Eric Voegelin and “The Recovery of Political Theory”
My approach to political theory was influenced by Eric Voegelin in courses he taught at Notre Dame in 1965 and 1967. My mentors at Notre Dame (Voegelin, Niemeyer and Henri Deku) were part of a flow of Europeans forced to flee a Europe torn by war, and who struggled to adjust to American culture. As it is said of serious illness, “It beats the alternative,” and these men, and women (Hannah Arendt), enriched American scholarship, and gave it a depth that it would have taken a century or more to attain.
Oddly, the Founding generation responsible for the Constitution of the United States were similarly trained, and, thus, knowledgeable, and interested in, the great questions of Western civilization. They studied the history of Greece and Rome, debated how best to prevent a republic’s decline into Empire, and read deeply in ancient history, philosophy and history while engaged in active, public, lives. How different from today when our best educated are ignorant of philosophy, history, religion, politics, the arts, music and their country’s desperate struggle to preserve personal liberty. If this struggle ends in maintaining limited government, and personal freedom, we may thank these men, and especially Eric Voegelin and Michael Polanyi.
SCIENCE AND PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE:
MICHAEL POLANYI
The work of Michael Polanyi (1891‑1976) was a powerful antidote to much of what passed for serious discourse in the 20th Century. In a series of books commencing with Science, Faith and Society (1946), and including his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post‑Critical Philosophy (1958), The Study of Man (1959), Beyond Nihilism (1960), The Tacit Dimension (1966), and in numerous lectures and essays,36 Michael Polanyi has attempted to formulate a view of science which overcomes the conventional notion of science as supremely objective, impersonal, and detached. The purpose of his study Personal Knowledge is, he writes, “to re‑equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical thought have taught them to distrust.”37 The challenge Polanyi sets for himself then, could be seen as a direct response to the explicit advice of Skinner, and the implicit intention of Easton, that we should replace “traditional prescientific views” with scientific ones.38
SCIENCE AND ART
Polanyi begins his argument with rejection of the spurious ideal of scientific detachment.39 Scientific reasoning is human reasoning and should never claim absolute objectivity, absent of the scientist’s “passionate impulse.”40
Scientific discourse must maintain its human perspective.
. . .as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.41
The notion of political life in political community, we may infer, is somehow lost in its translation into reified, “objective” language used by David Easton which reduces all that is human to “processes” of a “system” analogous to a “factory” or airport “traffic control center.”42 The behaviorist’s pursuit of objective knowledge, which in Easton’s approach means the search for causal hypotheses of behavior ultimately verifiable empirically, creates a disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity which Polanyi rejects because it does not adequately reflect the personal character of human knowledge. An element of personal skill is involved in even the most mechanistic of scientific measurements. As such, scientific research can be viewed as an art which is largely communicated by cultural traditions and attitudes. Though science as substantive knowledge can be readily transmitted from one person to another person, from one civilization to another, the art of scientific research is less easily conveyed.
The regions of Europe in which the scientific method first originated 400 years ago are scientifically still more fruitful today, in spite of their impoverishment, than several overseas areas where much money is available for scientific research. Without the opportunity offered to young scientists to serve an apprenticeship in Europe, and without the migration of European scientists to the new countries, research centres overseas could hardly ever have made much headway.43
The instruments of science, moreover, are extensions of our persons; they are not external objects, objective devices, the consequences of which are equally objective. We “pour ourselves out into” our tools, he writes, “and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them.”44
AN ONTOLOGY OF KNOWING
We participate in that which we come to know. What we discover, for example, is often the outgrowth of a long period of incubation. Knowledge has a latent characteristic by which we continue to engage in the resolution of problems even though we make no conscious effort to resolve them. An unfinished task preoccupies us, and we exist in relationship to the resolution of the problem, to the conclusion of the task. We strive to express something which will satisfy our craving for resolution or solution. Thus we progress in our knowledge by premonition, intimation, commitment, and trust in something which is not a physical object, “an idea never yet conceived,” which “emerges in response to our search for something we believe to be there.” When we have found it, it conveys to us the “conviction of its being true. It arrives accredited in advance by the heuristic cravings which evoked it.”45 “The effort of knowing,” Polanyi writes, “is thus guided by a sense of obligation towards the truth: by an effort to submit to reality.”46 It seems an obvious statement that we “submit to reality,” but in the climate of contemporary politics, the more successful enterprises of which seem to owe their success to irrational evasion of personal reality, the observation of Polanyi must be given prominent place. A scientific enterprise is necessarily a dialogue between reality and a psyche which at the same time participates in reality. Because whatever aspects of reality we discover are necessarily the declaration of a personal discovery, our search, our valuations, and discoveries will contain some emotional content. But this is a necessary part of the scientific method, not the unwanted accretion of unprofessional dabblers. Our differentiation of phenomena according to the more or less important depends on what Polanyi calls an intellectual passion or emotion, “on a sense of intellectual beauty; that it is an emotional response which can never be dispassionately defined, any more than we can dispassionately define the beauty of a work of art or the excellence of a noble action. “47 The author or founder of science as “a heuristic communion with reality. . .”48 was St. Augustine, Polanyi writes. “He taught that all knowledge was a gift of grace, for which we must strive under the guidance of antecedent belief: nisi credideritis, nun intelligitis.”49
The discovery of truth or reality is based upon faith, not doubt. Modern philosophical method, however, beginning with Descartes and including behaviorism as its most recent manifestation, has emphasized doubt and distrust of the personal act by which knowledge is affirmed.
PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE
AND CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
The alternatives developed by Polanyi recall the ontologically oriented methods of Classical‑Christian political theory in which the philosopher was not everyman, but the lover of truth whose soul was structured by the experience of reality manifest to the divine. His cognitive faculties were perceived as participating in the full compass of reality. Not cut off from transcendent being, but sharing or participating in the divine, the lover of truth came to a fuller appreciation of his nature as man. Existence and knowledge were intwined in a personal process of awareness of the depth of the soul and its place in being. Knowing and being were in communion at the site of personal consciousness of the tensions of human place and commitment. The philosophic symbols which the philosophers created to express this perspective were expressive of personal experience of a common reality which could be transmitted to another person, trusting in the universality of that experience and the capacity of the other person’s participation in a common reality. The appeal of philosophy was necessarily an appeal to a common humanity, not to an abstract ahistorical method manipulable by men committed to autonomous, “objective” truth. Were truth autonomous of human experience then it would lose its luminosity to being and become a method open only to its own processes. Whereas Classical‑Christian political theory explored the dimensions of ontologically oriented human consciousness, modern political theory went the way of autonomous method. In contemporary political theory this latter movement leads to behavioral theory. The former, Classical‑Christian approach, leads to philosophical anthropology.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
OF ERIC VOEGELIN
The political theory of Eric Voegelin (1901-1992) is called a “philosophical anthropology” because it is based on analysis of the experience of the “open soul.” The term “open soul” was coined by Henri Bergson whose Two Sources of Morality and Religion is an examination of the soul which is “open,” not self‑centered, transparent to the divine in its unwilled erotic movement away from selflove. Men who drew the multitude of mankind after them by their persuasive examples (one thinks of Moses, the Prophets, Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth) are representative. Voegelin’s philosophical anthropology, then, is an examination of the historical event of the opening of the soul in representative men and the consequences of that movement for our understanding of the order of history as it is revealed in the history of order. By “history of order” Voegelin means the symbolizations of order which can be found in the historical record of human society. Voegelin’s examination of the history of order in his multi‑volume work, Order and History, shows that man’s consciousness of order is not static, but moves toward differentiated insight. As a result, Voegelin’s philosophical anthropology at its core is not exclusively a political theory, but a philosophy of history, “history understood as the symbolic form by which man is conscious of the movement of reality in the direction of emerging truth.”
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Voegelin’s concept of history changed as he more deeply faced the philosophical problems of his subject.. In The New Science of Politics (1952), written as the sum of his research preliminary to embarking on his Order and History, he anticipated that the history of order was manifest in three “types of truth”: cosmological, anthropological, and soteriological.s0 The first type, “cosmological truth,” is manifest in the historical record of ancient Near Eastern civilizations whose basic conceptual form was the “cosmological myth.” The “cosmological myths” expressed a concept of political order as a small cosmos or “microcosmos” formed by the presence of intra-cosmic gods in every facet of life of ancient man. “Anthropological truth” represents the progress from the compact cosmological form of symbolization into the differentiated concept of representative men attuned to transcendent divine reality. The symbol of order as “macroanthropos,” the concept of order as man writ large of the Greek philosophers, however, emphasized the psyche of man as the actor in the drama of man’s participation of being. “Soteriological truth” of the Christian epoch represented a further differentiation.
