Posted on 12/08/2002 12:25:26 PM PST by betty boop
The point is, Voegelin doesn't "dismiss Cicero." He takes his testimony fully into account, and sources back to Cicero when he does it.
Sometimes the "most obvious" things are at the same time the most illusive in terms of rational analysis and thus, the most difficult to understand. But if they are "absent" to the conscious mind then perhaps this is only due to their sheer familiarity and ubiquity on the level of the unconscious mind....
Now there's a paradox for you! But IMHO there's a truth buried there....
To Voegelin, Cicero had "a pathetic mixture of submission to the Hellenic superiority."
This sentiment seems to be the primary source of Cicero's attitude to politics and theory. A second source we have to see in the narrowness of his personality and the conservatism of a newcomer in the Roman aristocratic society. His narrowness and conservatism made him misunderstand fundamentally the actual state of Rome. The external success of Rome im the imperial struggle was doubtless conditioned by the qualities that distinguished the republic favorably from the conquered rivals. But the fact of the success should not obscure the other fact that the internal phases of Roman evolution are parallel with the Greek, that the Republic was in dissolution like any Greek polis, and that only a lucky convergence of ethnical, geographical, civilizational, and historical factors had tipped the scales for the survival of Rome just long enough to carry the state over into the imperial expansion and then keep it going by the organized plunder of the orbis terrarum. Cicero was blind to the tragedy around him; his attitude toward the new type of political master as personified in Caesar was on the whole negative, though he could not quite escape the fascination of this great personality.And, betty boop, "dismiss" was unwarranted. I'll leave you the relish to supply the right adjective : )Under these circumstances, the Socratic problem had to remain foreign to his soul. There is no spark of understanding for Plato the founder of a new polis. Plato is for him, in spite of his admiration, a philosopher who expounded an ideal system of government with little practical success. Cicero's ideal is not a philosopher-king but the roman citizen in office who compels men by authority and state power to follow precepts, "of whose validity philosophers find it hard to cinvince even a few by their admonitions." Those who govern a city are preferable even in wisdom to those who are mere experts in public affairs without participation in them (Rep. I.2). Rome is successful;
BTW, did you ever find that collection of Voegelin's correspondence with Leo Strauss? If you haven't, you really owe it to yourself to track down....
Yes, cornelis -- he gives the four domains of the "community of being" encompassing man and God, society and nature (aka the world). To "solve for the ethics" of any one of these domains, it seems to me, is also to solve for the ethics of the other three. For the community of being is at bottom "seamless." And its truth is One Truth.
In connection with Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, may I quote Voegelin's finding (from the essay "Remembrance of Things Past," Anamnesis, 1978):
"On the level of pragmatic history, of the mass movements, totalitarian governments, world wars, liberations, and mass slaughters, the deformation of existence has produced 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'; it has revealed its febrile impotence that cancers out [sic] in bloody dreams of greatness and has brought the majority of mankind into subjection under mentally diseased ruling cliques. I am using the term mentally diseased in the Ciceronian sense of the morbus animi ["disease of the soul"], caused by the aspernatio rationis, the contempt of reason."
Voegelin must have resonated to something about Cicero; otherwise he would not have cited him as his source.
I'm not saying that Cicero "supported" Voegelin. Cicero preceded Voegelin by some 2,000 years, so was hardly in a position to do that. What I'm saying is that Cicero gets a "new lease on life" when a scholar of the rank of Eric Voegelin can "support" the great Ciceronian insights.
ricpic, this is hardly an "oversimplification." What you say above and the rest that followed in your last is precisely what Voegelin is saying. Truly, you get the picture. IMHO. Thanks for writing!
the mother of all science(REALITY) is PHILOSOPHY/metaphysics(bias/sin vs Truth/knowledge)---
it is...inescapable!
Evolution/ideology skips/LEAPS all FOUR...
My point was that, notwithstanding the separation in time between the two thinkers, Voegelin has something to do with Cicero. Is that a problem for you?
I shall bookmark this for future reference though I haven’t “hit the wall” in a debate so far. That is because I don’t find the universe of modern physics and astronomy incompatible with the first reality.
Dear tpaine, for Voegelin -- taking a page from Plato -- the authentic "authority figures" in society are never the same people as the people who wield political power. Bona fide "authority figures" are philosophers, not politicians. Plato, for one, said the polis (the "state," or government) is an organic community, a common culture formed in the crucible of "the human condition," extended into the forms of public life, for the welfare of the polity and the individuals who comprise it.
A lot has changed since then. The political class these days who so bedevil and impede us in the exercise of basic human freedoms, are the very same who refuse to pay homage to the conditio humana, to the basic human condition as explicated by ancient (and modern) experiential understandings of human existence. The political class hates personal liberty as an affront to its own authority and privilege. This is not a modern development -- it has always been so, throughout history....
The Framers certainly knew this. They tried to protect us, their "progeny," from such an outcome. They used the language of the classical and Christian thinkers to defend us against just such an outcome. But hardly anybody seems to realize that, these days. Least of all you -- unfortunately, who seemingly has the most to gain from getting this problem "right," given your love for Liberty....
The denizens of Second Reality simply hate First Reality; not only do they themselves not want to "live there"; but if given the power to do so, they would prohibit anybody else from "living there."
There is a simple formula involved here. It's called the Will to Power. And the Will to Power is the creature of Second Reality. It has no source in First Reality -- which is constituted by and in God. (I just know you'll hate me for saying that; but if you don't want to be "bedevilled" by the Devil himself, then please tell me: where do you think you can you go for relief from His Pestilence?)
For in First Reality, the only power that really counts, from "the alpha to the omega" is God's. And what powers we humans have derive from God. IMHO.
So go figure.
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