UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH

from  The Growth of the Liberal Soul -Ch 3 Pt 3

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth" appears here in four parts.

 

The Hollowness of Liberal Construction (concluded)

 

All of the critiques point toward the fundamental objection that Nietzsche was to express so powerfully. That is, that liberal politics had cut itself off from its own roots in philosophy and Christianity and had no comparable motivat­ing appeal to put in their place. His prediction of its impending collapse has still not materialized but that does not negate the force of the warning that he has only been the most prominent in sounding.¹² Without the formative spiritual traditions that produced order in the soul, liberal democracy seemed only to provide the outer shell that concealed the hollowness within. The liberal construction had merely been a secularization of the philosophic-Christian understanding of the person, but once it cut itself off from those roots it cut itself off from its own means of support. That step had been taken when the liberal ethos came to regard itself as self-sufficient.¹³

 

The process by which this self-subversion took place was, of course, grad­ual. Eighteenth-century liberals were still aware of the innovation they were taking in de-emphasizing the dependence of the legal order on its tran­scendent authorization. "Is there a possibility," John Adams asks, "that the government of nations may fall in the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fire flies, and this all is without a father? Is this the way to make man as man an object of respect? Or is it to make murder itself as indifferent as shooting plover, and the extermination of the Rohilla nation as innocent as the swallowing of mites on a morsel of cheese?" Even Robespierre is perhaps not disingenuous when he declares that a legislator cannot be an atheist since he depends on a "religious sentiment which impresses upon the soul the idea of a sanction given to the moral precepts by a power greater than man" (quoted in Arendt, On Revolution, 192).

The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of  Spiritual and Political Individualism —Part 1

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

"The decade of the nineties is the watershed of American history. As with all watersheds the topography is blurred, but in the perspective of half a century the grand outlines emerge clearly."

(Henry Steele Commager)¹            

 

On the level of pragmatic ex­istence, the watershed results from the civilizing process. Self-contained, autonomous, independent agrarian America is transformed into urban­ized, industrialized America, and this new entity was, by force of its stage of development, inevitably drawn into the tension field of world econom­ics and world politics. The apocalyptically motivated idea of the nation of 1776 had, by the time of the Civil War, been realized in the continental American empire that not only had freed itself from the threat posed by the competing imperial enterprises of the European powers, but had also risen to be the hegemonic power in the Western hemisphere.

 

The internal consolidation of this empire had progressed to the point at which the mechanism, inherent in American society, of solving con­flicts through avoidance, the principle of separatism or secession, had become ineffective. The Civil War proved that any antagonism taken to the extreme between two types of social organizations could no longer be solved in this empire through the collective secession of one, so that one had to fall back on the instrument for solving conflicts employed in such cases in the Old World—armed confrontation.

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning  

§4. The Beginning of Genesis 1

In Genesis 1:1, we read: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." We can hardly come closer to the real beginning of anything than in an original act of creating everything. But what is creation? and how does God proceed when he creates? Genesis 1:3 gives this information: "And God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light" or, in the more literal Buber-Rosenzweig translation, "God spoke: Light be! Light became." The reality light appears in this verse when the divine command calls it forth, into its existential luminosity, by calling it by its name. The spoken word, it appears, is more than a mere sign signifying something; it is a power in reality that evokes structures in reality by naming them. This magic power of the word can be discerned even more clearly in Genesis 1:5 (Buber-Rosenzweig translation): "God called to light: Day! and to the darkness he called: Night! And there became evening and morning: A Day."

UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH

from  The Growth of the Liberal Soul -Ch 3 Pt 2

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth" appears here in four parts.

The Illusion of Progress (concluded)

 

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 4

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

§ 4.  An Open Quest of Reality

 

In Search of Order can thereby be seen as Voegelin's valedictory analysis of a set of interrelated problems that he struggled with for more than sixty years. He did so from a remarkably consistent and resolute perspective of affirmation of man's participation in divine Being as the sine qua non of his very humanity.

 

If anything is surprising about the book, it lies, I have tried to suggest, primarily in the subtle shift of vocabulary away from objectivation, in the tautness of the prose, in the emphasis upon the mysterious impersonal depth of It-reality beyond the doctrinal God of ready invocation — all in the interest of so refining the participa­tory mode of discourse as more tellingly to express the philosopher's meditative process as the truly cooperative divine-human event of In-Between reality Voegelin experienced it as being. Voegelin rigorously adapts the radical empiricism of Plato and James to express the process of noetic meditation in quest of truth — the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum that emerges as the standard of true philosophizing. More­over, as William Petropulos convincingly shows, this is not new in principle: Meditation as the essence of philosophizing is characteristic of Voegelin's published work from age twenty-one onward.