Richard Rorty and the Core of Progressivism

  by  Scott Segrest

 

Scott Segrest is Instructor in Political Philosophy at  University of Alaska, Anchorage. He is the author of America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, University of Missouri Press, excerpts from which have appeared here at VoegelinView. He is also an editor at VoegelinView.This essay appears with permission.

 

The Religious Character of American Progressivism

The analysis of progressivism given by Eric Voegelin six decades ago in his New Science of Politics remains illuminating even today.  The animating center of progressivism, he said, is the Christian idea of history gutted of spiritual substance and turned from its original destination.

 

The original idea, classically articulated by St. Augustine, was that the human history that really counts–the history of those who love and follow God–is a pilgrim’s progress to a perfect city, a journey with no map and no guide but God himself to a mysterious place not of this world. 

 

The great modern ideological formations, Voegelin said –progressivism, utopianism, and revolutionary activism–are all moved by a similar vision, but God has dropped out of the picture, and the process has become a quest for political perfection in this world, to be achieved not by God’s but human hands. 

from The Collected Works

Montesquieu
The Elements of Political Liberty

 

The Climate in 18th Century England and France

The French revolt paralleling Hume's critique of reason came through Montesquieu [Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu–ed] (1689-1755).

 

Again a new set of problems was opened that could not be covered by the Myth of Reason or the contract theory of government. But here the parallel ends, for the approach of Montesquieu differs as widely from that of Hume as the French political situation differed from the English.

 

Hume was the philosopher of a settled society that had passed through a revolution. A splenetic humor is creeping up, tempered in Hume by a natural complacency; but through the veneer of his conformism and skepticism one can sense other possibilities: the century of Hume is the century of Beckford and his Vathek.

 

The France of Montesquieu is full of unrest presaging a revolution; the expectancy of movement, the smell of unknown horizons, is as characteristic of Montesquieu as a certain musty smell of stagnation is peculiar to Hume.

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 2

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy 

Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes . She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.

The Cure for Uprootedness

 

The disease of uprootedness is in fact, for Weil, a spiritual one. “We suffer from a lack of balance, due to a purely material development of technical science. This lack of balance can only be remedied by a spiritual development in the same sphere, that is, in the sphere of work.”³³

 

This imbalance is, moreover, the result of our failure to understand the “Needs of the Soul,” which is the title of the opening chapter of The Need for Roots. For Weil, we may discover what these needs are by analogy with the needs of our bodies and they, too, must be satisfied in order that the soul should not die.

 

These needs are “sacred” inasmuch as they are those of a human being. To each of these needs corresponds an obligation which testifies indirectly to the bond which unites man “with a reality.”³⁴

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 3

by Glenn Hughes

 

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio.  The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.

 

History as Metaxy 

 

Though Four Quartets is described most simply as "a series of meditations upon existence in time," it also necessarily includes meditation on the meaning and structure of history.¹⁸

 

Through his understanding of incarnate human consciousness as participating in the timeless meaning of divine real­ity, Eliot draws the conclusion that it is improper to conceive history as being principally a process of chronological development.

from The Collected Works

David Hume
Spokesman for the Comfortable Class

 

 

While the new order [the secular settlements following the religious upheavals of the 16^th and 17^th centuries–ed] appeared roseate in the "Myth of Reason and Nature" to Hugo Grotius and John Locke, their greater contemporaries were not happy.

 

. . . . [Unfortunately the great] work of Giambattista Vico did not become effective in England and France; the resistance had to develop independently out of the forces of those societies. While the results are modest compared with the work of Vico, the change of sentiment that makes them possible merits our attention, at least in some outstanding examples.

 

In England the decisive break came through David Hume (1711-1776). The Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740)¹ brings the at­tack on Reason with the purpose of revealing the true foundation of morals and politics in the sphere of sentiment.