The Eric Voegelin Reader by Charles R. Embry & Glenn Hughes

Author:Charles R. Embry & Glenn Hughes [Embry, Charles R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826273901
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 2017-10-20T03:00:00+00:00

Reason: The Classic Experience (1974)

From Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 12: Published Essays, 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 265–92.

[Voegelin recounts in this essay the discovery of “reason” by the Hellenic philosophers—“Nous in the classic sense”—and explains why it was a transformational event in the history of humankind. He begins by describing how reason, in the classical analysis, is understood as both the “force and criterion of order in personal and social existence”; and he goes on to explore how the analysis reveals human life to be, normatively, a state of unrest, a “tension” of seeking for meaning and for the divine ground of existence.

The Greek analysis makes clear, Voegelin explains, that if a person is closed toward the divine ground and existential openness to it, the result will be various forms of “psychopathology.” Healthy existence, by contrast, remains aware that it is always a tension “in-between” divine and human, knowledge and ignorance, immortality and mortality, “true life” and existential death.

Identifying his own essay as an act of resistance to the modern “climate of opinion,” he concludes it with an “Appendix” that offers a diagram laying out all possible theoretical relationships through which philosophies might eclipse one or another essential component in the structure of conscious existence or reality.—Eds.]

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