Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of Reality

Scholarly engagements with the work of Eric Voegelin continue apace. Alongside evaluation and re-assessment, many Voegelin scholars also engage in what one might call “lens-crafting”—a move beyond exegesis to the development of new interpretive screens and tools based on a notable scholar’s work. The eight essays collected in this volume were first presented at a conference held in 2024 in Budapest under the auspices of the European Centre of Political Philosophy. The premise of the conference was contained in its title: “Why Philosophy? To Recapture Reality! – An Eric Voegelin Conference.” That title, as contributors to the collection remind us, derives from a comment of Voegelin recorded in the Autobiographical Reflections that articulates a running theme in his philosophical work from at least the 1930s onward. The notion that reality is something that needs to be “recaptured” would likely surprise many people of common sense, which alone makes Voegelin’s comment and efforts to unpack its meaning worthy of attention.

Voegelin’s philosophical quest for recapturing reality began with an examination of human experience historically. That work led to a realization that the experience of reality —of the world or cosmos or order or the “it-reality” in which human beings find themselves and have their life and being—is not an object, the existence of which is a simple fact. It is, instead, an interpretation, understanding, or “take” (to use a term from the work of Charles Taylor) that is subject to a host of formations, misformations, and manipulations. To work out how best to understand reality experienced and how best to discern good from bad “takes,” interpretations, and understandings of it, Voegelin began with “full reality, as it is present in the primary experience of the cosmos.”^[1] From this starting point, he developed a precise description of that primary reality, its gradual differentiation historically in many different ways and locales, guided by a variety of new and rediscovered experiences of the cosmos. Accompanying this description and analysis was a parallel description and analysis of the deformations and derailments of primary experiences that have occurred historically. Voegelin carefully developed diagnostic tools for distinguishing primary reality from the derailments, which —following Heimito von Doderer,— he called “second reality(s)” and for which he also developed an extensive lexicon to precisely describe them.  Arguably the best summary of his explorations in this regard can be found in “The Drama of Humanity,” which he presented as the Walter Turner Candler Lectures at Emory University on April 17, 18, and 19, 1967.^[2] Voegelin there outlines the experience and meaning of primary existence in the cosmos, its differentiation into various sectors of reality over the past three or more millennia, the need for and manner of maintaining a balance between the various sectors uncovered in this processes of differentiation, and the ways in which the experience and symbolization of that existence and its differentiation can be derailed into “second realities” by way of creating imbalances between the sectors or the outright exclusion of one or another of them.^[3]

While various of the sectors that reality comprises receive attention in the collection under review here, none is given comprehensive attention. An underlying assumption —and a perfectly legitimate one— is that readers will be sufficiently familiar with Voegelin’s work (or have sufficient access to it) that a primer in this regard is unnecessary. Rather, in an activity of “lens-crafting,” the authors are on the whole more interested in either exploring new ways of grappling with reality and its deformations by means of the diagnostic Voegelin provided or in unfolding updated, further implications of Voegelin’s work.

In the first essay, “Reality, Lost and Found: Eric Voegelin as a Guide in and out of Trickster Land,” Árpád Szakolczai ponders how it is that reality itself can be lost (and hence be in need of recovery). Reality, after all, is not an object to be grasped. Physical objects constitute part of what we call “reality,” but so do events. Indeed, events are central to our experience and interpretation of reality. Prof. Szakolczai’s focus on events as a means of understanding the human condition and primary reality affirms Voegelin’s argument that human experiences and their symbolization —not ideas— are the fabric of history. Experiences are not merely “inward,” even if they have profound consequences for the inner life of human beings. Many experiences, including experiences of events, are also outward, communal. The two world wars of the early and mid-twentieth century are prominent modern instances of this claim. These two events, their surrounding responses and developments, and the long history that preceded them, were cumulatively and collectively so catastrophic for those who underwent them that they significantly affected in many instances the human capability properly to perceive reality. They were, in this sense, ”epoch-making.” That epoch has included all sorts of bad ideas concerning the nature of reality, as Voegelin explored at great length in many of his writings. “Retrieving” or “recovering” reality therefore becomes an explicit philosophical task that may require swimming strenuously against the tide of opinions and perspectives that define one’s “epoch.”

