The significance of the 'break' of later Eric Voegelin

Voegelin experiences an important 'break' during the composition of the fourth volume of his magnum opus, Order and History, titled The Ecumenic Age. Even though Voegelinians like Michael Franz argue against the existence of the 'break' in Voegelin's philosophy, pointing to continuities of his historical analysis, I believe there is sufficient evidence to claim that the proposed 'break' was actually a significant leap in his philosophy of history. Why would Voegelin insist on the break he experienced if the significance was actually almost nonexistent in the first place (as Franz would argue)? Franz tries to solve this problem by indicating that Voegelin was a philosopher who maintained a strong aversion against any kind of system-construction. Because Voegelin always wished to destroy people's established convictions, he would argue with vigor that he had been wrong, just in order to make readers anxious about their beliefs. This scenario does not sound so convincing...

Rather, I would point to the role played by the concept of 'historiogenesis.' For, ultimately, this is the reason of the break. By this term he wishes to point to a type of historical speculation that warps reality to fit the perspective of a human being embedded in a society. When men wrote history in the ancient Orient, they did so in a manner that directly connected facts and myths on a single, unilinear, time line. He would see it as a form of distorted pre-historiography, involving both mythopoesis and rational speculation - thus calling it 'mytho-speculation.' The point here is that this has been, in Voegelin's terms, a 'millennial constant,' meaning that even in Hegel's philosophy of history one can detect this type of symbolism. This shocked Voegelin because he had thought of history as a process of symbolic 'differentiation' from the compact to the complex, meaning that the ideas that people had in their mind became more and more articulated and adjusted to fit the reality they experience. This conceptualisation of history, however, lapsed when he had noticed that many things hadn't really changed through four thousand years. To simplify, he found out that nothing had really changed and people's understanding of the origin of things, the world, society, men and god, didn't get as far as he had thought before. This also shocked his own conceptualisation of history, for he had used the same scheme of unilinear history, presupposing one universal underlying process of human history that had a certain direction in time. He had understood that he had been wrong after all.

However he did not let go of that direction and attempted a different form of universal history. This is what happened in the fourth and the fifth volume of Order and History: The Ecumenic Age and In Search of Order. There he abandons temporal process: he does not extensively describe the Gnostic nature of modernity as he would have done before, according to the original plan of publication. It seems to me that historical science has become impossible for him. He concentrates on the description of his new meditative philosophy of history and of consciousness.

Thomas Altizer criticised Voegelin's later philosophy of history and indicated that he couldn't understand Voegelin's thoughts, maybe due to its sheer originality and novelty, but probably because of its absurdity. I would not say the same thing. However I think Voegelin's later thought does indicate a certain limit, especially concerning the possibility of historiography and the speculation on the beginning. Currently I cannot formulate myself clearly on this, but I will try to do so in the near future.

フェーゲリンは主著『秩序と歴史』第四巻となる『世界的時代』を著している最中に大きな断絶を経験している。マイケル・フランツのような研究者はそもそもこの断絶の存在を否定し、その前後で歴史分析に大きな連続性があることを指摘するけれども、個人的にはこの断絶はフェーゲリンの哲学に大きな変革をもたらしたと思う。そもそも、（フランツの議論のように）特に重要な断絶をそこに見たのでなかったら、何故フェーゲリンはいちいち自分のプログラムが誤っていたことをああまで認め続けるだろうか？フランツは、フェーゲリンが常に体系を構築することに対して嫌悪を示していたことを持ち出してきてこれを正当化しようとする。彼は余りにも読者の信条を破壊したかったので、自分の読者に対してさえ、実は自分が間違っていたことを情熱を持って説き続けるのだ…なんていうシナリオは、ちょっと信じられない。（以下後で訳す）