Self-Appropriation in Lonergan and Voegelin

What does it mean to appropriate the self? Is the self somehow a “something” that can be “appropriated”? Is this mysterious appropriation something added on to the mysterious self coming from outside the self? Or is it an enrichment of the already present self? Or is it a fundamental constituent of the very being of the self?

Indeed, if Kierkegaard is correct and the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, then perhaps self-appropriation concerns the very being of the self.¹  Lonergan and Voegelin would, in fact, agree with Kierkegaard’s assessment, each from his own distinct, but substantially equivalent, perspective, Lonergan highlighting more the role of mediation (and Intentionality) in the enterprise, Voegelin more the role of meditation.

But, given their respective emphases on mediation and meditation, how can we speak of their equivalent positions? For the former conveys the image of scientific discourse, whereas the latter suggests the practice, if not the silence, of the mystic.

Lonergan’s Reflective Subjectivity

Since self-appropriation is Lonergan’s technical term, we can start first with his analysis.²  What, then, is the self? Interestingly enough, the self, for Lonergan, is a thing. But it is not a thing like an instance of the Cartesian res extensa or like a Kantian phenomenal object, both of which are “bodies” in the “already-out-there-now-real.” No, the self is a thing simply because it is a unity, identity whole grasped in data as individual.³ Its unity, however, is a unity that marks it off from the unity of other kinds of things: it is a unity that is simultaneously intelligible and intelligent. To use Hegel’s language, as does Lonergan, it is subject and not just substance. Thus, metaphysical categories, equally applicable to plants, animals, and humans, are not adequate to explore the being of the self.⁴

To say that the self is intelligent is to say that the self is the subject of conscious and intentional operations that spontaneously constitute a dynamic structure: the successive levels of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. Thus, we can equate self and subject and consciousness. It is furthermore an incarnate consciousness since it is a higher integration of otherwise coincidental manifolds of subatomic, chemical, organic, and psychic manifolds. It is thus conditioned by the lower, material manifolds but not determined by them. It is not only not determined by them but also oriented to something wholly beyond them. For, as Lonergan makes clear, the subject’s performance of conscious and intentional operations is underpinned by the pure unrestricted desire to know and the all-encompassing unrestricted intention of the good neither of which will find rest save in the unrestricted being of the transcendent beyond. Although conditioned by the empirical residue, the self is not intrinsically conditioned. Thus, the self, so defined, is the central form of a concrete human being.⁵

Still, as we have seen above, the metaphysical category of central form is not sufficient to explore the dynamics — nay, even the seeming paradox — of the self. We can capture this dynamic by stating quite simply that the self is a process of self-transcendence. We can be selves as we can be subjects, by degrees, minimally when we are in deep sleep and maximally when we are deliberating and deciding. The entire movement and flow and direction of conscious and intentional operations are the tendency of questioning, and the entire process of inquiry is under the guidance of the existential level of consciousness, where we decide not just about X, Y, or Z but equiprimordially about who we are to be as we decide about X, Y, or Z.⁶ In deliberating about any course of action, we are also, at least implicitly in subsidiary awareness, asking about what we are, what we can be, and what we ought to be. And the context of the questions — where our selves are at issue — changes the “what” to “who.” The self, then, is the tension of self as questioner and self as questioned, self as choosing and self as chosen.⁷ The self is the relation that relates itself to itself. The self is not therefore some pure “given,” an “already-in-here-now-real.”

Here we first witness self-appropriation and mediation. For to choose the self is to appropriate the self. And to appropriate the self requires the mediation of an interpretation of what the self has been, what it can be, and what it ought to be. This mediation is obviously conducted for the most part in what Polanyi calls subsidiary awareness rather than in what he terms focal aware- ness, and it is usually expressed in a combination of nonthematic, or elemental, meanings and commonsense language. It takes place on the level of the cultural infrastructure, where meaning is spontaneously apprehended and communicated. Since moral deliberation typically involves commonsense insight in the self-correcting process of moral learning, this kind of self- appropriation and this kind of mediation may seem adequate to the task of selfhood.⁸

