"The Attunement of the Soul"
Eric Voegelin's Search of Order -Part 1
by Charles Embry
Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosoohy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This is offered in two parts and appears with permission.
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On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and . . . I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me . . . I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori December 10, 1513
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At the time of his death, Voegelin left unfinished the fifth volume of Order and History, In Search of Order, which was published posthumously in 1987. Although the book is unfinished, its fragmentary nature should not "convey a suspicion of its being imperfectly deliberated," points out Ellis Sandoz in his introduction to the volume. For "it is fragmentary only in not extending the analysis to other materials plainly in the author's view and in not illustrating the theoretical presentation in greater detail than he was able to do before time ran out. But the theoretical presentation itself is essentially complete, and the fact that the quest of order is an unfinished story as told by Voegelin is most fitting."1
The various components of Voegelin's philosophy that I consider crucial to a Voegelinian approach to literary works are not necessarily discussed in the order in which he wrote about or published them. This approach is justified by the fact that his thought, as we now see it whole, did not develop in a unilinear manner from an earlier position that must be discarded as new material is uncovered. Responding, late in his life, to the question of whether he would deny anything he had written in Anamnesis (1966), Voegelin replied, "No. I rarely have something to deny because I always stick close to the empirical materials and do not generalize beyond them. So when I generalize, I have to generalize because of the materials."2
The historical materials that had been the foci of his early works continued to be the foci of his late meditations. Many examples could be adduced here, but a few prime examples would include Hesiod, the Timaeus of Plato, the Metaphysics of Aristotle, and the philosophy of Hegel. That he was unafraid to begin again at the beginning is evident in the title of the first chapter of In Search of Order: "The Beginning of the Beginning." Even a cursory examination of the book's Analytical Table of Contents by anyone familiar with the first four volumes of Order and History would reveal that Voegelin continually returned to materials he had already dealt with, deepening his insights and refining his linguistic expression as he probed the depths of his own soul in the manner first discovered by Heraclitus. The form that this chapter takes harkens back to and combines both strands — reflective meditation and historical recollection — of his empirical-experientially grounded philosophizing identified in 1966 as anamnesis.
The Double Origin of the Philosophical Quest:
Wonder and the Experience of Disorder
As Voegelin himself pointed out on many occasions, philosophy begins with the philosopher's personal experience of political and social disorder that arises from spiritual disorder. In Voegelin's case, the experience of disorder occurred in early twentieth-century Austria, especially the period between the two world wars, when he was personally in danger following the Anschluss. Philosophy also has a second empirical root: the experience of wonder. Voegelin often meditated on and quoted a passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics that links myth and philosophy through the experience of wonder and wondering:
it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters. . . . And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth [philomythos] is in a sense a lover of Wisdom [philosophos], for the myth is composed of wonders).3
Searching through the process of recollecting the experiences in his own consciousness, thereby implementing the Delphic-Socratic precept "Know thyself" that led to his life in philosophy, Voegelin conducted a set of anamnetic experiments in 1943. Describing these experiments to R. N. Palmer, editor of Sewanee Review, Voegelin observed "that the life of the spirit and intellect is historical in the strict sense, and that the determinants of mature philosophical speculation have to be sought in the mythical formation of the mind in experiences of early youth."4 Through these experiments, Voegelin was grounding his own philosophizing in the historical biography of his own consciousness. In the prefatory remarks to the first publication of these experiments in Anamnesis he asserts that "the radicalism of philosophizing can never be gauged either by the results or the critical framework of a system but rather, in a more literal sense, by the radices of philosophizing in the biography of philosophizing consciousness, i.e., by the experiences that impel toward reflection and do so because they have excited consciousness to the 'awe' of existence."5
The importance of these anamnetic experiments lies in the connection Voegelin makes between the "mythical formation of the mind in the experiences of early youth" and the experiences that move the inchoate philosopher toward reflection because "they have excited consciousness to the 'awe' of existence." Myth was an integral component in the historical development of philosophy as the love of wisdom, especially in the work of Plato. Voegelin's own biographical experience demonstrated to him the foundation of philosophy in myth, itself "composed of wonders."
