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One View of Zdravko Planinc’s Critique of Voegelin

A number of scholars whom I admire and who have been good friends to me have suggested that I would be a satisfactory respondent to another good friend of mine, Zdravko Planinc, who in 1996 wrote a critique of Eric Voegelin’s uses of Plato. I hope that I do not run the risk of getting in trouble with one friend or another by virtue of what I shall say. Whatever the case, I shall speak and let the chips fall where they may.

Speaking of chips, in my initial appearance on the academic stage I was one of those students to whom Voegelin gave the Chip Hughes treatment.  To say the very least, Voegelin invariably found me wanting. He would turn in his grave if he knew that I, of all people, had been called upon to defend him, or that I would be thought suitable to address the issue of his uses of Plato. Perhaps his judgment was sound and I should say nothing.

My friend Zdravko attempted in a twelve page paper to analyze a topic that requires a book. He unavoidably touched on several important problems in cursory fashion, probably creating both true and false impressions of his stance and raising hackles in the process. He made several excellent points that require more extensive elaboration and qualification in some future work.

I think that we should react to his criticisms that are accurate by paraphrasing Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” I would have Voegelin reply: “Am I subject to criticism, even to criticism that is well justified?  Very well, then I am subject to justified criticism, I am large enough to absorb it and still emerge an inspiring philosopher.”

Having read Zdravko’s paper years ago, I accepted it with this kind of equanimity, concluding that it was justified in the main and nevertheless continuing serenely to count myself an admiring student of Voegelin because he was a great philosopher. I think that Zdravko himself shares this posture. My evidence for this assessment is that, at the end of the day, Zdravko still sees Voegelin as “roughly Platonic” and calls upon us to complete Voegelin’s work, not to reject it.

Zdravko clearly recognizes himself as engaged in the same quest that occupied Voegelin. He is very far from some other famous critics of Voegelin to whom I have reacted with heat because I thought that their treatments of a splendid philosopher were openly contemptuous. He and I both remain philosophic friends of Voegelin.

I shall respond to some, not all, of Zdravko’s particular points in stream-of-consciousness fashion, with off-the-cuff remarks that are brief and insufficiently developed,  for I am busy with my own work and lack time to offer something better.

Plato as the Measure and Voegelin’s Selective Use of Plato

Zdravko begins by observing that, while God may be the measure of human beings, Plato certainly is the measure of anything written about God, human beings, and their relation. One already could tell from this opening that sparks would fly between Zdravko and Voegelin, and also between Zdravko and devout Christians.

While Plato is a worthy contender for the position of “measure” of things written about God and man, one could think of other strong candidates for the job. Perhaps Jesus? Or perhaps Meister Eckhart, my favorite “heretical” mystic who seems to have blended Plato and Jesus? Eastern mystics? There is no need to debate this point with Zdravko. I note and appreciate his choice while remaining open to anyone who can teach me about God, human beings, and their relation, taking good things from all who offer them and not worrying so much about how they rank as about what is true and untrue.

Zdravko is right to say that Voegelin ordinarily “discusses Plato not by way of explication de texte but rather in authoritative summaries of Plato’s meaning, presented both as self-evident interpretations of various passages and also as instances of important elements of Voegelin’s own philosophy of consciousness.”

As a student who did not know Plato, I had the impression that Voegelin analyzed Plato’s texts, accurately reporting the philosopher’s arguments and intentions. In the course of many years of study of Plato, I gradually realized that Voegelin not only did not do that but that he sometimes misunderstood what Plato was doing–his wonderful treatment of Republic being his best exegesis but still a bit inaccurate and incomplete.

Actually, Voegelin was engaged in his personal search for truth, in reaction to the oppressive ideological atmosphere of his time, and he selectively used things that he found in Plato as springboards to his own self-saving insights. We can debate how true these moves were to Plato, just in case Plato is the best measure of things written about God and man.

The Example of Borrowing “Metaxy”

Let us take for example Voegelin’s use of the word metaxy, which Zdravko finds especially distressing. Zdravko is absolutely right to criticize Voegelin’s use of this term as insufficiently grounded in the texts, and right about his report of how metaxy functions in the Platonic corpus. Plato never says “the metaxy.” Plato uses the term as an ordinary preposition. Voegelin does hypostasize it, saying “the between” much as if one could say “the of,” “the in,” or “the on.”

However, Voegelin is thinking of an experience of what we analogically could call a “site” mysteriously in eternity and the soul simultaneously. He coins “the metaxy” to represent it. This strikes me, in Zdravko’s terms, as “roughly Platonic,” for it reminds me of the Eros in Symposium who is ontologically “between divine and human,” and who is the (mythical) daimonic essence of the eros that is a movement of the human soul toward the divine. “The metaxy” is not exactly Platonic. As a concept, it might even serve its purpose less well than Plato’s “eros.” But it recognizably is on the trail of Plato’s truth.

Voegelin’s View of the Relative Merits of the Gospels

Zdravko is unhappy with Voegelin’s theory of equivalences, especially with Voegelin’s proposition that there is an equivalence between Platonic philosophy and the Gospels. Zdravko states that this theory always leaves a reader with the impression that Plato is not quite up to the mark.

This impression certainly was created by the Voegelin of the era of the New Science, who saw an “ascending branch” of history rising through Greek philosophy and culminating in the higher revelation of the Christ. Zdravko is convinced of the superiority of Plato’s dialogues to the Gospels so the early Voegelin’s argument naturally inspires his resistance.

