Voegelin and

his Contemporaries  

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at Careleton University, Ottawa, on October 24th, 2008. It appears here in two parts.

It would take a very fat volume or two to do justice to the subject of Voegelin and his contemporaries. I would like to begin by indicating the magnitude of the problem more or less empirically by referring initially to Voegelin’s extensive correspondence. To begin with, it fills over forty boxes in the Hoover Institution archival collection. Second, the significance varies enormously — from pesky intellectuals asking him for his views on American conservatism, which receive, quite properly, amusing rebukes, to lengthy exchanges that penetrate to the heart of a serious problem in political science.Looking over this vast collection of documents, I would divide it into five or six categories. The least important for our purposes is probably largest — casual inquiries and business, including some very interesting exchanges with publishers as well as the amusing rebukes.

 

Second, I would classify his exchanges with his students. After he removed to Munich in 1958 to establish the Political Science Institute, he became what the Germans call a Doktorvater with expected or conventional responsibilities that he did not always discharge to the satisfaction of his students. Many of these German students had, in fact, lost their actual fathers in the war. Those fathers who survived ranged in respectability from a major war criminal hanged by the allies after trial at Nuremberg to members of the German resistance. For all of them, Voegelin was more than a dissertation director. He was also a German untainted by the Nazi experience. As you might expect, they formed an attentive audience as well as tireless researchers when Voegelin gave his 1964 lecture series, “Hitler and the Germans.”

 

His relations with his American students were much different. One reason was simply cultural — American and German universities during the 1940s and 1950s were quite different places. In addition, Voegelin’s encounter with American students was chiefly as undergraduates; his German students were either studying for their doctorates or were post-docs. The only two American doctoral students Voegelin supervised, Ellis Sandoz and Richard V. Allen, both studied with him in Munich. They had quite different careers. Many of the Germans became academics, though often without assistance from their Doktorvater. Others became lawyers, journalists, and government officials of one sort or another.

 

A third category of contemporaries I would call important scholarly personalities and occasional colleagues. I am thinking here of people such as Michael Oakeshott, Eduard Baumgarden, Herman Brock, Rudolf Bultmann, or Jacob Taubes. These are individuals who are both intellectually significant and with whom Voegelin exchanged more than perfunctory words. If one examines the footnotes of Order and History, for example, one can find additional members of this group. With many of them — Gilles Quispel, for instance, or Gerhardt von Rad — the correspondence does not reflect their significance.

 

A fourth category I would call simply “friends.” Most of these people were also scholars though not necessarily housed in the university. Here I would mention John Hallowell, Wilmore Kendall, Gerhard Niemeyer, Emmanuel Winternitz, Fritz Machlup, and Gregor Sebba. Much of this material touches upon substantive questions of political science — even with Winternitz who was a curator of antique musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum — but it is wide-ranging rather than specialized and focused.

 

This type of correspondence shades into a fifth, which deals much more substantively with what Voegelin called “the problems.” Chief among these contemporaries was Alfred Schütz, whom he knew from his student days and with whom he conducted a lengthy and wide-ranging correspondence. Of particular interest to political science are their letters on philosophy of consciousness. Voegelin and Talcott Parsons were also friends from Voegelin’s stay at Harvard during the late 1930s and he was called in to mediate a dispute between Schütz and Parsons regarding some recondite matters in sociological theory. Alois Dempf and Friedrich Engel-Janosi, whom Voegelin knew from Vienna as well, were consulted extensively when Voegelin was writing the History of Political Ideas during the 1940s and early 1950s and when he was at work on Order and History during the later 1950s.

 

Robert Heilman, whose correspondence with Voegelin has recently been published, was self-identified in anthropological terms as Voegelin’s “native informant.” He gave him sage advice on the peculiarities of the American university. Particularly interesting in this respect is the botched efforts by Yale in the early 1950s to hire Voegelin. The multi-sided conversation among Yale officials — Wilmore Kendall, his local champion; Cleanth Brooks, who was then at Yale in the English department and whom Voegelin knew when he, Heilman, and Voegelin were at LSU together — along with Heilman and Voegelin tells a great deal about Voegelin’s sense of humour and the difficulty mediocre scholars at famous universities have when they encounter the kind of intellectual competence that made their universities important in earlier times.

 

In this category I would also place George Jaffé, a physicist at Berkeley, and Marie König. Jaffé and Voegelin also knew one another at LSU. Their discussion regarding physics formed the context both for “The Origins of Scientism” (1948) and “The Moving Soul” written twenty years later.