In his interpretation of modernity and the Voegelinian efforts to uncover its basic principles and dynamics, Prof. Szakolczai faults Voegelin for not recognizing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 as a pivotal historical events that not only marked the end of the Roman Empire as the Italian Renaissance was bringing the so-called European Middle Ages to a close, but that was also “epochal” as an originating event of modernity. Prof. Szakolczai is not quite clear what the precise features of the fall of Constantinople were that contributed to this origin function. He is one of several contributors in this volume to confront the reader with a peculiar philosophical problem with which Plato wrestled expansively: if reality can be obscured and our ability to perceive it can be handicapped, then how do we recognize “real” or “primary” reality in contrast to a “second” or “counterfeit” or “trickster” reality, and how do we recover the former over against the latter? Prof. Szakolczai names poets and novelists as the foremost amongst those who—especially in the context of epochal events—have recognized both sides of the problem: the phenomenon of reality lost and the need for its recovery. While Plato generally criticized the poets—  Prof. Szakolczai argues that they often also identify for us the true reality and the means of recovering it. Voegelin advised (and exemplified) a “turn back,” a recovery of reality by way of a recovery of the vision of reality in the writings of the “basic sources of human wisdom” in our past. Poets and novelists, in the modern era as in earlier periods, may reveal those basics in their writings.

It is a common experience that whatever we may take the “it-reality”^[4] in which we live and move and have our being to be, others will disagree with us to greater and lesser extents concerning especially the details of that “take.” Barry Cooper addresses this oft-times confounding experience from the problem perspective of widely accepted “second reality[s].” Taking to hand Voegelin’s Political Religions and his Munich lectures on “Hitler and the Germans,” Professor Cooper explores Voegelin’s account of how it is that people can dwell in what seems to be a common world but have such contrasting understandings of it that they do not entirely share a common reality. Indeed, the “take” that some—perhaps even a majority— have regarding reality may induce them to commit what others know to be crimes, at times heinous ones. Those whose “reality” includes a world-historical conflict of races, for example, do not share a common understanding with those who reject such an oppositional frame of reference that reifies incidental differences between human beings into world-historical and biologically dubious claims that arbitrarily dehumanize and valourize human beings against one another. Such claims have produced public policies and political behaviours that are foolish, self-harming, or —in the worst instances—criminally insane. “Second reality,” and “Dummheit” (stupidity) are two concepts or “diagnostic tools” that German thinkers of the Nazi period developed to describe such situations. Voegelin took up both of these, alongside the “pneumopathology” of Schelling and his own concept of “spiritual illiteracy,” to explicate the psychological and social disorders of National Socialism and the German institutions, elites, and society that opened the doors to its evils. Professor Cooper summarizes the National Socialist derailments that Voegelin diagnosed in an accessible way for readers not familiar with Voegelin’s work. Cooper provides details and a fine summary that readers may consult for their edification.

These first two essays surface for the reader various questions of political relevance, one of which concerns the problem of practical wisdom and judgment (Greek: phronesis). Disagreements concerning the nature of reality are not all of one kind or category: how shall we distinguish between differences, say, in matters of political opinion (perhaps very well informed on both sides) or of public policy judgments on the one hand, and a breakdown on the other of a shared, common reality in which those opinions and judgments are being rendered? When can we claim someone has lost touch with one or more sectors of reality in contrast to disagreeing with us on some matter of opinion or policy preference? Some distinctions are easy: It is one thing to disagree about a taxation policy; it is quite another to disagree about whether one class of people should deign to share the world with other classes of people, or, indeed, of whether it makes any sense in the first place even to divide the world into “classes” of people in such a way as to produce such contrasts. While understanding the relationships and required balances between the various sectors of primary reality is more than merely helpful or useful, elements of those balances are matters of judgment, not firm facts. When is a criticism of the economic elites a Marxist critique of “the social conditions of work,” and when is it a Dickensian reflection on the ills of the Victorian political economy or an Israelite prophetic denunciation of elite abuse, both of which arguably belong broadly in the same category as the recognition of political philosophers from Aristotle to Machiavelli that achieving an agreeable balance between the rich and the poor has been a political imperative since the founding of the first city? In a similar vein, how are we to interpret the mistruths to which some medical elites gave voice early in the recent pandemic? Were they expressions of incompetence, human errors in judgment, second-reality arrogance, perhaps even malice? The evidence is easier to weigh concerning some historical episodes than others. Professor Cooper  reminds us that a firm understanding of Voegelin’s critiques and categories does not extinguish a need for prudent judgment in the specific concrete circumstances of everyday political life.

The next two essays bring Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss into conversation, sometimes by way of reviewing their actual correspondence and published critiques of each other’s work, at other times by way of speculatively filling in gaps in that dialogue. Lee Trepanier contrasts the thought of Voegelin and Leo Strauss regarding the relationship between faith and reason with a particular view to understanding the relationship of that ensemble with Jürgen Habermas’s notion of “post-metaphysical” thought. Prof. Trepanier takes this latter to be itself an effort at recovery; Habermas calls on us to set aside the dogmas or doctrines that developed out of the experiences and insights of the axial age and refocus on the discoveries in that epoch of the “equal worth of all individuals” and of an “objective and impartial standard of justice.” The question of the nature of faith and reason and their relationship to one another establishes the terms of the Strauss-Voegelin debate as also their distinct critiques of Habermas’s hopes for a “communicative reason” that set aside the substance of their debate. It is likely that this particular hope will be disappointed. Voegelin’s debts to Plato and Strauss’s to Nietzsche are on clear display in Prof. Trepanier’s review.