Thomas Aquinas admitted that the assent to unverifiable propositions that he defined as faith is not knowledge. Therefore, Zdravko is fully within his rights to entertain various doubts about the validity of the Gospels and their parity with Platonic philosophy.

Devout Christians can accept Zdravko as a fellow seeker of the truth without being disturbed by his doubts. They and all of us can duly note Zdravko’s objections to Voegelin on this score, file them under “within the range of possible theoretical alternatives about which none of us knows for sure,” and move on.

Meanwhile, I am uncertain as to whether Voegelin remained steadfast until the end of his life about his early evaluation of the relative merits of Plato and the Gospels.  Indeed, I am not sure that Voegelin ever fully accepted the more or less official christology of the western churches or every article of the Nicene Creed.  In light of the admissions of Thomas Aquinas, he too was within his rights to entertain doubts about these matters. I think that he always gave himself theoretical leeway to award a few of his palms to Plato.  Thus the ambiguity noted by Zdravko.

Voegelin’s Use of Epekeina to Account for Right Judgment

Zdravko is right about Voegelin’s use of epekeina.  I think he also is right about what Voegelin left out on this score in his analysis of the Good in Republic (although I disagree with Zdravko’s interpretation of the flying philosopher in Theaetetus, this being a minor quibble in the present context).  However, Glaucon’s surprise about the Good beyond being seems to indicate that this insight was either new or not widely credited in Plato’s time.

This is a debatable point about the dates of a discovery or of its social acceptance, issues that lose some importance with Voegelin’s abandonment of the theory of the ascending and descending historical branches. On the other hand, Voegelin’s idiosyncratic epekeina is a term that is a successor to his early concept of “experiences of transcendence” and this is important.  Voegelin was educated in an era when all statements about the right order of human life were dismissed as unscientific “value judgments.”  As I reconstruct his personal journey, he began by sensing that this was all wrong, that somehow spiritually healthy people were able to make reasonable judgments about right and wrong.  The problem was how to account for this.

He also realized that no statements about good and evil could be proved by appeals to sense data or by logical deductions from self-evident premises, which were widely regarded as the only permissible modes of science.  This was and is a serious problem.  A theory of how we could somehow know right order, however dimly, had to escape the strictures of modern science while yet being subject to what Voegelin in the New Science called “empirical control.”

Husserlian Consciousness and Finding Empirical Control

“Empirical control” meant adhering to the rules of the thinker who reigned supreme in Voegelin’s early day, Husserl. Voegelin himself was both steeped and trapped in Husserl. To progress beyond the arid condition in which he found himself oppressed, and to be acceptably scientific in the process, he could only begin where he was, with Husserl. Thus Voegelin’s lifelong exploration of “consciousness,” which Zdravko (who never was trapped in Husserl) with some justification views as an unfortunate substitute for Plato’s psychē.

In this philosophic quest, words could not function as they do in modern science, as signs for objects of the senses. Rather, they had to be signs of “non-objects” of our uncertain knowledge of our right order and its source(s), the “non-objects” of the “experiences of transcendence” that might be subject to the “empirical control” of careful Husserlian introspection.

Thus Voegelin’s distinction between ordinary language and the analogical words issuing from the quest, namely “symbols,” which makes sense when understood in his context. Thus also the cascade of concepts that followed “experiences of transcendence,” including “ground of being,” metaxy, epekeina, and luminosity, all of which welled up from the struggle to explain how we humans can ever so dimly know the truth(s) of our right order and what is the mode of that uncertain knowledge.

I do not fault Voegelin for starting with Husserl in his wrestling with the fundamental question of our lives, for that was the only starting point he had, and I do not blame him for ending with a Husserlian take on Plato rather than a Platonic take on Plato. In his work he got somewhere in a way that helped me, indeed, in a way that helped me think with Plato more Platonically (maybe).

His efforts and his concepts might be inferior in some respects to those of a Buber or a Scheler. More power to them. I will take what I can use from all three. If Zdravko finds Buber more helpful to him than Voegelin, more power to him for that. No one needs to be upset about it. Rather, we should all take a look at Buber to see if he helps us too. We are all engaged in the same quest.

Voegelin’s Neglect of the Virtues is an Opportunity for Others

I think that Zdravko is right about Voegelin’s neglect of the virtues. Well, nobody can do everything. Voegelin was focused on the problem of how we might be able to know the ground of the virtues. He might have thought it unnecessary to go on to do the virtues themselves.

In his understanding, “experiences of transcendence” formed the soul in its right order. Perhaps the virtues would follow upon these experiences automatically in his larger picture. If so, Zdravko is right to suspect that it does not quite work that way. This is one area in which Voegelin’s work needs to be redone or undone and completed. Let those who are able take up the task cheerfully.

Zdravko’s tribute to Voegelin’s analysis of the “quaternarian structure” of “the primordial community of being” is appropriate. It also is an adequate common ground for the continued good fellowship of our community. In Augustine’s words, there are shared objects of our love.

 

Also available is “The Real Name of the Stranger: The Meaning of Plato’s Statesman,” “Plato’s Critique of ‘Platonism’ in the Sophist and Statesman,” “Challenging Plato’s Platonism,” “Plato Reconsidered: Planinc-Rhodes Correspondence,” and “The Uses of Plato in Voegelin’s Philosophy.”

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James M. Rhodes (1940-2015) was Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Marquette University in Wisconsin. He was author of The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution ((980) and Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues (2003), both winners of the Alpha Sigma Nu Award. His posthumously book is Knowledge, Sophistry, and Scientific Politics.

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