The Philosopher of Reality

1

Reality, Lost and Found:
Eric Voegelin as
a Guide in and out
of Trickster Land

ÁRPÁD SZAKOLCZAI

How can reality itself be lost? This is the puzzle evoked by the title of this conference and rendered explicit in the title of this paper.

Voegelin on Reality and Its Eclipse

This theme-the concern with reality, the realness of reality, the need to keep our sense of reality, and the increasing threats to this sense in the contemporary world-was a recurrent theme of Eric Voegelin's work, prominent in some of his most important writings, though hardly ever as a main theme. It was present in The New Science of Politics, as evidently any form of Gnosticism, modern or not, implies a rejection of the reality of the natural world. It was present in Anamnesis, especially in the long essay "What is Political Reality". It was present in the lecture series Hitler and the Germans, especially through the concern with "Second Reality", taken from novels, especially Heimito von Doderer's The Demons. Of particular importance is Voegelin's 1969 essay "Eclipse of Reality": due to its title, which directly addresses the loss of reality; due to the occasion for which it was written, a memorial volume for his lifelong friend, Alfred Schutz, with a main theme of Schutz's work being "multiple realities", while Schutz was also a main interlocutor, through their correspondence, in discussions regarding the relevance of the modern Gnosticism thesis; due to its discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous intellectual of the times, singling him out as an example for the deformation of "projecting an imaginary reality", or a "Second Reality";[1] and finally, due to its extensive and occasionally joint discussion of Comte's positivistic sociology and Hegel's philosophy, both being key examples for modern Gnosticism, according to Voegelin.

Important insights about the loss of reality are contained in Autobiographical Reflections, especially the pages from which the conference title was taken. The context is important and worthy of a few words. The conference call is from the title of a central section of the book, where Voegelin is offering the motivations for his work, culminating in a philosophy of history.[2] His work is rooted in the political situation, marked by a flood of ideological language, traced to the end of the First World War-though it is traced further back to 1870 and the "fantastic destruction of the German language" in the Imperial period.[3] This gives the proper meaning of philosophy, back to the times of Plato, as standing up against the dominant ideologies of the time, marked by "spiritually energetic people" who are "breaking out of the dominant intellectual group". The examples listed, however, are not professional philosophers but novelists like George Orwell, Albert Camus, and Thomas Mann. They succeeded not on their own but by finding people who could be called "guides", as the "most important means of regaining contact with reality is the recourse to thinkers of the past who had not yet lost reality, or who were engaged in the effort of regaining it".[4] This includes a return to myths, where Voegelin singles out for attention the collaboration between Thomas Mann and Károly Kerényi, central for the Joseph novels. But it also implies a revisiting of classical philosophy, theology, ancient history, even archaeology-or, as two key sentences state: "Recapturing reality in opposition to its contemporary deformation requires a considerable amount of work. One has to reconstruct the fundamental categories of existence, experience, consciousness, and reality."[5]

But the central importance Voegelin attributed to reality, in this sense, perhaps is best revealed in an anecdote told by Gregor Sebba. In a discussion, Voegelin expressed his dissent regarding the use of close-ups in films, claiming that a face is not a landscape, so one should not start wondering about it, adding a revealing phrase: "'Stay with rrreality'"-the triple "r" in the original.[6]

Voegelin's manifold discussions of reality, the sense of reality, and its loss cluster around three major themes. The first is the impact of wars, especially the First World War, on human history. Sociologists and social theorists, in conformity with the self-understanding of modernity, focus on the role played by progress in the genesis of modernity and thus underplay, or even outright ignore, wars. It is quite revealing that in the December 1999 issue of International Sociology, which contains a symposium on war and modernisation theory, and the February 2001 issue of the European Journal of Social Theory, which was based on a symposium on "War and social theory" held in 2000 at the European University Institute, several contributors explicitly discuss the failure of sociology and social theory to properly discuss warfare.

For Voegelin, however, the First World War was an epoch-making caesura. He lived through it, just as he later survived the Second World War; through political anthropology and its central term "liminality", one can show the tightness of his connection with the Great War: he was about 13 and a half years old when the First World War started and almost 18 when it ended, so practically his entire adolescence, usually lasting between the ages of 13 and 18, occurred under its shadow, representing a coincidence of personal and global historical liminality, making it a particularly momentous rite of passage. Voegelin was thus able to experience firsthand that the world in which we all live was the product, more than anything else, of the Great War.

The second point concerns novels. In a much-quoted sentence of Anamnesis, Voegelin stated that if "one wishes to inform oneself about the great problems of thinking about order in Germany, one would do better to read the literary works of Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann, Heimito von Doderer, or the dramas of Frisch and Dürrenmatt, rather than the professional literature of politics".[7] It does not require much argument to make the point that many of the most important works of most of these writers, like The Magic Mountain, The Sleepwalkers, The Man Without Qualities, or The Demons, were directly preoccupied with the processes that led to the First World War or that started in its aftermath.

Third, Voegelin's diagnosis regarding the increasing loss of reality often accompanies, directly or indirectly, his famous, though also controversial, discussion of modern Gnosticism, or modernity as a Gnostic revolt. The connection, in a way, is evident, as Gnosticism historically was a doctrine denying the goodness, even the reality, of the world, attributing creation to an evil demiurge.

But how is it possible to study the unreality of the apparent reality itself? Here again, Voegelin offers precious indications with his modern Gnosticism thesis and the related problematisation of scientism, but the point must be taken further. The central issue is that science as science does not offer a way, as science has no clue about the realness of reality. Science, supposedly, deals with "facts"; this itself is a very problematic word, as it is etymologically rooted in the Latin word fare "make", so it focuses not on what is, but on what is made. But reality, essentially, is not a "fact", but a value: its heart is what is really real and not fabricated, imitated, copied, or concocted. This is why positivistic sociology, focusing on "facts" and "data", just like neo-Kantian and analytical philosophy, with its similar obsession with "facts" and "logic", fail to touch upon the realness of reality. Reality as a value, however, was central to medieval philosophy, with its focus on the given as a gift, on datum and donum, and their difference-though from our perspective what is important is what is shared by them, visible in the English etymological identity of the "given" and the "gift". It is this concern with existence as Being (Seyn) that was central for Heidegger, and it is a real pity that, for some reason, the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century abandoned his rootedness in the theological philosophies of Aquinas and Bonaventure. A return to givenness and giftedness is central for political anthropology, which intends to approach and study the realness of reality and its systemic loss in the modern world - this genuine "Trickster Land".[8]

Political Anthropology: An Approach to Retrieve Reality

Political anthropology, as understood here, following the journal International Political Anthropology and the Routledge series Contemporary Liminality, is not a subfield of anthropology as a discipline, but rather a genuinely interdisciplinary area aiming to explore the anthropological underpinnings of politics, or the "pre-political", in the broadest possible sense of the term.[9] Political anthropology addresses three main questions. First of all, what is it to be human? What does it mean that we are human? What is a human being, or, rather, what is human "Being"? Second, however, and following Aristotle, "man" is not an isolated and atomised being but inherently a zoon politikon. So, what does it mean to...