David. I hope that the issues I raise will spur dialogue and allow me to discover fellow wanderers along the way with whom I can converse about truth and truthfulness as we search for meaning and light and existence in truthfulness. Indeed, it is with existence in truthfulness that I would like to begin.

Existence in truthfulness

“Primum vivere, deinde philosophari¹-- ‘first live, then philosophize.’” But life is infinitely complex; no finite being can master what itself will always master (has always mastered) man. Therefore, as Fitzgerald once noted: The sign of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Prof. Walsh is such a first-rate mind and a true philosopher—a lover of wisdom who searches after the Beloved in and through life; a Beloved only ever glimpsed, never beheld (except in the only begotten of the Father—more on this shortly).

The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence  

Commentary  by Brendan Purcell

Father Purcell is Senior Lecturer in University College, Dublin. He is the author of numerous articles on Eric Voegelin and is editor and translater of Hitler and the Germans, Vol 31 of the Collected Works. He has been a frequent contributor to VoegelinView.

My first contact with David Walsh was when I was working on my own MA a century ago. One of his big interests then was a love of Beckett who was also dealing with the mystery of human existence. David has a similar linguistic gift, without the obscurity. Not so much Beckett’s “No’s knife to yes’s wound” (as he called one tough piece), what you got from David was yes’s smile to no’s bad hair day.

In fact, even though this is a philosophical exploration, David himself is coming out of a very wide embracing meeting with modernity. I well remember summer courses we were giving together in the States where we sat in on each other’s lectures. So I got to attend his audiovisually based lectures on modern painting and modern music. While from one perspective modernity may seem to be undergoing a dark night of culture, he showed that—like the people who wrote “my night has no darkness” on the walls of their catacombs—the very awareness of night implies a long night’s journey into day. He was the one who helped me see Casper Friedrich’s paintings pointing beyond the spiritual darkness of the Enlightenment, and how that motif continues through Augustus Tack, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clifford Still.

In his review of The Modern Philosophical Revolution, James Schall, Professor of politics at Georgetown University writes: “He is a man whose work I have admired, but it is only with this last work on the ’luminosity of existence’ that I have fully realized what he has been up to.’“ Because what David has been ‘up to’ these last twenty years is definitely a mystery.

THE WORLD WE THINK IN

by James V. Schall, S.J.

We are pleased to offer this review of David Walsh's The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence in addition to those reviews already presented here from the Toronto Eric Voegelin Society Symposium. Father Schall is Professor of Government at Georgetown University.  He is the author of  books on politics, religion, Chesterton and Maritain. Among his more recent books are The Regensburg Lecture, The Life of the Mind, and The Order of Things.  Part of this review first appeared in Ignatius Insight and is reprinted here with permission.

This is why we are engaged in a drama of which we are not the source, and we sense the importance of responding rightly to the pull of Being. What is at stake far transcends any immanent good. It is nothing less than the loss of our participation in Being. The soul of man is, as Dostoevsky noted, a battlefield in which God and the devil are contending. Our decisions are of surpassing significance because they carry a dimension that endures beyond the universe itself. This is the drama of existence that is glimpsed by the Greek discovery of Being, but that reaches its full transparence only in Christ. (David Walsh, The Third Millennium) ¹

Indeed, there is hardly a ‘world’ or an ‘age’ at all when we see that each individual exists within an eternal scale of measurement that utterly outweighs any finite calculation. (David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution:The Luminosity of Existence) ²