On Eagle's Wings: Eric Voegelin's Onto-Theological Conception of History in "the New Science of Politics"
Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin (
1986)
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Abstract
On Eagle's Wings: Eric Voegelin'S Onto-Theological Conception of History in The New Science of Politics is a close texual analysis of Voegelin's 1952 publication that also draws on the entire corpus of Voegelin's work, including his four volumes of Order and History. The purpose of the analysis is to show that Voegelin's philosophical approach to reality is a phenomenology that is essentialist in its foundational ontology. Voegelin's knowledge of the object of his theoretical inquiry constitutes the essence of the object through the analysis of it. Because Voegelin's essentialist ontology holds that essence entails existence, when the knowledge of the object sufficiently obtains the object is. Its produced existence retrospectively verifies the knowledge that constituted it. Because that knowledge is of the essence coming-to-be, theoretical inquiry contains necessary and universal judgments that, on condition of the object, are true of the object or are objectively valid propositions. ;The subject of Voegelin's inquiry is the Western Crisis. His analysis develops it into the object of his political science: the constitution of modern Western nation-states that have democratic institutions but nevertheless are threatened by revolutionary ideologues who would seize existential representation but destroy its Western, democratic character with their totalitarian regimes. The phenomenological demonstration of the object of Voegelin's political science is also an onto-theological conception of history, which searches for the ground of meaning in history by searching for the highest ground and the most general ground. The result of this conception is history defined as an experienced dialectical tension between the truth of the soul and the truth of society as an historically realized objectivity or as a permanent structure of civilization. ;The first chapter contains biographical material pertinent to the crisis that motivated Voegelin's inquiry. An epilogue critiques, in principle, Voegelin's general philosophical position from the position of St. Thomas Aquinas's moderate metaphysical realism and its existentialist ontology. On Eagle's Wings closes its analysis of Eric Voegelin's method of analysis in The New Science of Politics with the conclusion that, despite his attempt to establish the objective criterion for meaning in history which would resolve the problem of historicism, Voegelin himself remained a radical historicist