The impossibility of philia between God and man may be considered typical for the whole range of anthropological truth. The experiences that were explicated into a theory of man by the mystic philosophers had in common the accent on the human side of the orientation of the soul toward divinity. The soul orients itself toward a God who rests in his immovable transcendence: it reaches out toward divine reality, but it does not meet an answering movement from beyond. The Christian bending of God in grace toward the soul does not come within the range of these experiences . . . .The experience of mutuality in the relation with God, of the amicitia in the Thumistic sense, of the grace which imposes a supernatural form on the nature of man, is the specific difference of Christian truth.51
This early formulation implied a view of history as a linear progress towards the fully differentiated consciousness of Christianity, and Voegelin argued that the cosmological mode knew only a cyclic concept of history.
In volume one of Order and History, Voegelin developed the concept of the “cosmological myth” by an examination of the myths of the ancient Near East and attempted to explain Israel’s view of history, which had broken with the cyclical view of order of the cosmological myth. Volumes two and three dealt with the origins of philosophy in Hellas as a leap into an order of consciousness formed by the mystic philosophers. Volume four was to have been titled “Empire and Christianity,” and to have dealt with the merger of historical consciousness of Israel and anthropological truth of Hellas in Christian soteriological truth. Volumes five and six, “The Protestant Centuries” and “The Crisis of Western Civilization” respectively, were to deal with the break with the Classical‑Christian concepts of order in the modern epoch, and the ensuing crisis. When he finally published volume four in 1974, however, Voegelin revealed that he had changed his mind. He came to realize that the concept “cosmological myth” was too narrow to encompass the varieties of myth he had uncovered: the myths of a different structure and a less compact mode, in the ancient Near East and also the cosmogonic myth of Genesis and of Plato’s Timaeus. Hence, though in its broad outlines the concept of “cosmological myth” was still valid, he was now forced to restructure his study of order and history to the extent that his theoretical formulation had ignored the consciousness of history within the “cosmological” myth. Voegelin commenced Order and History with the view that his study would reveal a concept of linear history made conscious by the revelatory events of Israel and the Gospels. But, he writes, “This conventional belief had to be abandoned when I discovered the unilinear construction of history, from a divine‑cosmic origin of order to the author’s present, to be a symbolic form developed by the end of the third millennium B.C. in the empires of the Ancient Near East.”52 Nevertheless, Voegelin did not repudiate the insight that anthropological and soteriological truth were differentiations of compact truth. He retained his concept that history is a process of differentiated consciousness and reaffirmed that a study of order and history needs to consider the problem of deformed modes of experience.
“NOETIC” AND “PNEUMATIC” THEOPHANY: In the “Preface” to the first volume of Order and History, Voegelin writes that “The order of history emerges from the history of order.”53 The concept of history contained in this sentence informs his philosophical anthropology with its chief focus, his choice of materials, and controls the development of his mufti‑volume study. What “history” is cannot be answered without reference to Voegelin’s differentiation of types of consciousness in which history becomes known. The consciousness of the open soul is structured by poetic and pneumatic theophanies, experiences of divine reality, which “do not occur in history; the constitute history together with its meaning.”54 To understand the meaning of history, one must know the “history of theophany.”55 Voegelin’s discussion of “poetic” theopany in Order and History explores the development of the symbols of philosophic consciousness in Hellas. The discovery of the order of the soul in openness to transcendent divine reality by the Greek philosophers is simultaneously the discovery of the soul’s movement towards differentiated poetic consciousness. Reality, as the philosophers became conscious of it, therefore, “is not a static order of things given to a human observer once for all; it is moving, indeed, in the direction of emergent truth.”56 The “truth” of the philosophers is not a fixed piece of information, “but the event in which the process of reality becomes luminous to itself., 57 This “event” is historical in the sense that consciousness of history is a process shaped by theophanies. History “is the In-Between where man responds to the divine presence and divine presence evokes the response of man.”58
The poetic and pneumatic opening of the soul reveals the divine reality from the direction of the “Beginning” and from the “Beyond.” The “Beyond” refers to Plato’s symbol of experience of the transcendent Good beyond existence and essence, which moves the soul away from the world of shadows and ignorance. The experience of divine reality in the “Beginning” is symbolized in the language of cosmogonies which extend in their historical range from the cosmogonic myths of Egypt and Mesopotamia, to the account of creation in Genesis and the formulation of the Gospel of John that “In the beginning was the Word.” The “Beyond” is a symbol which articulates the experience of divine reality beyond the world of immanent existence.
