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Order and History #3
Order And History, Volume 3: Plato and Aristotle
This third volume of Order and History together with its companion volume, The World of the Polis, completes the study of Greek culture from its earliest pre-Hellenic origins to its full maturity with the dominance of Athens. As its title indicates, it is principally devoted to the work of the two great thinkers who represent the high point of philosophic inquiry among the Greeks.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1957
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
May 13, 2016
Voegelin's account of Plato differs from the usual textbook accounts in that he goes beyond the facile claim that "Plato believed in the realm of Forms" to the reality that the soul manifests the idea through mythological symbols. Yes, Plato did believe in the realm of Forms, but that doesn't say a whole lot. The more interesting problem is tying Plato's use of forms to his use of myth.
And that's what Voegelin does. He gives a remarkably lucid and sophisticated organization of Plato's key works, especially The Republic, Timeaus, and Laws. Regarding the Republic he notes the primarily line of meaning in Plato’s work is between ascent and descent: Plato descends to speak with his friends and only with difficulty can he ascend to the order of the soul.
Which brings us to a key point: The Idea. The soul is the idea of the form of the cosmos instantiated in lesser souls. The idea is Plato’s reality and is embodied in the historically existing polis (272). The “Spirit” must manifest itself in the “visible, finite form of an organized society” (281; despite his hostility to Hegel Voegelin is starting to sound a lot like Hegel).
Myth for Plato draws from and upon the powers of unconsciousness. The symbols of the myth are not meant to be taken as wooden epistemological objects (241). They are the reality “broken in the medium of consciousness” (246).
Aristotle appears to get short shrift in this volume, but in many ways Voegelin handles Aristotle more lucidly than he does Plato--and Aristotle isn't quite the deep thinker that Plato is. This book is very good but I got the impression that Voegelin deliberately "floated around" getting to the heart of the forms. Further, in some areas he sounds a lot like Hegel. That's not a criticism; just an observation that should come into play when one reads Voegelin's famous essay on Hegel the Sorcerer.
So is Plato a totalitarian? Not exactly, since his "totalitarian" views in the Republic probably never could come to fruition given his other view that only few men could "contain the Idea."
Why no voting buttons? We don't let customers vote on their own reviews, so the voting buttons appear only when you look at reviews submitted by others.
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And that's what Voegelin does. He gives a remarkably lucid and sophisticated organization of Plato's key works, especially The Republic, Timeaus, and Laws. Regarding the Republic he notes the primarily line of meaning in Plato’s work is between ascent and descent: Plato descends to speak with his friends and only with difficulty can he ascend to the order of the soul.
Which brings us to a key point: The Idea. The soul is the idea of the form of the cosmos instantiated in lesser souls. The idea is Plato’s reality and is embodied in the historically existing polis (272). The “Spirit” must manifest itself in the “visible, finite form of an organized society” (281; despite his hostility to Hegel Voegelin is starting to sound a lot like Hegel).
Myth for Plato draws from and upon the powers of unconsciousness. The symbols of the myth are not meant to be taken as wooden epistemological objects (241). They are the reality “broken in the medium of consciousness” (246).
Aristotle appears to get short shrift in this volume, but in many ways Voegelin handles Aristotle more lucidly than he does Plato--and Aristotle isn't quite the deep thinker that Plato is. This book is very good but I got the impression that Voegelin deliberately "floated around" getting to the heart of the forms. Further, in some areas he sounds a lot like Hegel. That's not a criticism; just an observation that should come into play when one reads Voegelin's famous essay on Hegel the Sorcerer.
So is Plato a totalitarian? Not exactly, since his "totalitarian" views in the Republic probably never could come to fruition given his other view that only few men could "contain the Idea."
Why no voting buttons? We don't let customers vote on their own reviews, so the voting buttons appear only when you look at reviews submitted by others.
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July 5, 2026
This is a review of the first three installments in the Order and History series, not just this volume.
There are two aspects to the series, one of them good and the other not so good – the internal and external aspect (for Voegelin, the importance of these aspects is reversed). From the first aspect, it is an excellent analysis of the internal development of conceptions of social order in relation to cosmic order, as a historical process. This is most true of Israel and Revelation, in which Voegelin frames the transition from cosmological to conceptual order in terms that overlap heavily with Jaspers’ “axial age.” That’s especially true of his biblical exegesis, in which he traces the rise of Jewish monotheism as a movement in the late pre-exilic period, and the further development of a transcendent, universalistic conception of monotheism by Deutero-Isaiah and others.