Nonetheless, this is not what Lonergan means by self-appropriation. There remains the Delphic imperative, “Know thyself.” What ought the self to choose? Clearly, the true self, the authentic self. And what is the authentic self? The self-transcending self faithful to the transcendental precepts of being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. Indeed, on the level of the cultural infrastructure there can be an “implicit intellectual conversion” that in a somewhat spontaneous and perhaps inchoate manner through commonsense understanding identifies true responsibility with the openness of questioning. Still, this identification can be a tricky business, especially since most people are not too attentive to the apparently fuzzy structure and dynamics of interiority and since common sense, not being reflective, can easily merge with common nonsense. Hence, in the hermeneutics of performance and interpretation, where past performance becomes data for present interpretation as the self relates itself to itself, it is easy for there to be an operative existential gap between the reality of authentic selfhood and the interpretations.⁹ Unfortunately, the misinterpretations can mediate future performance in a cycle of decline, whereas what is needed is increased lucidity about the authentic self that can foster progress.

Here we turn, then, to the meaning of self-appropriation and mediation in Insight. Lonergan’s cognitional theory aims at adequate self-knowledge on the critical and reflective level of the cultural superstructure. It promotes an explicit intellectual conversion that defines cognitive and moral truth in terms of the norms ingredient in the process of inquiry. As Lonergan makes clear at the beginning of Insight, such self-appropriation places a premium on intelligence as the spring of progress and, in closing the existential gap, combats bias as the primal source of decline.¹⁰ We must emphasize that mediation in this project is not the mediation of some reified speculation. Mediation has two precise loci. On the one hand, mediation must always necessarily be carried out by the concrete person. Self- appropriation, Lonergan proclaims, issues in a decisive, personal act.¹¹ It is not knowledge of an abstract self that is at stake; it is the experiment of one’s self-consciousness taking possession of itself.

On the other hand, the self-appropriation of a sufficient number of persons can form the nucleus of a community in dialogue, a critical culture, a dimension of consciousness. What Lonergan calls “cosmopolis” can act through (nonpolitical) indirection, through example, through satire and humor, through critical historical scholarship, through plain spokenness about the truth, through addressing issues of maximum consequence for human welfare or human disaster — it can act through all these means precisely as a mediating force in society.¹² It can mediate in an ongoing fashion in the hermeneutic of performance and interpretation through the functional cooperation of specialties in the cultural superstructure. It can criticize contemporary deculturation in light of the dialectic of progress and decline, guiding culture toward the openness of the basic horizon of inquiry. Lonergan is well aware of the ordinary mediating functions of tradition and belief through acculturation, socialization, and education in what he characterizes as the “movement from above downwards.” To this he would add cosmopolis.

Like Plato’s true polis, cosmopolis first and foremost resides in the souls of authentic inquirers, whether a sole representative figure, a small remnant, or, in more golden moments of history, a larger segment of the cultural superstructure.¹³ Cosmopolis, says Lonergan, can formulate statements about cognitive, moral, and spiritual reality—statements he would term “doctrines.” Lonergan emphasizes, however, that these “doctrines,” which can play a positive role of mediating self-appropriation, must themselves be mediated by self-appropriation in the foundational enterprise of appealing to the data of consciousness and the engendering experience of self-transcending inquiry.¹⁴

Although in insight Lonergan focuses on mediation, his post-insight work offers the prospect of forging links between meditation and self-appropriation. Consider again the self. The authentic self performs within a self-assembling structure of cognitive and moral operations underpinned by the basic intentionality of unrestricted questioning. The self is located between lower, material manifolds and the beyond correlative to the unrestricted sweep of questioning. This creates a tripolar tension — tension below and tension above. The hallmark of this location, then, is the tension of limitation and transcendence. Another word for this tension is anxiety. To carry out self-appropriation requires that we come to grips with this permanent existential mood. If we become, in Kierkegaard’s language, pupils of possibility in the curriculum of anxiety, then we must engage in something like existential meditation.¹⁵

There is also the task of negotiating with the psychic depths in the twofold manner described by Ricoeur, namely, the archaeological retrieval of repressed unwanted materials, largely vital urges of image and affect, and the teleological conscription of psychic energy supporting the process of inquiry. Lonergan speaks of a self-appropriation of the sensitive psyche involving “genuineness,” which brings to light unconscious components of development that need integration with the life of intelligence. Genuineness might then bring about a kind of psychic conversion. Particularly in the case of the teleology of the psyche, this would seem to entail a type of psychic meditation on the symbolic and affectively charged anticipations and virtualities of higher living.¹⁶

