Voegelin’s Conception of Political and Historical Knowledge
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 124th anniversary of the birth of Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin (03 January 1901–19 January 1985), known today as Eric Voegelin, who was born in Cologne on this date in 1901.
Last year I recorded an episode on Voegelin for the 123rd anniversary of his birth, discussing some of the usual topics associated with Voegelin, like his best-known book on what he characterized as Gnosticism in twentieth century political movements. I continued to think about Voegelin after posting that episode, and I dug a little deeper, obtaining more books, and I realized that I had more to say about Voegelin. Later in the month of January 2024, I recorded an addendum on Voegelin, longer than my original episode on Voegelin, mostly about his relationship to and his criticism of Husserl.
Voegelin was in the habit of being abusively critical of other philosophers, and he was this of Husserl. Husserl was also a significant influence on Voegelin, and we know that it isn’t uncommon for those who have been profoundly influenced by someone to eventually turn against that influence — sometimes in a reaction against that influence, sometimes to distance themselves from the influence so as to better to define themselves in contrast to this influence, and sometimes because their thought took a different direction and they no longer identify with the former influence. Sometimes all three of these motivations are at play.
Certainly, Voegelin took a very different direction than did Husserl both in his general philosophical position and in his philosophy of history, but at the end of my addendum on Voegelin and Husserl I suggested that there was something that Voegelin and Husserl had in common, and that was their non-naturalistic outlook, and, in particular, their non-naturalistic conception of the foundations of natural science, which sound paradoxical. To give a full exposition and explanation of this claim would require a significant effort — more like a series of talks than a single episode. Maybe someday I’ll attempt that. Today I’ll only try to sketch what’s going on, or what I think’s going on. I’m going to try to make this episode as self-contained as possible, but it’ll make more sense if you listen to my two Voegelin episodes of January 2024 before this one.
In most contemporary philosophy, and especially in Anglo-American philosophy, naturalism is taken for granted as the default paradigm. Of course, naturalism means different things to different men. Contemporary analytical philosophy makes careful distinctions among naturalism, physicalism, materialism, eliminative materialism, and other related approaches, but I’m not going to try to define naturalism today or to distinguish it from closely related positions. I just want to make the difference clear between a generic naturalism and similarly generic forms of idealism or non-naturalistic epistemology like phenomenology.
In my addendum episode I mentioned that Voegelin was in correspondence with the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz throughout his life, and that Schütz was in correspondence with the influential American sociologist Talcott Parsons. I’m going to take Parsons as my example of generic naturalism, which in this context is a form of naïve scientific realism. While Voegelin and Schütz had a vigorous exchange of ideas in their correspondence, Schütz and Parsons couldn’t find any common ground; their disagreement was very nearly barren. My interpretation of this failure of understanding was Schütz’s insistence on a radical phenomenological grounding of the fundamental concepts of sociology, and Parsons was more-or-less dismissive of Schütz’s phenomenological foundationalism. Another way to put this is that Parsons and Schütz were working within different traditions, and, I would even say, within distinct conceptual frameworks. These conceptual frameworks overlapped, but only marginally.
Parsons, as was typically the case for twentieth century American scholars, assumes a thorough-going naturalism, and Schütz had something else in mind. While Schütz had assured Voegelin in a letter in regard to Husserl that Schütz was no knight’s squire, so as to give license to Voegelin to freely speak his mind about Husserl, and this gives an impression of the distance between Schütz and Husserl, reading the correspondence of Schütz and Parsons makes it clear the extent to which Schutz had bought into Husserl’s conception of a phenomenological foundation of knowledge. Schütz wanted a phenomenological foundation for sociological knowledge, and Parsons didn’t really see the point of what Schütz was trying to do. Although my own presuppositions are naturalistic, I can sympathize with both sides in this failure of understanding. I sympathize with Parson’s naturalism because I know that this is how science actually gets done. On the other hand, I can also sympathize with Schütz because, while the pragmatic efficacy of naturalism works in the short term, it also leaves unresolved problems.
