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VOEGELIN

Protecting philosophy against perversion is vital to the larger task of protecting human existence itself against perversion and tyranny. The issues are matters of life and death (OH I, xiii). To illustrate this point, Voegelin juxtaposes famous philosophers like Marx, Comte, and Hegel, who prohibited questions that might undermine their systems’ credibility, with Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz, who testified to the inability of an SS officer to ask questions in a newspaper interview a few weeks before Voegelin’s lecture. No SS leader would even think of questioning his orders. “’Something like that was just completely impossible,” said Höss. “This is very close to the wording of Marx’s declaration,” Voegelin wrote, “that for ‘socialist man’ such a question ‘becomes a practical impossibility.’ Thus, we see delineated three major types for whom a human inquiry has become a practical impossibility: socialist man (in the Marxian sense), positivist man (in the Comtean sense), and national-socialist man” (18). The line drawn in the material before us is mainly between philosophy and anti-philosophy in the form of Gnosticism. What are the differences between the two? Voegelin states the two principles as follows: “Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one” (30). First, last, and always, philosophy is the love of wisdom, not its possession, as in the system and claim to actual knowledge (wirkliches Wissen) in Hegel’s Phenomenology. The closure against divine reality-variously effected through the libido dominandi, or will to power, appearing as philosophy by means of systems construction, the prohibition of pertinent questions, and the murder of God-is that in...