 

Among those individuals with whom Voegelin was seriously engaged, Marie König was, so far as I know, the only scholar who was not also an academic. She was, as Jodi Bruhn and I will show in our next book, central to Voegelin’s understanding of Stone Age symbolism. Since Voegelin’s interest in the early history of humanity is not well known, a few words of explanation are in order.

 

When Jodi Bruhn and I were turning the interviews we collected into a coherent narrative for Voegelin Recollected —and I must say that Jodi did most of the work— I was again alerted to the importance of his interest in the Stone Age and what we conventionally call “prehistory.” When I was a graduate student I heard him deliver a lecture in 1967 at Emory University in Atlanta called “The Drama of Humanity.” He later visited Duke, where I was in grad school and I heard him discuss petroglyphs and pictograms and cave paintings, none of which seemed to me to be related to political science. But what did I know?

 

A few years later at an APSA meeting in Chicago I heard him speak again on the topic. At this meeting I first met Tilo Schabert, who was at the time his assistant at the Hoover Institution but had also been a student with him in Munich. Schabert and I discussed his talk and he told me that the German students of Voegelin referred to his interest in the Stone Age as relating to his project for “Volume Zero.” The reference, obviously, was to the Order and History series, which begins, as one might expect, with volume one. Now, Order and History recast many of the materials contained in the History of Political Ideas. The History employed what was pretty much a standard “history of ideas” approach, the only unusual feature being that Voegelin did not start with the Greeks but with the empires of the Ancient Near East in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, Akhenaton made a cameo appearance in his 1938 book, The Political Religions. Volume one of Order and History, using a new approach that dealt not with ideas but with experience and symbolization, also began with Egypt and Mesopotamia.By the early 1950s, Voegelin could draw on the work of the Oriental Institute in Chicago and on postwar publications on Israelite archeology and Biblical textual analysis.

 

I mention the change from the History of Political Ideas to Order and History for two reasons. First is the methodological shift just mentioned — from ideas to experience and symbolization; second is Voegelin’s willingness to rely on the assistance of specialists in interpreting hieroglyphic or cuneiform texts for which extensive training is necessary if they are to be intelligible.

 

Let us consider a few implications of the first problem. The opening sentence of Voegelin’s 1966 book, Anamnesis, reads: “The problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the essential element of a philosophy of politics.”  If one accords full weight to the expression “human order in society and history,” it is apparent that preliterate, prehistoric or, to avoid any progressivist bias, early historic human order must be included. That all members of the species homo sapiens shared a common humanity was obvious to Voegelin from his earliest publications. It became critical by 1933 when he wrote his analysis of the grotesque Nazi doctrines of race. By the time he had developed the arguments that constituted his philosophy of consciousness, chiefly in Anamnesis, in his later “meditative” essays, and in volume five of Order and History, it was clear to him that his discussion of “the materials” extended into remote early human history.

 

To see the importance of the present point, I must say a few words about Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness. It is complex, first of all. A relatively straightforward explanation of why he abandoned the “history of ideas” can be found in his Autobiographical Reflections, recorded in 1973. “I had to give up ‘ideas’ as objects of history and establish the experience of reality — personal, social, historical, cosmic — as the reality to be explored historically. These experiences, however, one could explore only by exploring their articulation through symbols.” Instead of political ideas understood as objects of historical analysis the subject-matter of political science was the self-interpretive reality of experience.

 

Likewise, at the beginning of the Preface to the first volume of Order and History, Voegelin argued that human experience of “the primordial community of being” was the proper subject matter of his study, not “ideas” as “objects” of analysis. The purpose of Order and History, Voegelin said at the end of this Preface, was “a philosophical inquiry concerning the order of human existence in society and history.” In conventional language, which Voegelin acknowledged in The New Science of Politics, he was engaged in writing a philosophy of history. Indeed, he said in the opening words of that book, “the existence of man in political society is historical existence, and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.”

 

Whether identified as philosophy of consciousness or philosophy of history, the focus is on the symbolic “articulation” or expression of experiences of reality. In principle, because human beings are “historical,” these symbolic presentations are apt to vary owing to the distinct historical circumstances that accompanied their articulation. Thus the symbolization used by Plato in the Republic to present his experience of reality was heavily conditioned by the polis culture with which he was familiar. Not so for the author of an Egyptian tomb text or, for that matter, St. Augustine. And yet, Voegelin argued, all these authors aimed at making intelligible their experiences of reality. All were engaged in what he said was a “search for truth concerning the order of being.”