Finally, and perhaps most important, the self has a relation — perhaps an intrinsic relation — to divine presence. Lonergan in his later writings, we must underscore, focuses on three dimensions of interiority: not only on the structure of cognition and on the basic Intentionality driving it but also, third, on the existential state of being-in-love that engulfs the directional tendency and the structured operations. As the desire to know and the intention of the good are unrestricted, so the existential state that engulfs them is unrestricted. The unrestricted state of being-in-love is the experience of divine presence, the consciousness of divine presence as object (the object of the unrestricted desire to know and the unrestricted intention of the good) and of divine presence as subject (the experience of participation in divine reality analogous to vital intersubjective union).¹⁷ The experience of divine presence is the existential condition for sustained moral commitment and for the effort of cognitive self-appropriation.¹⁸ Meditative practices of the most traditional sort not only can be woven into the fabric of the originating experiences but presumably can also assist materially in the task of self-appropriation of spiritual consciousness. In other words, meditation on religious experience can assist the project of fides quaerens intellectum, which, among other things, would mediate, or objectify, spiritual interiority.

Voegelin’s Existential Exegesis

It is obvious that in his later writings Lonergan has entered the territory of Voegelin. We see Lonergan articulating the reality of tension as the equivalent of Voegelin’s in-between participatory reality; suggesting the negotiation of the psychic depths, reminiscent of Voegelin’s portrait of consciousness opening to the unfathomable psychic reaches below, as depicted in Plato’s Timaeus; and showing the centrality of the divine human encounter.¹⁹ Voegelin, however, has a somewhat precise and perhaps novel idea of meditation as it is related to his version of self-appropriation. Voegelin, of course, has explored his own territory in a more concerted and detailed manner by a style evocative of the very existential consciousness being investigated.

Voegelin does not mention the “self” often, and when he does, he usually refers to the creation of imaginary selves as “second realities,” as substitute, false selves, exemplifying what Lonergan calls the existential gap. The idea of a false self, however, points, by contrast, to a true self. And Voegelin indeed speaks of a “true self”: the self that experiences the divine pull and responds with the loving search for being; the self whose reaction to the anxiety of existence is not flight but instead the search for the ground; the self who exists in the tension, the in-between, of time and the timeless, the human and the divine; the self who is aware of participating in the order of being.²⁰

Rare is the thinker — philosopher, prophet, or saint — who can successfully elucidate the true self and the participatory, in-between structure of the human experience with its worldly and transcendent poles. When such elucidation occurs, it is because the thinker has had differentiating insights into transcendence as the ground of being and into the soul as the sensorium of transcendence. This identification, for Voegelin, is the key moment in his version of self-appropriation, which is nothing less than the “truth of existence.” The latter term Voegelin defines as “the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the conditia humana.“²¹

The thinkers of first rank with differentiated consciousness (Plato, for example), or their followers, articulate their experiences in the language of symbols or of reflective distance, which are eventually written down.²²  Such texts become normative for a genuine tradition of higher culture. They are truly mediators. But the texts themselves can be misinterpreted. The tradition can become inauthentic and adhere to dogmas, in the negative sense, that are cut off from the engendering experiences. There is always the temptation to interpret the texts about the in-between of participatory existence (which is concomitant with the luminosity of consciousness) as though they refer to bodies in the external world, which are the content of the Intentionality of consciousness (modeled on perception). This temptation follows almost inevitably from the fact that since human consciousness is incarnate, human language tends to mirror the externality of bodily relations in space and time.²³

Every person, according to Voegelin, experiences the anxiety of existence, including the mystery of death, and every political society needs to address it by creating symbols of participation in the wider network of reality (in the community of being shared by person, society nature, and the divine). When these symbols break down and are no longer effective, then the society faces a severe crisis of anxiety, usually leading, at least since Hellenic times, to philosophies of hedonism (in order to avoid pain), to contract theories of government based on a psychology of the passions, and, more nefariously and more typical of recent times, to activist ideologies and movements that would mold idols of transcendence in speculative gnostic systems or in radical revolutionary regimes.²⁴

It is at this juncture that the philosopher is motivated to respond to the disorder of the age by meditative exegesis, namely, the effort, in the meaningful concreteness of the present, to recover the original noetic experiences behind the language of higher intellectual culture and the original pneumatic experiences behind the language of higher religions and to expose the distortion of meaning, the closed existence, and the contracting of reality of the contemporary climate of opinion.²⁵

Comparative Assessment

Self-appropriation, then, for Lonergan and for Voegelin regards the same reality: the self as inquirer. Lonergan objectifies inquiry as structure, as Intentionality, and as existential state. Voegelin objectifies inquiry as process. What are the specific advantages of the respective focus of each thinker?

