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I asked for my post to be pulled because I thought I was unfair in my criticism. It was late at night and I was tired when I posted it. Sometimes my tongue can be a little too tart. I had hoped it would be pulled before you read it. I shouldn't have called you a dilettante. The condescension inherent in the term was uncalled for.

Suffice it to say that calling Voegelin a "nihilist" caused my reaction. Voegelin may be many things, but a nihilist is certainly not one of them. Neither is he a sophist. As for learning about him, BB can do much better than I on that score. The New Science of Politics is considered his most influential work.

Thanks for your gracious apology, which is accepted. I used "nihilist" and "sophist" knowing that these would be the last things that V. would admit to, and therefore would give greatest offence. But I do have reasons for my charges. In the excerpt that begins this, V. says: "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." I would say that abandoning the idea that reason is something that all men can grasp is a kind of nihilism; if different groups have different kinds of reason, (1) rational discourse is impossible, since the world is divided into islands of people who cannot have discourse with other groups, and (2) there is a serious question whether my "reality" or my "reason" is any better or truer than anyone else's, since there is no objective yardstick (beyond my loud voice) of the "real" reality or the "true" reason. And as for the charge of sophism--somewhere in his Dialogues, Plato has Socrates say that the sophist is the one who pretends to be a philosopher.