True enough, maro. But Socrates was never able to "teach" the Sophists...presumably because they did not share his "universe of discourse." The great divide between the two "camps" was that the Sophists insisted that "man is the measure of all things" (and thus generally went about telling people exactly what they wanted to hear in "high-blown language," for pay); whereas Socrates believed that the worthy man attunes himself to the divine measure. In many ways, the present dispute, so characteristic of our culture today, is a recapitulation of this most ancient one...and may well come to the same result.
For when the Sophist opponent realized Socrates had "beaten" him in debate, typically he had this nasty habit of going all surly, nasty on him.... That such men had long memories of grievance at the hands of Socrates accounts for the fact that Socrates was tried, convicted, and executed -- preeminently on the testimony of defeated adversaries (e.g., Anytus, Meletus) in debate....
I'll see what I can do about coming up with an "outline," since you express interest (might take me a while, though). Whether it will pass for philosophy, I'll leave it to you to judge.
One thing's for sure, Voegelin is not a "school philosopher," such as, for instance, the German Idealists: Unlike, say, Hegel, or even Kant, he wasn't a "system builder." I really don't know how to classify him -- he's been called a "philosopher of history," and an "historian of philosophy," among other things. I just think of him as a "philosopher of consciousness" or of "open existence" -- which IMHO would place him in the company of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard (the latter two each in his own way), for examples.
Thank you for writing, maro.
Does this resonate with today's Lib vs. Conservative debate, or what? You beat the Libs, they get nasty. And it's a cautionary tale should the Libs ever achieve unchallenged authority and power in this culture. The Culture War is very real and it must be won by the Conservatives.
Anyhoot, FWIW, jumping in:
1. Voegelin states that it is difficult, if not impossible, to “debate” with “ideologists” when the subject matter pertains to the “sphere of the person” – that is, to aspects of human existence that do not lie within the purview of the natural sciences or logic.
2. The “ideologist” in this context can be defined as a thinker who -- “preanalytically” -- assumes that only those aspects of reality that are susceptible to the critical model of the scientific method are “real”; all other aspects of reality are either illusionary or of no importance. The assumption rules out consideration of vast sectors of human experience that cannot be made to fit this model – unless first restated in terms of what the scientific method can purportedly validate or falsify. For instance, “mind” becomes “brain” – for mind is inaccessible to scientific technique in a way that brain is not. For Voegelin, such a maneuver is a shift away from the “truth of existence” to untruth. It is a reduction of the person for the purpose of fitting him to a model that is inherently materialistic or phenomenalistic in character. The “sphere of the person” is severely whittled down to fit the preanalytical notion-become-premise.
3. In particular, the sphere of the person is so whittled down that there is no way to consider generic problems of the human condition, which typically express as key, perennial questions regarding human existence and the nature of man and his place in the universe, his relations with his fellow human beings and with God. The questions are “perennial” in the sense that human beings down the ages have always asked precisely these questions. Categorically, they are the type of questions that the scientific method cannot address. Science, simply put, does not speak this language at all.
4. This is precisely the type of questions that the great classical and Christian thinkers have engaged. Voegelin’s “On Debate and Existence” examines the classical and Christian view of this subject matter in the great culminations (provisionally) achieved by Aristotle and Aquinas – who do speak this language, and sublimely.
5. Yet as Voegelin notes, starting roughly around the sixteenth century, with the stunning breakthroughs in the physical sciences, this older body of thought about things human has been increasingly, effectively eclipsed. On the surface of things, this is entirely understandable; because for Aristotle – and Aquinas after him – the model of the universe was the “closed cosmos” – a spherical cosmos surrounded by the starry firmament with “our world” at its very center, ordered by a First Cause or Prime Mover who moved every aspect of the hierarchy of being, from least to greatest, throughout time. Obviously, the amazing strides of the physical sciences utterly have exploded the basis for such “cosmological symbolism.” We know our universe truly is not like what it appeared to be to the ancient Greek, or to the thirteenth-century scholastic doctor.
