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Voegelin and His Contemporaries

It would take a very fat volume or two to do justice to the subject of Voegelin and his contemporaries. I would like to begin by indicating the magnitude of the problem more or less empirically by referring initially to Voegelin’s extensive correspondence. To begin with, it fills over forty boxes in the Hoover Institution archival collection. Second, the significance varies enormously — from pesky intellectuals asking him for his views on American conservatism, which receive, quite properly, amusing rebukes, to lengthy exchanges that penetrate to the heart of a serious problem in political science. Looking over this vast collection of documents, I would divide it into five or six categories. The least important for our purposes is probably largest — casual inquiries and business, including some very interesting exchanges with publishers as well as the amusing rebukes.

Second, I would classify his exchanges with his students. After he removed to Munich in 1958 to establish the Political Science Institute, he became what the Germans call a Doktorvater with expected or conventional responsibilities that he did not always discharge to the satisfaction of his students. Many of these German students had, in fact, lost their actual fathers in the war. Those fathers who survived ranged in respectability from a major war criminal hanged by the allies after trial at Nuremberg to members of the German resistance. For all of them, Voegelin was more than a dissertation director. He was also a German untainted by the Nazi experience. As you might expect, they formed an attentive audience as well as tireless researchers when Voegelin gave his 1964 lecture series, “Hitler and the Germans.”

His relations with his American students were much different. One reason was simply cultural — American and German universities during the 1940s and 1950s were quite different places. In addition, Voegelin’s encounter with American students was chiefly as undergraduates; his German students were either studying for their doctorates or were post-docs. The only two American doctoral students Voegelin supervised, Ellis Sandoz and Richard V. Allen, both studied with him in Munich. They had quite different careers. Many of the Germans became academics, though often without assistance from their Doktorvater. Others became lawyers, journalists, and government officials of one sort or another.

A third category of contemporaries I would call important scholarly personalities and occasional colleagues. I am thinking here of people such as Michael Oakeshott, Eduard Baumgarden, Herman Brock, Rudolf Bultmann, or Jacob Taubes. These are individuals who are both intellectually significant and with whom Voegelin exchanged more than perfunctory words. If one examines the footnotes of Order and History, for example, one can find additional members of this group. With many of them — Gilles Quispel, for instance, or Gerhardt von Rad — the correspondence does not reflect their significance.

A fourth category I would call simply “friends.” Most of these people were also scholars though not necessarily housed in the university. Here I would mention John Hallowell, Wilmore Kendall, Gerhard Niemeyer, Emmanuel Winternitz, Fritz Machlup, and Gregor Sebba. Much of this material touches upon substantive questions of political science — even with Winternitz who was a curator of antique musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum — but it is wide-ranging rather than specialized and focused.

This type of correspondence shades into a fifth, which deals much more substantively with what Voegelin called “the problems.” Chief among these contemporaries was Alfred Schütz, whom he knew from his student days and with whom he conducted a lengthy and wide-ranging correspondence. Of particular interest to political science are their letters on philosophy of consciousness. Voegelin and Talcott Parsons were also friends from Voegelin’s stay at Harvard during the late 1930s and he was called in to mediate a dispute between Schütz and Parsons regarding some recondite matters in sociological theory. Alois Dempf and Friedrich Engel-Janosi, whom Voegelin knew from Vienna as well, were consulted extensively when Voegelin was writing the History of Political Ideas during the 1940s and early 1950s and when he was at work on Order and History during the later 1950s.

Robert Heilman, whose correspondence with Voegelin has recently been published, was self-identified in anthropological terms as Voegelin’s “native informant.” He gave him sage advice on the peculiarities of the American university. Particularly interesting in this respect is the botched efforts by Yale in the early 1950s to hire Voegelin. The multi-sided conversation among Yale officials — Wilmore Kendall, his local champion; Cleanth Brooks, who was then at Yale in the English department and whom Voegelin knew when he, Heilman, and Voegelin were at LSU together — along with Heilman and Voegelin tells a great deal about Voegelin’s sense of humour and the difficulty mediocre scholars at famous universities have when they encounter the kind of intellectual competence that made their universities important in earlier times.