 

Awareness of the equivalence in meaning with respect to the aim of the authors of these various symbolic expressions of experience was the first principle of Voegelin’s interpretive strategy. The second was that, notwithstanding this equivalence, there was also a “sequence” of efforts the elements of which were “intelligibly connected” to one another “as advances toward or recessions from an adequate symbolization of truth concerning the order of being.” The question of “adequacy” was conceptualized in terms of what Voegelin called compactness and differentiation “from rite, through myth, to theory” — as Voegelin put it in The New Science of Politics. In Order and History he analyzed the break from the “compactness” of what he termed the cosmological myths of Egypt and Mesopotamia to the “differentiation” of the Israelites, on the one hand, and of the Greek philosophers on the other. The change in consciousness form compactness to differentiation he called a “leap in being” that, in his view, produced “a new truth about the order of being.”

 

Even in volume one of Order and History Voegelin was clear that this “sequence” did not amount to a progressive development whereby the historically later somehow, in Hegelian fashion, overcame the inadequacies of the previous symbolization. Consciousness of the “truth about the order of being” was not some sort of cultural or historical achievement.

 

A third aspect of Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness to be noted is that, if political philosophy can legitimately examine Egyptian tomb texts, there is no reason why it cannot examine even earlier material and nonverbal forms of symbolization. In The New Science of Politics, as noted, Voegelin mentioned the importance of rites — though he did not actually publish much about these essentially nonverbal or at least nondiscursive symbolizations. There is, however, no reason to exclude the application of Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness to such materials, including preimperial, Stone Age artifacts. The only problem was: how, in fact, to acquire the meaning of such materials? What does a polished skull or a cave drawing actually mean? Let us be clear about the issue: from the perspective of Voegelin’s philosophy of history or philosophy of consciousness the difference between literate and preliterate materials was that the latter gave visual expression to a repertoire of common human experiences, including the search for the truth of the order of being, rather than a textual expression. This difference in form, important though it is, did not prove to be an insuperable barrier to understanding.

 

Just as Voegelin relied on scholars expert on Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts in the work published in volume one of Order and History, he again needed assistance to interpret the visual materials of the Stone Age, which brings us back to Marie König. She was his guide. He met her in Rome in 1968. In her biography of König, Gabriel Meixner quoted König’s account of their first encounter: “Voegelin gave a lecture at the Istituto Accademico di Roma and so did I. He came to me immediately and said: ‘We must work together’.”  Voegelin had found in her work an approach that interested him greatly. Specifically, in her analysis of the petroglyphs, pictographs, stone monuments and tombs, and drawings painted in caves that had been left behind by Stone Age people Voegelin saw an additional symbolic order alongside the historic symbol orders that had been relevant for him during the conduct of his work on Order and History. König advised him on the research literature and especially on his own research trips to sites of Stone Age culture in Spain, Ireland, Malta, and Hawaii. At her house in Saarbrucken, she acquainted him in detail with her own research, and she personally led him through caves in Ile-de-France where she was able to show him her insights into the symbolism of the Stone Age directly.

 

In sum, Marie König introduced Voegelin to the earliest historical investigation of human symbolism and the experiences they made which were, if not textually articulate, at least graphically visible. More generally, her work described the context for later cultures that left us literary commentaries about their own significance — such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece and China. Voegelin was attracted to her work in part because of the fact that she had overcome existing prejudices regarding early humanity, particularly the progressivist evolutionary model that visualized human development as proceeding from a primitive condition to one of modern rationality. She approached the materials with the assumption that the “authors” were as intelligent and thoughtful as modern human beings, and that they, like us, were concerned with such “philosophical” or “spiritual” questions as the origin and purpose of existence, the structure of reality, and so on.

 

This approach proved decisive for Voegelin. König provided him with an insight into the structure of the prehistoric consciousness of humanity, which enabled him to integrate experiences and symbolizations of order historically prior to those of the cosmological civilizations discussed in Order and History, volume one. Voegelin did not, unfortunately, complete the project that Schabert and the other German students called “Volume Zero.” With a little luck, Jodi Bruhn and I will describe how König’s exegesis of the origins of culture translated into Voegelin’s “primary experience of the cosmos.”

 

There are three other contemporaries of Voegelin with whom he had quite distinct but unquestionably interesting relations: Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Hans Kelsen. It is important to mention all three, not least of all because of the importance they have as twentieth century thinkers.

 

Regarding Hannah Arendt I would say a couple of things. First, his famous review of her Origins of Totalitarianism and her response in the pages of the Review of Politics in 1953 tended to overemphasize what might be termed the metaphysical difference between this student of Heidegger and a scholar at the time deeply immersed in medieval scholasticism. Voegelin’s letter to her of 16 March, 1951 was much more nuanced; his view of her later Eichmann book was very positive.