Even this analysis is hampered to some extent, because, despite relying heavily on historical and source criticism, and recognizing that monotheism was largely “retconned” into the Jewish scriptures in exilic and post-exilic times, he is inexplicably adamant that Moses must have been a historical figure and there must have been some historical basis to the Exodus, Sinai Covenant, and conquest of Canaan. Oddly enough, for a tradcath (some sort of which he appears to be), Voegelin attaches little importance to the Torah or to scripture in general, viewing them as a sort of material husk thrown off by Israel’s living experience of God.
The second and third volumes are also excellent as an analysis of the development of conceptions of a transcendent Good, or One, from Homer through Hesiod to the Ionians and Socrates and Plato. Voegelin provides a close textual analysis of several works, focused on the relation between the structure of the individual soul and that of the polis, and the polis’s orientation to the order of being, is well worth reading. And the chapter on Gorgias, with its treatment of Callicles’ style of argumentation and his view of human nature, is especially good.
Interestingly, the third volume is almost entirely devoted to analysis of the political texts — the Republic, Theatatus, Statesman, and Laws by Plato, and Aristotle’s Politics — because Voegelin’s interest lies not in the metaphysical systems of the philosophers but in their understanding of how human social and political being is oriented toward a given society’s experience of the Order of Being.
The second, outer, aspect must be taken with a grain of salt. For Voegelin, they are one and the same. This is not just a history of the internal development of systems of human thought. It is meant as a history of humanity’s increasing apprehension of an actual, objective order of being. History is a process of this objective order being progressively approached, through a human mode of apprehension that seems to have elements of intuition and the Jungian collective unconscious.
Just as there must have been some actual, historical Sinai encounter, the core of Plato’s philosophy was his direct encounter – “passionate experience” – with the Order of Being. This experience is the concern of philosophy, and the attempt to transform the experience into objects of cognition by Aristotle and subsequently was a “derailment.” For example:
[BLOCK] If a study of order and history would assume the form of a history of philosophy… merely because after the creation of philosophy the Western debate about order is conducted in philosophical form, it would itself derail in following the derailments of philosophy. The “philosophies” of order must not be taken at their face value, but must be critically examined under the aspect whether the symbols used have retained their original meaning of symbols that express the experience of the transcendent source of order, or whether they are used as speculative topoi for purposes widely differing from the Platonic love of the divine Measure [/BLOCK]
Likewise: “Truth is not a body of propositions about a world-immanent object; it is the world-transcendent summum bonum, experienced as an orienting force in the soul, about which we can speak only in analogical symbols.”
He takes this to the point of arguing that Plato’s philosophy is meaningless to a modern who studies it from the perspective of a history of ideas, rather than accepting it as a description of reality. Voegelin rejects modernity from a perspective somewhat comparable to that of Strauss in Natural Right and History, and dismisses all modern philosophers from Locke on as “philodoxers.” He sees modern philosophies, political and otherwise, as sharing the “gnosticism” of Joachim of Fiore – as ideologies of progress that envision an immanent achievement of the final human end within history.
My own approach is to find value in Voegelin’s analysis of the advance from cosmological civilization to the universalist ethical/philosophical/religious systems of the Axial Age, while – unlike Voegelin – also seeing the modern idea of progress as a further positive advance. In materialist terms, we can treat the “immanentization of the eschaton” as a *good* thing that reverses humanity’s previous practice of alienating its own development to a transcendent realm.
It’s quite uncharitable IMO to frame modern contractarianism, whether Lockean or Rawlsian, as the philosophy of Callicles and Thrasymachus. Nothing in contractarianism or modern philosophies of progress, as such, is incompatible with eudaimonism, and much of it explicitly treats room for human flourishing (the free and full development of each) as a primary goal – it just rejects embodying any particular view of human flourishing as the official philosophy of the state or giving it constitutional status.
It doubt I’ll read the fourth and fifth volumes, because it’s becoming apparent that the intrusion of Voegelin’s second or outer aspect will increasingly smother any value his work might have from the standpoint of historical analysis, and that his anti-modernism will take over completely by the fifth volume.
Tl;dr – Voegelin’s Order and History series is intended primarily as a history of humanity’s encounter with a transcendent Order of Being, and its increasingly complex and differentiated understanding of that order. It also happens to be an excellent history of the development of human thought — up to a point. With the third volume, that point has probably been reached.
