The Collected Works: Selected Correspondence 1950-1984 (Volume 30)

Selected Correspondence 1950-1984 (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 30). Thomas Hollweck, ed. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007.

This big volume is one of the last two of the 34 volume Collected Works to be published (The other, Volume 29, prepared under the editorship of Professor Juergen Gebhardt, has just been published in July 2009). The reader will find here  530 letters written by Eric Voegelin during the last 35 years of his life (1950-1984). The volume contains a remarkable amount of analysis and insight not found in his books and essays as well as the restatement of his thought in fresh and more accessible ways.

Here are excerpts from some of the letters that caught my eye.

1.  To Leo Strauss, on Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, he concludes his analysis with:

“Popper engages in no textual analysis from which can be seen the author’s intention; instead he carries the modern ideological clichés directly to the text, assuming that the text will deliver results in the sense of the clichés. . . . In its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually, one would have to use expressions like rascally, impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence, as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish and as a result is worthless.” (April 18th, 1950).

2.  To Hannah Arendt, on her then new Origins of Totalitarianism, he concludes:

“The talk about a change of human nature implies the anti-religious revolt against the imago dei. And the attempt to change this nature results (as you correctly say) in its destruction. The intellectual mischief of the 19th century of publicly discussing the possibilities of changing human nature would for instance have to stop; for (1) it is technically philosophical nonsense and (2) it is politically a public danger and, as the consequences show, complicity in murder.” (March 16th, 1951).

3.  To Alfred Schütz, on deficiencies in Max Weber’s theorizing, not alluded to in The New Science of Politics out of respect for the memory of Weber:

“. . . I would then see ‘theory’ as a science of man and society that bases itself on an ontology in which the experiences of transcendence are acknowledged as constituents of the essence of man. All concepts of type in social science, therefore, must be based in the ontology in order to be theoretically tenable. And my main argument against Weber’s types is the lack of such a foundation. Concepts like rational and traditional domination, for example, as far as I can see, are based in nothing more than a historical situation created by the French Revolution. . .” (April 30th, 1951).

4.  To Friedrich Engel-Janosi:

“Concretely speaking, it is not enough to condemn stupid people who let themselves be seduced by Voltaire; it would be the duty of Catholic writers to unmask Voltaire’s impertinent ignorance with just this kind of headlong energy and such an 18th century Catholic thinker does not exist. The same problem we have today. Where are the Catholic thinkers-with the exception of de Lubac and Balthasar, who are treated miserably by the Church-who fight against the intellectual scandal of our time in such a way that intelligent, vital, idealistic young people would be fascinated by it?. . . . Sometimes I have the feeling that my intellectual achievement for the cultural problematic of the Church is greater than that of the professionals whose task it actually would be.” (May 11th, 1951).

5.  To Karl Löwith, on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit:

“The night in Heidelberg in the winter of 1929 in which I devoured Being and Time like a detective novel is long gone. At that time I was very moved by the author’s temperament and impressed by his technical competence. I would still acknowledge his temperament; as to his competence, in view of the crude nonsense he indulges in with the ‘unhidden,’ I think doubts are permitted.” (May 25th, 1952).

6.  To Alfred Schütz, his famous long letter on the content of Christianity:

“The fourth achievement, linked to the three preceding ones, is the critical understanding of theological speculation and its meaning, attained above all by Dionysius Areopagita and Thomas Aquinas. The centerpiece of Thomistic theology is the analogia entis, i.e., the recognition that theological judgments are not judgments in the sense of statements about the content of the world. The proposition `God is almighty’ combines a transcendent subject (one of which we have no innerworldly experience, only an experience of faith) with an ‘idealized,’ infinitized, innerworldly predicate. The proposition is therefore meaningless if both the subject and the predicate are taken literally; it makes sense only if the predicate is added analogically to the extrapolated subject of the experience of faith.”

“What the men of the 18th century Enlightenment held against Christian dogmatics (enlightened thinkers are repeating it today), namely, that theological statements—unlike statements concerning sense perception—-are meaningless because they cannot be verified, is the very starting point of Christian theology. On this point Thomas would agree with every Enlightener. Dogmatics is a symbolic web which explicates and differentiates the extraordinarily complicated religious experiences; furthermore, the order of these symbols is a descriptive system, not a rational system capable of being deduced from axioms (We must note the insistence of Thomas that Incarnation, Trinity, and other doctrines are rationally impenetrable, i.e., rationally meaningless.)”

“Here, it seems to me, lies the greatest value of Christian theology as a store of religious experiences amassed over more than a thousand years, which has been thoroughly analyzed and differentiated by Church Fathers and Scholastics in an extraordinary cooperative enterprise. To set up against this treasure hoard (without having an exhaustive knowledge of it) philosophical speculations of a monotheistic, pantheistic, dualistic, or any other kind, speculations which inevitably rest on individual thinkers’ very limited experiences, seems to me, I am bound to say, brash mischief-making, even if the mischief is committed by thinkers such as Bruno or Hegel or William James.” (January 1st, 1953).

7.  To John H. Hallowell, on American political theology:

“According to the Declaration of Independence all men are born free and equal–that is part of the American political theology–even if the very author of these words knew quite well that the successful existence of the society which he helped to found depended on the social effectiveness of a ‘natural aristocracy’ which gave the lie to the phrase `free and equal.’ One can, of course, honor the expounding of political theology with the name political philosophy–and that is what is merrily done all around us, with horrible consequences for political science . . .” (January 28th, 1953).

