{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat eagerly leaps at the chance to expose Eric Voegelin’s haughty disdain for, well, pretty much everyone.}
“The appeal of the mass for the common man lies in the possibility of obtaining the benefits of mankind without incurring its obligations.” (Voegelin)
Before turning to Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment, let us consider his general view of his fellow man—or of, as he said, “the common man,” in which category he surely did not include himself. While fond of calling the ideologues he despised “elitarians” (his neologism; he meant “elitists,” but he liked coining words), Voegelin also made clear his own low opinion of the easily misled, duped, propagandized, and distracted masses; as he put it, “The idea of being a part of a ‘masse totale’ can only appeal to a man who has not much substance of his own. His personality must be sufficiently underdeveloped, that is, it must be deficient in spiritual organization and balance to such a degree, that the anxiety of existence cannot be controlled and absorbed by the normal processes of the mature, meditative life. As a consequence, he will be plagued by insecurities, frustrations, fears, aggressiveness, paranoiac obsessions, and uncontrollable hatreds.”
Voegelin was by no means misanthropic; “man” qua “man” was not the object of his diatribe, but the modern “collective man,” the member of the ‘masse totale’ who, having been deprived of his spiritual heritage, was fully committed to an “intramundane” existence and no desire for, or belief in, transcendence. Thus, modern man was at best half a man, and one afflicted with the symptoms of his “pneumapathology” (“spiritual sickness,” another Voegelin neologism).
Given the widespread existence of such spiritually deficient individuals, they will inevitably be guided by a minority: either one with greater insight into reality, or one with greater ambition to change that reality. It was the latter to whom Voegelin objected. He believed in spiritual, intellectual, and philosophical elites; his quarrel with modern elites was that they were ideologues lacking the right qualifications, credentials, or “substance” to assume the role. Rather than being spiritually mature and steeped in tradition, they were self-promoting masters of propaganda and sophistry, self-appointed rousers of a pliable public rabble; rather than being wise contemplatives, they were “pneumapathological” activists.
A true elite, for Voegelin, should be composed of individuals who, having devoted themselves to “the mature, meditative life,” understand the nature of the human condition and the importance of accepting human limits, leading them to reject hubris, Promethean ambition, and utopian efforts to remake the world. They were the guardians, as it were, of the metaxy, the “in-between” condition of our existence. The new elitarians, on the other hand, wanting either to jettison transcendence completely or to bring it down to earth, were full of “blissful ignorance concerning the difficulties of their enterprise. They did not sense clearly that a renovation of society through a new elite would have to rest on deeper foundations than any of them were able to lay.” The modern, politically active, ideologically driven elitarian was, for Voegelin, “an intellectual parasite whose zeal to teach others is stronger than his willingness to submit to intellectual discipline, who thrives on the fallacy that truth is to be found in the solutions of problems rather than in their discovery, who believes that truth can be dispensed as a body of doctrine, who transfers the characteristics of revealed truth to the finite human search for knowledge; who consequently, through vulgarizing problematical knowledge into dogmatic results, can make the innocent believe that they enter into the truth if they accept faithfully as dogma a proposition which no conscientious thinker would accept without far-reaching qualifications, who create in their victims the belief that instruction is education, who destroy intellectual honesty through their separation of results from the critical processes which lead up to them, who build up in the masses the unshakable brutality of ignorant conviction and who, for their murderous work of destruction, want to be applauded.”
It seems that most of us just aren’t smart enough for Eric Voegelin, as his admirers are fond of pointing out:
“Voegelin’s work is rejected out of hand by most secularists and liberals, in part because of their own superficial education and lack of knowledge in comparison to Voegelin’s. During the height of the Cold War, his work was adopted simplistically by anti-communist conservatives, but they equally have a very superficial understanding of Voegelin. Voegelin is not embraced as one of their own by historians or theologians or political scientists or philosophers because they cannot encompass him within their specialized fields and must necessarily be multidisciplinary in their approach and knowledge as he was. As such, he remains an outsider—much like anyone who has developed his reflective consciousness in openness to the Divine Ground with a command of art, literature, history, political philosophy, science, and theology.” 1
The Voegelin enthusiast Ellis Sandoz positively gushed over his hero’s world-historic philosophizing:
Eric Voegelin, by his exploration of the heights and depths of reality experienced in consciousness, secures the divine ground of being along with the In-Between of man’s participation in time-eternity, a moving present with eschatological direction. His significance philosophically lies in the unique acuteness and subtlety of the affirmation of being—in his affirming both the beyond of the beyond experienced-symbolized as the It-reality of divine appeal, as well as the process and structure of the hierarchy of reality experienced as limiting human existence symbolized as In-Between, even as man is drawn by the divine appeal toward superior reality and divine fulfillment. In other words, Voegelin reauthenticates and rearticulates the intellectual and spiritual tradition of our civilization, further differentiating it through a revolutionary philosophy of consciousness that is of a technically superior order as theory. But more than this, he validates the realm of divine presence for mankind and for history generally by reconciling reason and revelation as modes of theophany…
Be that as it may, Voegelin’s superior knowledge and wisdom led him to such inscrutable utterances as “There is no answer to the Question other than the Mystery as it becomes luminous in the acts of questioning,” and to such haughty declarations as “One cannot enter into rational discourse with a person whose disease consists in the denial of the order of the logos.” Like the Gnostics he denounced, Voegelin believed in a saving knowledge (“the order of the logos”), which, while in theory available to all, was in fact capable of being truly apprehended and appreciated only by an elect—of which Voegelin had no doubt he was a member and for which he knew he was writing.
So, what did Voegelin find so wrong with the Enlightenment? We shall see.
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1 The quote is from the biographical sketch offered at the Voegelin View; it is not credited to any author.
The working title for Eric Voegelin's unfinished autobiography?
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