Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Zusammenfassung: vom Mythos zur Philosophie (der agnostische Empiriker)

Kurzinhalt: The mystic-philosophers break with the myth because they have discovered a new source of truth in their soule.

Textausschnitt: 311a The mystic-philosophers break with the myth because they have discovered a new source of truth in their souls. The "unseemly" gods of Homer and Hesiod must pale before the invisible harmony of the transcendental realissimum; and the magnificent Homeric epic that was enacted on the two planes of gods and men must sink to the level of "poetry" when the drama of the soul with its intangible, silent movements of love, hope, and faith toward the sophon is discovered. The order of the polis cannot remain the unquestioned, ultimate order of society when an idea of man is in formation that identifies humanity with the life of the common Logos in every soul. What appears negatively as the break with the myth is positively the transition from a theomorphic symbolization of experiences to their understanding as movements of the human soul itself. The true range of humanity comes into view correlatively with the radical transcendence of the divine realissimum. It is a process that may overshoot its mark-and actually did so in the century after Heraclitus-insofar as the recognition of the invisible God may degenerate into the denial of the existence of God when visibility becomes the criterion of existence. The movements of the soul that animate the speculation of a Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Heraclitus are not everybody's affair-as Heraclitus had diagnosed rightly. The many need gods with "shapes." When the "shapes" of the gods are destroyed with social effectiveness, the many will not become mystics but agnostics. The agnostic empiricist, if we may define him historically, is an enlightened polytheist who is spiritually not strong enough for faith. (Fs)

312a The transcendental irruption that makes the generation of the mystic-philosophers an epoch in the history of mankind has profoundly affected the problem of social order up to the present because the old collective order on the less differentiated level of consciousness is under permanent judgment [krisis) by the new authority, while the new order of the spirit is socially an aristocratic achievement of charismatic individuals, of the "dry souls" who can say: "I have come to throw fire on the earth. [...] Do you believe I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, rather division" (Luke 12:49, 51)- As a consequence, entirely new problems of social organization appear. Neither can the Hellenic manifestation (or the Christian revelation) of the spirit be removed from history because, on the human side, they are structures of the soul; nor can the problem of the Heraclitean sleepwalkers be removed from history through human agencies, however much of a fire the mystics and saints may build under them to arouse them from slumber or at least to fits of wakefulness. Social order will from now on depend on the hierarchical structure that is foreshadowed in the authoritative self-assertion of the charismatic souls ever since Hesiod and Sappho, as well as in the Heraclitean insight that it may be law to obey the counsel of one man. And in order to make this hierarchical structure effective in social practice, institutions will be required for continuing and transmitting spiritual insights, as well as the intellectual culture that is necessary for their exposition and communication, through the generations, and for mediating them to the many thorough processes of education appropriate to their receptiveness. (Fs)

312b This is the problem that was seen by Plato. In his philosopher-king he has created the symbol of the new order: that the spirit must be linked with power in order to become socially effective. And this demand is not a protective reflex under the impression of the fate of Socrates, which demonstrated that the sleepwalkers can solve their problem of order in the short run by the simple means of killing a disturbing "dry soul"; it springs from the insight of the patriot who sees the power of his polis disintegrating because it is not linked with the spirit. The work of Plato, however, the creation of the science of order under the conditions of the new epoch, did not get under way before the grandeur and catastrophe of Athens had furnished the object lesson that made it compelling and convincing. (Fs)