The Philosopher's Vocation:

The Voegelinian Paradigm 

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. His most recent book is Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in two parts.  It was originally published in the quarterly, The Review of Politics, Vol. 71, at pp 54-67 (2009).  It appears with permission of Cambridge University Press.

PART 1

In his personal and scholarly demeanor, Eric Voegelin’s stance was overtly and explicitly that of a philosopher and teacher professing truth and resisting corruption. The mark of his life was intellectual integrity in the Weberian sense, and his only professional commitment was that of a partisan of truth. This was more than academic duty, however. It was quite distinctly a vocation—or calling (klesis)¹—of the highest order and responsibility, one intrinsic to the paradigm of philosophizing Voegelin accepted from Plato and Anselm and differentiated in his own life and work. It is exemplified, directly evoked, in the “introduction to political science” he taught as a lecture course at the University of Munich in spring semester 1964, now published under the title Hitler and the Germans.² But it can be traced everywhere in his writings, beginning in the 1930s, as a constant and defining attitude.³

The implications are important not only for Voegelin but for philosophy itself when rightly done as embracing the science of human affairs palpably akin to that first elaborated in antiquity by Aristotle. It is this decisive, unfashionable, and somewhat elusive contextual dimension of Hitler and the Germans that I wish briefly to explore on the present occasion.

The responsive center of the philosopher’s calling lies in the divine-human partnership, understood as participation in the process-structure governing metaxic-reality-experienced or “In-Between”—the only reality we have—with the philosopher cast in the role of representative man. The hyphenated terms are meant to symbolize as units of meaning the epistemologically participatory character of luminous meditative discourse, in contradistinction to the conventional intentionalist subject-object mode of propositional statements of doctrines about entities or things in the positivist reductionist mode of scientism addressing phenomenal experience of the external world.⁴

Thus, Voegelin insists, the philosopher is a lover of wisdom, never its possessor, for only God is wise and can have knowledge of the Whole. Political science is a prudential and noetic science. Thus, not the natural science of the external world, but philosophical or noetic science as perfected by Plato and Aristotle is paradigmatic for its inquiries into the order and disorders of the human condition. While largely a recovery and reinterpretation of the ancient “philosophy of human affairs,” this is plainly political science in a new key to most contemporaries.⁵ To make it intelligible and to find the way himself in resisting untruth, Voegelin expends substantial effort in working through the inadequacies of the still-prevailing positivist, Marxist, and other reductionist paradigms. That effort culminated at a provisional stage in the well known conclusion that “the essence of modernity is Gnosticism.”⁶