Thus, in the Christian experience of the Gospel of John, the “Word” of the “Beginning” is identified with the Word of Christ who manifests the movement of the word from the Beyond.59 In this manner, Voegelin identifies the equivalence of the reality experienced in philosophy with the reality experienced in the Gospels and does not accept the conventional opposition between reason and revelation. Analyzed on the level of experience, noetic theophany articulates an aspect of the same divine reality expressed in the pneumatic symbols of Moses, the Prophets, and the Gospels.6 Accordingly, Voegelin emphasizes the compatibility of historical consciousness in the noetic theophany of Plato with the pneumatic theophany of St. Paul. In the Christian epoch pneumatic theophany is marked by a further differentiation of the directional movement of history in the eschatological view of the immortality of man. “Faith in Christ means responsive participation in the same divine pneuma that was active in the Jesus who appeared in the vision [of St. Paul] as the Resurrected Lord.61
“LEAP‑IN‑BEING:‑ Bergson observed that the passage from the closed to the open soul is not an advance of degrees, but a “sudden leap” into a different order of consciousness. 62 In Order and History, Voegelin has called this phenomenon the “leap in‑being:” those historical moments when a new truth about God and, in consequence, a fuller understanding of man and history is discovered. When a “leap‑in‑being” occurs,
Not only will the unseemly symbols be rejected, but man will turn away from the world and society as the source of misleading analogy. He will experience a turning around, the Platonic periagoge, an inversion or conversion toward the true source of order. And this turning around, this conversion, results in more than an increase in knowledge concerning the order of being; it is a change in the order itself. For the participation in being changes its structure when it becomes emphatically a partnership with God, while the participation in mundane being recedes to second rank. The more perfect attunement to being through conversion is not an increase on the same scale but a qualitative leap. And when this conversion befalls a society, the converted community will experience itself as qualitatively different from all other societies that have not taken the leap.63
Such a qualitative spiritual irruption occurred when Israel discovered itself as a community of chosen people of God, living in the historical present under God. The Israelites were conscious of themselves as having been taken up from among the other cultures whose symbols were expressive of a compact consciousness of participation in being, and made God’s special people. In this sense, they constituted a theopolity, or city of God, whose historical traditions began with a revelation of a transcendent God whose love for Israel as a people is visible in the history of Israel. The historical consciousness of Israel did not remain static, but became a stratum of historical consciousness which lay in the background of further development. In the Christian epoch,
When the distinctions are more fully developed, as they were by St. Augustine, the history of Israel will then become a phase in the historia sacra, in church history, as distinguished from the profane history in which empires rise and fall. Hence, the emphatic partnership with God removes a society from the rank of profane existence and constitutes it as the representative of the civitas Dei in historical existence.64
Voegelin calls this process of movement, from compact to generalized insight, the process of “differentiation.”
Voegelin’s philosophy of history distinguishes between incomplete‑and complete breakthroughs or leaps‑in‑being. In Israel and Hellas, the breaks from the cosmological form were radical and complete, developing in their wake “pneumatic” and “poetic” symbols respectively, which express the character of the theophanies which constituted the “leap.” Other societies such as China reveal only a partial or “tentative” breakthrough.65 The concept of society as “macroanthropos” occurs in China by a “leap‑in‑being” of the Confucian and Taoist sages, he writes, but the leap “was not radical enough to break the cosmological order completely.”66 Voegelin’s philosophical anthropology goes beyond the traditional limits of political theory, therefore, because political science itself is the outgrowth of a radical “leap‑in‑being,” not a tentative one.
DEFORMATION OF THE OPEN SOUL: The history of order does not reveal an unremitting upward movement towards greater consciousness of being. The experience of the open soul is sometimes deformed. The general term which Voegelin gives to the eclipse of experiential symbols is “derailment.” Derailment can occur to any symbolism, in any experiential mode. The cosmological symbol of political rule over the “four quarters of the world,” analogous to the North‑South axis of the cosmos, can become a program for imperial expansion. The Christian differentiation of a “universal mankind under God” can be hypostatized into a quest for world empire. Voegelin writes that “The possibility of making immanentist nonsense of symbols which express the experience of divine presence in the order of man’s existence in society and history is always present.”67 Derailment can take several forms. In the period of transition of Classical philosophy to the speculation of the Stoics, philosophy was deformed into “doctrine.” The hierophanous symbols which Plato and Aristotle created to articulate their experience of reality evoked original experience of the sacred. But once philosophy ceases to be a medium of experience, Voegelin writes, “A new intellectual game with imaginary realities in an imaginary realm of thought, the game of propositional metaphysics, has been opened with world‑historic consequences that reach into our own present.”68 The Stoic dogmatization of philosophy, though destructive in its ultimate consequences, had the immediate effect of preserving the insight of Classical philosophy against the inevitable defect that philosophy requires “philosophers” if it is to be preserved. In the absence of persons of the rank of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to continue the search for truth, and of circumstances conducive to the contemplative life, the dogmatization of philosophy at least preserved the symbols of philosophy. But the ravages of dogmatism can be contained only so long before they take pernicious forms. For Voegelin, the concept “ideology” represents the final turn in the decline of philosophy when the symbols no longer articulate original experience of theophany, but become the means by which theophany is eradicated from public and personal consciousness.
