Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Kriterium der Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: Why did we start with Israel in the first place and not rather with India or China?

Textausschnitt: Why do we not proceed from Israel to China or India? Why do we proceed laterally in time at all? Why do we not rather follow the Augustinian example and develop a Judaeo-Christian historia sacra to the exclusion of Hellenic philosophy? Moreover, one could ask: Why do we not stop with Israel? And most radically: Why did we start with Israel in the first place and not rather with India or China? Are we not indulging a "Western prejudice" in the choice of the starting point and the mode of procedure? (72f; Fs) (notabene)

11/I Whatever the answers to these questions will be - and only the execution of the study on Order and History as a whole can give them - it will have become clear that a philosophy of history cannot be an amiable record of memorabilia, in the hope that the passions that have caused phenomena of the past to survive in the memory of mankind were judicious in their choice. It must be a critical study of the authoritative structure in the history of mankind. Neither can the authoritative communications of truth about order, as they have sprung up in the course of history, be sympathetically accepted on an equal footing - for that would submerge us in the evils of historicism, in skepticism and relativism; nor can they be rejected by the standards of an ultimate truth, whether such ultimacy be attributed to a truth of the past or a new one discovered by ourselves - for such absolutism would involve us in the gnostic fallacy of declaring the end of history. A study that wants to be critical must take seriously the fact that the truth about the order of being emerges in the order of history. The Logos of history itself provides the instruments for the critical testing and ranking of the authoritative structure. For without the leap in being that brings God and man into their mutual presence, without the creation of history as the inner form of existence in opposition to the cosmological form of order, there would be no problem of a history of mankind; and without the discovery of the logos in the psyche and the world, without the creation of philosophical existence, the problem of history would not be a problem of philosophy. Hence, the manifold of authorities must be critically measured, and their relative rank can be determined, by the degrees of approximation to the clarity of historical consciousness and of penetration to the order of the psyche and the world. (73; Fs)