6. But when new discoveries seem to challenge these older “symbols,” Voegelin insists that doesn’t mean we have to ditch the symbol, and start all over from scratch. Instead, he urges us to consider the experiential basis that gave rise to the articulation of the symbol in the first place. For such symbols are an attempt to describe human lived reality. In the case of the Aristotelian and Thomist symbologies, Voegelin insists “there is a solid core of truth” in them – for they are works of the human intellect and spirit meditatively expressing the lived experience of human beings. In short, they are works concerning the human condition which, arguably, has not changed much over time. (Arguably, the only thing about man that really changes is the tools he uses….)
7. Certainly, what has not changed about the human condition are the items on Voegelin’s list: “…experiences of finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures of a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world,… of possible fulfillment in a state beyond this world…. [W]e can see philosophy emerging from the immediate experiences as an attempt to illuminate existence….”
8. Voegelin says we must discover the solid core of truth in these symbols by a surgical process that seeks to remove all their cosmological elements. When we do that, we are left with the irreducible insight that a universe that contains intelligent beings cannot originate from a cause or source that is less than intelligent itself. The intellect, having “discovered itself,” recognizes that it does not have the character of an “accident” or a culmination of random events, nor did it “create” itself. Further, it recognizes itself as a “force transcending its own existence” – that is, the intellect is capable of reaching out and engaging objects of knowledge that are outside or “beyond” itself – the things of the natural world among them – and of forming concepts about them (Voegelin calls this “ideation”), and then of testing the concepts analytically and experientially (reason).
But essentially, all this relies on the “preanalytical notion” (the unproven premise) that the world is intelligible -- because its order arises from an intelligent cause. And thus, Aristotle’s “prime mover” has indeed been “smuggled [back] in with the unproven premise,” through the back door as it were. Yet this appears to be unavoidable; for once we recognize that the universe is “ordered,” we cannot reasonably entertain the proposition that order has an accidental or random cause, so it must be the product of intelligence. And perhaps reasoning by analogy to our own self-aware intelligence, we therefore conclude that the first cause or prime mover of the universe is also a self-aware Intelligence.
Or as Voegelin puts it, “…knowledge of the something that “exists” beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence.” It is “preanalytical” in precisely this sense. It seems to have something to do with the structure of noetic consciousness (i.e., intelligence) itself.
9. And so we get to Leibnitz’s two seminal questions: Why is there something, why not nothing? And why are things the way they are, and not some other way? These questions are substantively motivated from the same experiential and rational basis that moved Aristotle to speculate on the prime mover and the chain of causation.
Voegelin reminds us, however, that these questions are utterly incapable of either verification or falsification – that is, they are not properly “scientific questions.” Yet these pesky questions inevitably seem to “arise authentically when reason is applied to the experiential confrontation of man with existent things in this world.” We might say it is human nature to ask them.
10. Thus was the universal basis of rational discourse understood, up til the modern centuries, and the emergence of the builders of Second Realities. Typically, denizens of Second Reality refuse to engage any and all questions whose answers cannot be validated by the scientific method. They don’t seem to mind in the least that this is a “surgical procedure” that makes it impossible to consider the human condition (“the sphere of the person”) as such. Further, it renders human intellectual history irrelevant. It even forbids the asking of questions whose rational answers would tend to undercut the supremacy of its “preanalytical notions.”
Voegelin quotes an amusing little line from the chapter headings of Elias Canetti’s Auto da fe that neatly summarizes the thought process of the ideologue of Second Reality: “A Head Without a World – Headless World – The World In One’s Head.”
There is no common ground of rational discourse with the thinker of Second Reality, for he has lost his capacity or will for self-transcendence, such that he can engage the world “outside his head.” In obviating the world “outside his head,” he moots all questions regarding its ordering cause. (“God is dead.”) Therefore, “the world is only what I think it is – it is the world inside my head.”
This is a willful, absolute flight from reality, an absolute refusal to apperceive what sane human beings have been thinking about for millennia. How does one “debate” with a person like this? What common ground can be found on which a debate could reasonably be based?