In this category I would also place George Jaffé, a physicist at Berkeley, and Marie König. Jaffé and Voegelin also knew one another at LSU. Their discussion regarding physics formed the context both for “The Origins of Scientism” (1948) and “The Moving Soul” written twenty years later. Among those individuals with whom Voegelin was seriously engaged, Marie König was, so far as I know, the only scholar who was not also an academic. She was, as Jodi Bruhn and I will show in our next book, central to Voegelin’s understanding of Stone Age symbolism. Since Voegelin’s interest in the early history of humanity is not well known, a few words of explanation are in order.

When Jodi Bruhn and I were turning the interviews we collected into a coherent narrative for Voegelin Recollected —and I must say that Jodi did most of the work— I was again alerted to the importance of his interest in the Stone Age and what we conventionally call “prehistory.” When I was a graduate student I heard him deliver a lecture in 1967 at Emory University in Atlanta called “The Drama of Humanity.” He later visited Duke, where I was in grad school and I heard him discuss petroglyphs and pictograms and cave paintings, none of which seemed to me to be related to political science. But what did I know?

A few years later at an APSA meeting in Chicago I heard him speak again on the topic. At this meeting I first met Tilo Schabert, who was at the time his assistant at the Hoover Institution but had also been a student with him in Munich. Schabert and I discussed his talk and he told me that the German students of Voegelin referred to his interest in the Stone Age as relating to his project for “Volume Zero.” The reference, obviously, was to the Order and History series, which begins, as one might expect, with volume one. Now, Order and History recast many of the materials contained in the History of Political Ideas. The History employed what was pretty much a standard “history of ideas” approach, the only unusual feature being that Voegelin did not start with the Greeks but with the empires of the Ancient Near East in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, Akhenaton made a cameo appearance in his 1938 book, The Political Religions. Volume one of Order and History, using a new approach that dealt not with ideas but with experience and symbolization, also began with Egypt and Mesopotamia.By the early 1950s, Voegelin could draw on the work of the Oriental Institute in Chicago and on postwar publications on Israelite archeology and Biblical textual analysis.

I mention the change from the History of Political Ideas to Order and History for two reasons. First is the methodological shift just mentioned — from ideas to experience and symbolization; second is Voegelin’s willingness to rely on the assistance of specialists in interpreting hieroglyphic or cuneiform texts for which extensive training is necessary if they are to be intelligible.

Let us consider a few implications of the first problem. The opening sentence of Voegelin’s 1966 book, Anamnesis, reads: “The problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the essential element of a philosophy of politics.”  If one accords full weight to the expression “human order in society and history,” it is apparent that preliterate, prehistoric or, to avoid any progressivist bias, early historic human order must be included. That all members of the species homo sapiens shared a common humanity was obvious to Voegelin from his earliest publications. It became critical by 1933 when he wrote his analysis of the grotesque Nazi doctrines of race. By the time he had developed the arguments that constituted his philosophy of consciousness, chiefly in Anamnesis, in his later “meditative” essays, and in volume five of Order and History, it was clear to him that his discussion of “the materials” extended into remote early human history.

To see the importance of the present point, I must say a few words about Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness. It is complex, first of all. A relatively straightforward explanation of why he abandoned the “history of ideas” can be found in his Autobiographical Reflections, recorded in 1973. “I had to give up ‘ideas’ as objects of history and establish the experience of reality — personal, social, historical, cosmic — as the reality to be explored historically. These experiences, however, one could explore only by exploring their articulation through symbols.” Instead of political ideas understood as objects of historical analysis the subject-matter of political science was the self-interpretive reality of experience.

Likewise, at the beginning of the Preface to the first volume of Order and History, Voegelin argued that human experience of “the primordial community of being” was the proper subject matter of his study, not “ideas” as “objects” of analysis. The purpose of Order and History, Voegelin said at the end of this Preface, was “a philosophical inquiry concerning the order of human existence in society and history.” In conventional language, which Voegelin acknowledged in The New Science of Politics, he was engaged in writing a philosophy of history. Indeed, he said in the opening words of that book, “the existence of man in political society is historical existence, and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.”

Whether identified as philosophy of consciousness or philosophy of history, the focus is on the symbolic “articulation” or expression of experiences of reality. In principle, because human beings are “historical,” these symbolic presentations are apt to vary owing to the distinct historical circumstances that accompanied their articulation. Thus the symbolization used by Plato in the Republic to present his experience of reality was heavily conditioned by the polis culture with which he was familiar. Not so for the author of an Egyptian tomb text or, for that matter, St. Augustine. And yet, Voegelin argued, all these authors aimed at making intelligible their experiences of reality. All were engaged in what he said was a “search for truth concerning the order of being.”

