Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Philosphie: Bruch mit dem Mythos, symbolische Form der Ordnung im Gegensatz zur Unordnung d. Polis

Kurzinhalt: ... it was a symbolic form that expressed definite experiences of order in opposition to the polis;

Textausschnitt: 238a Hellas did not rise above the level of the city-state, as did the Mesopotamian civilizations, through imperial unification and the development of a political summodeism, of the same symbolic type as the myth of the single city-states, but through the efforts of individuals who discovered the order of the human psyche beyond the order of the polis and articulated their discovery in the symbolic form that they called philosophy. Hence, philosophy was more than an intellectual endeavor in which certain Greek individuals excelled; it was a symbolic form that expressed definite experiences of order in opposition to the polis. The tension between the Hellas of the poets and philosophers, and the polis to which they were in opposition, was the very form of Hellenic civilization. Nevertheless, this form had something elusive in comparison with the Near Eastern empires, because the personal order of a soul through orientation toward transcendent reality could not be institutionalized but had to rely on its autonomous formation by individual human beings. And since this elusiveness of the form is the cause of the error that philosophy is an "intellectual" or "cultural" activity conducted in a vacuum, without relation to the problems of human existence in society, it becomes all the more important to stress the roots of philosophy in the order of the polis. This problem can be clarified best by a comparison between the Hellenic and the Israelite mortgage of society on the symbolic form. (Fs) (notabene)