Jim Stoner begins with a review of the only “published dispute” between Voegelin and Strauss, which revolved around Voegelin’s review of Strauss’s On Tyranny. He provides a detailed, careful, and insightful exegesis of their argument, which revolves around the interpretation of what is tyrannical government, and whether the classical understanding of this form of political regime is adequate for understanding its modern equivalents. The answer has immediate implications for what we take political science to be and how and to what ends we should practice it. The debate and Prof. Stoner’s speculative continuation of its implications, had the two scholars continued it, moves quickly to questions of modernity, “nature,” and the relationship between reason, as manifested in philosophy (Strauss), and faith, which, for Voegelin is manifested not only in the beliefs and practices of communities of believers, but also in the activity of philosophy, because faith and reason are not distinct in the manner Strauss argues that they are. “Reality,” to recall the theme of the book, is treated in this contribution primarily in regard to epistemology: what can we know, and how can we know it? As the “Post-Constitutionalism” in the title indicates, it is ultimately in regard to the political that Prof. Stoner asks this question.

The next two essays focus on the “politics of the person.” What is the good regime? In contrast to regime of the “city in speech” that Socrates and his interlocutors erected in Plato’s Republic and that induces background laughter in that dialogue, the good regime, argues David Walsh, is rooted in the “politics of imperfection,” because a good regime directs its efforts toward the flourishing of persons, who are always complex and flawed, and not toward ideals or other abstractions, which are never entirely of the real world in which persons exist. Nietzsche’s well-worn dictum in Zarathustra that “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil”^[5] is well observed in several of these essays, and none more so than in Professor Walsh’s friendly but firm criticisms of Voegelin’s consistent skepticism of liberal democracy. Walsh has published a trilogy that explicates in detail the liberal tradition and the comparatively salutary politics it has fashioned and may yet bring forth.^[6] Voegelin, however, was a life-long skeptic of liberal democracy, and Walsh offers in this essay a summary of the criticisms he has made orally and in writing on a number of occasions concerning Voegelin’s well-known unwillingness to endorse this form of regime. In his reading, Walsh takes Voegelin to hold to a politics of the person, which Walsh explicates as the source of Voegelin’s deep, lifelong detestation of twentieth century revolutionary ideologies and the politics that arose (and arise) from them. Forms of politics that instrumentalize human persons for the sake of some collective, oft-times utopian end are by their nature out of bounds; Walsh regrets that neither this principle of evaluation, nor the philosophical investigations from which it arose led Voegelin to a more positive engagement with the possibilities of liberal democractic regimes. Walsh explicates what —in his view— Voegelin got right, what he missed, and what he seemed unwilling or unable to say in regard to the favourability of liberal democracies for the kinds of personalist considerations Voegelin seems implicitly to have favoured. The primacy and centrality of the person is, for Walsh as for Voegelin, a core aspect of primary reality. The details of this essay are well worth close consideration.

In “Voegelin’s Recapture of Reality as Personal Encounter,” John von Heyking, like David Walsh, wants to focus on the person as the centre of politics and political thought. He reminds us that, with the charge to “recapture reality,” Voegelin points to the personal responsibility each of us has to avoid the second realities of the modern era and “to live in the light of truth.” Prof. von Heyking develops an interesting argument in this regard by beginning not with a paragon or even an approximate model of the life of virtue, but with the political teaching of Niccolo Machiavelli, “the greatest of all proponents of betrayal.” A careful study of what Machiavelli was trying to say is a means of overcoming the currently existing harms of his teaching. Heyking suggests, following Voegelin’s study of Machiavelli’s thought, that the “Machiavellian” principle that one should act in bad faith and betray one’s friends as the moment may require is a commonplace among Machiavelli’s epigones, but a misrepresentation of the master’s teaching. Properly understood, Machiavelli’s spiritual realism recognizes the tensions inherent in human affairs. Those tensions, however, exist only when we find ourselves confronted with the demands of virtue on the one hand and necessity on the other. All such cases, however —including the tension between constancy towards one’s friends and the dictates of political necessity that may demand betrayal— are instances of exception, not of everyday affairs. Were that not the case, the life of the spirit would be unimaginable. Given this exceptionalism, Machiavelli did not relax the tension in favour of vice as a matter of everyday principle. It is only careless readers of Machiavelli not attuned to the spiritual aspects of the horizontal dimension of human existence —friendship and keeping faith in contrast to opportunistic betrayal being two elements of that dimension— who would invent a second reality in which such considerations account for nothing in politics or elsewhere. Resisting such a reading of Machiavelli, argues von Heyking, becomes a way of resisting the second reality of opportunists and other malignant types. In such a political context, and taking our direction from Plato/Socrates, “recapturing reality” entails “recovering personhood in one’s self and with others, oriented to the good.”^[7] Von Heyking’s essay provides a helpful reflection on where in the sectors of existence second realities can occur, how perniciously compelling they may at times become to us, and the ofttimes pragmatic means we can employ to resist them. Here, too, question of practical wisdom makes an appearance.