Awareness of the equivalence in meaning with respect to the aim of the authors of these various symbolic expressions of experience was the first principle of Voegelin’s interpretive strategy. The second was that, notwithstanding this equivalence, there was also a “sequence” of efforts the elements of which were “intelligibly connected” to one another “as advances toward or recessions from an adequate symbolization of truth concerning the order of being.” The question of “adequacy” was conceptualized in terms of what Voegelin called compactness and differentiation “from rite, through myth, to theory” — as Voegelin put it in The New Science of Politics. In Order and History he analyzed the break from the “compactness” of what he termed the cosmological myths of Egypt and Mesopotamia to the “differentiation” of the Israelites, on the one hand, and of the Greek philosophers on the other. The change in consciousness form compactness to differentiation he called a “leap in being” that, in his view, produced “a new truth about the order of being.” Even in volume one of Order and History Voegelin was clear that this “sequence” did not amount to a progressive development whereby the historically later somehow, in Hegelian fashion, overcame the inadequacies of the previous symbolization. Consciousness of the “truth about the order of being” was not some sort of cultural or historical achievement.

A third aspect of Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness to be noted is that, if political philosophy can legitimately examine Egyptian tomb texts, there is no reason why it cannot examine even earlier material and nonverbal forms of symbolization. In The New Science of Politics, as noted, Voegelin mentioned the importance of rites — though he did not actually publish much about these essentially nonverbal or at least nondiscursive symbolizations. There is, however, no reason to exclude the application of Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness to such materials, including preimperial, Stone Age artifacts. The only problem was: how, in fact, to acquire the meaning of such materials? What does a polished skull or a cave drawing actually mean? Let us be clear about the issue: from the perspective of Voegelin’s philosophy of history or philosophy of consciousness the difference between literate and preliterate materials was that the latter gave visual expression to a repertoire of common human experiences, including the search for the truth of the order of being, rather than a textual expression. This difference in form, important though it is, did not prove to be an insuperable barrier to understanding.

Just as Voegelin relied on scholars expert on Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts in the work published in volume one of Order and History, he again needed assistance to interpret the visual materials of the Stone Age, which brings us back to Marie König. She was his guide. He met her in Rome in 1968. In her biography of König, Gabriel Meixner quoted König’s account of their first encounter: “Voegelin gave a lecture at the Istituto Accademico di Roma and so did I. He came to me immediately and said: ‘We must work together’.”  Voegelin had found in her work an approach that interested him greatly. Specifically, in her analysis of the petroglyphs, pictographs, stone monuments and tombs, and drawings painted in caves that had been left behind by Stone Age people Voegelin saw an additional symbolic order alongside the historic symbol orders that had been relevant for him during the conduct of his work on Order and History. König advised him on the research literature and especially on his own research trips to sites of Stone Age culture in Spain, Ireland, Malta, and Hawaii. At her house in Saarbrucken, she acquainted him in detail with her own research, and she personally led him through caves in Ile-de-France where she was able to show him her insights into the symbolism of the Stone Age directly.

In sum, Marie König introduced Voegelin to the earliest historical investigation of human symbolism and the experiences they made which were, if not textually articulate, at least graphically visible. More generally, her work described the context for later cultures that left us literary commentaries about their own significance — such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece and China. Voegelin was attracted to her work in part because of the fact that she had overcome existing prejudices regarding early humanity, particularly the progressivist evolutionary model that visualized human development as proceeding from a primitive condition to one of modern rationality. She approached the materials with the assumption that the “authors” were as intelligent and thoughtful as modern human beings, and that they, like us, were concerned with such “philosophical” or “spiritual” questions as the origin and purpose of existence, the structure of reality, and so on.

This approach proved decisive for Voegelin. König provided him with an insight into the structure of the prehistoric consciousness of humanity, which enabled him to integrate experiences and symbolizations of order historically prior to those of the cosmological civilizations discussed in Order and History, volume one. Voegelin did not, unfortunately, complete the project that Schabert and the other German students called “Volume Zero.” With a little luck, Jodi Bruhn and I will describe how König’s exegesis of the origins of culture translated into Voegelin’s “primary experience of the cosmos.”

