Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Geschichtsphilosophie (4 Schwierigkeiten); Seinssprung: Ermöglichung der Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: ... mankind, which is so blandly assumed to have history, is not an object of finite experience;

Textausschnitt: 5/I The anthropological and epistemological situation just adumbrated is the abysmal source of difficulties for a philosophy of history. For mankind, which is so blandly assumed to have history, is not an object of finite experience. However much we talk about mankind and history as if they were objects of science, all that is really given are the concrete societies whose members experience themselves in historical form by virtue of the leap in being. When such a center, luminous with truth about the order of being and its origin in God, springs up in the sequence of human societies, the light of the discovery radiates over the sequence and transforms it into the history of mankind in which the leap in being has occurred. The truth, to be sure, is not an illusion; and neither is the discovery in retrospect of a history of mankind. But if the philosopher accepts the truth, as he does when he makes history and its order the subject of his inquiry, he must also face the spiritual mysteries and theoretical problems that originate with the phenomenal manifestations of the generic-unique nature of man. And above all, he must face the phenomena themselves. (69; Fs) (notabene)

6/I The principal phenomena that cause the difficulties are four in number:
(1) The leap in being, when it occurs, transforms the succession of societies preceding in time into a past of mankind.

(2) The leap in being, while it gains a new truth about order, neither gains all of the truth, nor establishes an ultimate order of mankind. The struggle for the truth of order continues on the new historical level. Repetitions of the leap in being will correct the initial insight and supplement it with new discoveries; and the order of human existence, however profoundly affected by the new truth, remains the order of a plurality of concrete societies. With the discovery of its past, mankind has not come to the end of its history, but has become conscious of the open horizon of its future.

(3) The initial leap in being, the break with the order of the myth, occurs in a plurality of parallel instances, in Israel and Hellas, in China and India, in each instance followed by its own indigenous history of repetitions on the new level of existence.

(4) The parallel leaps in being differ widely with regard to the radicalism of their break with the cosmological myth, as well as with regard to the comprehensiveness and penetration of their advance toward the truth about the order of being. The parallel occurrences are not of equal rank.