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The zetema of Eric Voegelin: symbol and experience in

political reality
a
Eric Harold Wainwright
a
UNISA , 1979
Published online: 24 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Eric Harold Wainwright (1979) The zetema of Eric Voegelin: symbol and experience in political reality,
Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 6:1, 80-84, DOI: 10.1080/02589347908704752

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 DISSERTATION AND THESIS/
VERHANDELING EN PROEFSKRIF
Summan; of doctoral thesis.
THE ZETEMA OF ERIC VOEGELIN:
SYMBOL AND EXPERIENCE IN POLITICAL REALITY
BY ERIC HAROLD WAINWRIGHT
(UNISA, 1979)
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THE ORDER OF HISTORY
The task that Eric Voegelin has set himself is to discern
within the vast panorama of man's history the modes of
experience upon which man has based his forms of order
and expressed them in the personal, social, and historial
dimensions of his existence. These modes have been
conditioned by six factors:
(1) the existence of the cosmos as the reality of which
man has a direct physical contact and an
unselfconscious experience; as such it is the
background to all forms of order,
(2) the slowly evolving awareness both of the hierarchy
of being and then of the diversification of being,
(3) the experience of questioning as the constituent of
humanity, the steps from an awareness of
ignorance to the active attempts to dispel this
ignorance,
(4) the leap in being, which is a direct result of the
attempt to dispel ignorance and issues in a
differentiation through noetic and pneumatic
illuminations of consciousness,
(5) the process of history, which is experienced as a flux
of being in time and in which the differentiations of
questioning consciousness and the leaps in being
both occur and constitute the flux through their
occurrence, and
(6) the eschatological movement in the process toward
a cause outside of its structure; this index may be
either a gnostic or a deformed metastatic
movement, or it may be a true attempt to answer
the complex of questions that arise from existence.
The* modes have been expressed in types of order, and
each order has been the result of reflexion on one or
more of the factors. The orders have then been expressed
in terms of the cosmic analogy, of revelation, of wisdom,
and of a universal humanity.
The Order of the Cosmos
The cosmic order is an attempt to reflect the perceived
order of the whole in terms of an institutional structure
that bespeaks the oneness of being and order. Its self-
interpretation sees it as a compact unit of gods, men,
nature, and society, in which the ruler represents the
society upward and he represents the gods downward.
The mechanism that links the whole of Being to the being
of the individual is the myth that is expressed through the
mesocosm that provides man with a representative access
to the divine forces of the cosmos. Myth thus supplies the
global horizon for existence within the mesocosm, for it
expresses the total explanation for the happenings of
historical process and for the individual it gives a meaning
to his personal existence. It articulates not only the
harmonized and organized aspects of the individual's
existence but it also explains the disharmonies of the
cosmos that protrude into human affairs. But, within the
myth and its political structures, there is no such thing as a
80
personal dimension to individual life in history, man's
existence is consubstantial with the existence of all other
things and his participation in life is one of group
participation.
The concrete societies that spring from the myth are
what Dunne (1974) calls the cities of the gods, where a
divine pattern of political order is imposed on the
mesocosm by means of the perceived will of cosmic
forces. For the cosmic gods are never more than the
natural phenomena of the cosmos - the storm, the waters,
the sky, and the earth - and these pattern the existence of
man through his total participation through
consubstantiality of being with all Being. The totality of
man's existence in an order that was divine must be
stressed, for there was no separation between the realms
of man's life within the mesocosm; all aspects of existence
are subsumed into the oneness of the cosmic order, and
the political, social, and economic realms are not so much
subordinate to as a part of the overarching religious
realm.
The societies of the cosmological civilizations were
time-bound through the ever-recurring cycle of mythic
renewal, but managed to formulate a unilinear history of
the society that stretched back to the beginning of the
world, and related the beyond of the cosmic gods to their
mesocosm. The objective of such "historiogenetic"
constructions was to lend to a polito-religious institution
the authority of tradition. In one sense this zetema is
similar to that of Voegelin's, in that his analysis of past
achievements of order is meant to become the occasion
for a re-discovery of order in the present age. The
historiogenetic speculation on a traditional order is
presented as an ultimately self-authenticating experience,
in which the authenticity of the speculation is found within
the primary experience of the all-embracing order of the
cosmos. Voegelin believes that the primary experience, or
its equivalent in other societies, is a constant facet of
man's consciousness of order and must be a component
in any well-conceived political philosophy.
