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.
Calling and Authority
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
In contrast to the overwhelming tendencies of modernity, he argues, the philosopher’s noesis (rational inquiry) is centered in his orienting tension toward the transcendent divine ground of being. It consists, constructively, in the exploration of philosophical anthropology as part of ontology as that engages all the realms of the hierarchy of being from the Anaximandrian apeiron (depth) to the divine Nous, starting from commonsense understanding and elaborated empirically through differentiating apperceptive experiences symbolizations of the great spiritualists of all ages.7
Openness to the Whole, experienced both noetically and pneumatically, is the chief mark of noetic inquiry and of philosophy as a calling and way of life. The philosopher ineluctably lives the open quest of truth, however, as a participant in the In-Between or metaxic common divine-human reality: there is no Archimedean point outside of reality from which to objectively study it, nor is the leap in being or experience of the transcendent Beyond a leap out of the abiding reality of the human condition–a lesson of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.8
Thus, within the limits of possibility and persuasion, the philosopher is called actively to resist untruth through searching noetic critique, grounded as in Aristotle in robust common sense which is the foundation of prudential rationality and of political science itself.9 Such resistance forms against the corruptions of the age at all levels–whether like those of sophistic Athens or of the ideological autonomous men infesting our contemporary existence with fanatical zealotry cloaking libido dominandi and the eros tyrannos in dreamworld delusions. The traits and detachment from reality of such pneumopathologies were already admirably delineated by Plato in the Republic (577c–588a).
The calling and its authoritative consequences are announced, for instance, in Voegelin’s essay entitled “The Oxford Political Philosophers“: “This is a time [1953] for the philosopher to be aware of his authority, and to assert it, even if that brings him into conflict with an environment infested by dubious ideologies and political theologies—so that the word of Marcus Aurelius will apply to him: ‘The philosopher—the priest and servant of the gods.’”10
Even more energetically, the transfer of authority from corrupt public institutions to the philosopher is traced in principle to the climax of the Gorgias, with plain allusions to Voegelin’s own totalitarian experience: “The man who stands convicted as the accomplice of tyrannical murderers and as the .corruptor of his country, does not represent spiritual order, and nobody is obliged to show respect to his word. The authority of public order lies with Socrates. The situation is fascinating for those among us who find ourselves in the Platonic position and who recognize in the men with whom we associate today the intellectual pimps for power who will connive in our murder tomorrow. It would be too much of an honor, however, to burden Callicles personally with the guilt of murder. The whole society is corrupt, and the process of corruption did not start yesterday.”11
The same applies to Hitler and the Germans, as Voegelin stresses:
during the Third Reich. But, as I again and again emphasize, we are speaking, not about the problem of National Socialism, but about Hitler and the Germans. . . . I have continually spoken of moral degeneracy; it does not exist abstractly. . . . It is, rather, a matter of this whole process of intellectual and spiritual degeneration [infecting every level of personal and institutional life with rot]. . . . All of these people are accomplices. I have forgotten nobody—[clergy, judges, generals, professors]. . . . I will not here, for heaven’s sake, defend the professors. When in the early 1930s, after Hitler had come into power, a whole series of professors, not only Jews, were relieved of their posts, none of the others. . . . ever refused to occupy with pleasure one of the posts vacated through this dismissal. Since I was myself dismissed in 1938, I have always [had] a particularly keen eye for people who became tenured professors in Germany after 1933. So there is this kind of aiding and abetting, one always goes along, there is no one who offers resistance. . . .That does not happen.”12
Truth and Ecumenicity
The language of truth is spoken in many dialects and no absolute partition between revelation and noesis is empirically or theoretically supportable, whatever the institutional differentiations. As Voegelin informed his political science students in Munich from time to time, one cannot go back of revelation and pretend it never happened. If apperceptive experience forms the empirical ground of philosophical inquiry and exegesis, then one must attend to insights from that and every other quarter whenever they arise as events of consciousness in concrete individual human beings to form the articulate experiences-symbolizations of noetic exploration.
