from The Collected Works

Conceptions of History,

the Mathematics of Progress,

and the Problem of Time

Man is constructed as a function of history in such philosophies of history as those of Comte, Hegel, and Marx, with an apocalyptic present, that is, a present in which all past reality is relegated to a dead past and all present is concentrated in this empirical present in time, loaded with expectations that something meaningful will come out of this present. That is the characteristic of the apocalyptic attitude, projecting into the future and forgetting about the past: the dead past and the living future.

With regard to such an opposition of a dead past to the living future, one should, for instance, be aware that these ideas of a time that flows from a past into a future on a symbolized line — just one line running through the point of present — is a conception, a meaning of the word future, which does not become current before the middle of the eighteenth century. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century we have no term for what today we call "the future"— a better future, a more peaceful future, or God knows what. This term, or meaning of, future did not exist in any European language before 1750. . . .

Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness   —Pt 3

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003), from which this excerpt is taken. He is also the poetry editor here at VoegelinView.  This excerpt appears in three parts with permission of the publisher.

Pound's Resisitance to Radical Transcendence

Pound's brand of immanentism, of course, is quite different from those of philosophical materialists or secular progressivists: it has ample room for the divine and its mystery, but still at a certain limit Pound balks at the full implications of transcendence. The closest he gets to an embrace of radical transcendence is his approving use of the light symbolism he finds in the Neoplatonic mystical tradition, the notion of the "undivided light" of which all visible things are but manifestations.

Shines

in the mind of heaven    God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
                                                           (51/250)
Light tensile immaculata
                 the sun's cord unspotted 
"sunt lumina" said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
                                "OMNIA, 
all things that are are lights"
                                                         (74/429)20

Pound is comfortable with the notion of the divine mind, the Platonic Nous, as an original "light" that both constitutes reality and is refracted in the "light" of human understanding, and he gives credit to Plato for establishing the symbolic tradition: "What we can assert is that Plato periodically caused enthusiasm among his disciples. And the Platonists after him have caused man after man to be suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man's individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light."

The Ministry of love

The War on Hate: The Past and Future of Political Correctness and Liberty

  by John von Heyking

Professor von Heyking is a prolific author of books and papers in political science and is a regular contributor to VoegelinView. His biographical notice is found here. The following paper was delivered to the Eric Voegelin Society at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Toronto in September of 2009 and appears here with permission.

Alexis de Tocqueville thought the future democratic despotism would degrade men without tormenting them. Canadian Human Rights Commissions do an effective job doing both because defending oneself against charges of promoting “hate” — or political incorrectness — consumes vast amounts of one’s time and money, so much so that even in the rare of event of successfully defending oneself, one can be sure that, in Ezra Levant’s words, the “process is the punishment.” Moreover, defending oneself means engaging in the same whining exercise as that of the complainants. Reading the transcript of a HRC proceeding displays this degradation of character that a contemporary Karl Kraus (or Mark Steyn) easily could, and has, parodied.¹

Roger Scruton charitably observes that political correctness in Western societies — most notably the United States — originated in the attempt to promote civility. As people became more aware of the effect of language and terminology on prejudice and discrimination, attempts were made to find more respectful terms that cultivated civility instead of rudeness and disrespect.²

Art and Philosophy in the Life of  Étienne Gilson  –Pt 2 of Chapter 1

by Francesca Aran Murphy

Alfred Loisy and Henri Bergson

Loisy struggles to reconcile old and new