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Order and History #5
In Search of Order
In Search of Order brings to a conclusion Eric Voegelin's masterwork, Order and History. Voegelin conceived Order and History as "a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the corresponding symbolic forms." In previous volumes, Voegelin discussed the imperial organizations of the ancient Near East and their existence in the form of the cosmological myth; the revelatory form of existence in history, developed by Moses and the prophets of the Chosen People; the polis, the Hellenic myth, and the development of philosophy as the symbolism of order; and the evolution of the great religions, especially Christianity.
This final volume of Order and History is devoted to the elucidation of the experience of transcendence that Voegelin discussed in earlier volumes. He aspires to show in a theoretically acute manner the exact nature of transcendental experiences. Voegelin's philosophical inquiry unfolds in the historical context of the great symbolic enterprise of restating man's humanity under the horizon of the modern sciences and in resistance to the manifold forces of our age that deform human existence. His stature as one of the major philosophical forces of the twentieth century clearly emerges from these concluding pages. In Search of Order deepens and clarifies the meditative movement that Voegelin, now in reflective distance to his own work, sees as having been operative throughout his search.
Because of Voegelin's death, on January 19, 1985, In Search of Order is briefer than it otherwise might have been; however, the theoretical presentation that he had set for himself is essentially completed here. Just as this volume serves Voegelin well in his striking analyses of Hegel, Hesiod, and Plato, it will serve as a model for the reader's own efforts in search of order.
120 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1987
About the author
Eric Voegelin
95 books197 followersGerman-born American political philosopher. He taught political theory and sociology at the University of Vienna after his habilitation there in 1928. While in Austria Voegelin established the beginnings of his long lasting friendship with F. A. Hayek. In 1933 he published two books criticizing Nazi racism, and was forced to flee from Austria following the Anschluss in 1938. After a brief stay in Switzerland, he arrived in the United States and taught at a series of universities before joining Louisiana State University's Department of Government in 1942. His advisers on his dissertation were Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann.
Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958 when he accepted an offer by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber's former chair in political science, which had been empty since Weber's death in 1920. In Munich he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft. Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow where he continued his work until his death on January 19, 1985. He was a member of the Philadelphia Society.
Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958 when he accepted an offer by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber's former chair in political science, which had been empty since Weber's death in 1920. In Munich he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft. Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow where he continued his work until his death on January 19, 1985. He was a member of the Philadelphia Society.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 5, 2013
This theoretical explanation of basic concepts in Voegelins thinking - reality, conscientiousness, transcendence etc. - helped me a lot to understand the previous volume of Order and History. And to understand our human existence in general. So far I have not read any philosopher seeing so clearly and soberly.
June 14, 2019
This is Eric Voegelin’s unfinished conclusion to his Order and History series. He gives us just enough clues as to what he probably meant without a complete explanation. While little more than 100 pages, this is a dense read.
A note on language: “Beyond” for Voegelin and Plato is similar to what Christians mean when they say God is hyper-ousia.
Man participates in being not in the sense that there is an object “man” and an object “being,” but rather “a part of being capable of experiencing itself as such” (OH 1:1-2). Man’s participation in being is a reflexive tension in his existence (is this what Maximus means by the expansion/diastolic and contraction/systolic of being?).
Voegelin’s thesis hinges on the dynamic interplay between It-reality and Thing-reality. Thing-reality is fairly obvious: it is the world as object. It-reality requires some Platonic metaphysics: it is the methexis, the participation. It is the reality that comprehends partners-in-being (Voegelin 16).
Let’s unpack that. The enemies in metaphysics are those who take legitimate symbols (e.g., Plato’s nous) and absolutize and hypostatize them. In other words, they treat reality as an object of consciousness rather than the event of participation. This will make more sense when we discuss Hegel and Marx.
“The order of history is the history of order.”
Gnostics, our enemies, either try to abolish reality altogether and escape into “the Beyond,” or they try to bring the Beyond into our reality now. The first is ancient Gnosticism. The latter is post-Hegelian, Marxist, and Cultural Marxist gnosticism (37).
Philosophical symbols either shed light on our quest for order, or they are manipulative and turn metaphysics into a deformative task. Some of these symbols are nouse, amamnesis, etc.