There are three other contemporaries of Voegelin with whom he had quite distinct but unquestionably interesting relations: Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Hans Kelsen. It is important to mention all three, not least of all because of the importance they have as twentieth century thinkers.  Regarding Hannah Arendt I would say a couple of things. First, his famous review of her Origins of Totalitarianism and her response in the pages of the Review of Politics in 1953 tended to overemphasize what might be termed the metaphysical difference between this student of Heidegger and a scholar at the time deeply immersed in medieval scholasticism. Voegelin’s letter to her of 16 March, 1951 was much more nuanced; his view of her later Eichmann book was very positive.   

Turning to Hans Kelsen, who was Voegelin’s Doktorvater, matters were extremely complex. To begin with, early in his career Voegelin was identified, quite properly, as a member of the “Vienna School” of jurisprudence.  His early work was unquestionably part of the Staatslehre tradition though with his first publications he expressed his reservations about the neo-Kantian methodology that was central to Kelsen’s work. Voegelin also came to the conclusion that Staatslehre was itself both a parochial German discipline and radically defective inasmuch as it was useless in the understanding of British, French, or American political reality and, even when confined to German phenomena, could not handle what, during the 1930s, he was already calling political ideas.  This was especially significant in his analysis of the “race idea” as it was employed by the National Socialist.

The difference with Kelsen, at least in retrospect, can be detected in Voegelin’s work during the 1920s.  His concern was directed at “units” or “lines” of meaning that were found in social and political self-understanding.  In contrast, as Kelsen put it, “the object of knowledge is determined by the aim of knowledge,” namely science as defined by neo-Kantian premises.  The purity of Kelsen’s “pure theory of law” was achieved by ensuring its independence from what Kelsen called “social events.”  For Voegelin it was a virtuoso performance that described the formal order of a logic of norms independent of any particular content.

The implication Voegelin drew from this argument was clear: it was always possible to practice “norm logic” because norms were postulated objects of cognition.  By the same token norm logic was not genuine legal logic because the formative elements in the latter were not objects of cognition but “symbols, ideas, fragmentary acts, and the founding elements” of the polity – all of which demanded imaginative participation not scientific, neo-Kantian cognition in order to be apprehended.  In short, the criteria by which law was to be distinguished from other social and political realities was found not in the formal structure of its norms but in its content, as Voegelin said as early as 1924.  And content, as Voegelin stated on several occasions, appears in “a particular manner of givenness” and not as an a priori cognitive construct of a transcendental ego or anything similar.  This remained a major limitation to Staatslehre.

On the other hand, one could look at Kelsen’s pure theory of law as being itself a “content” or historical event.  In that case Kelsen’s jurisprudence was internally or experientially connected to the historical reality of defeat in the Great War and the enormous social, political, economic, and legal disruption associated with the replacement of two large empires with one medium and one small republic – much as the entire Staatslehre tradition grew out of the successful conclusion to the wars of unification in 1871 and the necessity of establishing uniformity among a large number of heterogeneous legal systems.

In Beginning the Quest I traced Voegelin’s dissatisfaction with Staatslehre in general and Kelsen’s version of it in particular through his writing what he called a Herrschaftslehre in the early 1930s.  The term was borrowed from Max Weber and can be translated more literally as “theory of dominance,” or “command” or “theory of rulership,” but is nowadays translated as “theory of governance.”  In a report to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1930 Voegelin said he was at work on a study of the “Principles of Government.”  Whatever it was called, Voegelin was looking to integrate legal theory with philosophical anthropology to develop what today we would call a theory of the regime.

This was the context within which he wrote his two books on race in 1933, and his 1936 book on Austria, which contained a fifty-page criticism of Kelsen.  And Kelsen, it will be recalled, was the author of the Austrian constitution.  Voegelin was perfectly willing to praise the logical coherence of the constitution, but he insisted that it had nothing to do with the political reality indicated by the term “Austria.” The Austrian populace, Voegelin said, remained a Reichvolk, an imperial people, but without an empire and without becoming a Staatsnation, by which he meant a “nation of common spirit intent upon the formation of a state.”  There did exist Kelsen’s legal order but there was no body politic to which it applied.  Indeed, if you read The Authoritarian State as Voegelin’s version of a Viennese comic opera – not an easy thing to do, admittedly – then it reminds you of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities which appeared a few years earlier.  Voegelin’s more serious conclusion was that the authoritarian regime under which Austria existed was a late and rather desperate effort to maintain its political existence.  When he completed the book Austria enjoyed another 26 months of existence.  By then Kelsen was teaching at Berkeley.

