The Pursuit of Unity and Perfection in History

Klaus Vondung. The Pursuit of Unity and Perfection in History. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2020.

The Pursuit of Unity and Perfection in History collects eleven of Klaus Vondung’s essays previously published individually between 1979 and 2016. This collection, Vondung notes in the preface, is the culmination of his fifty-year career, during which he has spent studying National Socialism. In each of these essays, Vondung develops aspects of his unifying thesis that “secular apocalypticism is the signature of modernity” (vii). According to Vondung, modernity is defined by the ongoing desire to seek unity, not with God, but through political perfection, achieved by an apocalyptic break with the past “in which the whole world, the ‘old world’ of the past is doomed to death” (81). Only once the old world is eradicated can a new, perfect human experience be created. Vondung’s project is diagnostic, rather than prescriptive. In each of these essays, Vondung slowly guides his readers through his specific argument, by his careful consideration of Greek philosophy; German philosophy, theology, and literature; and German political history, culminating in Nazi ideology. Vondung contrasts his own worldview to that of his teacher and dissertation supervisor, Eric Voegelin, whose “theoretical approach as well as the interdisciplinary scope of his scholarship was the strongest and most attractive stimulus of [Vondung’s] student years and had lasting effect on [Vondung’s] subsequent scholarly endeavors” (154). While Vondung’s text is not explicitly concerned with contemporary politics, each of his essays remains timely and provides a framework in which to consider our own times and our own longings for unity and perfection in ourselves and through politics.

Vondung’s text is divided into four sections loosely unified thematically. The first section, Philosophy, Literature, and Politics, includes three essays. The first essay, “The Paradox of Rhetoric (or: On the Reliability of Written Discourse),” originally published in 1984, is a consideration of public speech. This is a fitting essay with which to begin the collection, as it highlights an enduring challenge inherent in all democratic politics: establishing the criteria by which to evaluate the veracity of competing arguments, so that the political order is designed to reflect the truth of the world, rather than the victory of the most adept or powerful speaker. By contrasting Aristotle’s rhetoric with Plato’s dialectic, Vondung reminds us that rhetoric must be guided by proper practice, which includes a shared agreement to seek the truth. As revealed in Phaedrus, virtuous speech requires that orators know the truth of their subjects and understand their own nature and the natures of those to or with whom they speak. The paradox of public or political speech, however, is that knowledge of the entirety of one’s audience and the variety of their distinct natures is impossible to achieve. Orators cannot tailor their speech to suit every person’s distinct nature simultaneously. Vondung does not tell us how to address this paradox, but he does provide a framework, vocabulary, and shared intellectual history—a point of unity—from which to tackle this challenge. Yet, he notes, rhetoric is “a techne that could be learned” (4). Vondung concludes this essay by affirming the paradox of rhetoric: “the task remains for us to make the right use of rhetoric” in our search for the truth, as individuals and collectively (13).

The second and third essays in the first section of the text turn to the distinctly German approach to the desire for unity and concurrent apocalyptic mindset, through a consideration of Bildung—a German concept that is decidedly complex and not captured by English translations of the term. In the first of this pair of essays, “Unity through Bildung: A German Dream of Perfection,” first published in 1988, Vondung begins with a statement about human nature:

‘Unity’ is something people long for in many ways: they seek to bring their lives, their talents, emotions, beliefs, and actions into a state of existential unity; they strive for the social unification of different classes; they struggle for the political unity of a divided nation; they speculate about the unity of knowledge and faith, reason, and sensuality, matter, and spirit, essence, and existence. (14)

Although neither written at the same time nor initially intended to be published together, these two essays include a philology of Bildung, originally understood as a state in an individual’s distinct development—our inner personality—but, by World War I, the term was understood in Germany as “synonymous with culture and the historical development of culture” (15). Vondung, tracing the meanings of Bildung in German philosophy and literature over time, concludes that Bildung has a “new meaning which found its explicit articulation in the philosophy of idealism. Here, as before, the aim of Bildung is a state of perfection: unity. But it is no longer unity with God” (16). Instead, this desire for perfection is pursued through politics—in German unity and German nationalism—and comes to be understood as synonymous with German culture and history. In this essay, Vondung focuses on literature, with reference to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis, Gustav Freytag, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, and Theodor Fontane.

The second of this pair of essays, “German Nationalism and the Concept of Bildung,” originally published in 1983, opens with a reference to a lecture delivered at the University of Berlin after the start of World War I by the Hegelian philosophy professor Adolf Lasson, who understood Bildung “as proof of Germany’s superiority over other nations and as justification for the mission which she was now to execute with military force” (33). In this essay, Vondung focuses on philosophy. His discussions include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, Eric Voegelin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and others, as he traces the parallels between Bildung and German nationalism. The central argument in this essay is that nationalism, understood as a means of unity, necessarily results in the pursuit of one global identity. Vondung charges the German intellectual class with hypocrisy, characterized by “The inconsistencies between nationalism and intellectual humanism, between anti-feudalism and an ideology of social unity, between apolitical inwardness and political ambitions by way of Bildung” (49). Vondung contends that these inconsistencies give rise to nationalism, as Bildung, and provide a theoretical justification for World War I, a war that failed to promote a global German nationalism.

