from The Collected Works
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from The Collected Works
A Letter to Alfred Schütz concerning Edmund Husserl —Part 2
This letter has earned a place alongside Voegelin's important published essays. It sets forth his analysis of Husserl's achievements and shortcommings as well as Descartes'. Because it is a long letter it is presented here in three parts. Contributor David Walsh makes reference to it in his concurrently appearing essay "Voegelin and Heidegger."
Husserl and Averroes' World Soul
In the uppermost and most general layer Husserl's historical teleology calls for classification under the category of Averroist speculation.FN I have addressed this topic in detail in my Authoritarian State as a motive occasioning the rise of national socialist and fascist speculations. My article on Siger de Brabant, with which you are likely to be more familiar, should make clear the reasons for this classification. We have to distinguish in Western philosophy between two fundamental positions concerning the essence of man; they are represented most clearly by the Christian orthodoxy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the heterodoxy of Siger. The Thomistic position places emphasis on the singularity of human substance (intellectus), Siger's on the world soul, of which the singular human substance is a particle. Both positions can be historically traced back to Aristotle's doctrine of the soul (De Anima 3), which left this question hanging in the balance, so that in fact either one of the two positions can be deduced from De Anima.
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from The Collected Works
A Letter to Alfred Schütz Concerning Edmund Husserl —Part 1
This letter has earned a place alongside Voegelin's important published essays. It sets forth his analysis of Husserl's achievements and shortcommings as well as Descartes'. Because it is a long letter it is presented here in three parts. Contributor David Walsh makes reference to it in his concurrently appearing essay "Voegelin and Heidegger."
903 Camelia Avenue
Baton Rouge, LA.
September 17, 1943
Dear Friend,
Please accept our heartfelt thanks for those fine evenings which we were able to spend with you and your dear wife. Unfortunately, the time we spent together was all too brief, not allowing us to discuss many things that are certainly of great interest to both of us . . . .
Even now the impossibility of communicating with you face-to-face causes me great pain. Kaufmann was so kind to lend me Husserl's essay "The Crisis of European Sciences," which figures in volume I of the Philosophia. I just finished reading it and would love to discuss it with you. Allow me to offer just a few brief comments–you might not have time to enter into particulars in your answer, but perhaps you might be able to let me know when I might have misunderstood Husserl.
To start with: The overall impression is magnificent–not only in comparison with other philosophical output of our time, but also in comparison with many other works by Husserl. It is most gratifying that Husserl does not indulge in the officious tomfoolery ("stupendous" and "laborious" analyses, and so on) that mars a number of pages of the Ideas; no more than two or three times does he break into a sweat over "philosophical existence." In spite of the dry language the essay moves in the Olympian atmosphere of pure philosophical enthusiasm.
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from The Collected Works
What is Nature?
Part 3
In Metaphysics Alpha, Aristotle pursues this idea further ["And so there are two kinds of production (poietike), the one human, and the other divine."]. Following his report on the Ionian speculation, he asks himself how matter could be the cause of change, since wood does not make the bed, nor bronze the statue. How could fire, earth, or any other element cause things to be good and beautiful? Since these qualities of things cannot be attributed to automatism or chance, one must look to other causes (aitia) besides matter, above all, for an arche of the movement.
In the midst of the confused ideas of his predecessors came a moment of sobriety (Met. 984b15) when a certain thinker (Anaxagoras) declared that nous is present (eneinai) not only in animate beings but also in nature, and that it is the cause (aition) of order (kosmos) and all arrangement (taxis).
It now becomes clear why Aristotle patterned his concept of nature on the model of an artifact, even though he was aware of the philosophical inadequacy of this procedure. This otherwise shocking feature now becomes understandable in light of the experience of a demiurgic God.
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from The Collected Works
What is Nature?
Part 2
When the gods, too, having become homeless through the dissociation of the cosmos, relocate themselves in the truth of God, and thereby the relation of the divine to the world has become clear, this clarity leads in turn to new problems, as soon as the relationship is interpreted in the language of the experience of being.
The difficulties are caused by an only slowly dissipating obscurity concerning a number of points. In order to avoid lengthy historical investigations, we prefer to formulate them as theses:
(1) The being of philosophical experience is not a newly discovered entity to be added to the things that are already given in the primary experience of the cosmos.
(2) The experience of being differentiates the order of things (a) in their autonomy, (b) in their relation to one another, and (c) in their relation to their origin. This experience discovers the order of the cosmos.
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from The Collected Works
What is Nature?
Part 1
Any assertion that this or that is, or is not, "right by nature" must remain void of meaning unless we know what nature is. In this matter we are not too well off. The texts we have consulted so far lead us to believe that Aristotle lived in a tradition going back beyond Plato and the tragedians to the older philosophers, and that he counted on being understood when speaking of nature.
The contexts in which this term is used indicate that "nature" refers to constant structures in the movement of being, comprising gods and men, organic and inorganic matter — in other words, to something like a constitution of being. That, however, is all that can be inferred. Where can we learn with a higher degree of accuracy what is meant by nature?
Whoever is looking for an answer to this question will first of all think of the philosophical dictionary in Metaphysics Delta, which offers precise definitions of nature and related concepts. This source, however, is a disappointment. It develops the concept of nature in its three meanings of (a) matter, (b) form or shape (eidos kai morphe), and (c) the unity of form and matter in a thing (Met. 1014b16-1015a5), by means of the experiential models of organism and artifact.
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