The German Revolution
The Germans wanted to access being in a purely subject-object mode. They created a new symbol, speculation, in order to do it. Speculation allowed the observer to stand outside the field of historical consciousness. Whereas each man had to participate (or not) in the “Beyond” as himself, now man would be forced to participate in the new observer’s own speculation. In other words, you have to participate in the structure of my own thought. As Hegel noted, “once the realm of perception [Vorstellung] is revolutionized, reality cannot hold out” (quoted in Voegelin 51).
The second half of the book explores various Hellenistic accounts of Being. Voegelin died before he finished this part, so the arguments aren’t always focused or in context, erudite they may be otherwise.
Mnemosyne: the dimension of consciousness of the Beyond (72).
A note on language: “Beyond” for Voegelin and Plato is similar to what Christians mean when they say God is hyper-ousia.
Man participates in being not in the sense that there is an object “man” and an object “being,” but rather “a part of being capable of experiencing itself as such” (OH 1:1-2). Man’s participation in being is a reflexive tension in his existence (is this what Maximus means by the expansion/diastolic and contraction/systolic of being?).
Voegelin’s thesis hinges on the dynamic interplay between It-reality and Thing-reality. Thing-reality is fairly obvious: it is the world as object. It-reality requires some Platonic metaphysics: it is the methexis, the participation. It is the reality that comprehends partners-in-being (Voegelin 16).
Let’s unpack that. The enemies in metaphysics are those who take legitimate symbols (e.g., Plato’s nous) and absolutize and hypostatize them. In other words, they treat reality as an object of consciousness rather than the event of participation. This will make more sense when we discuss Hegel and Marx.
“The order of history is the history of order.”
Gnostics, our enemies, either try to abolish reality altogether and escape into “the Beyond,” or they try to bring the Beyond into our reality now. The first is ancient Gnosticism. The latter is post-Hegelian, Marxist, and Cultural Marxist gnosticism (37).
Philosophical symbols either shed light on our quest for order, or they are manipulative and turn metaphysics into a deformative task. Some of these symbols are nouse, amamnesis, etc.
The German Revolution
The Germans wanted to access being in a purely subject-object mode. They created a new symbol, speculation, in order to do it. Speculation allowed the observer to stand outside the field of historical consciousness. Whereas each man had to participate (or not) in the “Beyond” as himself, now man would be forced to participate in the new observer’s own speculation. In other words, you have to participate in the structure of my own thought. As Hegel noted, “once the realm of perception [Vorstellung] is revolutionized, reality cannot hold out” (quoted in Voegelin 51).
The second half of the book explores various Hellenistic accounts of Being. Voegelin died before he finished this part, so the arguments aren’t always focused or in context, erudite they may be otherwise.
Mnemosyne: the dimension of consciousness of the Beyond (72).
June 30, 2026
THE (POSTUMOUSLY-PUBLISHED) CONCLUSION OF THIS SERIES OF BOOKS
Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was a German-American political philosopher. He originally taught political science at the University of Vienna. Fired from his position after the 1938 ‘Anschluss’ [annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany], he and his wife fled from the Nazis to the United States, where he taught at Louisiana State University, until 1958, when he accepted an offer to teach at the University of Munich, where he remained until 1969, when he joined the Hoover Institution, where he remained until his death.
Voegelin’s wife wrote in the Foreword to this 1987 book, “It is only on the insistence of friends that I have agreed to write these lines, to state a few facts that could be of general interest about the origin of this volume. My husband started to write these pages in the summer of 1980 after four years of research… and he continued his extensive readings and his writing during the next three years. In late 1983 his health began to fail and the strenuous concentration required for writing became more and more difficult. By that time he had already sent a good part of the manuscript to the Louisiana State University Press, always hoping that some day he would be able to write again. But, as his illness advanced, he finally understood that it was not meant for him to go on living. In the last months I saw him, almost every day, reading and rereading the manuscript, making slight corrections occasionally, and always pointing out to me: This will be Volume 5… he knew very well that these pages are the key to all his other works and that in these pages he has gone as far as he could go in analysis, saying what he wanted to say as clearly as it possibly could be said.”