The book’s second section, Apocalypticism, Hermeticism, includes three essays. The first, “Millenarianism, Hermeticism, and the Search for Universal Science,” originally published in 1992, is an intellectual history of Millenarianism and Hermeticism. The Millenarians, who were prominent in Europe from the twelfth to eighteenth centuries, were concerned with spiritual salvation and pietism and motivated by dissatisfaction with the church, economic and social depression, and wars. In this context of decay and depression, they believed that the world was going to end soon and that the Millennium or world Sabbath would then begin. This apocalyptic worldview influenced both Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Hegel; however, Herder used Hermeticism to develop a more comprehensive philosophy. Hermeticism, Vondung explains, grounds its philosophy and theology in a collection of third-century Greek scriptures that recount the prophecies of Hermes. Vondung argues that “it has not been sufficiently appreciated that this conception of Hermeticism influenced the new German anthropology and philosophy of nature of the late eighteenth century and gave new impulses to the search for a universal science” (76). The apocalyptic worldview proliferated in “the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…a time,” Vondung reminds us, “of severe political and social grievances, which made the world seem to be deteriorating” (54).

The second essay in the section, “Apocalyptic Activism: Ernst Jünger on the Meaning of the First World War,” first published in 2016 under a different title, recounts Jünger’s experiences as a soldier during World War I. Jünger, according to his memoir and his subsequent writings, originally understands himself and the war as nationalistic, but then regards the war as a turning point in history and adopts an apocalyptic worldview. Nationalism, Vondung explains, is concerned with preservation and seeks destruction of the political world as it is, to make possible something new. The political and economic collapse in Germany that follows the war gives rise to Adolf Hitler’s apocalyptic Nazi ideology.

The final essay in this section, “Transhumanism: The Final Revolution,” first published in 2010, is the shortest essay in the collection. It concerns an apolitical longing for a new, hopeful, more perfect human being. Ray Kurzweil, an American futurist, is the subject of the essay. According to Vondung, transhumanism, which is the newest iteration of Bildung, is a rebellion against one’s own body, evidenced by the desire for immortality and a bodiless existence, both of which are examples of the simultaneous apocalyptic desires to destroy and perfect.

Each of the three essays in the third section, National Socialism and Political Religion, examines the nature of National Socialism within the apocalyptic tradition. Vondung begins the first essay, “Spiritual Revolution and Magic: Speculation and Political Action in National Socialism,” first published in 1979, by explaining:

Magic begins with the belief that reality can be dominated if one finds the key to its mystery, the proper spell, or to put it into more theoretical language, if reality can be constructed in such a way that it forms a coherent totality that can be explained from one starting point. (105)

Vondung’s definition is based on “Voegelin’s definition of magic as the expansion of the will to power from the realm of the phenomena to that of substance or the attempt to operate in the realm of substance” (105). Magic is a type of apocalypticism. National Socialism constructs a desired and self-reinforcing image of reality, which Hitler promises will create a new, classless society and a new type of man united by blood. Nazi ideology depicts a coherent reality, a totality that can control and shape external reality and is, therefore, a form of magic in action.

In the second essay of section three, “National Socialism as Political Religion: Potential and Limits of an Analytical Concept,” first published in 2005, Vondung examines the ways in which National Socialism models itself as a political religion. Vondung explains that National Socialism is organized hierarchically like a church and establishes new, politically relevant celebrations, holidays, and rituals. In his speeches, Hitler emphasizes faith and belief. Vondung, building on Voegelin’s analysis of National Socialism, argues that National Socialism does not simply appropriate Christian belief and ritual, but is itself an attempt to build a new religion. Although Vondung criticizes Voegelin’s “emphasis on the ‘spirit of the people,’” he agrees with Voegelin’s essential assessment that National Socialism includes an “existential core and… a particular set of articles of faith” (120). For Vondung, the core of Nazi ideology is apocalypticism.

In the third and final essay in this section, “Are Political Religions and Civil Religions Secularizations of Traditional Religions?,” first published in 2016, Vondung distinguishes between secularization, a Western practice of turning something sacred into something secular, and sacralization, the turning of something secular into something sacred. Vondung identifies the origin of this discussion in the individual works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Marquis de Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, and Voegelin.

The text’s final section, On Eric Voegelin, includes two essays. The first essay, “Eric Voegelin, the Crisis of Western Civilization, and the Apocalypse,” first published in 1997, is an analysis of Voegelin’s project. The final essay in the collection, “Rereading Eric Voegelin’s Order and History,” first published in 2014, as indicated by its title, is a review of Voegelin’s Order and History. Vondung credits his own interest in apocalypticism to a specific graduate course taught by Voegelin in 1964. Now, we can see in his preceding essays the ways in which Vondung understands his own worldview and work as a refinement and extension of Voegelin’s work. Whereas Voegelin understood Gnosticism as the defining characteristic of modernity, Vondung understands apocalypticism as the enduring threat to reality. Voegelin’s project, Vondung makes clear, is “the basis and point of departure for [his] own attempts to carry further the apocalyptic symbolism” (141).

Throughout these essays, Vondung reminds us that we are social creatures who seek unity within our own selves and with those around us. Virtuous politics is possible only when society comprises and cultivates virtuous citizens who are able, despite impediments, to think consistently about our individual and shared political aspirations. The pursuit of perfection in politics has resulted, as evidenced by world history and Germany’s particular example, in death, destruction, and ideological incongruity. Vondung claims to be “neither a philosopher nor a political scientist,” since these were not his academic majors (154). Each of the essays in The Pursuit of Unity and Perfection in History, however, is a work of political philosophy. This collection is a thoughtful introduction to Vondung’s worldview, one that is likely to encourage readers to explore his other works.

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