The January 1953 issue of the Review of Politics featured a unique dialogical exchange of articles between two leading political thinkers of the moment: Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin.Footnote 1 The two cut interesting figures in the American postwar intellectual scene, especially regarding the burgeoning literature on totalitarianism. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism Footnote 2 had appeared in 1951 and quickly earned a place at the forefront of the conversation despite its unorthodox historiography.Footnote 3 Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, published in 1952, offered a similarly distinct approach to understanding the roots of the totalitarian crises of the twentieth century.Footnote 4 Voegelin was invited to review Arendt’s book and she was given the opportunity to respond in the same issue.Footnote 5 This arrangement reflected not only the stature of these two figures, but also the weightiness of the issues at stake. However, this meeting of minds has not garnered the attention accorded to other similarly high-profile philosophical debates of the twentieth century. There is, for example, no book-length study of it in English,Footnote 6 unlike the debates between Ernest Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,Footnote 7 Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève,Footnote 8 Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky,Footnote 9 and Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer.Footnote 10 And yet, despite this lack of sustained study, there is something of a consensus in the secondary literature that Arendt and Voegelin’s views of the problem of totalitarianism are irreconcilable. Seyla Benhabib alludes to “curious distortions” of his interpretation “caused by his own hermeneutic lens” without offering further details about what caused such distortions.Footnote 11 Lisa Jane Disch argues that Arendt and Voegelin approach totalitarianism from “utterly incompatible” perspectives.Footnote 12 Jeffrey Isaac contrasts Voegelin’s “essentialism” with Arendt’s concern for “real historical phenomena.”Footnote 13 Barry Cooper accepts Voegelin’s assessment at the time that Arendt represented the exact kinds of distortions in historical analysis that he had been inveighing against in his attempts to lay the theoretical groundwork for a new approach to political science.Footnote 14 Hinchman argues that Voegelin simply fails to grasp Arendt’s conscientiously “antimetaphysical” philosophical approach in the book.Footnote 15 An interesting exception is the work of Manfred Henningsen, who rightly sees that both Arendt and Voegelin identified the “existential anomie” that characterized modernity.Footnote 16
In this article I argue that there is much to be gained by looking past Voegelin and Arendt’s disagreements in the debate itself, which, although substantive, belie important points of agreement that are only accessible through a close reading of their work from before and after the debate. The upshot of these unsettled disagreements from their exchange is a largely unrecognized convergence in their later approaches to public debates related to totalitarianism. In particular, Arendt and Voegelin both came to emphasize, in strikingly similar ways, the distortions of what I will call “moral reality” which characterized the totalitarian regimes and facilitated their rise. They both argued that politics in the modern age would require a sort of moral involvement, the absence of which had facilitated the rise of totalitarianism and in part defined it. This is illustrated most evidently in the way Arendt and Voegelin dealt with the Schuldfrage, or question of German guilt, that entered popular discourse in Germany in the early 1960s. To be sure, their responses to these questions were based on different first principles, but convergence on the practical question of the Schuldfrage makes this deeper agreement clear. Voegelin’s idea of “first reality” and Arendt’s conception of “reality as such” converge on those irreducibly moral aspects of human being which remain crucially important in the modern world. It is unclear whether the debate itself had any appreciable influence on Voegelin or Arendt’s later thought. But the issues that came up in the debate would remain important thematic concerns for each thinker.
In the first section, I briefly revisit the debate in order to show how both thinkers’ views on the problems inherent to the study of totalitarianism were evolving in 1953. Any significance this meeting of minds might have for the study of totalitarianism must be viewed in the broader context of the interlocutors’ development. In the second section, I examine how they independently reached similar ways of dealing with the questions that attended the Schuldfrage and the Eichmann controversy in the early 1960s. This is an ideal context in which to demonstrate my contention that the disagreements in the 1953 debate were by no means conclusive. Focusing on the debate itself rather than Arendt and Voegelin’s broader development has hindered later interpretations of its significance. In particular, these interpretations miss out on Arendt and Voegelin’s agreement as to the nature of what I call “moral reality.” In the third section, I demonstrate that Arendt and Voegelin’s insights into moral reality actually complement each other. Though they emphasize different sources of our connection to moral reality, their views converge on a sense of moral responsibility that transcends historical givenness.