Voegelin’s existential exegesis draws the reader into the historical drama surrounding the origin of a text and brings home in a compelling fashion the struggle against the forces of disorder that would block access to formative texts of differentiated consciousness. Whether engaged in a historical narrative or a reflective essay, the reader is invited to enter into the very process of inquiry being discussed. And since Voegelin conceives of the process of inquiry as a theophanic event, he presents entry into the process of inquiry as also entry into the dynamics of divine movement and human countermovement.

Voegelin’s style is uniquely crafted through meditative reflections to honor the participatory nature of human consciousness in the experiences of wonder, questioning unrest, search for the ground, and the pull of transcendence. Voegelin never lets the reader lose sight of the fact that the reality in which we participate is mystery. Conversely, Voegelin’s skills as a critic are fine-tuned to expose in historical case studies the flight from anxiety and from an encounter with transcendence and to analyze the various deft maneuvers of concupiscence to deflect the drive to the beyond onto some finite domain of being as an imaginary substitute, thereby seeking to hide the flight from anxiety.²⁶

If both Lonergan and Voegelin hold what Lonergan would call “positions” on the self, the advantage of Voegelin’s perspective is that his invitation to self-appropriation highlights living the truth as an inquirer who participates in mysterious divine reality on the road of inquiry itself. Voegelin’s writings would challenge interpreters of Lonergan, as it apparently did Lonergan himself, to consider more carefully and thoroughly inquiry as process and as existential state.²⁷

The advantage of Lonergan’s perspective, on the other hand, is that he has perhaps the most comprehensive and detailed explanatory account in the philosophical literature about inquiry as structure. With his cognitional theory as a base, he can develop an epistemology and metaphysics consonant with the openness, dynamism, and directional tendency of inquiry. His invitation for self-appropriation is supported by a vast amount of material all geared toward promoting intellectual conversion. But what are the real benefits of intellectual conversion? Lonergan’s cognitive self-appropriation offers two distinct positive challenges to interpreters sympathetic to Voegelin’s enterprise.

One is captured in the injunction “develop positions.”²⁸ When examining a text — whether a text of Voegelin or a text Voegelin investigates — one can employ Lonergan’s cognitional theory as a powerful tool to distinguish the insights from an inadequate epistemological framework. The purpose of such a “hermeneutic of the philosophical position” would be to tap more deeply into the solid core of a thinker by eliminating obstructions. Lonergan’s cognitional theory, for example, would critique Voegelin’s concept of Intentionality as too narrow and rigid because it is rooted in the model of perception.²⁹ A reformulated concept of Intentionality might allow for a more nuanced treatment of such issues as the origin of symbols, the criteria of genuine myths, and the authentic role of doctrines in mediating differentiated insights. It would also show the close link between the cognitive structure discerned by Lonergan and the existential state explored by Voegelin.

Second, evaluative historical studies that seek to identify intellectual decline, including the history of political ideas and the history of symbols, will have their critical powers enormously expanded in the measure that they can recognize epistemological assumptions as decisive influences on thinkers and as contributors to precipitous cultural deformation. In evaluating Hobbes, for example, one can neither ignore the fact that he eliminates the orientation to transcendence as a constitutive factor behind political order nor ignore the fact that the first part of the Leviathan is about an empiricist epistemology as the foundation of the rest of the text.³⁰ To understand adequately the unfolding of the dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism in modernity one needs both Voegelin’s existential analysis of how ideas are tied to dispositions, sentiments, and spiritual aspirations and Lonergan’s cognitional analysis of how ideas are tied to epistemological counterpositions.