It was not until 1954 that Voegelin and Kelsen exchanged letters. This correspondence provides a fascinating example of an exchange between a brilliant Doktorvater and his brilliant pupil.  It is made even more compelling because from Kelsen’s standpoint Voegelin had, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, “erred, and strayed…like lost sheep.”  From Voegelin’s point of view, Kelsen’s philosophical assumptions were now questionable on their own terms because Voegelin had moved far beyond them and had come to understand neo-Kantianism, as other uncritical intellectual doctrines, as symptoms of a more fundamental problem to which he had, as yet, not attached an unequivocal name.  The discussion between Kelsen and Voegelin can be seen, as it were, as the voice of a younger Voegelin interrogating what the mature Voegelin had become.

Kelsen replied to Voegelin’s initial letter by saying that he had just finished The New Science of Politics and that Voegelin must consider him an “agent of destructive positivism” and worse, an out-and-out gnostic.  Voegelin replied with polite formality and said that he would like to clarify “a misunderstanding that necessarily and improperly clouds relations with a man to whom I owe as much as I do to you.” Voegelin sketched the differences between Kelsen’s “dogmatic assertion” that there were no legal problems outside the pure theory of law that admit of scientific treatment and Voegelin’s view that the pseudo-problems were in fact “substantial and real.”  For Kelsen, pseudo-problems were quite properly to be dismissed; for Voegelin, “because I am of the opinion that these problems are real and very important, you will certainly understand that we are of divergent opinions in the evaluation of your destructive intention.”  Moreover, if Kelsen did not care to deal with metaphysical questions, his “subjective” attitude, did not, in fact touch upon those “substantive and real” problems at all.  The most that could happen was that Kelsen’s rhetorical brilliance would deter others from concerning themselves with metaphysical questions, that were, for them existentially real or important.  The consequence, which Voegelin did not spell out, would be that such genuinely searching individuals would be prevented from asking what to them were meaningful questions, which, Voegelin said, was a serious matter.

Finally, on the question of gnosticism, Voegelin assured Kelsen that the purity of his metaphysical agnosticism ensured that he never attempted to “fill the vacuum of transcendence” created by his attitude with any immanent type of gnosis – unlike both Cassirer and Husserl who did so by creating positivistic philosophies of history.  Voegelin ended on a conciliatory note: “if you reconsider your misguided student, you might consider that the best students are not necessarily those who swear in verbamagistri and remain inside the ‘school,’ but perhaps rather those who studied so thoroughly at school that they free themselves from it and can go their own way.”

In an additional exchange of letters Kelsen and Voegelin expressed mutual respect for one another’s scholarship.  Kelsen did not, however, deal with the issues Voegelin raised because, from his position they were not issues at all.  He did however produce a lengthy manuscript criticizing The New Science of Politics, which he sent to Voegelin with instructions that Voegelin should respond to it and that they would publish the criticism and the response in the same issue of an unnamed journal. Voegelin provided his own somewhat melancholy postscript to Kelsen’s criticism in a 1956 letter to his older colleague and fellow student of Kelsen, Alfred Verdross:

“The conversation with Kelsen a while back was not very pleasant. He had sent me his voluminous critique of my New Science, apparently with the request that I should give him my opinion on the matter.  And he wanted to hear my counter-arguments in a discussion. Now, for quite some time I have been beyond letting myself get caught up in debate with ideologues.  And I indicated that to him.  I further assured him that as far as I’m concerned, he can publish anything about me that he wishes, and that I wouldn’t think badly about it if he did, but he mustn’t demand that I answer him. In any case: the review did not get published; and I have heard indirectly that K. has discovered in the meantime that I am not an isolated criminal case, but that there is a very extensive scientific literature of this sort.  He is now, the rumors have it, occupying himself with that.  I wonder what he will have to say when the Exodus volume, with its overview of the literature on various individual questions is published.”

In the event Kelsen said nothing.  Nor did he ever publish his critique of The New Science of Politics.  Indeed, its very existence was denied for a time by the Kelsen Institute in Vienna.