Revisiting the debate: causality and writing sine ira
In this section, I examine two of the issues that came up in Arendt and Voegelin’s debate that best demonstrate that neither had reached definitive conclusions about the nature and meaning of totalitarianism. The more general differences between Voegelin and Arendt’s views of the historical roots of totalitarianism are well known and need not be rehearsed here in depth. Voegelin had argued that, with the triumph of Christianity as a spiritual and political force, the belief in Christ’s return and Final Judgment became the dominant understanding of history: “The soteriological truth of Christianity … breaks with the [pagan] rhythm of existence; beyond temporal successes and reverses lies the supernatural destiny of man, the perfection through grace in the beyond.”Footnote 17 This eschatological view of history came to dominance as the pagan “world full of gods” receded from popular consciousness.Footnote 18 However, beginning with Gnosticism, these ideas became hypostatized or “immanentized” over the succeeding centuries. Despite the “theoretical fallacy” of turning the “eidos” of history into an object within immanent reality, this view became the dominant interpretation of history.Footnote 19 It had its roots in ancient Gnosticism that wound their way into the thought of Joachim of Fiore, through the Puritans, and into the modern age with the Positivists, Marxist-Leninists, and Nazis: “The totalitarianism of our time must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology.”Footnote 20
Arendt, by contrast, began Origins by examining the most salient features of the totalitarian regimes, making those features thematic, and tracing them only as far back as strictly necessary in order to understand their role in the advent of totalitarianism. Thus, her study focused on the events that paved the way for the appearance of cultural, economic, and ideological features that preceded totalitarianism in history. This resulted in a three-part study that focused on antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism, respectively. Along the way she covered such seemingly disparate topics as the Dreyfus Affair, the Boer War, the life of T. E. Lawrence, and the thought of Cecil Rhodes. This grab-bag of historical data is held together by the idea that all these developments, on some level, facilitated the subsequent superfluity of the emerging masses of people. As a result of these historical forces, persons came to be viewed as superfluous, a tendency which Arendt argues culminated in the singularly horrible destruction of personhood in the concentration camps. This superfluity was thus both the condition for and the ultimate goal of totalitarianism.Footnote 21
Two issues that came up in the debate are particularly revealing in this respect: the question of causality versus agency and the question of whether or not one can write history sine ira, which in this context means without becoming morally involved. On each of these issues, they would argue forcefully for their respective positions in the debate, then subtly modify their viewpoints in the years that followed.
Causality
The question of causality concerns the relation between individual persons and the larger historical forces that shape them. The question is whether one’s historical circumstances or his or her agency is decisive in the advent of historical events. Social, economic, and cultural forces play a large role in Arendt’s analysis, and Voegelin asserts that such emphasis misses the point. In Voegelin’s words,
[Arendt’s] treatment of movements of the totalitarian type on the level of social situations and change, as well as of types of conduct determined by them, is apt to endow historical causality with an aura of fatality. Situations and changes, to be sure, require, but they do not determine a response. … If conduct is not understood as the response of a man to a situation, and the varieties of response as rooted in the potentialities of human nature rather than in the situation itself, the process of history will become a closed stream, of which every cross-cut at a given point of time is the exhaustive determinant of the future course.Footnote 22
Arendt responds with her famous “elements” and “crystallization” explanation of the role that impersonal forces play in history:
What I did … was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history of totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history; I did not write a history of antisemitism or of imperialism, but analyzed the element of Jew-hatred and the element of expansion insofar as these elements were still clearly visible and played a decisive role in the totalitarian phenomenon itself. The book, therefore, does not really deal with the “origins” of totalitarianism—as its title unfortunately claims—but gives a historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism.Footnote 23
Arendt’s thinking on this point is not entirely clear. The claim that the “elements” of antisemitism and imperialism “played a decisive role in the totalitarian phenomenon itself” seems to stand on its own. Accordingly, her comment in the preface to the first edition of Origins that she was trying to better understand the “hidden mechanics” behind totalitarianism lends further plausibility to this assertion.Footnote 24 Yet there are also hints scattered throughout the book that reflect a certain level of ambiguity. Just after the hidden mechanics comment, she notes that one should not try to deduce “the unprecedented from the precedented.”Footnote 25 In the end, then, the comment on “elements” which “crystallized” does not clarify the issue with any finality. The question was: if historical forces are not decisive in allowing totalitarianism to come about, what is? While Arendt seems to have had a definite sense that the moral awareness of individual people mattered, she was still in the process of providing a precise articulation of how she understood it. Her responses would become clearer over time, but there was room for an astute reader like Voegelin to raise the question fairly.