The Order of Revelation
The order of revelation is a theophanic event in which
the ultimate source of order reveals Himself to a
representative group of men as differentiated from His
creation. In the revelation there is the explicit statement
that Yahweh is separate from the world and from being
and that there is no consubstantiality of world and being.
The event broke the rigid bonds of cyclic time and
revealed Yahweh as the telos beyond time; the end and
the goal of man's striving. The theophany also constituted
history in that the people of Israel lived in the present
under God, even though they structured their early
history in terms of the historiogenetic principle.
It seems impossible to construct a pragmatic history of
Israel because of the extensive redaction of the historical
Politikon Vol.6 No.l Junie 1979June
 records that was undertaken for the purpose of pointing
up a paradigmatic state of affairs so as to show the will of
Yahweh on the occasion. The impracticability of
constructing such a history as a cause of an explanation
for the faith of Israel is not caused by lack of material. It is
because Israelite "civilization" followed on and was
created through the history of Israel as a people under
God, and the written history of Israel in terms of her own
self-interpretation, had the function of creating and
expressing the fact of Israel as the crucible of a new faith,
in which the relation of man to God asumes a new and
different significance. Israel created itself by creating its
own history as an inner form of being, where the existence
of a people is meaningful in the light of a relation to God
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in the past, the present, and the future.
During the period of the Israelite Empire, there begaa
the prophetic revolt against the political order of Israel, in
which a new personal relation of the individual to God
received form. The revolt is presented as an exodus of the
spiritual Israel from the pragmatic Israel, and the type
becomes a symbolic form when the carriers of meaning
release themselves from the concrete societies of their
birth to develop a religious outlook for all men.
The Order of Wisdom
The order of wisdom is the philosophical attitude, in
which the criterion for a public order is the private ethical
order of an individual who has knowledge of the good.
Voegelin has traced the growth of the attitude from the
mythopoetic writers of Hellas to Plato and Aristotle in
terms of the experience of the political community of the
Greek po/is. The polis was the form to which the
philosophers gave symbolic value as it was the crucible of
experience of disorder, and from the disorder both poets
and philosophers built up the notion of a private order
that was construed as an act of resistance to the public
disorder in which the po/is existed at that time. The act of
resistance is personal and it issues in the privacy of a
personal orderof existence; thus.itisboth therapeutic for
the individual and soteriological for those that would
listen to him. The idea of the philosopher-king of Plato as
a saviour is not "the singular opinion and the isolated
personal feeling that it is often taken for. It seems rather to
be the high crest of a wave of consciousness sweeping
over the East and the West, leading first to a spiritual
revolution in which there appeared saviors who were
thought to be sages and then to a political revolution in
which there appeared kings who were thought to be
saviors" (Dunne, 1974, p. 110). But, although Plato
established the academy as a school for future leaders of
the polis, the personal order of existence became a thing
apart from the public affairs of the polis and Aristotle
retired his philosopher into the stellar regions of the bios
theoreSkoi. In this way, the private order became
divorced from any relevance for the public order, and it
became accepted that the good man need not necessarily
be a good citizen and vice versa.
The Order of Universal Humanity
The final symbol of order is found in the combination
of the pragmatic oikoumene and the spiritual outburst
that recognizes the extensiveness of the ecumene. On the
basis of his examination of the self-interpretation of the
ecumenic empires, Voegelin concluded that these were
political structures sui generis, and cut across the
boundaries of the civilized world of cosmic or personal
order. Concomitant with the establishment of the
pragmatic empires, there were parallel spiritual outbursts
that endeavoured to express the unity of humanity. He
disclosed that the ecumene itself had two symbolic
meanings: first, it means the actual or potential unification
of the civilized world through conquest, or as Polybius had
it the entelechy of a tehs that inhered in the urge to
expansion; second, it means the potential of spiritual
unification through spiritual conversion. Voegelin calls
these the pragmatic and the spiritual ecumenes, and
considers that they coexist in intricate and complex
interrelation with one another.
The great conquests overran and destroyed many
ethnic societies and destroyed the politico-religious order
with which they had existed for centuries. Voegelin says
that the whole process seems to be sensless, for the
empires were a society of societies without any spiritual
substance in their complex power frameworks, and he
develops the theory that they were mere organizational
"shells" seeking for a substance with which they could be
filled. On the other hand, the uprooted cosmic societies,
deprived of the traditional meaning of their existence,
partly responded by an outburst of universal spirituality
that, in turn, formed movements "in search of a people
whose order they could become. 'This millenial process
of dissociation of order", Voegelin remarks (IV, p. 145),
"its vicissitudes to the end in the rise of orthodox imperial
civilizations, is what we have called the Ecumenic Age".