Husserl had written of the natural sciences, “…how little they are fit to present themselves in naive positivity as self-sufficient and to persist in such a self-sufficiency, is shown by the controversy in every science, no matter how exact, about the true sense of its fundamental concepts.” (Husserl, FTL, 16–17) In this, Husserl was right. Every science to some degree is plagued by the ambiguity of its fundamental concepts. A phenomenological foundation for fundamental concepts is intended to mitigate this problem, though it doesn’t seem to have been any more successful at conceptual clarification than naturalism.
That Schütz was able to carry on a life-long correspondence with Vogoelin suggests that their conceptual frameworks overlapped to a much greater extent than those of Schütz and Parsons. Voegelin, Husserl, and Schütz all believed that scientific knowledge was not final, not the ultimate court of epistemic appeal, but rather that scientific knowledge required justification of an order that was not scientific. A non-naturalistic foundation of the natural sciences sounds paradoxical, but once you get past the paradoxical feeling of Voegelin and Husserl insisting on a non-naturalistic foundation for the knowledge of natural science, it doesn’t need to seem so strange. In fact, the logical positivists whose doctrines were rejected by both Voegelin and Husserl were trying to do much the same thing by providing a logical basis for scientific knowledge. Logic as understood by the logical positivists was central to both scientific and philosophical methodology. For some positivists, logic was a priori while, for others, logic was merely conventional, i.e., an agreement to use signs in a certain way. Bertrand Russell wrote in A History of Western Philosophy: “…mathematical knowledge ceases to be mysterious. It is all of the same nature as the ‘great truth’ that there are three feet in a yard.” (Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Chapter XXXI) This conventionalist conception of logic isn’t like the foundational project of Voegelin or Husserl, but the conventionalist view of logic wasn’t universally held.
Wittgenstein and others argued that logic tells us nothing about the world because it consists of nothing but tautologies — saying the same thing in multiple ways, like saying six of one and a half dozen of the other. The idea that we can make an absolute distinction between a priori logic on the one hand, and a posteriori observation on the other hand, which is a distinction that goes back at least to Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact — a distinction now sometimes called Hume’s fork — makes logic completely independent of the world, and so, in a way, it’s non-natural. Even although the argument can be made that the positivist conception of logic is non-naturalistic, as I’ve tried to show, logical positivism was beyond the pale for Voegelin and Husserl, for whom positivism is a bête noir.
In many places in his works, Husserl dismisses what he calls science in naïve positivity as a foundation for knowledge. For example, Husserl wrote:
“Historically existing logic, with its naive positivity, its way of obtaining truths as objects of naïve straightforward evidence, proves to be a sort of philosophic puerility.” (Husserl, FTL, p. 13)
It was this science in naïve positivity was Talcott Parsons’ conception of science and scientific adequacy. Voegelin was no kinder to this way of thinking than was Husserl. Both Husserl and Voegelin were working at the time of positivism’s meteoric rise to influence and prominence, so we shouldn’t be surprised that there were holdouts and reactionaries who rejected positivism. What positivism meant to Voegelin in expressed by Eugene Webb in his book Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (p. 30):
“…an externalizing conception of being, an immanentizing conception of man, the belief in a dichotomy between facts and values, and a tendency to deny genuine cognitive status to modes of knowing not of the form exemplified in the natural sciences.”
And,
“…a tendency to conceive of reality in such a way that it seems reduced from a mystery in which we are overwhelmingly involved to a problem we can master. Ultimately this amounts to the reduction of existence to ideas.”
Husserl’s work on philosophy of history was called The Crisis of European Sciences. One of Voegelin’s major works is called The New Science of Politics. Both addressed the problem and the possibility of scientific knowledge in the human sciences. In this sense, Voegelin and Husserl were engaged in the same over-arching philosophical project, but they came to different conclusions. Why do we need a new science of politics? What’s wrong with the old science of politics? Voegelin starts out The New Science of Politics with this:
“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.”
Voegelin said that what needed to happen was a retheoretization of political science in the light of principles that naturally tie politics to history, and that, “The movement toward retheoretization must be understood, indeed, as a recovery from the destruction of science which characterized the positivistic era in the second half of the nineteenth century.” This malign influence of positivism on science was primarily the work of two assumptions: “…the methods used in the mathematizing sciences of the external world were possessed of some inherent virtue,”and, “…the methods of the natural sciences were a criterion for theoretical relevance in general.” History that embodies these assumptions he calls the positivist conception of history. And he further says, “The subordination of theoretical relevance to method perverts the meaning of science on principle.” For Voegelin, the logical methods of the positivists we’re working for him.