Finally a few words on Leo Strauss.  In 1993, when Peter Emberley and I drew together 53 letters by Strauss and Voegelin, the task of accounting for their relationship was relatively manageable.  The eight commentaries in Part III of that book provide the evidence.  Fifteen years ago it was possible to argue that Voegelin’s hermeneutic of experience and symbolization was sharply distinct from Strauss’s “total commitment to Greek philosophy,” as Thomas Altizer put it. Thomas Pangle contrasted “Voegelin’s faith-inspired historical philosophizing or philosophy of history” with Strauss’s “intransigent stand for philosophy as rigorous science.”

Several commentaries drew attention to a remark by Strauss from his 1954 paper, “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” also included with the correspondence, that: “no one can be both a philosopher and a theologian or, for that matter, a third which is beyond the conflict between philosophy and theology, or a synthesis of both.”  The great division, apparently, was over reason and revelation.  Or, as Strauss wrote to Voegelin in 1951, “every synthesis is actually an option either for Jerusalem or for Athens.”  Voegelin replied that “the problem of revelation,” along with the form of the Platonic dialogue, was “quite rightly identified in your letter as the cardinal points at which our views probably differ.”

There is also an element of accident that should be noted.  Prior to the publication of the correspondence the only public evidence that Strauss and Voegelin were aware of one another was the 1949 review by Voegelin of Strauss’s study of Xenophon’s Hiero, and Strauss’s response to it a few years later. Most political scientists during the 1950s and 1960s would likely have categorized the two scholars, probably along with Hannah Arendt, Yves Simon, and perhaps Jacques Maritain, as “political theorists,” the most familiar exemplar of which was George Sabine, and before him, reaching back to the turn of the century, W. A. Dunning.

By the late 1960s, the differences among these practitioners of “political theory,” and specifically between Strauss and Voegelin, gradually fell into focus.  To simplify but not unduly distort, many who read Voegelin were also concerned with theology and comparative religion, for example, whereas, it is probably accurate to say that many who read Strauss carefully were chiefly, not to say exclusively, concerned with the tradition of western “political philosophy.”  Indeed, the term “political philosophy,” as a term of art, was introduced by Strauss, so far as I can tell, in a lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the winter of 1954-55.

In the past fifteen years a number of things have changed regarding the scholarly literature on the work of both Voegelin and Strauss.  I would like to suggest briefly a couple of them today and indicate that these changes may have a bearing on how we understand the work of these two men on this particular question. Beginning with Voegelin, I agree with Jürgen Gebhardt in his dispute with Fred Lawrence that Voegelin was first and last a Wissenschaftler, a scientist.  As he said to a rather surprised Patricia Coonan at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal:

“everywhere in departments of religion, you run into somebody who is bright enough to ask himself occasionally whether it is just a question of the Buddha having a conception of something, and Confucius having another one, and so on – or whether perhaps they have all experienced the same Divine reality and there is only one God who manifests Himself, reveals Himself, in a highly diversified manner all over the globe for all these millennia of history that we know. The mere fact that we now have in history a global empirical knowledge extending into the archaeological millennia all over earth requires a theology that is a bit less confined to Islam or to Christianity.  It must explain why a God who is the God of some witch doctor in Africa is the same God who appeared to Moses as “I am” or to Plato in a Promethean fire.  And that theology is unfortunately not yet in existence.”

P. Coonan: But wouldn’t you have to use philosophy in order to try to understand the evidence and the formulation?

E. Voegelin: Absolutely.

Voegelin’s concern, in other words, was with the experiential sources of the various symbolic orders he had distinguished and “the problem is that the language of the gods…is fraught with the problem of symbolizing the experience of a not-experientiable divine reality.”  As a result, because the language of gods tends to be misconstrued as referring to “a divine entity ‘beyond’ the experience of the [presence of the] Beyond,” then the gods must die when a more adequate language is achieved.  In this way “the historical scene becomes littered with dead gods.”

On the other hand, if language is not misconstrued “the succession of gods becomes a series of events to be remembered” as the history of the presence of the Beyond.  What has history, what leaves a historical trace, is not the Beyond, which is also “beyond history,” but the presence of the Beyond “in the bodily located consciousness of questioning man.”  That is, “the experience of non-experientiable divine reality has history,” namely “the history of truth emerging from the quest for truth” that in turn occurs “in the bodily located consciousness of questioning man” and so constitutes an element of his (or her) biography.  In this respect, “the serious effort of the quest for truth acquires the character of a divine comedy.” In other words, there is no Beyond beyond the experience of the presence of a Beyond.  And that being so, the focus of science is on the experience and its symbolization, not the imaginary hypostasis of a Beyond beyond experience.  This is why Voegelinian political science is empirical in the precise, Aristotelian sense and why, for Voegelinian political science, the problem of reason and revelation does not exist.