While Voegelin's early childhood experiences formed, shaped, and thus prepared him to become a philosopher, it was his adult experiences not only of the National Socialist forces of political disorder but also of the political turmoil of early twentieth-century Europe that motivated and guided the search for order that continued throughout his life.
His own resistance to disorder began with his recognition of the spiritual disease underlying Nazi racist theories, which led him to publish two books in the 1930s analyzing and critiquing these theories. After his flight from Vienna to America in 1938, he continued that search for order in a more congenial milieu as he worked on his History of Political Ideas. In Autobiographical Reflections, he said that"the motivations of my work, which culminates in a philosophy of history, are simple. They arise from the political situation." And he added: "Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language."6
In the process of mastering the primary material for the History of Political Ideas project, Voegelin discovered, especially in the work of Plato, that philosophy itself was developed as a response to the political and spiritual disorder of Athenian society. In Plato and Aristotle, he argued that
The philosopher is compactly the man who resists the sophist; the man who attempts to develop right order in his soul through resistance to the diseased soul of the sophist; the man who can evoke a paradigm of right social order in the image of his well-ordered soul, in opposition to the disorder of society that reflects the disorder of the sophist's soul; the man who develops the conceptual instruments for the diagnosis of health and disease in the soul; the man who develops the criteria of right order, relying on the divine measure to which his soul is attuned.7
Of course political and social disorder may provoke various types of resistance, and resistance does not necessarily become a philosophical search for order. That Voegelin's resistance took the form of a philosophical search originated with those experiences of early childhood that he later remembered had excited his "consciousness to the 'awe' of existence." This experience of the awe of existence resembles the primary experience of the cosmos that is equivalent to a faith in the order of the cosmos and that is expressed, in the Christian symbolization, as faith. Voegelin's late work confirms this pattern of a fundamental faith in order, for there he becomes more attentive to the work of Anselm of Canterbury and his fides quaerens intellectum. In fact, in his very last work, "Quod Deus Dicitur," Voegelin meditates in his final ascent to the divine upon the theme of his faith in search of understanding.
In volumes II and III of Order and History (The World of the Polis and Plato and Aristotle), Voegelin traces the history of the search for order from myth — the Cosmological form that symbolizes experiences of order — through the development of philosophy in the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Greek dramatists, and the Greek historians, culminating in the work of Plato and Aristotle. He observed that in this development the philosophers (especially Plato and Aristotle), rather than rejecting mythical symbolizations, recognized that there existed in myth an essential kinship with philosophy and an indispensable component — an experience of wonder — without which philosophy could not proceed. In his later work especially, Voegelin identified this component as a "primary experience of the cosmos." This insight into the history of the search for order enabled Voegelin to differentiate the components of philosophy that recognized the vital role of mythical symbolizations in the philosophical quest to understand and to symbolize the experiences of order with greater precision and insight.8
Thus, Voegelin's historical researches confirmed for him empirically what he had discovered in his own particular case, that is, that the experiences of order symbolized mythically were an indispensable foundational element of the philosophical search for order. Not only, then, does philosophy have a double origin — historically in the human search for order and biographically in the person of the philosopher — but philosophical understanding itself reveals the doubleness of its empirical grounding.
Experience: the Empirical Grounding of Philosophy
The double empirical grounding of Voegelin's philosophy is built upon the experiential exploration of the depths of the philosopher's own psyche and upon the search of order experienced and symbolized in literary documents of the past — Hesiod's poems, Heraclitus's fragments, Plato's dialogues, the Torah, or the Gospels, for example. In a letter to Heilman, Voegelin explained that in composing Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, he had empirically grounded his work by organizing it around meditations — explorations of his consciousness in the Heraclitean depth9 — and historical studies. He pointed out that,' he had included two meditations, in the first and third parts. The first meditation, which he conducted and wrote down in 1943, enabled him to recover "consciousness from the current theories of consciousness, especially from Phaenomenology."
The second meditation he conducted in 1965 through a "rethinking of the Aristotelian exegesis of consciousness (in Met. I and II)," and then expanding "into new areas of consciousness that had not come within the ken of classic philosophy but must be explored now, in order to clear consciousness" of current dogmatisms. Between these two meditations he had placed in part II, "Experience and History," which contained studies that "demonstrate how the historical phenomena of order give rise to the type of analysis which culminates in the meditative exploration of consciousness." He concluded that "the whole book is held together by a double movement of empiricism" (letter 110, June 19, 1966, pp. 242-43).
