The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Autobiographical Reflections

 by Bob Cheeks  

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Dr. Ellis Sandoz has declared that the Autobiographical Reflections is the best place to begin a study of the mind of the gifted philosopher Eric Voegelin.

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index.
Edited with introductions by Ellis Sandoz
University of Missouri Press
Columbia, Missouri
Hdbk, 541 pgs., index, notes, glossary, 2006.
ISBN: -10: 0-8262-1589-0

THE FIRST REALITY

The University of Missouri Press is doing the Lord’s work with a fervor and panache seldom seen in this age of modernity, whose primary characteristics are consumerism, declining academic standards, and a timorous population frenetically engaged in the Sisyphean task, mindful of very little beyond self-gratification.

As well as publishing the above mentioned Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, The University of Missouri Press has established The Eric Voeglein Institute Series in Political Philosophy, a new and decidedly interesting collection of learned books that constitute a significant foray into the arenas of political theory, constitutionalism, and intellectual history and presents the work of some of America’s leading scholars, to wit: Ellis Sandoz, Elizabeth Campbell Corey, and Glenn Hughes, just to mention a few.

Not since the halcyon days when the beloved reactionary Fugitives loitered about Vanderbilt University discussing the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and laying the foundation for their stand against Leviathan have so many gifted authors been gathered under one symbolic roof. The books I’ve read are well written, in-depth, insightful, and illustrate a scholarship of the first order, rendering this collection of studies the most significant literary achievement in the United States in quite some time and clearly indicating an intellectual movement from the moribund East coast, where technos guided by its Neo-Marxists acolytes is in its ascendancy, to America’s heartland where a remnant stubbornly continue to adhere to a transcendent, traditional worldview that, surely, Dr. Voegelin would approve.

The book in review is the 34th volume of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, titled: Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition With a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index, with introductions by Dr. Ellis Sandoz, a student, disciple, and chronicler of Dr. Voegelin’s life and work.  Sandoz provides the reader with an understanding of the character of the good philosopher in his introduction: “Evident to everyone who turns to these publications,” Sandoz writes, “is the magnificent scope and depth of the work of Voegelin as a great scholar. What seldom appears in all this, however, is much evidence of Voegelin as a teacher — and he was a superb teacher . . .” Expanding on the subject, Sandoz tells us that Voegelin’s lectures were extemporaneous exercises delivered with “force and clarity,” supported by notes and outlines, “but never read,” and that his M.A. students dutifully assembled at Dr. and Mrs. Voegelin’s home in Baton Rouge, where “amid clouds of cigar smoke,” the philosopher would explore humanity’s greatest questions.

Voegelin, unlike many of his contemporaries, believed that “classical Greek philosophy is the foundation for political science,” and that any philosophical inquiry had as its starting point not only in the search for the truth but in the acknowledgement of “. . . the tension toward the divine ground of reality as the decisive context for exploring the human condition and political issues.” Voegelin, Sandoz tells us, did not accept the Rationalist view of “science” that excluded the inherency of revelation in the human condition; rather, he embraced “the experience of transcendence” as the defining element in the nature of man.

In his "Introduction to the Revised Edition," Dr. Sandoz informs his readers that the publication of the Autobiographical Reflections of Eric Voegelin “is a major intellectual event,” and he is quite correct!

Sandoz’s revised introduction (for this edition) provides an outline of the philosopher’s rather interesting life and a publishing history including those works published posthumously, and explains in some detail how he managed to conduct a number of interviews with Voegelin in 1973 while he was working at Stanford. These interviews are The Autobiographical Reflections and became, as Dr. Sandoz, explains, “. . .a further anamnestic search of the reality of Eric Voegelin whose story rises in its best moments into the meditative discourse of high philosophy. Even cold on the page, the result is a triumph in which all can rejoice.”

Sandoz declares that the Autobiographical Reflections is the best place to begin a study of Eric Voegelin and again, I think he’s correct, and this edition includes a Voegelin Glossary which is most helpful.