The different between the logical positivists and their non-naturalistic rivals wasn’t logic alone, but rather the nature of the logic involved. Husserl wrote in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, “Objective logic, logic in the state of natural positivity, is the first logic for us, but not the final logic.” (Husserl, FTL, p. 2714) For the logical positivists, logic in its state of natural positivity was the final logic, just as what Voegelin called the positivistic conception of history was the final word in history. The relative finality of logic in naïve positivity separated the logical positivists from Voegelin, Husserl, and Schütz, but these thinkers who rejected positivism, they didn’t agree with each other as to how scientific knowledge ought to be founded.
Less than two weeks after his long letter to Schutz in criticism of Husserl’s philosophy of history, Voegelin wrote in a 28 September 1943 letter to Schutz:
“Your concept of rationality is not quite clear to me — doubtless as the result of my lack of comprehension. I can understand that one develops a concept of rational action, as you do, and that the creation of such a concept is eminently important because rational action is a frequent and pragmatically important phenomenon of social reality. I cannot fully understand what should result from that in general for the construction of ideal types in social science.”
It shouldn’t surprise us that when philosophers differ on their concept of rationality they are likely to differ on questions of logic, and that when philosophers go in search of non-naturalistic foundations of science that they’re likely to spread out in different directions.
I’ve called their positions non-naturalism, but that’s not what it was called by Voegelin, Husserl, or Schütz. Husserl and Schütz could say that they were pursuing a phenomenological foundation of knowledge, and since the bulk of Husserl’s phenomenological writings are methodological in nature, he could refer to that work as the basis of his engagement with history, and anyone who wanted to know more could satisfy themselves to the extent they cared to look into it. As I said in my earlier episode on Voegelin, Husserl has spent his entire career on logic, mathematics, and methodology before he came to history, and he came to history in the spirit of an arch-rationalist coming to address a crisis that he believed had become acute in his time. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
Voegelin, by contrast, spent the bulk of his career on politics and history, not developing a distinctive methodology, so while his historical erudition far surpassed that of Husserl, he hadn’t developed the extensive range of methodological tools that Husserl had developed. But Voegelin did reflect on methodology occasionally, and in his 1965 lecture “In Search of a Ground” he wrote:
“The quest of the ground, or ‘search for the ground’ as I formulate it, is a constant in all civilizations, as also in all subdivisions of civilizations in all societies. That is not to say that the search for the ground, or the expressions of it, always have the same form. As you will see, they sometimes have widely differing forms. But at least we can express them clearly in the form that they assumed in the eighteenth century, especially with Leibniz.” (Voegelin, 1965 lecture “In Search of a Ground”)
For Voegelin, the search for a ground, or, we would say in other contexts, the search for a foundation, is his alternative to Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, and it’s the whole of a civilization that affords the foundation for knowledge. Voegelin elaborated this view in his book Anamnesis:
“…there is no absolute starting point for a philosophy of consciousness. All philosophizing about consciousness is an event in the consciousness of philosophizing and presupposes this consciousness itself with its structures. Inasmuch as the consciousness of philosophizing is no ‘pure’ consciousness but rather the consciousness of a human being, all philosophizing is an event in the philosopher’s life history — further an event in the history of the community with its symbolic language; further in the history of mankind, and further in the history of the cosmos.” (Voegelin, Anamnesis, p. 33)
Husserl had spent a lifetime elaborating a doctrine of pure consciousness, and Voegelin says this is impossible, and we could also say that Husserl’s epistemology is one of an absolute starting point, and Voegelin rejects this too. So this is the point at which the shared non-naturalism of Voegelin and Husserl breaks down and they go their separate ways. Voegelin’s epistemic position represents a distinctive conception of the foundations of knowledge, but whether or not this historical inquiry can provide a foundation for historical knowledge runs into the problem of circularity, or self-reference. My first reaction is that Voegelin is going to get trapped in all the problems of which historicists are accused, especially the relativizing of all knowledge to an historical period, but I don’t know Voegelin’s work well enough to make this claim. It’ s possible that he addresses this squarely in his many books, so I would have to read more deeply in Voegelin to see how he resolves this.