Ellis Sandoz wrote in his Introduction, “the concluding volume of ‘Order and History’ is devoted to the elucidation of the experiences of transcendence that Voegelin has widely discussed in previous volumes and in essays in books not included in this work… Voegelin held true to his view that ‘philosophizing seems to me to be in essence the interpretation of experiences of transcendence’… Precisely how this completes the work and the noetic science comprising a new philosophy of consciousness, politics and history is a vast subject best left to the commentators and to another places. Briefly, since experiences of transcendence compose the essence of both philosophy and the order of human existence and history, it remains to be shown in a theoretically acute manner exactly what such experiences are. This is the essential task of the present volume.” (Pg. 6)
Voegelin states, “The great quests for truth in which the consciousness of the metaleptic story becomes differentiated … do not occur in a vacuum… They occur in social fields, constituted by older experiences of order… now experienced by the questioners to have fallen into disorder and decline. The quest for truth is a movement of resistance to the prevalent disorder; it is an effort to attune the concretely disordered existence again to the truth of the It-reality… the quest, then, is not only its own beginning. By restructuring the social fields at large in their relation to the truth of order, it marks the beginning of a new configuration of truth in history… the questioner has to tell quite a story indeed. It is the story of his experience of disorder… his experience of being drawn into the search of true order by a command issuing from the It-reality… of his discovery of the truth, and of the consequences of disorder unrestrained by regard for the order he has experienced and articulated. The event as a beginning is the story of an attempt to impose order on a wasteland of disorder.” (Pg. 24-25)
He asserts, “finally, the criteria really emerge from the history of the quest as the quest becomes reflectively intelligible for its own structure in the existential experiences symbolized by the complex consciousness-reality-language. The present analysis thus confirms the statement by which this study on ‘Order and History’ opened, the statement: ‘The order of history emerges from the history of order.’ (Pg. 32)
He says, “At the extreme of the revolt in consciousness, ‘reality’ and the ‘Beyond’ become two separate entities, two ‘things,’ to be magically manipulated by suffering may for the purpose of either abolishing ‘reality’ altogether and escaping into the ‘Beyond,’ or of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’ The first of the magic alternatives is preferred by the gnostics of antiquity, the second one by the modern gnostic thinkers.” (Pg. 37)
He summarizes, “Whatever the order of history may ultimately be, there is a history of order because the truth of consciousness is documenting itself as a historical process through the reflectiveness of symbolizing consciousness. The history of consciousness, as I formulated it, is internally cognitive.” (Pg. 44)
He says of the ‘modern God-is-dead movement, "The movement must be taken seriously. The terse formula on the ‘senseless sound’ is not idiosyncratic, but must be accepted as the authoritative expression of the God-is-dead movement that characterizes a period of Western modernity, now lasting for about 300 years… But the movement also has its comic touch: the God who is declared dead is alive enough to have kept his undertakers nervously busy by now for three centuries. Yet the life he is leading, before and after his death, is troubled and complicated… What is absolute in this ambiguous debate about the Absolute is its deadly seriousness. The only one permitted to laugh in the situation appears to be God.” (Pg. 67)
He argues, “this divine-human movement in the metaxy is reported as the existential, revelatory event in which the truth of reality originates. The event, then, is accompanied by the assurance that the present revelation will be truer than what sometimes was revealed to and by the poet’s predecessors… there is no song of the gods without their mediated presence in the Muses. Though the existential event has revealed itself in its happening, nothing is revealed as yet beyond the fact of its happening. We are at the stage of analysis which, on another occasions, I have pressed into the succinct formula: The fact of revelation is its content.” (Pg. 71)
