Eric Voegelin (4)

The World of the Polis

Voegelin's multivolume Order and History seems to be an effort to write a universal history at the deepest possible level, the level of the history of the development of human self-consciousness. This attempt can be likened to the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson's works, in which history is built up around the influence of ideas more than of material factors. Like Dawson, Voegelin puts the "Great Books" in their historical contexts, which have evidently not been adequately appreciated in the past, and so apparently manages to deepen our understanding of these works in a rather dramatic way. The two authors are probably somewhat complementary, since Dawson (without neglecting philosophy) emphasizes Christianity and the key importance of the "Dark Age" of Western culture, during which Christian influences were acting as a ferment, while Voegelin (without neglecting Christianity, or denying that it constituted an advance in consciousness) concentrates more on the role of ancient Greek philosophy. . . . CONTINUE

Voegelin calls upon the evidence of both artistic and philosophical works, as well as of more conventional historical sources, to which the historian may restrict himself only if he assumes that human consciousness is unchanging. One important result of this kind of investigation is that it becomes apparent that there can be abrupt losses of the ability of cultures to grasp profound truths. One generation's greatest writer can become essentially incomprehensible to even the leading minds of the next generation. This occurred, Voegelin claims, in the generation after the great Greek tragedian Aeschylus, whose leading representative Herodotus was already unable to fully grasp Homer. Voegelin saw his own generation, that of the first half of the twentieth century, as recovering some of the wisdom lost by the shallow materialists of the nineteenth century, but I think that he would now perceive a similar process of cultural impoverishment at work in the West. The good news about this is that history demonstrates that such declines can be unexpectedly reversed. Plato and Aristotle, for example, succeeded in recovering wisdom that seemed to have disappeared from the Greek world.

The World of the Polis is the second volume in this work, and deals with Greek culture up to the appearance of these great philosophers (who are the subject of the subsequent volume). Unlike in much of Voegelin's work, the style is quite readable. Nevertheless I did not become really engaged with it until the chapter on the sophists. These itinerant teachers have had a justifiably bad reputation ever since Plato's condemnations of them, but at the same time, Voegelin points out, they were essential to the education of Athens, which had been a backwater within Greece until her victory in the Persian War; and some of the ideas credited to Plato actually derive from sophist sources.

Here is Voegelin finding a parallel between the age of the sophists and the modern Enlightenment (p. 275):

[Gorgias's] essay On Being is a priceless document because it has preserved one of the earliest, if not the very first, instance of the perennial type of enlightened philosophizing. The thinker operates on symbols that have been developed by mystic-philosophers for the expression of experiences of transcendence. He proceeds by ignoring the experiential basis, separates the symbols from this basis as if they had a meaning independent of the experience which they express, and with brilliant logic shows, what every philosopher knows, that they will lead to contradictions if they are misunderstood as propositions about objects in world-immanent experience . . . .

If we assume [this] tract to be representative of the sophistic attitude . . . and if, furthermore, we define enlightenment by the type of philosophizing just characterized, we can arrive at some clearness with regard to the question whether the sophistic age can justly be labelled an age of enlightenment. We may say that the age indeed has a streak of enlightenment in so far as its representative thinkers show the same kind of insensitiveness toward experiences of transcendence that was characteristic of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century A.D., and in so far as this insensitiveness has the same result of destroying philosophy—for philosophy by definition has its center in the experiences of transcendence.

(Frithjof Schuon would probably agree with Voegelin here.)

See also: Eric Voegelin (3).