And it is symbolic of a new view in that the "existence of
things is reduced to power; and the process itself is
hypostatized into a powerful existent thing. The mystery of
reality has been deformed into a power game by which
the power of the process keeps itself in existence" (IV,
p. 201).
The Order of Consciousness
History is the structured flow within which man's
consciousness perceives the four orders of his existence,
and, politically speaking, he then builds political forms
that are analogous to the order apprehended at any one
period in time. In a sense the order of time is understood
to lie behind the orders of existence as a subconscious
imprint and when time comes to the fore in conscious
thought an attempt is made to realize on earth an order
whose authority is derived from beyond the now (metaxy)
of man's being. Voegelin calls these attempts to create a
blueprint of Utopia metastatic and believes that they are
meant to exist as paradigms and his search for the order
of history is meant to clarify the components of the
Western symbolic form. The venture is conceived of as a
history of man's attempts to find the source of order and
to create an analogy of this order in his political forms.
This venture led to Voegelin's elucidation of the nature
of political theory in an attempt to clarify the questions to
be asked (1966, pp. 283-354). Briefly the main point of
his essay may be stated as: The source of theoretical
knowledge is the human consciousness that experiences
the tensions of existence within the boundaries of a
particular and peculiar political order. Consciousness
encompasses not only the activities that are carried out in
this existence, i.e. the fact of being in the order, but also
the passions, opinions, subconscious motivations for the
activities that are carried out in bringing the order into
being and sustaining it. The central problem thus is not
the formation of theoretical problems in terms of morality
and values, which invite empiricist restrictions on the one
hand and theoretically untenable speculation on the
other, but the "return" from symbols that have "lost their
meaning" to the analysis of the "experiences which
constitute meaning". Voegelin notes that this approach is
"so generally recognizable as the problem of the present
that specific references are unnecessary". (IV, p. 58). An
aspect of the experiences that constitute meaning are the
opinions upon which political orders have been structured
and, in this sense, opinions become a proper subject of
empirical inquiry, as they are a part of a society's self-
81
 understanding. The historical documents that record such
opinions are the sources for the theoretical analysis
specifically of the society's "preanalytical" self-
interpretation, and to enquire critically, that is analytically,
into the nature of political reality and into the structure of
order requires a consciousness capable of experiencing
this reality at a distance from the pre-analytical self-
understanding of the society. This kind of consciousness,
which must be of the transcendent source of order itself, is
"philosophical consciousness", which produces
symbolisms as the adequate form of expressing its own
uderstanding. The process of forming adequate symbols
to express critical understanding of order is the noetic
process, which can be tested in the crucible of experience
and verified through its conformity to or deviation from
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the experiences of the past. That is, "noesis" (understood
as the critical, theoretical analysis of order experienced in
human consciousness) yields the knowledge that the
actual experience of order points to within the structure of
reality itself. Whatever conforms to this order is "in order";
whatever deviates from it is a source of disorder and
produces ascertainable consequences. Voegelin finds two
further uses of a theory of consciousness:
(1) it keeps the philosopher from deforming
philosophic symbols as it separates the experience
from the symbol, and
(2) it assists in illurhinating the common experiences
found in widely different types of speculative effort
and thus clarifies symbols and terminology.
AN EVALUATION OF ERIC VOEGEUN'S
THOUGHT
Voegelin's analysis of the symbolic forms of social order
and of the consciousness of the forms apparently is
unique in that he is the first political philosopher to seek
consciously for the origins of the forms of order. His
zetema grew out of his studies of the history of political
ideas when he came to realize that modem political
science had moved away from its original and traditional
concem with the totality of man's existence in community
and of his attempts to find some sort of meaning in his
existence. The results of the zetema have been delineated
in this Thesis, and it is believed that sufficient indication
has been given of Voegelin's thought to place him in the
forefront of the attempt by a handful of political
philosophers to recover the grand tradition of the past
and to make of political science the Aristotelian master
science of man and society. His thought and work place
him within the particular tradition of Western political
philosophy that is derived from the classical thought of
antiquity. Specifically, his inquiry is directed at the various
types of plitical order that had formed the origins of the
Western political form together with its potential for
universality. He believes that the experience of the origins
imprinted itself onto the subconsciousness of man, and
that the disorder of modern times is derived from political
philosophies that have degenerated into ideologies
because they have ignored the imprinted origins. The
modem disorder comes from ignorance of the tradition
that views man's societal existence as a coherent whole
and that refers him to an exterior and objective source of
morality in terms of what Voegelin calls the Question,
which is a complex of questions dealing with metaphysics
and man's attempts to discover meaning in his existence.