In general, intellectual decline is a complicated cycle with roots in both existential deformation and epistemological confusion. The existential gap is a gap between interpretations and the reality of the self as both cognitive subject and existential subject. Thus, for both Lonergan and Voegelin, self-appropriation, which recognizes inquiry as the in-between state of human existence, is in accord with the norms of human nature, is concerned with human nature, and is an enrichment of human nature — that is to say, self-appropriation is in accord with authentic selfhood, is concerned about the being of the self, and is an enrichment of the self. But self-appropriation does not transcend human nature since human nature, at its very core, is self-transcending.

Hence, Voegelin stresses how the truly great thinker’s inquiry about inquiry is always framed by a “balance of consciousness,” presuming both epochal differentiating insight into the process of inquiry and awareness of the participatory nature of the process of existence, including that of the philosophers understanding.³¹ The task of philosophy, whether in fifth-century Athens, thirteenth-century Europe, or the twenty-first century, like the discovery of historical existence in Israel and Hellas, has its concrete origins, in part, as a response to existential disorder. Whereas in the case of Israel the disorder is the threat of a universal empire to extinguish by brute force a spiritually advanced and creative society, in the case of philosophy the disorder also stems from intellectual culture itself, either from the sophistic intellectuals who deny the in-between status of self-transcending human being or from the court theologians who neglect the nature of the self.³² The philosopher can see the act of self-appropriation as marking a “before” and an “after” in personal, civilizational, and world history but not as thereby standing above history.³³

According to Lonergan, self-appropriation plays a role in self-constitution, but this role operates in the dialectic of performance and interpretation in the process of self-transcendence and does not differ in kind from any other genuine role in that dialectic. Self-appropriation indeed arises from the exigency of questioning and is an expression of the selfhood of the philosopher. Still, far from creating moral and religious conversion, it ordinarily stems from the latter. Philosophy itself, as the unrestricted love of wisdom, bears the hallmarks of a variety of religious experience, and it is this unrestricted eros of the mind that inspires and sustains the effort of self-appropriation.³⁴ Moreover, it is on the level of existential consciousness, where we act as moral agents and undergo religious experiences, that we are most fully subjects. And though self-appropriation points to openness as a demand, it is openness as a gift that heals the gap between openness as a demand and openness as an achievement.³⁵

We can conclude that Lonergan’s cognitional theory is no more a reification of subjectivity than Voegelin’s meditative exegesis is an exercise in mystical obscurantism. Both approaches invite us to engage in self-appropriation, both approaches deal with the same self, the same unity, identity whole, to be appropriated, both approaches keep self-appropriation within the process of self-transcendence — and both approaches provide us with searching texts to help mediate that self-appropriation.  

Notes

1. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 13

2. Insight, 13-17; Method in Theology, 95,262; Understanding and Being, 3-23, 261-66, 270-74, 297-99, 381-83.

3. On definition of a “thing,” see Insight, 271; contrast to Cartesian or Kantian object-as-extroverted, 275-79.

4. On self as intelligible and intelligent, see ibid., 538-43. On self as subject not substance, see Method in Theology, 96; Understanding and Being, 11-12, 297-98; “Philosophy of History,” 71; Topics in Education, 80-81; Verbum, 3-11; and Collection, 222-24. On inadequacy of metaphysical categories applied to the self, see Method in Theology, 95-96, Verbum, 4-6; Topics in Education, 209-10; and Second Collection, 72-73.

5. On self as conditioned by lower manifolds, see Insight, 494ff; on basic intentionallty of self, 539; on self as not conditioned intrinsically by empirical residue, 541; on self as central form, 460-63, 542-43.

6. On degrees of selfhood, see Collection, 222; and Second Collection, 80. On self-constitution, see Method in Theology, 121-22; Collection, 223-24, 229-30; and  Second Collection, 79-80, 83.

7. See Chapter 1, n. 20, above.

8. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, vii, 55-56. On the cultural infrastructure, see Insight, 594-95; Method in Theology, 86-90, 97-99, 272-73; Collection, 236; and Second Collection, 91, 102. On commonsense inquiry, see Insight, 196-204, 311-12, 314-16.

9. On the transcendental precepts, see Method in Theology, 20, 53, 104, 302; and Collection, 227ff. On common nonsense, see Insight, 4; on the “existential gap,” see “Horizon and History,” in Notes on Existentialism, 13.

