Abstract

The dissertation investigates the works of the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin, who after criticizing Nazi racism was forced to flee from Austria to the United States, following the Anschluss in 1938. Coetsier illustrates how as a native German Voegelin had to find an answer to this central experiential problem, the burning question: What went wrong, that Adolf Hitler could rise to power? What are the consequences? Voegelin had to come to terms with his own German past and whether he, although consistently rejecting National Socialism, shared any individual guilt for crimes committed in the name of the German people. Coetsier traces his intense awareness of Europe’s need for radical spiritual reform, after his experience of the intellectual and general breakdown of Europe, before and during the Second World War. Voegelin’s analysis of movements such as Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, and racism had made it clear to him that the centre of a philosophy of politics had to be a theory of consciousness. In search of his humanity and in acceptance of his own past, Voegelin developed a philosophy of luminous participation in the transcendent ground of being, which reflects his notion that we are not detached spectators but engaged in reality through participation. We participate in this world and one language expresses this, but we also participate in another world, in a divine reality, and the language of this world is metaphorised to express this other kind of participation in this other dimension of reality, which for Voegelin is the transcendent ground of being.