Also, he has extended the classical insights by
combining elements from a philosophy of symbolic
forms and of man's consciousness of both elements and
forms.
Structure refers to reality in its dual sense: the Reality
that is ultimately significant as the source of order in
man's existence and trie reality of man's unchanging
82
nature, which two forms constitute Being. These aspects
of reality demand that man explore their dimensions
through noetic experience and through the theophanies
that the ultimate Reality has shown to man. Because
man's nature does not change, the experiences that
issued from previous explorations of the noetic and
theophanic depth of the structure of Being are relevant
for modern times and it is necessary to understand these
experiences so as to keep in being the Western symbolic
form. This form has been distorted almost beyond
recognition by the derailment of philosophy from the
course originally laid down for it by the first philosophers
in recorded history, and part of the modem ailment - the
question of alienation, the failure to recognize the telos
that is beyond existence, the metastatic belief that man
can create a symbolic form that will stop in a state ot
perfection - stems from this distortion. This why
Voegelin's attempt to re-capture the experiences of the
past is of the utmost importance for modem man.
Structure also refers to process, where the explorations
of Being and the forms engendered through this
exploration, are the constituents of history, which thus is a
process of Being. Voegelin believes that history occurs
through man's consciousness of his tensional existence in
the metaxy that delineates the area between the poles of
Being - man and God - and that the noetic and
theophanic dimensions engender a response that
specifically is political because the order of society that
man structures depends on the results of these
explorations of Being. This order is not infinitely open to
man's comprehension because its source is God, who
essentially is unknowable, which means that man must
have faith in the unseen, un-imaged source of his own
being and in the morality that is derived from the
theophany of this source. But reason, which also is a
process, pervades the history that it constitutes with a
certain amount of luminosity, which man may use to
discern the order of his existence in the structural process
that is history. That is, the political order must depend on
the interpretation of the order of being that is consistent
with man's knowledge of the source of order, which he
has obtained through the theophanic event Again, once
noetic consciousness develops historically the order of
existence is conceived of as an analogue of the individual
who has explored the depths of the unboundedness of
the ultimate "Reality (as far as any man can go in such a
venture) and has come the closest to a comprehension of
the source and has attuned himself to the depth of his
comprehension in accordance with the measure that the
act of exploration has disclosed to him. This existential
exploration of depth within Being through man's noetic
consciousness constitutes the life of reason, and
Voegelin's zetema is concerned with making explicit the
symbolism of this life. As a Platonist he believes that the
dialectic allows the noetic consciousness to plumb the
contents of the reality of the Ideas, and, as an Aristotelian,
he believes that the empirical study of man's experiences
of order will allow man to discover which of these perfect
his nature. Voegelin constantly draws attention to
language symbols as the repository of historic experiences
of the noetic and theophanic exploration of the meanings
that various civilizational orders have allocated to the
reality of these orders, and he notes that the symbols have
the pragmatic effect of calling for a response that will have
repercussions in the political organization of society - both
ancient and modem. Again, in examining the history of
the symbols of man's political orders, he has made
historicial analysis the discourse of the continuous and
thus has made human consciousness the original subject
of all historical development and all human action where
time is conceived in terms of an openness in which the
 flow of history becomes the unceasing effort of a
consciousness turned in upon itself, trying to grasp itself in
its deepest condition of being so that it may give meaning
to itself. In this way Voegelin has linked a philosophy of
consciousness with ingredients from philosophies of
structure, flow, symbolic forms, and order, and has
established these elements as the constituents of the life
of reason. Such a life, though different in outward form
and dispersed in time, is a continuity because it refers to
the same tetos, and thus the zetemas of the past are
relevant for modem society precisely because of this
element of continuity.
The shared universe of the life of reason is based on
the historical pattern of man's experiencesoforderandof
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his interpretation of them in which the pattern receives
symbolic form through the representational efforts of the
men who are able to articulate the meaning of the form.
Among such men the life of reason is the dominant type
because it allows man to assess the experiences of
different forms of political organizations in terms of which
one best actualizes the potentialities of human nature.
Precisely because human nature does not change, the
efforts of previous thinkers to assess the experiences of
order are relevant for today's society. Voegelin places
himself squarely in the tradition of the life of reason, and
he has entered a powerful plea for the revival of the
life of reason in modern industrial society.