There are two aspects to the series, one of them good and the other not so good – the internal and external aspect (for Voegelin, the importance of these aspects is reversed). From the first aspect, it is an excellent analysis of the internal development of conceptions of social order in relation to cosmic order, as a historical process. This is most true of Israel and Revelation, in which Voegelin frames the transition from cosmological to conceptual order in terms that overlap heavily with Jaspers’ “axial age.” That’s especially true of his biblical exegesis, in which he traces the rise of Jewish monotheism as a movement in the late pre-exilic period, and the further development of a transcendent, universalistic conception of monotheism by Deutero-Isaiah and others.
Even this analysis is hampered to some extent, because, despite relying heavily on historical and source criticism, and recognizing that monotheism was largely “retconned” into the Jewish scriptures in exilic and post-exilic times, he is inexplicably adamant that Moses must have been a historical figure and there must have been some historical basis to the Exodus, Sinai Covenant, and conquest of Canaan. Oddly enough, for a tradcath (some sort of which he appears to be), Voegelin attaches little importance to the Torah or to scripture in general, viewing them as a sort of material husk thrown off by Israel’s living experience of God.
The second and third volumes are also excellent as an analysis of the development of conceptions of a transcendent Good, or One, from Homer through Hesiod to the Ionians and Socrates and Plato. Voegelin provides a close textual analysis of several works, focused on the relation between the structure of the individual soul and that of the polis, and the polis’s orientation to the order of being, is well worth reading. And the chapter on Gorgias, with its treatment of Callicles’ style of argumentation and his view of human nature, is especially good.
Interestingly, the third volume is almost entirely devoted to analysis of the political texts — the Republic, Theatatus, Statesman, and Laws by Plato, and Aristotle’s Politics — because Voegelin’s interest lies not in the metaphysical systems of the philosophers but in their understanding of how human social and political being is oriented toward a given society’s experience of the Order of Being.
The second, outer, aspect must be taken with a grain of salt. For Voegelin, they are one and the same. This is not just a history of the internal development of systems of human thought. It is meant as a history of humanity’s increasing apprehension of an actual, objective order of being. History is a process of this objective order being progressively approached, through a human mode of apprehension that seems to have elements of intuition and the Jungian collective unconscious.
Just as there must have been some actual, historical Sinai encounter, the core of Plato’s philosophy was his direct encounter – “passionate experience” – with the Order of Being. This experience is the concern of philosophy, and the attempt to transform the experience into objects of cognition by Aristotle and subsequently was a “derailment.” For example:
[BLOCK] If a study of order and history would assume the form of a history of philosophy… merely because after the creation of philosophy the Western debate about order is conducted in philosophical form, it would itself derail in following the derailments of philosophy. The “philosophies” of order must not be taken at their face value, but must be critically examined under the aspect whether the symbols used have retained their original meaning of symbols that express the experience of the transcendent source of order, or whether they are used as speculative topoi for purposes widely differing from the Platonic love of the divine Measure [/BLOCK]
Likewise: “Truth is not a body of propositions about a world-immanent object; it is the world-transcendent summum bonum, experienced as an orienting force in the soul, about which we can speak only in analogical symbols.”
He takes this to the point of arguing that Plato’s philosophy is meaningless to a modern who studies it from the perspective of a history of ideas, rather than accepting it as a description of reality. Voegelin rejects modernity from a perspective somewhat comparable to that of Strauss in Natural Right and History, and dismisses all modern philosophers from Locke on as “philodoxers.” He sees modern philosophies, political and otherwise, as sharing the “gnosticism” of Joachim of Fiore – as ideologies of progress that envision an immanent achievement of the final human end within history.
My own approach is to find value in Voegelin’s analysis of the advance from cosmological civilization to the universalist ethical/philosophical/religious systems of the Axial Age, while – unlike Voegelin – also seeing the modern idea of progress as a further positive advance. In materialist terms, we can treat the “immanentization of the eschaton” as a *good* thing that reverses humanity’s previous practice of alienating its own development to a transcendent realm.
It’s quite uncharitable IMO to frame modern contractarianism, whether Lockean or Rawlsian, as the philosophy of Callicles and Thrasymachus. Nothing in contractarianism or modern philosophies of progress, as such, is incompatible with eudaimonism, and much of it explicitly treats room for human flourishing (the free and full development of each) as a primary goal – it just rejects embodying any particular view of human flourishing as the official philosophy of the state or giving it constitutional status.