Now, what about Strauss? I would not attempt to make any definitive remark on the question of how Strauss and Voegelin differed on the issue of reason and revelation.  I would, however, note that several recent studies help because they clarify what had been largely obscure, namely Strauss’s starting point. To state the obvious: Voegelin began his scholarly career as a lawyer, as an exegete of Staatslehre, whereas Strauss came from a traditional or conservative Jewish home in the village of Kirchhain; he received a classical German humanist education at the Gymnasium Philippinum also in Kirchhain and then attended the nearby university in Marburg.  That is, if one may say that the internal logic of Staatslehre and its limitations guided the beginnings of Voegelin’s political science, one would say that the internal logic of the Bildungsideal and its limitation by Conservative Judaism guided Strauss’s.

To put my point in a non-biographical way: if we follow one of Strauss’s most celebrated hermeneutical maxims, that we seek to understand an author as he understood himself, then the fact that Strauss was a Jew in Germany mattered.  Here is a supporting anecdote from the 1970s told by Hadley Arkes:

“Not long after Mr. Strauss’s death in 1973, Milton Himmelfarb was doing a commemorative piece, and as he tried to estimate Strauss’s relation to Judaism he remarked that Strauss had not been seen often in the synagogue.  I remember calling Himmelfarb at the time and recounting to him a story I had been told about Mr. Strauss’s appearance for a lecture at Amherst – a few years before I had arrived at the College.  After his lecture, he was approached by a professor of English, a man of Jewish ancestry who had managed, with a steady policy, to detach himself from things Jewish.  He ran up to Strauss and said, ‘But if I follow what you’ve said, you have to believe in revelation.’ To which Strauss replied, ‘But I’m a Jew.’  The professor of English said, ‘But what does that mean – these days?’  To which Strauss said, ‘That’s not my problem.'”

In 1965 he remarked that, “the theological-political problem has remained, from that time [1920s] on, the theme of my inquiries.”  His analysis of Zionism no less than his discussion of assimilation were centered, as he said, on the problem of the Galut, Exile.  And Strauss argued from the 1920s on, if you abandon the world of the Galut – or the understanding that the world is the site of the Exile – then you abandon a central attribute of Judaism.  This is not a position with which Voegelin would differ.

As a final remark on the question of revelation, let me conclude with a remark Strauss made to Karl Löwith in a letter in 1946: “there is only one objection against Plato-Aristotle: and that is the factumbrutum of revelation or of the ‘personal’ God.”  In light of what has been previously discussed, it is clear that Strauss was emphasizing the externality or objectivity of revelation as an event that human beings can accept or reject, to be sure, but the reality of which does not depend on acceptance or rejection. Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and many lesser and dimmer lights have accused Strauss of being an atheist.  For reasons just elaborated, such a judgement is contradicted by the evidence.  Nor is it clear that one can say that Strauss took an intransigent stand for philosophy as a rigorous science – that is, for Athens over Jerusalem.  When Strauss wrote that “no alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance,” he meant it.

I would say, therefore, that recent analysis particularly of Strauss’s early work has situated his political philosophy more accurately than was done fifteen years ago.  Among Voegelin’s contemporaries Strauss has always seemed to me to be the most interesting and the most important.  This is why the most important chapter in a non-existent book calledLeo Strauss and His Contemporaries would deal with Voegelin.   And vice versa.  So: there is still plenty of work for contemporary political science to do.

 

 

This excerpt is from Voegelin Recollected: Conversations of a Life (University of Missouri Press, 2007); also see  “Voegelin in Baton Rouge: Parts One, Two, and Three,” “Voegelin at Notre Dame,” “Voegelin in Munich,” and “Voegelin Recollected.”

 

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Barry Cooper is a Board Member of VoegelinView and Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary; Jodi Bruhn is the Director of Stratéjuste Consulting, based in Ottawa, Canada. They are authors of Voegelin Recollected: Conversations of a Life (Missouri, 2007).

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