He concludes, “The comprehending It-reality moves formatively through the thing-reality from a Beginning that does not begin in things to an End that does not end in things. The Beginning and Ending of the story are experienced as a Beyond of the formative, tensional process of reality… there is no revelation of divine ordering force in the quest for truth without a divine reality beyond the manifestation of its order in the event. The meditative wandering through the constants in the tensional process thus becomes harmonious for a reality beyond the tensions that cannot be attained within tensional existence. The super-constant above the constants is not a principle of order whose proper application will dissolve the disorder of Cosmic order, but the experience of the paradoxic tension in formative reality, of the tension between the divine reality experienced as formatively present at the ordering pole of the tensions and the divine reality experienced as a Beyond of its concrete manifestations in the process, between the God who reveals himself in his presence in time and the God who remains the experienced but unknown reality beyond time. Moreover, the paradoxic tension in the revelation of formative reality is experienced as ultimate in the sense that intelligibility cannot be out-experienced or out-symbolized by further experiences of reality. This experienced ultimacy of the tension becomes luminous in the symbol ‘divine.’” (Pg. 106-107)
Jürgen Gebhardt wrote in his Epilogue, “The original program of ‘Order in History’ called for a philosophical inquiry into man’s advance from the truth of cosmic-divine order to the differentiated experience of transcendent divine order in Israel and Hellas… these Western modes of the differentiating consciousness and their attendant symbolic forms, Revelation and Philosophy, gave conscious HISTORICAL FORM to the order of human existence in society. Therefore, the philosopher’s discovery in retrospect of the history of mankind presupposes the symbolic explication of the historicity of human existence in the West, the philosophy of order and history being exclusively a Western symbolism. Without Revelation, Voegelin argued, there would be no problem of the history of mankind; and without Philosophy, the history of mankind would not be a problem of philosophy. From the authoritative communications about the truth of being in the Western historical form emerges the Logos of history itself. In other words, the language of these authoritative communications about the truth of being provides also the language of the modern analyst’s study concerning the order of existence in society and history. The terms of the philosophical inquiry evolve from the critical understanding of the historically differentiated experiences and their symbolizations; they are, however, still tied to the symbolic tradition bequeathed to us by the Greeks, the Jews, and the Christians. The dynamics of the ensuing empirical research propelled the philosophical reflection toward new horizons. The critical turn in Voegelin’s thought involved the need for a ‘more differentiated language that that of classical philosophy.” (Pg. 112-113)
Voegelin’s writing is always somewhat ‘dense’ and hard to interpret, but this book is more ‘plain’ and clear than most of the rest of his books. It will interest to those studying Voegelin, and the philosophy of history.
Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was a German-American political philosopher. He originally taught political science at the University of Vienna. Fired from his position after the 1938 ‘Anschluss’ [annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany], he and his wife fled from the Nazis to the United States, where he taught at Louisiana State University, until 1958, when he accepted an offer to teach at the University of Munich, where he remained until 1969, when he joined the Hoover Institution, where he remained until his death.
Voegelin’s wife wrote in the Foreword to this 1987 book, “It is only on the insistence of friends that I have agreed to write these lines, to state a few facts that could be of general interest about the origin of this volume. My husband started to write these pages in the summer of 1980 after four years of research… and he continued his extensive readings and his writing during the next three years. In late 1983 his health began to fail and the strenuous concentration required for writing became more and more difficult. By that time he had already sent a good part of the manuscript to the Louisiana State University Press, always hoping that some day he would be able to write again. But, as his illness advanced, he finally understood that it was not meant for him to go on living. In the last months I saw him, almost every day, reading and rereading the manuscript, making slight corrections occasionally, and always pointing out to me: This will be Volume 5… he knew very well that these pages are the key to all his other works and that in these pages he has gone as far as he could go in analysis, saying what he wanted to say as clearly as it possibly could be said.”