It doubt I’ll read the fourth and fifth volumes, because it’s becoming apparent that the intrusion of Voegelin’s second or outer aspect will increasingly smother any value his work might have from the standpoint of historical analysis, and that his anti-modernism will take over completely by the fifth volume.
Tl;dr – Voegelin’s Order and History series is intended primarily as a history of humanity’s encounter with a transcendent Order of Being, and its increasingly complex and differentiated understanding of that order. It also happens to be an excellent history of the development of human thought — up to a point. With the third volume, that point has probably been reached.
June 30, 2026
THE END OF THE FIRST PHASE OF VOEGELIN’S ‘ORDER AND HISTORY’ SERIES
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.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1957 book, “In the Aegean area emerged… the Hellenic polis with the symbolic form of philosophy. The study of Polis and Philosophy matches, in the organization of ‘Order and History,’ the earlier one on Israel and Revelation. Because of its size this second study had to be divided into the present Volumes II… and III… The two volumes, though each stands for itself in the treatment of its respective subject matter, form a unit of study.”
He observes, “Pathos is what men have in common, however variable it may be in its aspects and intensities. Pathos designates a passive experience, not an action; it is what happens to man, what he suffers, what befalls him fatefully and what touches him in his existential core---as for instance the experiences of Eros. In their exposure to pathos all men are equal, though they may differ widely in the manner in which they come to grips with it and build the experience into their lives…. The community of pathos is the basis of communication.” (Pg. 29)
He states, “In the symbolism of the myth eternal condemnation is the correlate to the refusal of communication on the level of the myth of the soul; eternal condemnation means, in existential terms, self-excommunication. The revelation of the divinity in history moves on; the authority rests with the men who live in friendship with God; the criminal can achieve nothing but the perdition of his soul.” (Pg. 45)
He explains, “the state of the individual psyche, in health or disease, expresses itself in the corresponding state of society. A polis is in order when it is ruled by men with well-ordered souls; it is in disorder where the souls of the rulers are disordered… Not only the good polis is man written large, but every polis writes large the type of man that is socially dominant in it.” (Pg. 70)
He recounts, “The posture of the statesman-philosopher had led to the paradox that the human stature will decrease when the justice of the soul increases. Plato was keenly aware of it; and toward the end of the inquiry he returned to the problems of statesmanship and realization of the paradigm in order to relieve, and perhaps even to dissolve, the paradox.” (Pg. 91)
He observes, “The decomposition of the well-ordered soul leads, not to disorder or confusion, but to a perverted order. It seems that Plato was acutely aware of the spirituality of evil and of the fascination emanating from a tyrannical order…. In this conception of tyranny, as related to the foundation of the perfect polis through a metamorphosis of Eros, we touch perhaps upon the most intimate danger of the Platonic soul, the danger of straying from the difficult path of the spirit and of falling into the abyss of pride.” (Pg. 127)
He notes, “The attack on mimetic poetry from Homer to the time of Socrates pronounces no more than the plain truth that the Age of the Myth is closed. In Socrates the soul of man has at last found itself. After Socrates, no myth is possible.” (Pg. 133)
He observes that Plato “is compelled to live in obedience to a government of the beast which makes the best die by the beast and for the beast… The rejection of, is not an escape from, the polis. Plato neither develops his position into a philosophy of apolitism like the Cynic school, nor will he engage in conspiracies with foreign powers, now show any loyalty to constitutional authorities. The disorder of the polis cannot be repaired by descending to the level of disorder, by adding a new faction to the existing ones. The tyranny of the rabble cannot be transformed into freedom by countering it with a tyranny of the spirit.” (Pg. 143)
He explains, “The royal ruler is the mediator between the divine reality of the Idea and the people; he is the Zeus who rejuvenates that order that has grown old; he is the physician who cures the souls by causing them to be reborn in the heavenly medium… and in causing the rebirth of the souls he provides the polis with a new spiritual community substance. It is superfluous to point out … the parallel of this Platonic evocation with the Pauline conception of the Christian community, bound into one mystical body through rebirth in the Spirit of Christ, deriving its coherence from the like-mindedness… of its members and overcoming the difference of gifts and characters through ‘agape.’ Rather, it is necessary to stress the fundamental difference that the Platonic rebirth of the community is not the salvation of mankind, but a return to the youth of the Cosmos that will be followed… by a new decline.” (Pg. 169)