To illustrate the nature of these meditations, which he referred to as "a new literary form in philosophy" (ibid., p. 241), Voegelin wrote:
At present, we are faced with the problem of getting rid of a considerable heap of dogma — theological, metaphysical, and ideological — and to recover the original experiences of man's tension toward the divine ground of his existence. Now, while dogma can be presented in the form of systems, of ratiocination from unquestioned premises, or discursive exposition of problems presented in the philosophical literature, original exegesis of consciousness can proceed only by the form of direct observation and meditative tracing of the structure of the psyche.
Moreover ,this structure is not a given to be described by means of propositions, but a process of the psyche itself that has to find its language symbols as it proceeds. And finally, the self-interpretation of consciousness cannot be done once for all, but is a process in the life-time of a human being . . . . The exegesis is an attempt to recover or remember, (hence the title Anamnesis), the human condition revealing itself in consciousness, when it is smothered by the debris of opaque symbols, (ibid., p. 242)
What is especially important for our study is both that Voegelin's "double movement of empiricism" focuses on experiences — engendering experiences — and the symbolizations of these experiences, and that the validation-confirmation of Voegelin's empiricism can only occur in the consciousness of the reader. One of the most succinct assessments of Voegelin's emphasis upon human experience as the empirical foundation of philosophy comes from a leading Voegelin scholar, Ellis Sandoz. In his introduction to Published Essays, 1966-1985, he writes:
The key [to re-establishing a theoretical science of humanity that would include all dimensions of human existence] lies in distinguishing the modes and scope of experience and in keeping in mind that experience is a transaction in consciousness. At the level of common sense, it is evident that human beings have experiences other than sensory perceptions, and it is equally evident that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle explored reality on the basis of experiences far removed from perception.
The Socratic "Look and see if this is not the case" does not invite one to survey public opinion but asks one to descend into the psyche, that is, to search reflective consciousness. Moreover, it is evident that the primarily nonsensory modes of experience address dimensions of human existence superior in rank and worth to those sensory perception does: experiences of the good, beautiful, and just, of love, friendship, and truth, of all human virtue and vice, and of divine reality. Apperceptive experience is distinguishable from sensory perception and a philosophical science of substance from a natural science of phenomena. Experience of "things" is modeled on the subject-object dichotomy of perception in which the consciousness intends the object of cognition. But such a model of experience and knowing is ultimately insufficient to explain the operations of consciousness with respect to the nonphenomenal reality men approach in moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences . . . .
The participatory (metaleptic) experiences of human beings in the In-Between (metaxy), which are the constitutive core of human reality, are transactions conducted within consciousness itself and not externally in time and space; hence Voegelin sometimes calls the realm in which they occur nonexistent reality . . . , or the realm of spirit.10
One should bear in mind that the findings of Voegelin's meditations and historical research are testable by any person who in loving openness to his own humanity and reality accepts the Socratic invitation to "Look and see if this is not the case." 
[This is the first of two parts. Part 2 will appear next week.]
NOTES
(for full citations see the bibliography in Professor Embry's book)
1. Sandoz,. Editor's Introduction to In Search of Order, 15.
2. Voegelin, "Autobiographical Statement at Age Eighty-Two," 451.
3. Aristotle Metaphysics 982bl1- 982b14, trans. Ross, p. 692.
4. Letter to J. N. Palmer, November 5, 1946, in Hoover Archives, Voegelin Papers, box 36, folder 8. Emphasis added.
5. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 84. Emphasis added.
6. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 93.
7. Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 123. Voegelin's recognition of the importance of what he calls the "Platonic Anthropological Principle" — the state is man writ large — leads to some of his most important and insightful work on the nature of consciousness. His 1943 "anamnetic experiments" lay the groundwork for Anamnesis.
8. Voegelin, In Search of Order.
9. Heraclitus Fragment B101: I searched into myself.
10. Sandoz, Editor's Introduction to Published Essays, 1966-1985, by Voegelin, xx.