10. On intellectual conversion, see Method in Theology, 238-40; on self-appropriation and progress, see Insight, 8.

11. Insight, 13.

12. Ibid., 263-67, 647-49; see Chapter 6 above.

13. On tradition as mediating from above, see Third Collection, 181. Lonergan invokes Toynbee’s ideal-type of the “creative minority” (16, 103-4, 214).

14. On doctrines, see Method in Theology, chap. 12; on foundations, chap. 11. The issue of authenticity regards both the authenticity of the tradition and the authenticity of the person within the tradition (78-80; Collection, 227-28). The criterion of authenticity is self-transcendence. See n. 9 above.

15. On the tripolar tension, see Insight, 749; on the tension of limitation and transcendence, 497-99. On anxiety, see Chapter 8 above; and Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, 139-43.

16. On Ricoeur, see Chapter 1, n. 27, above. On genuineness, see Insight, 499-504. The term psychic conversion is that of Robert Doran (see Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations: Toward a Reorientation οf the Human Sciences and Theology and Dialectic of History, 8-9, chap. 2). For Lonergan’s positive reference to Doran’s idea, see “Reality, Myth, Symbol,” 36-37. On psychic process as anticipation of higher living, see Insight, 482.

17. On being-in-love, see Method in Theology, 104-7; and Third Collection, 171-75. On religious experience as an analogue of intersubjective union, see Method in Theology, 101- 3, 105-7.

18. Method in Theology, 237-43

19. See Chapter 11, nn. 5, 92, 94, below.

20. On self as “second reality,” see Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 16, 33-34, 242-54, chap. 2; Voegelin, What Is History? 111-21, 136-39. On true self as tension to transcendence, see Voegelin, What Is History? 137-39.

21. Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 49.

22. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 60, 63-64, 70, 75, 77-80; Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint, 135-36, 138-39, 143, 147-48, 151-52; Voegelin, Order and History, 1:370, 3:10-14; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 111, 180, 192-93, 201; Voegelin, What is History? 47, 49.

23. On dogmatism, see Voegelin, Order and History, 4:36-57; Voegelin, Anamnesis, chaps. 8-10; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 52-57, 119-22, 173-76; and Voegelin, What Is History? 181-87. On the “intentionalist” fallacy, see Voegelin, Order and History, 5:14-18; Voegelin, Anamnesis, 168, 178-81; and Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, chap. 3.

24. On the anxiety of existence and political symbols, see Voegelin, Order and History, 1:1-2, 3:62; Voegelin, Anamnesis, 95-96; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 176, 268-70; Voegelin, What Is History? chap. 2; and Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, 1:225-33. On ideological response to political crisis, see Voegelin, New Science of Politics, chap. 4; Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint, 175-95; Voegelin, Order and History, 1:452-58; Voegelin, Anamnesis, 97-103; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 273-79; Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 83-114; Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint, 295-313; Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, 1:79-84; and Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, chap. 2.

25. Voegelin, Order and History, l:xiv, 3:62-63, 5:13-14, 41; Voegelin, Anamnesis, 89; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 45-46, 265, 371-74.

26. On inquiry as theophanic event, see Voegelin, Order and History, 4:241-44; Voegelin, Anamnesis, chap. 6; and Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, chaps. 7, 10. On the participatory nature of consciousness, see Voegelin, Order and History, 1:1-2, 4:330, 5:14-16; and G. Hughes, Mystery and Myth. On the flight from anxiety, see Voegelin, Order and History, 5:198-201, 260-66; Voegelin, Anamnesis, 97-103; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1953-1965, chap. 9; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 33-34, 242-54, 273-79; Voegelin, What Is History? chap. 3; and Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, chap. 2.

27. “Philosophy of History,” 65-66; Third Collection, chaps. 12-13.

28. Insight, 413.

29. Third Collection, 201 n. 46.

30. Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 1, chaps. 1-16.

31. Voegelin, Order and History, 4:227-37. See G. Hughes, “Balanced and Imbalanced Consciousness.”

32. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 122-23. See n. 24 above.

33. Voegelin, Order and History, 4:2-20; Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 195-96.

34. See Chapter 7 above, 150-54.

35. Collection, chap. 12.

This excerpt is from Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence (University of Missouri Press, 2000); also see “Voegelin’s Noetic Science,” “Lonergan and Voegelin: Religious Experience and Historicity Religious Experience,” and “Lonergan and Historiography.“

Print