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Remembrance of Things Past

In 1943 I had arrived at a dead end in my attempts to find a theory of man, society, and history that would permit an adequate inter­pretation of the phenomena in my chosen field of studies.

The analysis of the movements of Communism, Fascism, National So­cialism, and racism, of constitutionalism, liberalism, and authori­tarianism had made it clear beyond a doubt that the center of a phi­losophy of politics had to be a theory of consciousness: but the academic institutions of the Western world, the various schools of philosophy, the rich manifold of methodologies, did not offer the intellectual instruments that would make the political events and movements intelligible.

This curious default of the school philosophies in the face of an overwhelming political reality had attracted my attention ever since I was a graduate student in the 1920s. The default was curi­ous because it assumed the form not of a lack but of a superabun­dance of theories of consciousness and methodologies of the sci­ences. And I had to work through quite a few of them as part of my formal training, such as the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg school, the value philosophy of the Southwest German school, the value-free science of Max Weber, the positivism of the Viennese school, of Wittgenstein, and of Bertrand Russell, the legal positivism of Kelsen’s pure theory of law, the phenomenology of Husserl, and of course, Marx and Freud.

But when in the course of my readings in the history of ideas I had to raise the question why do important thinkers like Comte or Marx refuse to apperceive what they apperceive quite well? Why do they expressly prohibit anybody to ask questions concerning the sectors of reality they have excluded from their personal horizon? Why do they want to imprison them­selves in their restricted horizon and to dogmatize their prison real­ity as the universal truth? And why do they want to lock up all mankind in the prison of their making?

My formidable school equipment did not provide an answer, though obviously an answer was needed if one wanted to understand the mass movements that threatened, and still threaten, to engulf Western civilization in their political prison culture.

Only Relying on the Concrete Consciousness

A school is a formidable force indeed. Considerable time had to elapse before I understood the situation and its implications. The default of the school philosophies was caused by a restric­tion of the horizon similar to the restrictions of consciousness that I could observe in the political mass movements. But if that was true, I had observed the restriction, and recognized it as such, with the criteria of the observation coming from a consciousness with a larger horizon, which in this case happened to be my own.

And if that was true, then the school construction of an “intersubjective” ego as the subject of cognition did not apply to an analysis of con­sciousness; for the truth of my observation did not depend on the proper functioning of a “subject of cognition” in the Kantian, or neo-Kantian, sense when confronted with empirical materials, but on the “objectivity” of the concrete consciousness of a concrete human being when confronted with certain “subjective” deforma­tions.

An analysis of consciousness, I had to conclude, has no in­strument other than the concrete consciousness of the analyst. The quality of this instrument, then, and consequently the quality of the results, will depend on what I have called the horizon of con­sciousness; and the quality of the horizon will depend on the ana­lyst’s willingness to reach out into all the dimensions of the reality in which his conscious existence is an event; it will depend on his desire to know.

A consciousness of this kind is not an a priori struc­ture, nor does it just happen, nor is its horizon a given. It rather is a ceaseless action of expanding, ordering, articulating, and correcting itself; it is an event in the reality of which as a part it partakes. It is a permanent effort at responsive openness to the appeal of reality, at bewaring of premature satisfaction, and above all at avoiding the self-destructive phantasy of believing the reality of which it is a part to be an object external to itself that can be mastered by bring­ing it into the form of a system.

What I had discovered was consciousness in the concrete, in the personal, social, and historical existence of man, as the specifically human mode of participation in reality.

A Needed Revolt That Does Not Go Far Enough

At the time, however, I was far from clear about the full bearing of the discovery because I did not know enough about the great precedents of existential analysis in antiquity, by far surpassing, in exactness and luminosity of sym­bolization, the contemporary efforts.

I was not aware, for instance, of the Heraclitean analysis of public and private consciousness, in terms of the xynon and the idiotes, or of a Jeremiah’s analysis of prophetic existence, before I learned Greek and Hebrew in the 1930s. Nevertheless, I was very much aware that my “larger horizon” was not a personal idiosyncrasy but surrounded me from all sides as a social and historical fact from which I could draw nourishment for my own consciousness. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the revolt against the restrictive deformations and the re­covery of the content of consciousness through historical restora­tion and original perception was a massive, if diffuse, movement.

