A Night in Heidelberg—Part 2

Voegelin's Writings on Heidegger

by  Myron Moses Jackson

Myron Jackson is a PhD student in philosophy at Southern Illinois University. His thesis explores Ironic American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Open Self. His master's thesis explored Eric Voegelin's interpretation of natural law. His biographical notice may be found HERE. This study is presented here in two parts.

Voegelin's Response to Heidegger's "Magic"

As one may already suspect, Voegelin had little patience or sympathy for "the little magician from Messkirch."  This was Heidegger’s nickname given by his students, according to Karl Löwith, who had been one of his most exceptional students, which is saying a lot considering the others–Strauss, Arendt, Marcuse to name only a few. 

Löwith describes Heidegger’s masterful techniques that would razzle and dazzle his audiences:

He was a small dark man who knew how to cast a spell insofar as he could make disappear what he had a moment before presented. His lecture technique consisted in building up an edifice of ideas which he then proceeded to tear down, presenting the spellbound listeners with a riddle and then leaving them empty-handed.

 

This ability to cast a spell at times had very considerable consequences: it attracted more or less psychopathic personality types, and, after three years of guessing at riddles, one woman student took her own life.³⁷

from The Collected Works

Why Do We Need Philosophy? –Part 1

God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience.

It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it.

The perspective of participation must be understood in the fullness of its disturbing quality. It does not mean that man, more or less comfortably located in the landscape of being, can look around and take stock of what he sees as far as he can see it. Such a metaphor, or comparable variations on the theme of the limitations of human knowledge, would destroy the paradoxical character of the situation.

It would suggest a self-contained spectator, in possession of and with knowledge of his faculties, at the center of a horizon of being, even though the horizon were restricted. But man is not a self-contained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and, through the brute fact of his existence, committed to play it without knowing what it is.

from The Collected Works

Obedience to the Law 

The Normative Nature of the Rule

The Ought is not itself a "postulate" or a "norm" but the experienced tension between the order of being and the conduct of man.

In the orbit of this tension, rules concerning social order are more than empirical observations concerning regularities of ac­tion.

Since the problem of order is precisely the tension between empirical conduct and true order, legal rules, whether they are gen­eral rules or individual rules for the parties in a concrete case, have the character of projects of order.

Whether or not the rule employs the formula "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not," it has that meaning when it projects the types to which the conduct of human beings is supposed to conform.

The so-called "normativity" of the rule de­rives, therefore, from the ontologically real tension in the order of society.

Modernity and Secularization

According to Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age –Part 1

by Thierry Gontier 

M. Gontier is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Université de Lyon Jean Moulin – Lyon III.  He has written extensively on Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, and Voegelin and is an editor of the forthcoming Eric Voegelin, Politique, Religion et Histoire, Paris, éd. du Cerf. A biographical sketch may be found HERE. This essay was originally read at the annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society in Seattle, September  2011. It appears here in two parts.

To ask the question concerning "legitimacy of the modern age" represents an act characteristic of post-modernity, i.e. of a modernity which is suspicious of its own foundations.

One of the recurrent forms of this question consists in asking whether the values  proclaimed by modernity, the values of what we call "the Enlightenment" (secularism, the autonomy of reason, progress, political liberalism, etc.), are or are not authentic values.

Is modernity, in the words of Nietzsche, a high or a low civilization? Is it in particular a substitute for Christian theology or the moment at which values are created? Behind these apparently historical questions another lies hidden, namely, the relief from the anxiety of that modernity through the recovery of the intellectual act by which modernity was inaugurated.

Does this represent a reinstatement of the lost link with a premodern theology or the movement of the project of autonomy proclaimed by modernity towards its fulfilment?

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 5

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the  final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949.  We are featuring here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in multiple parts.  Parts 1 to 3 appeared here in 2010. It is reproduced here with permission.

Bureacracy as the Vehicle for Reform

Heedless of the decay of the "movement" with the end of World War I, Progressivism left behind an all-American consensus concerning the dominant sociostructural components of the industrial society of the United States.

This genuine product of progressivist politics was, for one thing, a saturation of politics with the principles of industrial organiza­tion. The organization of social groups along the lines of function and efficiency gave to the political process a new structure; agriculture, labor, and capital became the constitutive units of American politics.

But what was decisive was the social breakthrough of a specific Progressive com­ponent: the bureaucracy as the vehicle for public reform.

The commu­nity, the state, and especially the nation were subjected to bureaucratization in an effort to coordinate the organized special interests cooperatively through a powerful central organization of the public inter­est.