John Greenaway has recently published a book that articulates a philosophy of belonging.^[8] The fertility of Voegelin’s thought is well demonstrated in Prof. Greenaway’s contribution to this collection, in which he docks his philosophical investigation onto Voegelin’s exploration of human consciousness. Prof. Greenaway’s interest in a philosophy of belonging begins with his observation that during the past two centuries or longer, the problem of alienation has been a leading theme in political-philosophical inquiry. To speak of alienation, however, is to imply “the belonging that is not.”^[9] “Only a proper philosophy of belonging,” writes Prof. Greenaway, “can diagnose and provide a remedy for the failures and repudiations of belonging that we know all too well under the name of alienation.” While Voegelin did not explicitly develop anything like such a philosophy, his thought provides “a powerful rejoinder to both the mood and consequences of alienation,” thereby contributing to the philosophy of its counterpart—belonging. Prof. Greenaway examines three themes that recur in Voegelin’s work —participation, cosmos, and tension — as a way of calling Voegelin alongside to assist in further developing this philosophical thread. He provides a notably concise and cogent summary of Voegelin’s theory of consciousness, and a persuasive argument for finding in that theory important pathways to a philosophical account of belonging.

Alongside David Walsh, no other scholar associated with Voegelin or his work had done more to reintroduce the importance of the person in politics than Tilo Schabert. In the final essay in the volume, Prof. Schabert picks up a theme he also developed elsewhere, namely the reality of Eric Voegelin as a person, exemplified in his activities as a scholarly mentor.^[10] Readers will be familiar with the experience of listening to a renowned scholar explicate an argument they have made in print, whereby the listener is provided a clearer sense of what the scholar in question is trying to do, in part by way of observing the character of the scholar making the argument. That particular experience of clarification, amplification, or contextualization  is not available to those who read posthumously. But the recollections of their friends and pupils partially fills in this blank. Scholars like Prof. Schabert, who was a student of Voegelin during the 1960s and 70s, provide an invaluable service when they report such memories.^[11] Reality includes experiences of friendship, companionship, and mentorship. Eric Voegelin was not a disembodied Cartesian mind, but a human being, doing his scholarly work in the company of others with whom he consulted and who assisted him in various ways. Accounts of these interactions provide us not only with the substantive results of Voegelin’s work, but also teach us about the habits of mind and everyday work that produced them as Voegelin “engaged in the effort of regaining reality.” Professor Schabert invites us in this context, too, to consider the need for practical wisdom, both in the work of interpretation and in the everyday work of making sense of the world and making our way in it.

Alfred North Whitehead’s dictum that “the greatest enemies of discovery are the disciples of discoverers” is gainsaid in this volume. It may not be fair, indeed, to call the scholars represented here “disciples,” since Voegelin declared himself uninterested in having any. But as students of his work, they demonstrate the creativity of engagement that Voegelin would have encouraged. The results are a collection that edifies the reader.

NOTES:

^[1]  Eric Voegelin, “The Drama of Humanity,” in William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss, eds., The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers, volume 33 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 241.

^[2]  The transcription of these lectures is published as “The Drama of Humanity,” in Collected Works 33, 174-242.

^[3]  Voegelin provides a series of helpful technical arguments in “The Drama of Humanity” concerning primary reality, the distinctions between primary and second reality, and the manner in which a variety of second realities have historically developed out of derailments from the former.

^[4]  Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol: Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 1-12.

^[5]  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pt 1: chpt. 22.2.

^[6]  David Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, 2nd. ed. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2025); Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2016); The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).   

^[7]  Philosopher of Reality, 115

^[8]  James Greenaway, A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023).

^[9]  Philosopher of Reality, 118.

^[10] Tilo Schabert, “Eric Voegelin’s Workshop: A Study in Confirmation of Barry Cooper’s Genetic Paradigm,” in Thomas Heilke and John von Heyking, eds., Hunting and Weaving: Empiricism and Political Philosophy (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013), 232-251.

^[11]   (There are several references in other essays in this collection, for example, to Cooper and Emberly, Voegelin Recollected).

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