Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: "Song of the Harper"; Problem der Form einer Gesellschaft; Vergleich: Ägypten - China: Konfuzius

Kurzinhalt: Krise in Ägypten in der 1. Zwischenzeit führt nicht zu einer Öffnung in der Transzendenz (Hedonismus); Unterschied zw. Institution u. Erfahrung der Ordnung

Textausschnitt: The neglect of the pyramids, which stood there worn with age for everybody to see, as well as the plundering and destruction of minor tombs, must have made a deep impression. When the symbols of eternity were themselves passing away, the attempt to build eternity materially into this world must have appeared convincingly futile.
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The "Song of the Harper" does not flower into an opening of the soul toward transcendent divinity, but flattens into hedonism and skepticism. This peculiar phenomenon, the corrosion of the Pharonic symbolism to a breaking point never quite reached, will illuminate the problem of civilizational form raised by Frankfort.
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"Form," as previously suggested, results from the interpenetration of institutions and experiences of order. The institutions, to be sure, may break down under economic stresses, or through changes in the distribution of power, but when the afflicted society recaptures its strength for self-organization, the new institutions will belong to the same formal type as the old ones, unless there has also occurred a revolutionary change in the experience of order. ... The problem of "form" can be clarified theoretically, and its phenomena be made intelligible, through the use of the principles which govern the compactness and differentiation of the experiences of order. The three principles, as they have emerged in the course of this study, can be formulated in the following manner:
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Hence, the "form" of a society is at the same time the mode of its participation in the adumbrated world-historic process that extends indefinitely into the future. Beyond the primitive level, the earliest civilizations known, like the Egyptian, are ideed exposed to the same institutional vicissitudes as the later ones, ut since the compact experience of order does not break under the stress of institutional disasters, the actual changes of institutional order occur, with a peculiar quality of subduedness, within a cosmological form <eg: i.e der Erfahrung> that remains stable. Hence, while the formal differences between civilizations are correctly observed by Frankfort, the language of "static" and "dynamic" types must be replaced by descriptions that will determine its form for each case of a concrete society by relating it to the supra-civilizational process in which the compact experiences of order differentiate.