The spiritual preconditions of rational debate: Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis revisited

“What ‘banged’?”

That was the derisive reaction of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) to someone’s mentioning the prevailing cosmology, the Big Bang theory (not to be confused with the television comedy whose theme song’s lyrics encapsulate the disordered cosmology Voegelin analyzed*).

He asked that rhetorical question on March 26, 1983 in Newton, Massachusetts during a Friday night-Saturday afternoon conference arranged by organizers of the annual Lonergan Workshops. (During that year’s meeting in June I’d meet Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, whose mind I revered as much as Voegelin’s.)

Being a Rothbardian libertarian, I could hardly resist asking Voegelin about the seminars that Ludwig von Mises led in Vienna in the twenties. Smiling, Voegelin said he appreciated learning from Mises that inflation is not an increase in prices but rather the central bank’s increase in the money supply not commensurate with an increase in production of commodities. (A government may politically “freeze” prices, but then the economic effect of the inflation, that is, of the physical increase, is a shortage of the goods whose prices were frozen.)

At the cocktail hour I asked Voegelin (I paraphrase from memory) how he could communicate with scholars whose grasp of the historical material was far below his (among whom he did not number Father Lonergan, but I certainly include myself). “With a kind of controlled irony,” he deadpanned.

Reading Eric Voegelin’s “On Debate and Existence” in the mid-’70s disturbed my inner Blanshardian rationalist. Despite my exposure to Voegelin I had assumed, and continued to do so for decades, that two people proposing to debate an issue can succeed in their limited project. They need only define their terms, agree on how a claim is to be verified or falsified, and avoid fallacies.

That is, they can disagree but fruitfully, with each growing in his understanding of what the other assumes; what the other might need to learn to come around to one’s own way of thinking; and in what respects one’s own learning is lacking.

My summary oversimplifies, of course, but you get the idea. We’re familiar with the concept of two people “talking past each other”: the discussants, misapprehending the point at issue, proceed to develop irrelevant arguments and adduce irrelevant facts.

This pedestrian occurrence was not Voegelin’s concern. Interlocutors can both be in agreement about the object and each can regard the other’s perception of it as a distortion.

In Voegelin’s cosmology, human beings inhabit a divinely created cosmos. But for the one who opposes a “second reality” to this truth, we’re the vomit of blind, impersonal process, even an explosion. Out of that matrix of virtually no-thing there emerged, somehow, beings who are either determined by that matrix or free to make of themselves whatever they desire. There is no objective way to elect one prong of this road’s fork or the other. Voegelin’s shorthand for those opposing existence in truth is “ideologists.”

Voegelin belongs to a line of thinkers who, with both boldness and humility, claimed to perceive that order and allowed it to govern their thoughts and actions. With fear and trembling they have attempted to live lives of “existence in truth.” Their spiritual perception is neither a premise nor a conclusion of a syllogism.

They are not spiritually vain. That is, they do not regard themselves as morally superior to those who occlude or otherwise suppress awareness of that insight and its implications. (See Romans 1:18-20.)

But neither do these thinkers naively enter into Oxford-style formal debates about reality, knowledge, and value, or the true, the good, and the beautiful, with agents of spiritual resistance.

In the interest of getting you to read Voegelin’s essay, here’s its opening paragraph, broken up into shorter paragraphs for ease of reading:

*  *  *

In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists—whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home.

And we all have discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence—with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God.

Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality.

The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared. (My emphasis.-AGF)

*  *  *

I try to remember this whenever I criticize a Communist or any other representative of the spiritual resistance. For he presupposes (as I once did many years ago) that something other than God is in “back of everything” (to borrow Cornelius Van Til‘s homely yet effective phrase).

Differences over what is beneath the metaphysical “floorboards” (another Van Tillian metaphor) of our debating platform issue in different understandings of the nature and purpose of debate.

If in back of everything is the void, then one cannot confidently articulate or predicate that putative “truth.” By his resistance to existence in truth, the ideologist makes the coherent expression of resistance impossible. For existence has an intelligible or “noetic” structure (from the Greek nous):

By virtue of the noetic structure of his existence, we may say, man discovers himself as being not a world unto himself, but an existent among others; he experiences a field of existents of which he is a part. Moreover, in discovering himself in his limitation as part in a field of existents, he discovers himself as not being the maker of this field of existents or of any part of it. Existence acquires its poignant meaning through the experience of not being self-generated but having its origin outside itself. Through illumination and transcendence, understood as properties of the Intellect or Nous, human existence thus finds itself in the situation in which the questions concerning origin and end of existence will arise.

By now it should be clear to my readers that Voegelin demands much of his, but he demanded much more of himself.

I’ve reproduced above the opening paragraph of “On Debate and Existence.” I now leave you with its last, hoping reading it will stimulate interest in what transpires between them:

*  *  *

. . . [W]e must say that we cannot argue by the Old Testament, nor by the New Testament, nor by Reason. Not even by Reason, because rational argument presupposes the community of true existence; we are forced one step further down to cope with the opponent (even the word “debate” is difficult to apply) on the level of existential truth.

The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis.

Nevertheless, we cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of “debate.”

The “debate” has, therefore, to assume the forms of (1) a careful analysis of the noetic structure of existence and (2) an analysis of Second Realities, with regard to both their constructs and the motivating structure of existence in untruth.

“Debate” in this form is hardly a matter of reasoning (though it remains one of the Intellect), but rather of the analysis of existence preceding rational constructions; it is medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.