That philosophy by this accounting must be in some sense empirically grounded, and not merely imaginative word-play or logorrhea, however brilliant, if it is to be epistemologically cogent, immediately puts Voegelin at odds with both ideologues devising imaginary second realities (for whom experience is terribly “inconvenient”) and much else that otherwise passes for contemporary “autonomous” philosophizing.13
That it bridges the distance between pneumatic and noetic discourse to embrace both offends the self-appointed custodians of both revelation and academic philosophy. (So there goes the readership.) Nonetheless, there is this firmly reiterated conclusion: “We can no longer ignore that the symbols of ‘Faith’ express the responsive quest of man just as much as the revelatory appeal, and that the symbols of ‘Philosophy’ express the revelatory appeal just as much as the responsive quest. We must further acknowledge that the medieval tension between Faith and Reason derives from the origins of these symbols in the two different ethnic cultures of Israel and Hellas, that in the consciousness of Israelite prophets and Hellenic philosophers the differentiating experience of the divine Beyond was respectively focused on the revelatory appeal and the human quest. . . . The reflective action of [Plato and Aristotle] is a quest by concrete human beings in response to a divine appeal from the Beyond of the soul.”14
But it is of utmost importance to grasp that the relationship and process of communion with the divine is not reserved for grandiose personalities. It is the common coin of open existence available to every human being as the precious mark of their humanity as this is confirmed in apperceptive experience. Thus, in noting that reason is “due to God’s grace” even according to Aquinas, Voegelin remarks that this understanding applies today and to wherever we may be as well: “You are sitting here asking questions. Why? Because you have that divine kinesis in you that moves you to be interested. . .[I]t is the revelatory presence, of course, that pushes you or pulls you. It’s there. We are talking.”
15 “The consciousness of being caused by the Divine ground and being in search of the Divine ground—that is reason [
nous]. Period.”
16 
[Part 2 will appear next week]
NOTES
1. 2 Thess. 1:11; and 1 Pet. 2:9: “You are a . . . royal priesthood. . .that you should show forth the praises of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” Said of all believers under the dispensation of Grace who, living in immediacy to God, are sons of the heavenly Rex et Sacerdos. Cf. Rom 1 : 1–6, a passage Voegelin repeatedly read in his last days. It is a commonplace of Christian faith that “Conversion and vocation were for [St. Paul] one and the same event (Gal. 1 : 15–16.).” Franz J. Leenhardt, The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary, trans. Harold Knight (London: Lutterworth Press, 1961), 39.
2. Published as Collected Works of Eric Voegelin [hereinafter abbreviated as CW ], vol. 31, trans., ed. with an intro by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). A German language edition of the course of lectures basic to the text of this book appeared as Eric Voegelin, Hitler und die Deutschen, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Munich:Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006). References herein are to the English language version unless otherwise indicated.
3. As in the Herrschaftslehre or Theory of Governance, chap. 1 on the “Concept of the Person,” in CW 32, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss, 226–55.
4. For concise explanation of some of Voegelin’s terminology see the “Glossary of Terms Used in Eric Voegelin’s Writings,” in Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, rev. ed., CW 34 (2006), ed. Ellis Sandoz, 149–86, and the various indexes to the volumes in this edition, including the cumulative index (ibid.); also Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Pubs., 2000). Of the key “experience of transcendence” Voegelin writes: “The term experience [in this context] signifies an ontic event. It is a disturbance in being, an involvement of man with God by which the divine Within is revealed as the divine Beyond. What is achieved by it is immediacy of existence under God; what is discovered by it is the existence under God as the first principle of order for man. Moreover, the principle is discovered as valid not only for the man who has the experience but for every man, because the very idea of man arises from its realization in the presence under God. Both the reality and the idea of man are produced by the movement; the humanity represented is the humanity produced. In such terms can the representative character of the event be circumscribed.” Voegelin, What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, CW 28 (1990), ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, 49 (italics added.) The theory of representation is the theme of Voegelin’s first book in English, originally the 1951 Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures at the University of Chicago, published as The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). A number of studies are available including Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999) and recently on Voegelin as mystic philosopher is Meins G. A. Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), esp. chap. 3 and bibliography. The most comprehensive compilation of Voegeliniana is Geoffrey L. Price and Eberhard Freiherr von Lochner, eds., Eric Voegelin: International Bibliography, 1921–2000 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000); supplemented by Peter J. Opitz, ed., Voegeliniana Veröffentlichungen von und zu Eric Voegelin 2000–2005, Occasional Papers 46, Jan. 2005 (Munich: Eric-Voegelin-Archiv, 2005).
5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10. 9. 23, 1181b15-16; Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 22–26, where the program of “restoration” and “reinterpretation” of rationalism in the wake of Gnostic ideological destruction is tentatively sketched.
6. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, chap. 4; for the summary critique of positivism see the introduction, ibid., 2–22. Consequences of the argument are elaborated in Sandoz, “The Philosophical Science of Politics Beyond Behavioralism” in The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science, ed. George J. Graham and George W. Carey (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1972), chap. 14. The substantive issues were pivotal for Voegelin’s philosophical break with the neo-Kantianism of his teacher Hans Kelsen as given early on and definitively in The New Science of Politics, of which the latter wrote a book-length refutation that Voegelin responded to by letter: “There is no science which could develop a relevant concept of justice. . .[by] following the verification procedures of an immanent science. . . . The problem of justice is in my opinion not a problem of a normative science, or of a causal science, rather a problem of ontology.” Letter to Hans Kelsen, March 7, 1954, No. 75 in Voegelin, Selected Correspondence 1950–1984, CW 30 (2007), ed. Thomas A. Hollweck, trans. Sandy Adler, Thomas A. Hollweck, and William Petropulos, 217, 218. Cf. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, CW 34, chap. 6, where it is said that the positivism of Hermann Cohen and the Marburg School defined “science [as] meaning Newton’s physics as understood by Kant” (50). For the early (1936) detailed analysis of why this kind of science is wholly inadequate for a valid political science see Voegelin, The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State, CW 4 (1999), ed. Gilbert Weiss, trans. Ruth Hein, historical commentary on the period by Erika Weinzierl, chap. 6, pp. 163–212. For the underlying philosophical problem of phenomenalism (including scientism) see the chapter of that title in Voegelin, The New Order and Last Orientation, vol. 7, History of Political Ideas, CW 25 (1999), ed. Jürgen Gebhardt and Thomas A. Hollweck, intro. Jürgen Gebhardt, 175–92; also esp. the chapters on positivism, Comte, and Marx in Voegelin, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man, vol. 8, History of Political Ideas, CW 26 (1999), ed. with an intro. by David Walsh, 88–250, 303–372.
7. For a diagrammatic summary of the results and implications see the “Appendix” to “Reason: The Classic Experience,” in Voegelin, Published Essays 1966–1985, CW 12 (1990), ed. Ellis Sandoz, 287–91. For Anaximander and the apeiron see Voegelin, The World of the Polis, vol. 2, Order and History [1957 edn], 181–83; and esp. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4, Order and History [1974 edn], 174–92, 215–18.
8. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 79; Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1, Order and History [1956 edn], 10–11; see Ellis Sandoz, “Voegelin’s Philosophy of History and Human Affairs,” in The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays; The Crisis of Civic Consciousness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), chap. 10, §3.
9. As indicated in the text, Voegelin insists on the foundation of political prudential understanding in common sense as a mark of the universal rationality displayed in classical philosophy as that compactly underlies differentiated noesis and provides zetesis with its substantive starting points. Thus, he speaks of employing the “Aristotelian procedure” in The New Science of Politics, e.g. pp. 34 and 80. The ubiquitous presence of political common sense also is a mark of the philosophical superiority of Anglo-American thought to that of Europe which has been ruined by ideology (ibid, 188–89). See Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, chap. 10: “American society had a philosophical background far superior in range and existential substance, though not always in articulation, to anything that I found represented in the methodological environment in which I had grown up [in Vienna]” (CW 34, 57). At the end of “What is Political Reality?” he says, in speaking (to a plenary gathering of the German Association for Political Science in 1965) of Scottish common sense philosophy as given in especially Thomas Reid: “Common sense is a civilizational habit that presupposes noetic experience, without the man of this habit himself possessing differentiated knowledge of noesis. The civilized homo politicus need not be a philosopher, but he must have common sense.” He continues: “The reference to common sense is meant to make clear once more that, and also why, there can be no ‘theory of politics’ in terms of fundamental propositions or principles rising above the propositions of an ‘empirical’ science of politics. For the so-called empeiria of politics is the habit of common sense, that although compact, is formed by the ratio as the structure [Sachstruktur] of consciousness.” Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, CW 6 (2002), ed. David Walsh, trans. M. J. Hanak and Gerhart Niemeyer, 411.
10. “The Oxford Political Philosophers” in CW 11, ed. Ellis Sandoz, 46.
11. Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle (1957), 37–38. For the structure of corruption see the summary p. 79.
12. Hitler, §43, 230–35.
13. Cf. however David Walsh, “Voegelin’s Place in Modern Philosophy,” Modern Age 49, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 12–23; more fully David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
14. “The Beginning and the Beyond,” in CW 28, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, 211. See the late (1981) summarizing statement on these subjects entitled “The Meditative Origin of the Philosophical Knowledge of Order,” in CW 33, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss, chap. 14: “In my view there is neither natural reason nor revelation, neither the one nor the other. Rather we have here a theological misconstruction of certain real matters that was carried out in the interest of theological systematization,” CW 33, 385–86.
15. “Conversations with Eric Voegelin,” in CW 33, 243–343 at 328, 330–31. The attitude experientially validates the flux of ubiquitous divine presence in human consciousness implicit in Jesus’ promise at the end of the Gospel of Matthew: “[A]nd, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Matt. 28:20. On the pushes and pulls (helkein) in experiences of divine Reality as recounted in Greek philosophy as well as in biblical revelation, see Voegelin’s comparative analysis in “The Gospel and Culture” in CW 12, ed. Sandoz, 172–212 at 184–91; also CW 12., “Reason: The Classic Experience,” 265–91 at 281.
16. CW 33, 329.