Ellis Sandoz wrote in his Introduction, “the concluding volume of ‘Order and History’ is devoted to the elucidation of the experiences of transcendence that Voegelin has widely discussed in previous volumes and in essays in books not included in this work… Voegelin held true to his view that ‘philosophizing seems to me to be in essence the interpretation of experiences of transcendence’… Precisely how this completes the work and the noetic science comprising a new philosophy of consciousness, politics and history is a vast subject best left to the commentators and to another places. Briefly, since experiences of transcendence compose the essence of both philosophy and the order of human existence and history, it remains to be shown in a theoretically acute manner exactly what such experiences are. This is the essential task of the present volume.” (Pg. 6)
Voegelin states, “The great quests for truth in which the consciousness of the metaleptic story becomes differentiated … do not occur in a vacuum… They occur in social fields, constituted by older experiences of order… now experienced by the questioners to have fallen into disorder and decline. The quest for truth is a movement of resistance to the prevalent disorder; it is an effort to attune the concretely disordered existence again to the truth of the It-reality… the quest, then, is not only its own beginning. By restructuring the social fields at large in their relation to the truth of order, it marks the beginning of a new configuration of truth in history… the questioner has to tell quite a story indeed. It is the story of his experience of disorder… his experience of being drawn into the search of true order by a command issuing from the It-reality… of his discovery of the truth, and of the consequences of disorder unrestrained by regard for the order he has experienced and articulated. The event as a beginning is the story of an attempt to impose order on a wasteland of disorder.” (Pg. 24-25)
He asserts, “finally, the criteria really emerge from the history of the quest as the quest becomes reflectively intelligible for its own structure in the existential experiences symbolized by the complex consciousness-reality-language. The present analysis thus confirms the statement by which this study on ‘Order and History’ opened, the statement: ‘The order of history emerges from the history of order.’ (Pg. 32)
He says, “At the extreme of the revolt in consciousness, ‘reality’ and the ‘Beyond’ become two separate entities, two ‘things,’ to be magically manipulated by suffering may for the purpose of either abolishing ‘reality’ altogether and escaping into the ‘Beyond,’ or of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’ The first of the magic alternatives is preferred by the gnostics of antiquity, the second one by the modern gnostic thinkers.” (Pg. 37)
He summarizes, “Whatever the order of history may ultimately be, there is a history of order because the truth of consciousness is documenting itself as a historical process through the reflectiveness of symbolizing consciousness. The history of consciousness, as I formulated it, is internally cognitive.” (Pg. 44)
He says of the ‘modern God-is-dead movement, "The movement must be taken seriously. The terse formula on the ‘senseless sound’ is not idiosyncratic, but must be accepted as the authoritative expression of the God-is-dead movement that characterizes a period of Western modernity, now lasting for about 300 years… But the movement also has its comic touch: the God who is declared dead is alive enough to have kept his undertakers nervously busy by now for three centuries. Yet the life he is leading, before and after his death, is troubled and complicated… What is absolute in this ambiguous debate about the Absolute is its deadly seriousness. The only one permitted to laugh in the situation appears to be God.” (Pg. 67)
He argues, “this divine-human movement in the metaxy is reported as the existential, revelatory event in which the truth of reality originates. The event, then, is accompanied by the assurance that the present revelation will be truer than what sometimes was revealed to and by the poet’s predecessors… there is no song of the gods without their mediated presence in the Muses. Though the existential event has revealed itself in its happening, nothing is revealed as yet beyond the fact of its happening. We are at the stage of analysis which, on another occasions, I have pressed into the succinct formula: The fact of revelation is its content.” (Pg. 71)
He concludes, “The comprehending It-reality moves formatively through the thing-reality from a Beginning that does not begin in things to an End that does not end in things. The Beginning and Ending of the story are experienced as a Beyond of the formative, tensional process of reality… there is no revelation of divine ordering force in the quest for truth without a divine reality beyond the manifestation of its order in the event. The meditative wandering through the constants in the tensional process thus becomes harmonious for a reality beyond the tensions that cannot be attained within tensional existence. The super-constant above the constants is not a principle of order whose proper application will dissolve the disorder of Cosmic order, but the experience of the paradoxic tension in formative reality, of the tension between the divine reality experienced as formatively present at the ordering pole of the tensions and the divine reality experienced as a Beyond of its concrete manifestations in the process, between the God who reveals himself in his presence in time and the God who remains the experienced but unknown reality beyond time. Moreover, the paradoxic tension in the revelation of formative reality is experienced as ultimate in the sense that intelligibility cannot be out-experienced or out-symbolized by further experiences of reality. This experienced ultimacy of the tension becomes luminous in the symbol ‘divine.’” (Pg. 106-107)
Jürgen Gebhardt wrote in his Epilogue, “The original program of ‘Order in History’ called for a philosophical inquiry into man’s advance from the truth of cosmic-divine order to the differentiated experience of transcendent divine order in Israel and Hellas… these Western modes of the differentiating consciousness and their attendant symbolic forms, Revelation and Philosophy, gave conscious HISTORICAL FORM to the order of human existence in society. Therefore, the philosopher’s discovery in retrospect of the history of mankind presupposes the symbolic explication of the historicity of human existence in the West, the philosophy of order and history being exclusively a Western symbolism. Without Revelation, Voegelin argued, there would be no problem of the history of mankind; and without Philosophy, the history of mankind would not be a problem of philosophy. From the authoritative communications about the truth of being in the Western historical form emerges the Logos of history itself. In other words, the language of these authoritative communications about the truth of being provides also the language of the modern analyst’s study concerning the order of existence in society and history. The terms of the philosophical inquiry evolve from the critical understanding of the historically differentiated experiences and their symbolizations; they are, however, still tied to the symbolic tradition bequeathed to us by the Greeks, the Jews, and the Christians. The dynamics of the ensuing empirical research propelled the philosophical reflection toward new horizons. The critical turn in Voegelin’s thought involved the need for a ‘more differentiated language that that of classical philosophy.” (Pg. 112-113)
Voegelin’s writing is always somewhat ‘dense’ and hard to interpret, but this book is more ‘plain’ and clear than most of the rest of his books. It will interest to those studying Voegelin, and the philosophy of history.