That which made and makes Voegelin such a powerful force in the discipline of philosophy is his recognition, at an early age, that there was more to the subject than what he’d discovered in his studies in Austria. In a short time, following his visits to America, he acknowledged the intellectual   provincialism of the dominant neo-Kantian philosophy of Central Europe and turned to “the classics (Greeks), Christian scholastics and mystics, and ancient prophets of Israel and the New Testament Apostles.” Here, I think, Voegelin grasped the apodictical necessity of intellectually and spiritually conflating the conceptualization of reason and revelation in order to understand human experience, the divine ground, the “egophanic revolt,” second realities, and the Enlightenment Project heresies.

Some comments on selected “chapters” of the Autobiographical Reflections.

Chapter 3: Max Weber

Voegelin read Weber early in his student days and was impressed with Weber’s refutation of the Marxist dialectic — with which he agreed — and Weber’s critique of “ideologies,” which he defined as “values” that manifested a “distinction” described as “the ethics of intention and the ethics of responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions.” Voegelin embraced the ethics of responsibility, commenting that, “A moralistic end does not justify immorality of action,” a position that generated a certain animus with the Gestapo. 

Voegelin discusses the difficulty Weber faced when confronted with the fact that “value judgments thus had to be excluded from science,” which disallowed him from analyzing, scientifically, his ethics of responsibility and created a “gap” that Voegelin dealt with all his life.

Voegelin credits Weber with making him understand that to practice the social and political sciences he would have to acquire the “comparative civilizational knowledge” that incorporates an understanding of not only Western cultures but medieval, ancient, Near East, and Far East civilizations as well. To accomplish his task Voegelin would acquire his “materials” and begin his studies, which included discussions with experts in the various disciplines. He would continue his work until he had mastered the subject matter.

Chapter 14: Concerning Ideology, Personal Politics, and Publications

Here again, Voegelin credits Max Weber for developing in him a personal antipathy for “ideologies,” because Weber demanded “intellectual honesty” and, much to the chagrin of the modern, no ideology is honest. Voegelin further elucidates his animosity toward ideologies as: 1.) They “were incompatible with science in the rational sense of analytical analysis:” 2.) He had an “aversion to killing people for the fun of it:” 3). Ideologies demand the deconstruction of language and Voegelin liked “to keep his language clean,” and here he illustrates his point by describing how Hegelians and Marxists both refuse to engage in philosophical conversation once their premise has been questioned, and that question is predicated upon the “etiological argument of Aristotle – that is, on the problem that man does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground of all reality.”

Chillingly, Voegelin recounts how Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. And paving the way for the National Socialists was the ideologists’ “vulgarization” of the debate that “. . . give(s) to public discussion the distinctly ochlocratic coloring that today has reached the point of considering as fascist or authoritarian even a reference to the facts of political and intellectual history that must be known if one wants to discuss the problems that come up in political debate.”

Chapter 17: From Political Ideas to Symbols of Experience

This chapter alone is worth the price of the book. Voegelin provides the reader with his methodology as he is working on his History of Political Ideas: “. . . because I was still busy acquiring knowledge . . . one could not very well write about the Middle Ages and their politics without knowing a good deal more about the origins of Christianity than I knew at the time . . . I began to study Hebrew with the local Rabbi.” Nothing stopped Voegelin’s insatiable quest for knowledge, and that motivation coupled with his ability to critique and analyze the material served as a corrective element in his work. And, in his search for truth he never abandoned Weber’s demand for “intellectual honesty.”

* * * 

Reading Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections is very much like engaging the philosopher in conversation about his life and work. While many of his concepts are quite complicated, particularly for those of us who are laymen and autodidacts, and seek knowledge without benefit of the academy, we have the decidedly beneficial “Voegelin Glossary” to fall back on when coming across such concepts as “egophanic revolt,” or “metastatic faith,” or the Voegelian definition of “Gnosticism.”

The Autobiographical Reflections are a delightful learning experience for those of us just beginning to explore his fecund mind. It is the place where we can begin to understand the “life of the mind” of a unique and gifted philosopher. And, for Dr. Sandoz we owe an appreciation for his work that in the final analysis is truly a benefit to mankind.

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections, is available on Amazon.com.

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