The position taken in this Thesis is that the life of
reason asithasbeen described by Voegelin is relevant to
man's existence in the international and national disorder
of the age, where the standards upon which the West
originally based its political forms have dissolved into a
morass of relativism. Voegelin has said that the classical
political philosophy was the first to take up the zetema
into the subject of order, and that within this conceptual
concern there lie many lessons for modem man; and, in
particular, the lesson that "systems" of political philosopy
that postulate a te/osfor man-in-a-state-of-perfection are
gnostic perversions of the elements of the truth that were
discovered by the classical thinkers. Voegelin has ex-
ercised an enormous influence on the few thinkers who
have bothered to read his work carefully and to try to
understand what he is doing in his zetema into the order
of history, and a few papers in fields other than that of
political philosophy are showing the extent to which his
influence is spreading.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion. Voegelin has answered the question:
what is political science? anew out of a radically re-
oriented reconsideration of the question: what is political
theory and what cognitive avenues lead to its critical
understanding? It is a truism to say that if the paradigm of
any particular discipline is no longer adequate to provide
Summon; of Masters Dissertation
THE FOREIGN POLICY OFDRHF VERWOERD (1958-1966)
byELMARIEDUPLESSIS
university of Pretoria
A number of constraints on South Africa's external
behaviour already manifested themselves in the
international environment by 1958 when Verwoerd
became Prime Ministe. This notwithstanding, South
Africa's external behaviour revealed a freedom of action
that demanded an explanation. Vervoerd's unique
personality gave rise to an examination of the role and
the answers to the questions that are formulated within its
framework, the time has come to change the paradigm
itself. But Voegelin believes that the wrong questions are
being asked and he has re-oriented his analysis towards
what Germino calls the "critical study of the principles of
right order in human social existence" where such
principles are rooted "in the inwardness of human
experience" and are tested by "meditatively re-enacting
the experience" that is being analysed (1967, p. 6).
If Voegelin's analysis is correct, then criteria of order
can be theoretically ascertained, not as values and norms,
but as facts of existence in political society. The obvious
parallel with the natural sciences must have two major
qualifications:
(1) existential order is not an order of physical nature,
and
(2) history, historical change of a fundamentally non-
predictive type is an essential part of the existential
order experienced by man in society.
It follows that noetic analysis cannot yield absolute
values or eternal norms; it is a continuing process of
inquiry with its failues as well as its successes, and it is
confined to the limits of human knowledge.
Voegelins' political philosophy shows two features that
are of importance in formulating the principles of a
political order. These are:
(1) there is now in existence a rigorous type of politicial
theory that has little to do with the establishment of
absolute norms or values and other "unprovable
problems". It has demonstrated its capabilities for
dealing with the traditional questions of political
philosophy beyond the empirical study of the how
and why. and
(2) despite its methodological and philosophical
sophistication and its incorporation of a wide range
of twentieth-century historical and other research,
the philosophy is within the tradition of the great
political thinkers of the Western culture and has
also made an attempt to bring the East within the
same theoretical orientation.
Finally, it may be said the Voegelin has supplied the
conceptual apparatus, and it is now for his successors to
use it so as to gain a greater understanding of the
existence of man in community.
REFERENCES
Dunne, J. (1974), The cities of the Gods, London,
Sheldon Press.
Geomino, D. (1967), Beyond Ideology: the revival of
political theory. New York. Harper & Row.
Voegelin, E. (1966). Anamnesis, Munich Paper.
Voegelin, E. (1975). The Ecumenic Age. Baton Rouse,
Louisiana State University Press.
influence of his personal style and leadership on South
Africa's foreign policy from 1958 to 1966.
Certain characteristics in South Africa's behavoiur
during Verwoerd's term of office, the hypothesis is made
that his personal perceptions and interpretations have
been the most influential factor in his decision-making on
foreign policy. Because no single factor or determinant
83
 accounts for a specific policy, the interrelation between
internal and external factors also is examine.
The research concentrates on specific issues during this
period and includes an analysis of Verwoerd's policy
towards the Commonwealth, the Protectorates, the Black
African states, Rhodesia, and the United Nations. In the
last chapter the emphasis falls on a number of aspects
that were consistently present in his policy decisions.
The study reveals that the role and influence of
Verwoerd's personality was the single most important
factor that influenced South Africa's external behaviour
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84
during this period. An explanation of the prominent
differences between his and previous policies also
therefore can be found in his individual perceptions and
interpretations. Because of his intransigent ideological
convictions about racial matters, the external behaviour of
the state was dominated completely by his domestic
policy of separate development. The increasing
international isolation that the Republic was experiencing
during the late sixties may be regarded as a direct result of
this domestic racial policy,