Because the creation of ideologies historically occurs later, their construction includes a large arsenal of deformed symbols. For the symbol of the open soul, there is the symbol of the soul closed to divine reality. Voegelin calls this phenomenon “egophany,” the creation of a system symbolic of the will of the system builder to explain reality as a function of his own will. History, the experience of movement of the soul towards the divine, becomes in the work of modern “philosophes of history” the egophanous assertion that history culminates in one’s own thought. The Christian mystery of the Second Coming is deformed into egophanous certainty of a secular faith in the this‑worldly success of the ideologist’s own project for reconstituting reality. The political ideologies of the modern era are formidable not the least because they are deformations of ontologically oriented philosophic symbols of order. In this context, the attempt at recovering Classical Christian political theory is a necessary first step in the recovery of personal and social order in the modern world.
*This article was originally part of a chapter in The Development of Political Theory, Society for the Study of Traditional Culture (January 1, 1978). It is republished with the gracious permission of the author.
SUGGESTED READINGS
Crick, Bernard. The American Science of Politics. Its Origins and Conditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
Germino, Dante. Beyond Ideology. The Revival of Political Theory. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1967.
Matson, Floyd. The Broken Image. Man, Science and Society. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1966.
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post‑Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Voegelin Eric. Order and History, 4 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956‑74.
NOTES
36 Two collections of his essays and lectures are Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, Marjorie Grene, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). A bibligraphy of Polanyi’s social writings is available in Intellect and Hope. Essays in the Thought of Michael Polanyi, Thomas A. Langford and William H. Poteat, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968), 432‑446.
37 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post‑Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 381. An examination of the political implications of the thought of Michael Polanyi is made by James L. Wiser’s “Political Theory, Personal Knowledge, and Public Truth,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 36 (1974), 661‑674; and idem, “Michael Polanyi: Personal Knowledge and the Promise of Autonomy,” Political Theory (February, 1974), 77‑87.
38 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 22.
39 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, vii.
40 lbid., 256.
41 Ibid., 3.
42 Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 72; 66.
43 Polanyi, Personal knowledge, 53.
44 Ibid., 59.
45 Ibid., 130.
46 Ibid., 63.
47 Ibid., 135.
48 Ibid., 396.
49 Ibid., 266.
50 Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics. An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 76-77. Valuable commentaries on the thought of Eric Voegelin include: John W. Corrington, J. M. Porter, William C. Harvard, James L. Wiser, “A Symposium on Eric Voegelin,” Denver Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1975), 93-138; Gerhart Niemeyer, “Eric Voegelin’s Philosopy and the Drama of Mankind,” Modern Age, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), 28-39; Ellis Sandoz, “The Foundations of Voegelin’s Political Theory,” Political Science Reviewer, I (Fall, 1971), 30-73.
51 Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 77-78.
52 Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. IV, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 7.
53 Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. I, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), ix.
54 Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 252.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 217.
57 Ibid., 186.
58 Ibid., 242.
59 Ibid., 16.
60 This aspect of Voegelin’s thought should be contrasted with the political theory of Leo Strauss. “Strauss found that the harmony of reason and revelation was Maimonides’ and Farabi’s public teaching while the private teaching was that there is a radical and irreducible tension between them; he found that the teachings of reason are wholly different from and incompatible with those of revelation and that neither side could completely refute the claims of the other but that a choice had to be made. This is, according to these teachers, the most important issue facing man.” Allan Bloom, “Leo Strauss,” Political Theory, II, No. 4 (November, 1974), 381. Emma Brossard has pointed out that present experience which every human can have if he does not refuse himself to it.” Emma Brossard, “Leo Strauss: Philosopher and Teacher, Par Excellance,” Academic Reviewer (Fall-Winter, 1974), 2.
61 Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 242.
62 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, 1935 reprint (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., Anchor Books, n.d.), 73.
63 Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 10.
64 Ibid.
65 Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 285.
66 Ibid., 299.
67 Ibid., 148.
68 Ibid., 43.
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