Eric Voegelin — A Brief Biography (Part 2)
Eric Voegelin writes about the importance of a circle of individuals such as Stefan George Kreis and Karl Kraus. The former was a German poet who opened doors for Voegelin to get to know the work of Stéphane Mallarmé. The latter allowed Voegelin to deepen his critical understanding of politics and the role of the press in disuniting German and Austrian societies, preparing the ground for National Socialism.
During this period, Voegelin began to reflect on the importance of working with language:
“Ideologies destroy language, since, having lost contact with reality, the ideological thinker begins to construct symbols no longer to express it, but to express his alienation from it. Transposing this simulacrum of language and restoring reality by restoring language was the work not only of Karl Kraus, but also of Stefan George” (Pg. 39).
Voegelin was attracted to Hans Kelsen’s studies because of the rigor of his analyses. Kelsen not only developed The Pure Theory of Law, but also drafted the Austrian Constitution of 1920 and served as a member of the Constitutional Court. However, the biographer diverged from Kelsen due to ideological differences in the work “Pure Theory of Law”. The differences between the two were based on different sources of political science.
In fact, political events were a fundamental stimulus for Eric Voegelin to delve deeper into his studies. According to Voegelin, the rise of the communist revolution in Russia made the Marxist current an important topic for a political scientist.
Voegelin argued that one of the indispensable virtues in a man of science was Intellektuelle Rechtschaffenheit, which we can translate as intellectual honesty. The social sciences, particularly the humanities in general, are areas of activity that require an honest intention on the part of the student to examine the structure of reality, and ideologies — such as positivism, Marxism or National Socialism — build unsustainable edifices that are incompatible with science.
Another reason for Voegelin’s distancing himself from ideologies is the destruction of language. One example he gives is the concealment of the premises of Hegel and Marx. Voegelin wrote that their premises were wrong.
At a certain point in his life, Voegelin began to study Chinese language and its symbols based on some of his work involving Chinese political institutions. He read the classic works of Lao-Tsé and Confucius, and learned that “existential representation is always the central core of successful government, regardless of the formal procedures that elevate existentially representative government to its position” (p. 103).
This existential representation consists of the symbolization of government as the representative of divine order in the cosmos. According to Voegelin, “nothing has changed in this fundamental structure of the political order, not even in modern ideological empires. The only difference is that the god has been replaced by an ideology of history, now represented by the government invested with its revolutionary function” (p. 104).
REFERENCE
VOEGELIN, Eric. Reflexões Autobiográficas. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2008.