There are other problems as well. Voegelin wrote in criticism of Hegel:
“…the term ‘philosophy of history’ may be applied to Hegel’s speculation only with reservations. For Hegel’s history is not to be found in reality, and the reality of history is not in Hegel… The factor Hegel excludes is the mystery of a history that wends its way into the future without our knowing its end. History as a whole is essentially not an object of cognition; the meaning of the whole is not discernible.” (Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Part Two, V)
Many philosophers who have little sympathy for Voegelin’s work would probably agree that we wend our way into the future without knowing the end. If knowing the totality of anything is a condition of making anything an object of knowledge, then Voegelin’s conception of knowledge excludes history as an object of knowledge. But this isn’t how we approach knowledge in the natural sciences. When we do research in cosmology, for example, we don’t require that the researcher have the totality of the cosmos epistemically available as a whole. We start trying to understand something small and nearby, and work our way up to things that are larger and farther away, but we rarely make the claim that we know something about the cosmos as a whole, even as we make knowledge claims about some part of the cosmos that we can observe. That is to say, part of the cosmos remains a mystery to us, even while other parts of the cosmos are known to us.
Voegelin could have said of cosmology what he said of history, that cosmology as a whole is essentially not an object of cognition; the meaning of the whole is not discernible to us. This is a condition of knowledge that rarely if ever obtains in human experience, but this is the condition that Voegelin places on history. History, for Voegelin, is a mystery that cannot be thematized as an object of knowledge. We could, then, call Voegelin’s philosophy of history a non-cognitive philosophy of history. While Voegelin greatly limited what we might say about philosophy of history by the non-cognitivist limits he placed on history, we shouldn’t be surprised at this because he explicitly said that history is s mystery.
Husserl liked to express himself in logical categories. Voegelin didn’t. It’s consonant with the bulk of Voegelin’s thought that he would reject any quasi-logical foundation for historical knowledge, even as he rejected positivism. Voegelin much preferred to express himself in religious categories, and mystery is often employed as a religious category, although there is also such a thing as a scientific mystery. It’s here, in mystery, that we find the thread connects Voegelin’s criticism of modern forms of Gnosticism to Voegelin’s non-cognitive conception of history. At a round table discussion on Toynbee in 1958 Voegelin said:
“…within Judaeo-Christian eschatology, the transformation of man, the change in the constitution of being, is the product of a divine act. Now, if the transcendent is eliminated, while retaining the idea of metastasis, it is to human action that we must attribute the change of nature. The perspective is totally different. In the first case, neither science nor philosophy can say anything of worth, because it is a question of a revealed mystery. But in the immanentist conception, science and philosophy have the right to interfere — they can introduce an analysis of notions which make evident the derivative, bastard, illegitimate character of that which is in reality only a modern form of ancient gnosis.”
In his characteristically abusive language, Voegelin says Gnosticism is a bastard, illegitimate intervention of science and philosophy in history. This goes beyond mere non-cognitivism and veers into an irrationalism that resembles existentialism. Of course, I wouldn’t call Voegelin an existentialist, and I wouldn’t say that this philosophy of history is an existentialist philosophy of history, but it’s closer to this tradition than it is to positivism or even to Husserl.
I said that we could call Voegelin’s approach a non-cognitivist philosophy of history, which implies that history isn’t just non-rational, but that it’s unintelligible. That’s a strong statement to make, but Voegelin’s many books on history imply that he didn’t find history unintelligible. Perhaps it is, in the end, a religious philosophy of history, but, if it is, it’s quite different from providential philosophies I’ve discussed in relation to St. Augustine, Jacques-Benign Bossuer, Reinhold Neibuhr, and others. I think it’s safe to say that in a religious philosophy of history we can attribute religious meaning to history without trespassing on a mystery. This, at least in part, was what I think Voegelin was trying to do, but I don’t think that’s the only thing he was trying to do.