New Writ Has Come to Light

Or at least I'm reading a new volume on Eric Voegelin's Late Meditations and Essays. He has a ginormous body of work, but it turns out that much of what he wrote is rendered more or less obsolete in light of these last works. 

Which would have been nice to know before I slogged through all those earlier works.

Voegelin’s thought continued to develop at a rapid pace during the last two decades of his life, and his work found “not only its final but its most profound expression” during this period.... 

The meditative analyses and essays written in the culminating phase of Voegelin’s career not only expand and deepen his work as a whole, but also revise central components of it in ways that compel reconsideration of even his most widely read texts.

The book consists of essays about these late essays. I've only read the first one, which is about the rise of Nazism. How was this possible? What prior conditions were necessary for its emergence?

The same conditions that must exist for any ideology to hijack human consciousness and plunge it into a "second reality." Before this can occur, the person must somehow be alienated from primary -- AKA real -- reality. Which, it seems, is a constant temptation going back -- in my estimation -- to Genesis 3.

Man is a spiritual being open at both ends, i.e., to immanence and transcendence: closed off from the latter, "there occurs a loss of reality, insofar as this divine being, this ground of being, is indeed reality too." Again, total reality = immanence + transcendence.

The closure to transcendence typically results in the substitution of "a diminished or shrunken human reality for the Divine Ground of Being." And unfortunately, "dedivinizing is always followed by dehumanizing." 

Always? Yes, insofar as humanness and transcendence co-arise and are inseparable (or separable only in the imagination). 

Ever wonder why the rabble who disagree with us are so stupid?

First, because of a loss of reality, a human being becomes unable to properly orient his or her action in the world. Accordingly, he acts stupidly. 

Oh. That explains a lot. Because of a "defective image of reality" there is a loss of "experience of certain sectors of reality," and with it, a loss of "the language to characterize and evoke reality." Full reality, it seems. becomes an unknowable unknown:

That means that parallel to the loss of reality and to stupidity there is always the phenomenon of illiteracy. 

No offense though:

Voegelin warned his audience that terms such as stupidity and illiteracy (along with ignorance, rabble, and several others) were not terms of abuse but of concrete description.

Having said that, there is the "honorable stupidity" of the everyday dimwit, and "a higher or intelligent stupidity" that we know too well. The latter is "not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence," which "presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right." 

This is how the second realities of the contemporary ideologue "can become socially dominant," displacing the first (and only) reality. "Such a society perpetuates the highest betrayal of humanity," and here we are.

In summary, pneumopathology begins with "the initial non-recognition of reality and closure to the reality of the spirit." 

This "destruction of the ordering center" of the human being prevents "rational analysis" of the pathological appeal to disorder. There then "appears in place of the neglected reality the ersatz reality of the ideologies up to and including National Socialism."  

How does this square with present times? Conveniently, my inbox this morning contains an essay called The Importance of Knowing Reality, and let's find out what it says:

 “thought leaders” in many domains, from elite universities to athletics to airline CEOs to politics... seem to have departed from contact with reality in new and sharper ways.

No offense, but this sounds like intelligent stupidity and second realities. This malign combination

has given rise to calls for a return to prudence. Josef Pieper describes prudence as the “foremost of the virtues” and the “‘measure’ of justice, of fortitude, of temperance.” Prudence ‘“informs’ the other virtues; it confers upon them the form of their inner essence.”

Prudence is both an awareness of reality, of the order of “what is,” and the ability to act based on the reality of things. 

Prudence, it seems, is ordered to first reality. But

Modern philosophy has been skeptical of our capacity to know objective reality outside of our heads and the ideas we carry around between our ears.

Which is the very recipe for ideological second realities.

One essay down, thirteen to go.