8.  To Thomas H. Clancy, S.J., on evil means to attain good ends:

“The term ‘evil means,’ in my opinion, is ambiguous. If it means that political measures never must incidentally inflict misery on human beings, politics and order is impossible; one can only withdraw in quietistic suffering. Means should be termed evil only when (1) either the end is evil (and then even means that are moral in themselves would be evil in the light of the end), or (2) when the evil inflicted by the means is palpably greater than the good achieved by their use . . .” (April 26th, 1953).

And further to the same man:

“. . .the goodness of an act seems to me to depend to a considerable degree on the virtue of prudentia, under which I include the possession of adequate knowledge concerning the side-effects of action. And ‘adequacy’ will have a wide range of variability according to the environment in which a man acts, and according to his social status. Example: I very much doubt the goodness of certain acts of President Roosevelt, not because I doubt the goodness of his intentions, but because I doubt his adequate knowledge of the practice of a Communist government, which a President of the United States should possess, but which I do not expect to come within the prudentia of my yard-man.” (June 10th, 1953).

9.  To Marshall McLuhan on his remorse at having wasted years:

“And I respond to your excitement and bewilderment of the moment with feelings that are mixed of compassion and grim amusement. I would not complain too much about the time lost. We all lose time, for we have to disengage ourselves from the creeds of a dying world (I have lost more years than I care to remember with Neo-Kantianism and Phaenomenology, before I dropped the nonsense): and I am not so sure that the time is really lost, for if you have found the right way yourself you are much surer of it than you would be somebody had placed you on it right from the beginning.” (July 17th, 1953).

And on and on it goes, insights and formulations, often brilliant, arising in letter after letter, year after year. Here is a last one, describing the conference at York University, Toronto, in November, 1978.

10.  To Klaus Vondung on the Toronto conference:

“The most refreshing thing was that the students had organized the conference independently of the faculty–in fact there was a certain air of tension, since no one from the Philosophy Department had been invited to speak, presumably because of subject-area incompetence. . . . I gave a lecture on `Structures in Consciousness,’ in particular on the structure `Luminosity–Intentionality,’ which I now recognize as the key pattern in understanding the language of symbols. In conjunction with these explorations the structure of Volume V is now taking shape.” (December 11th, 1978).

[This conference was preserved on video tape and is available on the DVD entitled “Voegelin in Toronto.”  The DVD includes the lecture Voegelin describes and two panels in which he participated with Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernard Lonergan, Allan Bloom, Frederick Lawrence and Roger Poole.]

There are also letters relating to Voegelin’s appearances and travels in the U.S and Europe, and descriptions of his professorships in the U.S. and Munich. There are interesting notes, such as one to the late William F. Buckley, Jr., declining an offer to become a regular contributor to his magazine and another expressing appreciation for receiving a volume of Buckley’s writings.

The letters are a selection from the total correspondence and the selection was made by Professor Hollweck, once a doctoral candidate under Voegelin and now one of the general editors of The Collected Works and the editor of two other volumes in the series. The selection was made with the idea of helping the reader understand Voegelin’s intellectual life as well as the changes in his career. Hollweck is as well qualified to undertake this task as anyone. I usually find introductions to be tedious and often tendentious, but he provides real insight. His well thought-out and persuasive Introduction is definitely worth reading and pondering.

As is pointed out in the Introduction, if one is collecting the correspondence for two people, as in the case of the Heilman-Voegelin or Strauss-Voegelin or the Schütz-Voegelin correspondence, the editor only needs the permission of two people or their literary executors. But when there are over 230 letter recipients and many of them are dead, and the book is already approaching a thousand pages with only the Voegelin side of the exchanges, an editor is forced to chose between the good to be had in the near or foreseeable future and the ideal, which recedes into the mists of time!

So the decision was made to include only what Voegelin wrote and to compensate for this by providing footnotes to identify correspondents, works referenced in the texts, and when necessary, a sense of the occasion which brought forth the letter. Hollweck and Gebhardt together decided they would not “drown the letters in a vast apparatus of footnotes” and for this the reader can be grateful. At the same time there are a few letters where the lack of context makes one want to know much more. This lack of context can be easily repaired by looking at the recent volume of personal reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected—Conversations on a Life, edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn (U. of Missouri Press, 2008).

A number of the letters had to be translated from the original German and this was done by Professor Hollweck assisted by Sandy Adler and William Petropulos. Letters written originally in German are identified as such. A serious effort was made to preserve, in translation, the sometimes acerbic and often humorous tone adopted by Voegelin—what the editor calls the “Krausian” character of the writing, named after the style employed by Karl Kraus, whose fearless criticism of Austrian and German politics, society, and language in the first four decades of the twentieth century deeply influenced Voegelin.

Professor Hollweck suggests that the Selected Correspondence will enable someone to write the intellectual biography of Voegelin at some time in the future. I prefer to think of this as a work standing on its own which enables a reader to form a deeper understanding of the man behind a half-century outpouring of profound thought. And because the editor is a gentleman and many correspondents were still living at the time this volume went to press, it may still be useful for a future biographer to seek out the entire stored correspondence in the archives at Stanford.

This is a book that can best be read and savored and digested over a period of time. And then later, one can profitably go back and reread it, because nowhere else in the Collected Works can some of these ideas and expressions be found, as well as the occasional refreshing restatement of ideas from the published books and essays. Highly recommended for both the serious student and the intellectually curious.

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