My own horizon was strongly formed, and informed, by the restora­tion of the German language through Stefan George and his circle, the renewed understanding of German classic literature through Gundolf and Kommerell, the understanding of Platonic philoso­phizing, and especially of the Platonic myth, through Friedländer, Salin, and Hildebrandt, by the impact of Marcel Proust, Paul Va­léry, and James Joyce, by Gilson and Sertillanges, whose work in­troduced me to medieval philosophy, by Jaspers’ existentialism and, through Jaspers, by Kierkegaard, and by Spengler’s Decline of the West that was based on the conception of civilizational cycles de­veloped by Eduard Meyer whose lectures I still heard as a student in Berlin.

The list is by far not exhaustive, but I have made it long enough to suggest the range of the revolt as well as the difficulty of coping with such richness. I sensed the revolt, but I sensed it also as a beginning that could be short-circuited into new restrictive school formations. And if I certainly did not care to become a neo-Kantian subject of cognition, not even an intersubjective one, neither did I particularly care to become a Neoplatonist, or a neo-Thomist meta­physician, or an existentialist, Christian or otherwise.

The Roots of Resistance to Rational Debate

I was grate­ful, and still am, for every appeal to expand the horizon, from what­ever direction it may come; but I also knew that the revolt had to be considerably more radical to match the problems raised by the disorder of the age. Above all, there was the profound problem of resistance to truth, and the various forms it assumed, that required exploration. The reasons why the various ideologies were wrong were sufficiently well known in the 1920s, but no ideologist could be persuaded to change his position under the pressure of argument. Obviously, ra­tional discourse, or the resistance to it, had existential roots far deeper than the debate conducted on the surface.

In the interwar years, truth was definitely what did not prevail. The restrictive de­formation of existence was a social force that had, and still has, a long course to run. Some forms of this resistance I could observe in my more limited environment of neo-Kantian and positivist methodologies. A man who aspired to recognition as a philosopher had to base his work on Kant and the neo-Kantian thinkers; anybody who wanted to learn from a work written before Kant was a histo­rian. Consequently, I was classified as a historian; and inevitably I was under some suspicion as a true school member because of my “tolerance;” a methodologically reliable scholar had intolerantly to maintain the truth as represented by his school and not to flirt with larger horizons.

At the time, I could not yet develop such observations into well-founded insights concerning their meaning. Precisely for that rea­son, however, they are worth recalling; for in their manner of primi­tive puzzlement they correctly sensed a configuration of forces that has grown, from its modest beginnings, into the characteristic of the present century. During the last fifty years, the conflict be­tween open and restrictively deformed existence has hardened into the great stasis (in the Aristotelian sense) that we witness in our time.

Bloody Dreams and the Contempt of Reason

A few summary remarks on the rapid growth of this configu­ration into an ecumenic disruption of rational discourse will be in order:

1. On the level of pragmatic history, of the mass movements, to­talitarian governments, world wars, liberations, and mass slaugh­ters, the deformation of existence has produced “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It has revealed it­self as a febrile impotence that cancers out in bloody dreams of greatness and has brought the majority of mankind into subjection under mentally diseased ruling cliques. I am using the term men­tally diseased in the Ciceronian sense of the morbus animi, caused by the aspernatio rationis, the contempt of reason.

2. On the academic level of the sciences of man, the aggravation of the conflict I experienced in the 1920s is particularly striking. The restrictive school philosophies and methodologies are more dominant than ever; and I even have to observe a boring repetition of the very situation in which I grew up inasmuch as the contem­porary methodological debate in America lives to a large extent on the revival of the earlier German ideologies, methodologies, value theories, Marxisms, Freudianisms, psychologies, phenomenologies, hermeneutic profundities, and so on.

This peculiar repetition, as if there were no Americans who can think, is partly due to the influence of the German intellectuals who emigrated to America, but the social force it has gained stems from the populist expan­sion of the universities, accompanied by the inevitable inrush of functional illiterates into academic positions in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Adequate Form of Discourse Would be Satire

The intellectual quality of the debate has not been im­proved by its repetition. Today, the academic world is plagued with figures who could not have gained public attention in the environ­ment of the Weimar Republic, dubious as it was, with neo-Hegeli­ans who combine Marx and Freud in a theory of repression that as­sures a monopoly of repression to themselves; with megalomaniac behaviorists who want to manipulate mankind out of freedom and human dignity; and with egalitarian Holy Rollers who want to re­distribute distributive justice.

It is only fair to add, however, that in the country of its origin, in Germany, the quality of the methodo­logical debate has declined even worse, if that is possible. But it has become increasingly difficult to describe this sector of the aca­demic world, with its peculiar mixture of libido dominandi, philo­sophical illiteracy, and adamant refusal to enter into rational dis­course, because the adequate form would have to be satire and, as Karl Kraus noted already in the 1920s, it is next to impossible to write satire when a situation has become so grotesque that reality surpasses the flight of a satirist’s imagination.

Depressing as these remarks may sound, the end of the world has not come. For the third factor in the configuration, the revolt, has also gained momentum, beyond any expectations one could en­tertain in the 1920s. In the nature of the case, the revolt has its academic site in the study of man’s normal life in open existence, and that study comprises the whole history of mankind with the excep­tion of the restrictivist enclaves.

Scholarship and Ideology Doesn’t Mix

3. A student of Homer or Aeschylus, of Dante or Shakespeare, of the Old or the New Testament, of early creation myths or of Upanishadic meditations, or of any of the great figures in the history of philosophy cannot arrive at an under­standing of the literary work that lies before him on the table if he insists on interpreting it by one or the other of the restrictivist methodologies or ideologies, because the author he tries to under­stand has a self-reflective, open consciousness whose language is incompatible with the language of restricted consciousness.

And the same is true for the student of ancient history, of Western medievalism, of Chinese, Indian, Persian, or pre-Columbian civiliza­tions, of their rites and myths. He too will soon discover that he cannot interpret tribal or imperial societies, cosmological, ecu­menic, or orthodox empires in the language of the ideological ”phi­losophies of history” without making nonsense of his materials.

Not that of necessity the revolt would always have to become self-reflective and articulate. Though it is inherent in the enormous en­largement of the historical horizon, spatially covering the global ecumene and temporally extending into the archaeological millen­nia, that has occurred in the present century, the form it will as­sume in the individual case will depend on the circumstances.

Escaping the Apodictic Horizon

The departments in our universities are sometimes so rigidly segre­gated that a student of history, of art or literature, of comparative religion or mythology can quite well spend a life of scholarship without being forced to take formal notice of what he perhaps will consider the inevitable lunatic fringe in his university. And even if he is forced to take notice, he need not make an issue of it.1 A true scholar has better things to do than to engage in futile debate with men who are guilty of the aspernatio rationis.

The revolt at large has not become vociferous enough, and perhaps never will, to match the paranoiac aggressiveness of the mental cases, but it has become extensive enough to leave no doubt that the restrictivist move­ments have maneuvered themselves out of the empirical advance of the historical and philosophical sciences.

But however extensive the revolt may become and however suc­cessfully it may force the restrictive deformation of existence on the defensive by the sheer weight of empirical evidence, there re­mains the philosopher’s task of finding a theory of consciousness that will fit the facts of the great stasis that has grown, ever since the eighteenth century, to its present proportions.

The answer I attempted in 1943 emerged from long years of oc­cupation with Husserl’s phenomenology, and equally long years of discussion with Alfred Schütz about its merits and limitations. We both agreed on the work of Husserl as the most thorough and com­petent analysis of certain phenomena of consciousness that was available at the time; but we also agreed on the insufficiencies of his analysis that had become all too obvious in the Méditations cartésiennes of 1931 and made it impossible to apply the phenome­nological method, without further development, to the social phe­nomena that were our primary concern. Our discussions came to a head when, in the summer of 1943, I was at last able to obtain a copy of Husserl’s “Krisis der europä­ischen Wissenschaften,” published in Philosophia I (Belgrade, 1936).

In this essay, planned as an “introduction to phenomenologi­cal philosophy,” Husserl elaborated on the motivations of his own work by placing it in the context of a philosophical history. In his conception, the history of man’s reason had three phases: (1) a pre­history, of no particular interest to the philosopher, ending with the Greek foundation of philosophy; (2) a phase beginning with the Greek Ur Stiftung, the primordial foundation of philosophy, that was interrupted by the Christian thinkers but then renewed by Descartes, and reached up to Husserl; and (3) a last phase, begin­ning with the apodiktische Anfang, the “apodictic beginning” set by his own work, and going on forever into the future, within the “horizon of apodictic continuation” of his phenomenology.

Husserl: The Shock of Recognition

I still remember the shock when I read this “philosophy of history.” I was horrified because I could not help recognizing the all too familiar type of phase constructions in which the Enlighten­ment philosophes had indulged and, after them, Comte, Hegel, and Marx. It was one more of the symbolisms created by apocalyptic-gnostic think­ers, with the purpose of abolishing a “past history” of mankind and letting its “true history” begin with the respective author’s own work.

I had to recognize it as one of the violently restrictive visions of existence that, on the level of pragmatic action, surrounded me from all sides with its tale told by an idiot, in the form of Commu­nism, National Socialism, Fascism, and the Second World War.

Escaping the Apodictic Horizon

Something had to be done. I had to get out of that “apodictic horizon” as fast as possible.

The immediate action went into the correspondence with Alfred Schütz, continuing our discussion and clarifying the situation. The first piece I wrote and sent him was a critical analysis of Husserl’s “Krisis” essay. The reader who is interested in the details of my criticism will find it published in the German edition of my Anam­nesis (Munich: R. Piper &. Co. Verlag, 1966).

But that was not enough. I had to formulate the alternative to Husserl’s conception of an egologically constituted consciousness; and a formulation suggested itself as possible now, at least on prin­ciple, because his conscientious construction of the defense mecha­nism against all potential criticism of his apodicticity had given the cue.

Husserl’s apocalyptic construct had the purpose of abolish­ing history thereby to justify the exclusion of the historical dimen­sion from the constitution of man’s consciousness; the alternative, therefore, had to reintroduce the historical dimension Husserl wanted to exclude.

Such a reintroduction could, of course, not be achieved by dabbling with problems in the so-called history of ideas as a substitute for philosophizing; nor would it make sense to reject the magnificent work Husserl had done in clarifying the intentionality of consciousness.

The historical dimension at issue was not a piece of “past history” but the permanent presence of the process of reality in which man participates with his conscious ex­istence. Reality, it is true, can move into the position of an object-of-thought intended by a subject-of-cognition, but before this can happen there must be a reality in which human beings with a consciousness occur.

Moreover, by virtue of their consciousness these human beings are quite conscious of being parts of a comprehen­sive reality and express their awareness by the symbols of birth and death, of a cosmic whole structured by realms of being, of a world of external objects and of the presence of divine reality in the cos­mos, of mortality and immortality, of creation into the cosmic order and of salvation from its disorder, of descent into the depth of the psyche and meditative ascent toward its beyond.

The Search and the Consciousness of Ignorance

Within this rich field of reality-consciousness, finally, there occur the pro­cesses of wondering, questing, and seeking, of being moved and drawn into the search by a consciousness of ignorance, which, in order to be sensed as ignorance, requires an apprehension of some­thing worthy of being known; of an appeal to which man can lovingly respond or not so lovingly deny himself; of the joy of finding and the despair of having lost the direction; of the advance of truth from the compact to differentiated experiences and symbols; and of the great breakthroughs of insight through visions of the prophetic, the philosophic, and the Christian apostolic type.

In brief, man’s conscious existence is an event within reality, and man’s conscious­ness is quite conscious of being constituted by the reality of which it is conscious. The intentionality is a substructure within the comprehensive consciousness of a reality that becomes luminous for its truth in the consciousness of man.

Truth Found in Concrete Experiences

Recognizing this comprehensive structure of consciousness, however, raised a fundamental issue in philosophical epistemology. If the abstract statements about the structure of consciousness were to be accepted as true, they had first to be recognized as true in the concrete. Their truth rested on the concrete experiences of reality by concrete human beings who were able to articulate their experience of reality and of their own role as participants in it, and thus engender the language of consciousness.

The truth of con­sciousness was both abstract and concrete. The process of verifica­tion had to penetrate, therefore, through the engendered symbols to the engendering experience; and the truth of the experience had to be ascertained by a responsive experience that could verify or falsify the engendering experience. Even worse, the process was further burdened with the impossibility of separating language and experience as independent entities.

There was no engendering ex­perience as an autonomous entity but only the experience as artic­ulated by symbols; and at the other end of the process of verifica­tion, there was no responsive experience as an autonomous entity either but only an experience that could articulate itself in language symbols and, if necessary, modify the symbols of the engendering experience in order to let the truth of symbols more adequately render the truth of reality experienced.

The truth of consciousness, its verification and advance, could not be identified with either the truth of statements or the truth of experience; it was a process that let its truth become luminous in the procedural tension between experience and symbolization. Neither the experiences nor the symbols could become autonomous objects of investigation for an outside observer. The truth of consciousness revealed itself through participation in the process of reality; it was essentially historical.

The Anamnetic Exploration of One’s Own Consciousness

The insight into a process of reality that let its truth emerge into the luminosity of consciousness and its processes affected my work in years to come considerably inasmuch as I had to abandon an almost completed multivolume history of political ideas as philosophically untenable and to replace it by a study of the order that emerges in history from the experiences of reality and their symbolization, from the processes of differentiation and deforma­tion of consciousness.

But the far-reaching consequences, for in­stance for a philosophy of language, did not become visible all at once. What imposed itself as immediately necessary was the achievement of some clarity about the reason why a consciousness constituted by reality seemed to me preferable to a reality cog­nitively constituted by a transcendental ego.

I was confronted with the question of why I was attracted by ”larger horizons” and re­pelled, if not nauseated, by restrictive deformations. The answer to this question could not be found by pitting truth against falsehood on the level of “ideas.” For that procedure would only have intro­duced the libidinous apodicticity of the restriction into the “larger horizon.”

The reasons had to be sought, not in a theory of con­sciousness, but concretely in the constitution of the responding and verifying consciousness. And that concrete consciousness was my own. A philosopher, it appeared, had to engage in an anamnetic exploration of his own consciousness in order to discover its consti­tution by his own experiences of reality if he wanted to be critically aware of what he was doing. This exploration, furthermore, could not stop short at the more recent enrichments of his horizon by learning and the observation of political events because his manner clarified.

It had to go as far back as his remembrance of things past would allow in order to reach the strata of reality consciousness that were the least overlaid by later accretions. The anamnesis had to recapture the childhood experiences that let themselves be re­captured because they were living forces in the present constitu­tion of his consciousness.

The results of my anamnetic analysis constituted the second piece sent to Alfred Schütz. In the English edition [of Anamne­sis] this is reprinted as Chapter 3 under the title “Anamnetic Ex­periments.” Immediately afterwards I wrote, again as part of my correspondence with Schütz, the reflections “Concerning a Theory of Consciousness,” published [in the English version of 1978] as Chapter 2, explaining the theoretical situation as I understood it at the time.

The reader should be aware that these pieces were part of a corre­spondence between friends. They were not written for publication and will, therefore, sometimes appear abrupt in style. I have left them unchanged in order to preserve their documentary value as an analysis of consciousness.

Stanford, California

March, 1977

 

Notes

1. An amusing incident occurred in the UNESCO History of Mankind (1963), in the section on The Beginnings of Civilization, written by Sir Leonard Woolley. Everything went fine in a work devoted to the material and organizational progress of man on the level of the homo faber until Sir Leonard reached the chapter on the fine arts.

As he was a connoisseur in matters of art, he was struck by the fact that the works of art he had to deal with ranked in their quality at least as high as certain modern achievements which he named. But if there was no advance of quality, what then became of the restrictivist “development” of mankind into which he had to fit his own study? Being a conscientious scholar, he had to bring the issue to attention, but he did not care to pursue it further into its theoretical ramifications.

I am men­tioning the incident as an example of the subdued form the conflict will usually assume.

 

This excerpt is from Published Essays: 1966-1985 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 12) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

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Eric Voegelin (1901-85) was a German-born American Political Philosopher. He was born in Cologne and educated in Political Science at the University of Vienna, at which he became Associate Professor of Political Science. In 1938 he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna and emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Notre Dame, Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. More information about him can be found under the Eric Voegelin tab on this website.

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