September 12, 2021
Em Busca da Ordem é o último e incompleto livro de Voegelin. É uma análise meditativa do ato de filosofar. Voegelin aceita a realidade primária do senso comum em sua tensão com o fundamento divino.
A Busca da Ordem é uma história inacabada narrada por Deus na linguagem dos homens espiritualmente abertos à verdade por meio do encontro com o divino no intermediário da existência humana. A Busca da Ordem é a resistência à falsidade e a atribuição da primazia ao símbolo Deus. No livro, Voegelin busca elucidar as experiências da transcendência, isto é, demonstrar o que são as experiências da transcendência. Ele investiga a psicologia da experiência.
No capítulo I, V. estuda Gênesis I e o paradoxo da relação entre consciência, realidade e linguagem como estrutura da experiência simbolizada na imaginação. No capítulo II, Voegelin investiga as forças formadoras e deformadoras da filosofia moderna, com ênfase em Hegel, Hesíodo e Platão.
A Busca da Ordem é uma história inacabada narrada por Deus na linguagem dos homens espiritualmente abertos à verdade por meio do encontro com o divino no intermediário da existência humana. A Busca da Ordem é a resistência à falsidade e a atribuição da primazia ao símbolo Deus. No livro, Voegelin busca elucidar as experiências da transcendência, isto é, demonstrar o que são as experiências da transcendência. Ele investiga a psicologia da experiência.
No capítulo I, V. estuda Gênesis I e o paradoxo da relação entre consciência, realidade e linguagem como estrutura da experiência simbolizada na imaginação. No capítulo II, Voegelin investiga as forças formadoras e deformadoras da filosofia moderna, com ênfase em Hegel, Hesíodo e Platão.
June 11, 2026
Mais um dos livros da categoria "livros totais".
Para quem entende o «projeto voegeliano», aqui tem tudo: metodologia filosófica, história da filosofia, filosofia da história, filosofia da consciência, metafilosofia, comentário a certos «filósofos» (Hegel, Platão, Leibniz, Hesíodo, Homero, São Boaventura, Agostinho etc.), análises da própria filosofia...
A linguagem - como parece ser o caso de todos os pensadores que, vivendo muitos anos (Voegelin morreu aos 84 anos), falam numa língua própria - não é a mais fácil. Contudo, é desculpável por dois motivos: 1) não foi um livro finalizado pelo filósofo, tanto que a última secção é composta por um rascunho de um parágrafo; e 2) os assuntos aqui tratados - não esqueçamos que é o quinto volume de uma coleção muito densa - estão em um nível altíssimo de abstratividade.
Grande Eric Voegelin, o filósofo esquecido mais incontornável do século XX.
Para quem entende o «projeto voegeliano», aqui tem tudo: metodologia filosófica, história da filosofia, filosofia da história, filosofia da consciência, metafilosofia, comentário a certos «filósofos» (Hegel, Platão, Leibniz, Hesíodo, Homero, São Boaventura, Agostinho etc.), análises da própria filosofia...
A linguagem - como parece ser o caso de todos os pensadores que, vivendo muitos anos (Voegelin morreu aos 84 anos), falam numa língua própria - não é a mais fácil. Contudo, é desculpável por dois motivos: 1) não foi um livro finalizado pelo filósofo, tanto que a última secção é composta por um rascunho de um parágrafo; e 2) os assuntos aqui tratados - não esqueçamos que é o quinto volume de uma coleção muito densa - estão em um nível altíssimo de abstratividade.
Grande Eric Voegelin, o filósofo esquecido mais incontornável do século XX.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews