Bound by the Errors of Our Time?

Already in the nineteenth century, a generation before Russell and Whitehead, there was a man who knew all these problems perfectly — Gustave Flaubert. Just look at his Tentation de Saint Antoine or his Bouvard et Pécuchet. He knew all about the perversions of gnosticism; he established a central connection between hérésie et cruauté — in its tragic form and in its comic form. He knew, in Bouvard et Pecuchet, that such people had Ernst Haeckel for their bible as Hitler would have later. But who knows Flaubert? Who uses him as a source for understanding these matters? It’s a very complicated cultural situation.

Q.: When in your books you spoke of a leap in being, were you referring to a society or to something possible for an individual?

VOEGELIN: It is always done by individuals and spreads from there. We do not know of any collective leaps in being but only of experiences represented in concrete personalities. In the person of Confucius, as attested by his work, such a leap has taken place. Or in the life of the unknown author of the Tao Te Ching as attested by that text. Or in Plato’s dialogues we can see it. But it’s always a matter of individuals as far as we know.

Q.: How do you see the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre? As antagonistic to your position? Or as one of the criticisms of previous ideologies?

VOEGELIN: Excuse my rough words — I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the psychological analyses of Sartre (late in L’Être et le néant, for example) — but he is a vulgarian and an epigone. He’s not interesting. He’s not to be compared with Albert Camus; he was a thinker! Sartre is not on that level.

Q.: Professor Voegelin, what is your ground?

VOEGELIN: What do you mean by that?

Q.: Your ideology.

VOEGELIN: I have no ideology. I hope not. Why should I? Or do you consider it a general human obligation to have an ideology?

Q.: Is there a standard by which you govern your existence?

VOEGELIN: Philosophy, first of all; then there are certain elementary guides contained in revelatory literature — the Ten Command­ments, for instance — and so on.

M.O’H.: What do you mean by an ideology? I’m thinking partic­ularly of what you said about Freud: You distinguished between Freudian ideology and the openness of Freud’s work.

VOEGELIN: Well, I have not defined ideology. I have only picked out the formulation of one element in it — the misplacement of the ground within an immanent hierarchy of being. I cannot of course now give a lecture on ideology; I can only enumerate what is part of it.

In the first place, all ideology comes out of the classic and Christian back­ground (beginning with enlightenment) — so one element always is the survival of apocalypse, the idea that this present imperfect world is to be followed by a more perfect phase. A second element is gnostic, that is, knowledge of the recipe for bringing about the more perfect realm. (That is gnostic: the recipe.) Third, immanenti­zation, as distinguished from older apocalypses.

In old apocalypse, the new realm — the Fifth Monarchy [Dan. 2:44] — is brought about by the intervention of God, or by a messenger of God, by an an­gel. In modern immanentist ideologies, it is always brought about by human action. That begins even earlier; you might say Oliver Cromwell’s army takes the place, in apocalyptic speculation, of the messenger of the Lord in Revelation chapter twenty.  Then occurs a certain intellectual misplacement, due to the immanentization of this question of the ground. The temptation to extend “positively” a new science or immanent world physics as a model to other areas where the model doesn’t apply—the element of scientism — is always there too, from Marx as a scientific socialist to Mary Baker Eddy and Christ-come-as-Scientist.

These are some of the components you find always. And since you asked especially about Freud: He has the closest relation to Hegel’s dialectics. I should say the nucleus in Freud is that famous sentence, “All id should become ego.” Everything that is in the compactness of the unconscious should be unfolded into rational clarity — which is done by Hegel through the dialectical process and by Freud through analysis. In that sense Freud also is a gnostic ideologist. That gives you some possibilities of classification.

C.G.: Thinking of what you were saying about the basis, in the ground of being, for political friendship, political love, I wish you would say a bit more — perhaps in terms of this question: Aren’t there myths about the transcendent divine being that need to be broken before this kind of friendship can occur?

VOEGELIN: Could you give an example of what you mean? It’s very difficult to answer such an abstractly formulated question.

C.G.: Trying to ask more concretely: Are there not conceptions of a relation between a divine being and our world that distract us from concern for other human beings? I think of the phenomenon — at various stages in my own development — of a primitive and perhaps recurring strand of conception of the divinity that seems in fact not to ground political concern.

VOEGELIN: You wouldn’t let us know an example?

C.G.: Various Christian statements that seem to be speaking about escape from the community of this world.

VOEGELIN: Ah! you mean something like the Christian doctrine of the contemptus mundi? In the Middle Ages every good person, includ­ing every good pope, had to write at least one treatise on contemptus mundi. That is of course a problem. If we mean by Christianity, in its origin, that sort of experience that has manifested itself in the writings of the New Testament, Christianity contains nothing about politics but only, apocalyptically, about your way out of this world through the Second Coming of Christ, which will occur next week or the week after next — in your lifetime, anyway. There is no particular interest attached to the order of life in community, and so you can’t expect politics out of the Bible. If the church later has a lot to say about politics it is because it has compromised with the reality — given up the immediate expectation of the Parousia and de­veloped the church itself for life in the world. That’s a complicated process.

C.G.: The eschatological imagery turns into mythology then?

VOEGELIN: It was never anything but mythology, of course — not in a pejorative sense but in the technical sense. Myth has a good sense.

Q.: What exactly would be the criteria for rejection of past ide­ologies? If we could develop standards to judge the situation then perhaps we might have a way out.