He states, “The idea of the polis has grown into its fulness, not because it has gained overtly the dimension of history, but because in the life of the soul the solitude of contemplation is now in harmony with the transpersonal rhythms of the people, of the human race, and of the cosmos. The age of intellection, precariously in revolt against the appearance of history, has found its strength and support in the youth of the unconscious.” (Pg. 179)
He says, “For Plato the spirit must manifest itself in the visible, finite form of an organized society; and from this tension between universality of the spirit and the finiteness of its embodiment follow, as the characteristics of Plato’s politics, the supplementary use of violence as well as the Puritanic touch of a community of the elect. The tendency is toward ecclesiastic universalism; the result remains theocratic sectarianism.” (Pg. 227)
He asserts, “We have good reasons to doubt that a project of the Platonic type would solve the problems of the age on the pragmatic level of history; but we have lost our illusion that ‘freedom’ will lead without fail to a state of society that would deserve the name of order.” (Pg. 265)
He observes, “the Platonic work had the purpose of reversing the derailment, and of reestablishing the philosopher’s experience of the order of being as well as the symbolism for its articulation, in opposition to the sophists… If the relapse occurred nevertheless in the generation following Plato, and precisely in the work of the disciples whom he himself had trained in the Academy, a reason suggests itself which is rooted in philosophizing itself and cannot be explained by the label of ‘sophistry’---for neither Aristotle nor Speusippos were sophists.” (Pg. 277)
He summarizes, “The age is democratic, and Aristotle is resigned to the prospect that only democratic constitutions can be established with any chance of stability. Such resignation, however, does not imply the abandoning of critical standards; while the urban democracy of his time may be historically and politically inevitable, it still is what it is. Aristotle is a philosopher; he is not an intellectual flunky for the historically inevitable.” (Pg. 354)
He suggests, “In Aristotle’s philosophical anthropology and politics this correlative differentiation … expresses itself in the differentiation which no longer can be integrated properly into the supposedly all-embracing immanent political order, and of an immanent political and historical order, to be judged by the critical standards of the philosopher as a ‘perversion,’ but to be left in its perverted state nevertheless. We see prefigured a differentiation that later will develop into the temporal and spiritual order of a Christian society.” (Pg. 366)
Voegelin is one of the most famous ‘Philosophy of History’ writers, students of history may find him interesting.
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.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1957 book, “In the Aegean area emerged… the Hellenic polis with the symbolic form of philosophy. The study of Polis and Philosophy matches, in the organization of ‘Order and History,’ the earlier one on Israel and Revelation. Because of its size this second study had to be divided into the present Volumes II… and III… The two volumes, though each stands for itself in the treatment of its respective subject matter, form a unit of study.”
He observes, “Pathos is what men have in common, however variable it may be in its aspects and intensities. Pathos designates a passive experience, not an action; it is what happens to man, what he suffers, what befalls him fatefully and what touches him in his existential core---as for instance the experiences of Eros. In their exposure to pathos all men are equal, though they may differ widely in the manner in which they come to grips with it and build the experience into their lives…. The community of pathos is the basis of communication.” (Pg. 29)
He states, “In the symbolism of the myth eternal condemnation is the correlate to the refusal of communication on the level of the myth of the soul; eternal condemnation means, in existential terms, self-excommunication. The revelation of the divinity in history moves on; the authority rests with the men who live in friendship with God; the criminal can achieve nothing but the perdition of his soul.” (Pg. 45)
He explains, “the state of the individual psyche, in health or disease, expresses itself in the corresponding state of society. A polis is in order when it is ruled by men with well-ordered souls; it is in disorder where the souls of the rulers are disordered… Not only the good polis is man written large, but every polis writes large the type of man that is socially dominant in it.” (Pg. 70)
He recounts, “The posture of the statesman-philosopher had led to the paradox that the human stature will decrease when the justice of the soul increases. Plato was keenly aware of it; and toward the end of the inquiry he returned to the problems of statesmanship and realization of the paradigm in order to relieve, and perhaps even to dissolve, the paradox.” (Pg. 91)
He observes, “The decomposition of the well-ordered soul leads, not to disorder or confusion, but to a perverted order. It seems that Plato was acutely aware of the spirituality of evil and of the fascination emanating from a tyrannical order…. In this conception of tyranny, as related to the foundation of the perfect polis through a metamorphosis of Eros, we touch perhaps upon the most intimate danger of the Platonic soul, the danger of straying from the difficult path of the spirit and of falling into the abyss of pride.” (Pg. 127)
He notes, “The attack on mimetic poetry from Homer to the time of Socrates pronounces no more than the plain truth that the Age of the Myth is closed. In Socrates the soul of man has at last found itself. After Socrates, no myth is possible.” (Pg. 133)
He observes that Plato “is compelled to live in obedience to a government of the beast which makes the best die by the beast and for the beast… The rejection of, is not an escape from, the polis. Plato neither develops his position into a philosophy of apolitism like the Cynic school, nor will he engage in conspiracies with foreign powers, now show any loyalty to constitutional authorities. The disorder of the polis cannot be repaired by descending to the level of disorder, by adding a new faction to the existing ones. The tyranny of the rabble cannot be transformed into freedom by countering it with a tyranny of the spirit.” (Pg. 143)
He explains, “The royal ruler is the mediator between the divine reality of the Idea and the people; he is the Zeus who rejuvenates that order that has grown old; he is the physician who cures the souls by causing them to be reborn in the heavenly medium… and in causing the rebirth of the souls he provides the polis with a new spiritual community substance. It is superfluous to point out … the parallel of this Platonic evocation with the Pauline conception of the Christian community, bound into one mystical body through rebirth in the Spirit of Christ, deriving its coherence from the like-mindedness… of its members and overcoming the difference of gifts and characters through ‘agape.’ Rather, it is necessary to stress the fundamental difference that the Platonic rebirth of the community is not the salvation of mankind, but a return to the youth of the Cosmos that will be followed… by a new decline.” (Pg. 169)
He states, “The idea of the polis has grown into its fulness, not because it has gained overtly the dimension of history, but because in the life of the soul the solitude of contemplation is now in harmony with the transpersonal rhythms of the people, of the human race, and of the cosmos. The age of intellection, precariously in revolt against the appearance of history, has found its strength and support in the youth of the unconscious.” (Pg. 179)
He says, “For Plato the spirit must manifest itself in the visible, finite form of an organized society; and from this tension between universality of the spirit and the finiteness of its embodiment follow, as the characteristics of Plato’s politics, the supplementary use of violence as well as the Puritanic touch of a community of the elect. The tendency is toward ecclesiastic universalism; the result remains theocratic sectarianism.” (Pg. 227)
He asserts, “We have good reasons to doubt that a project of the Platonic type would solve the problems of the age on the pragmatic level of history; but we have lost our illusion that ‘freedom’ will lead without fail to a state of society that would deserve the name of order.” (Pg. 265)
He observes, “the Platonic work had the purpose of reversing the derailment, and of reestablishing the philosopher’s experience of the order of being as well as the symbolism for its articulation, in opposition to the sophists… If the relapse occurred nevertheless in the generation following Plato, and precisely in the work of the disciples whom he himself had trained in the Academy, a reason suggests itself which is rooted in philosophizing itself and cannot be explained by the label of ‘sophistry’---for neither Aristotle nor Speusippos were sophists.” (Pg. 277)
He summarizes, “The age is democratic, and Aristotle is resigned to the prospect that only democratic constitutions can be established with any chance of stability. Such resignation, however, does not imply the abandoning of critical standards; while the urban democracy of his time may be historically and politically inevitable, it still is what it is. Aristotle is a philosopher; he is not an intellectual flunky for the historically inevitable.” (Pg. 354)
He suggests, “In Aristotle’s philosophical anthropology and politics this correlative differentiation … expresses itself in the differentiation which no longer can be integrated properly into the supposedly all-embracing immanent political order, and of an immanent political and historical order, to be judged by the critical standards of the philosopher as a ‘perversion,’ but to be left in its perverted state nevertheless. We see prefigured a differentiation that later will develop into the temporal and spiritual order of a Christian society.” (Pg. 366)
Voegelin is one of the most famous ‘Philosophy of History’ writers, students of history may find him interesting.
April 18, 2023
one of the best account of the thought of Plato and Aristotle. The book is friendly to read, and very fascinating. It combines an insightful reading with a remarkably historical details. It is not an exaggeration to state that this book, for me, is unputdownable.
Want to Read
November 12, 2009Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 6, as one of Four Books and Two Essays to Help You Begin Wondering about Plato.
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