Arendt makes any number of comments elsewhere in the debate which could be read as responses to Voegelin’s question on causality. However, her opinion was not as well-formed in 1953 as it would become later. For example, in her late 1953 essay “Understanding and Politics,” Arendt would assert that “Whoever in the historical sciences honestly believes in causality actually denies the subject matter of his own science.”Footnote 26 She explains further in a footnote that “an event belongs to the future, marks a beginning, insofar as this crystallization itself can never be deduced from its own elements, but is caused invariably by some factor which lies in the realm of human freedom.”Footnote 27 Further, Arendt’s emerging notion of plurality, what she would later define as “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” did not appear in the first edition of the book.Footnote 28 In the second edition, published in 1958, she writes that “Total domination … strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings.”Footnote 29 The conspicuous inclusion of the concept in this important section of the book is a telling addition. Further, as Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells have pointed out, prior to the appearance of Voegelin’s review, Arendt twice responded to a letter which Voegelin had sent her asking for clarification on some of the issues that came up in the published debate. The first draft of the letter, which she did not send, included an explanation of the role plurality played in her analysis. The second, which she did send, does not mention plurality.Footnote 30
Plurality is connected to her notion of natality which was also developing at the time, and likewise only appeared in the second edition of the book:Footnote 31
[T]here remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—”that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.Footnote 32
Although she had been grappling with these ideas at least since writing her dissertation on St Augustine, she had not yet fully or thematically incorporated them into her analysis of totalitarianism.Footnote 33
Hence, any reading of this debate does well to take into account these later elaborations. Arendt was in a period of theoretical flux as she thought through the broader implications of the work she had done in Origins, which prevented her from unequivocally responding to Voegelin’s questions. The ideas were present in her mind, but not yet fully developed. As Arendt wrote in her letter to Voegelin before the publication of the debate, “At the moment my own thinking is just at the stage (the in-between stage) at which it is both too late and too early to be brief.”Footnote 34
Writing history sine ira
Another issue in the debate relates to writing about historical subjects “sine ira.” In this context, Arendt and Voegelin are referring to the tradition of approaching historical subjects without getting morally involved with the subject matter in an explicit way. He writes that
This organization of the materials … cannot be completely understood without its emotional motivation … [T]here can be no doubt that the fate of the mass slaughter and the homelessness of displaced persons, is for the author a center of emotional shock, the center from which radiates her desire to inquire into the causes of the horror, to understand political phenomena in Western civilization that belong to the same class, and to consider means that will stem the evil. This emotionally determined method of proceeding from a concrete center of shock toward generalizations leads to a delimitation of subject matter.Footnote 35
Even though the literal meaning of the term is “without anger,” it would be more accurate to describe Arendt’s approach in the book as “moral shock” rather than “emotional shock.” However, while Voegelin’s use of the term “emotional shock” is deficient in this case, his meaning on the broader question of writing sine ira merits close consideration. Given this, I retain the substance of Voegelin’s broader questions, but utilize the term “moral” in my own analysis.
Returning to Voegelin’s point, the question is: are political scientists or historians a part of the reality they study? Arendt responds that:
I parted quite consciously with the tradition of sine ira et studio of whose greatness I was fully aware, and to me this was a methodological necessity closely connected with my particular subject matter. … If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities. … I therefore cannot agree with Professor Voegelin that the “morally abhorrent and the emotionally existing will overshadow the essential,” because I believe them to form an integral part of it.Footnote 36
While it isn’t clear whether Arendt understands Voegelin as arguing in favor of a Weberian value-free standard (he was not), he does criticize the theoretical basis of her analysis, which guides her selection of relevant facts to include in her argument (i.e., the moral shock of the events themselves). For Voegelin, allowing this moral shock to serve as the theoretical starting point of her analysis prevents her from connecting totalitarianism to a deeper cause much farther back in history: “Then the origins of totalitarianism would not have to be sought primarily in the fate of the national state and attendant social and economic changes since the eighteenth century, but rather in the rise of immanentist sectarianism since the high Middle Ages.”Footnote 37
Yet Voegelin’s concern here is interesting, given Voegelin’s struggles with this very question. Ambiguities on this subject had started early in Voegelin’s career. In a 1925 essay on Max Weber, he pointed to what he viewed as a contradiction at the core of Weber’s “value-free” social science: “[Weber] has reached the irrational limit of objective rational formation, because the establishment of this philosophy of history was the very work of the daimon that this philosophy itself mentioned. The objective rational structure of the historical world is thereby, as it were, abolished.”Footnote 38 Later, he wrote that the “internalization of the course of events, this immersion of the external process into a movement of the soul, is possible because the internalizing soul is itself part of the stream.”Footnote 39
On the other hand, he had written in the introduction to History of Political Ideas (written in 1940) that “a political theory … would be the product of detached contemplation of political reality.”Footnote 40 His approach in that work was to differentiate between “ideas,” which play a part in creating the reality they articulate, and “theory,” which is “the product of detached contemplation of political reality.”Footnote 41 In 1938, Voegelin had responded along these lines to Thomas Mann, who had criticized his excessive “objectivity” in the foreword to his 1938 book The Political Religions:
My “objectivity” has its source in a deep pessimism concerning the Western world’s ability to combat nihilism. I can discern no movements that, in my view, would justify a literary struggle against National Socialism. And the impossibility to publicly express a radical position at all … only serves to strengthen me in my pessimismFootnote 42
Even in The New Science of Politics, Voegelin had hoped to attain the “dispassionate gaze” of the “theoretical attitude.”Footnote 43
It was only with the abandonment of his History of Political Ideas project, which had consumed him for over a decade, that Voegelin would leave this theoretical approach behind. There is no neutral theoretical standpoint from which one can observe events. Even the theorist is a part of the reality he or she invokes. This is evident in his famous introduction to the first volume of Order and History, the first fruits of this new theoretical approach (first published in 1956), where he declares that
God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it.Footnote 44
This participation is what the study of totalitarianism (indeed, the writing of any history) demands. As he would later write, “Reality is not a given that could be observed from a vantage point outside itself but embraces the consciousness in which it becomes luminous.”Footnote 45 I am not arguing here that Voegelin advocated anything like a “value-free” social science in his debate with Arendt. My claim is that he had not fully clarified for himself the exact role of the theorist, as his differentiation between “theory” and “ideas” shows. This clarification was not decisively made until after the debate with Arendt.
For her part, Arendt explicitly explores the implications such an approach holds for the study of totalitarianism. Drawing on the tradition of Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften, she terms it “understanding,” which includes problems that are approached existentially, not solved definitively. In an essay on the topic, Arendt had written that the process of understanding is
unending and therefore cannot produce final results. It is the specifically human way of being alive; for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he was born a stranger, and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger. Understanding begins with birth and ends with death. To the extent that the rise of totalitarian governments is the central event of our world, to understand totalitarianism is not to condone anything, but to reconcile ourselves to a world in which such things are possible at all.Footnote 46
This type of personal involvement in the questions related to totalitarianism had, as they had been for Voegelin, been further clarified after the debate with Voegelin. In a somewhat less direct fashion, Voegelin had also come around to the view that the totalitarian atrocities demand a more explicit moral involvement.Footnote 47
A closer examination of these two issues over the longer arc of their development shows that both authors were circling around key issues related to the project of understanding totalitarianism and its significance. They were attempting to understand it, not simply as an object of historical or methodological interest, but as something by which we all are implicated.
Eichmann and the Schuldfrage
Arendt on Eichmann
Arendt and Voegelin’s later, more fully fleshed out approach to these questions is most evident in their respective treatments of the questions that came up surrounding the Schuldfrage, which for Arendt manifested in the controversy over her coverage of what might be called the Eichmann phenomenon. Voegelin covered the Schuldfrage more broadly in his 1964 lectures later published in Hitler and the Germans. Footnote 48
Even before the articles Arendt had written about the 1961 Eichmann trial for the New Yorker were collected in Eichmann in Jerusalem,Footnote 49 Arendt had begun to face backlash.Footnote 50 Anson Rabinbach has called it “the most bitter public dispute among intellectuals and scholars concerning the Holocaust that has ever taken place.”Footnote 51 Two areas of particular controversy were Arendt’s judgment of the Judenräte, or Jewish councils, that in some cases abetted deportation of Jews during the Holocaust, and second, her interpretation of Eichmann’s understanding of his own role in the crimes he committed.
The Judenräte were councils made up of Jews “appointed by the Nazis to organize the Jewish communities and carry out the Nazi directives.”Footnote 52 Most provocatively, they would keep track of who was living in their ghettos and provide lists of names of Jews to be “resettled,” which often meant transportation to concentration or extermination camps, as some council members knew.Footnote 53 Richard Bernstein notes that, “Despite objections, protests, and even suicides by some council members, the Nazis were remarkably successful in organizing these councils and seeing that they functioned properly.”Footnote 54 The Nazis were, to a surprising degree, successful in getting the Jewish councils to comply with their murderous directives, rendering these local leaders in some sense complicit with Nazi crimes.Footnote 55
Arendt calls this “the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”Footnote 56 A crucial part of Eichmann’s defense was “the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution.”Footnote 57 Eichmann saw no reason to question this murderous process, when the Jewish leaders themselves sometimes didn’t resist. Arendt even went so far as to assert that these Jewish leaders were in some sense themselves responsible for the proportions of the death toll of the Holocaust:
Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.Footnote 58
Arendt seemed to place a hefty share of the blame on the Jews themselves for their plight, without accounting for the usual difficulties inherent to such sweeping judgments. For present purposes, however, what matters is that, by this time, Arendt had come to see more clearly that even victims are still somehow responsible for their actions. Though swept up in forces beyond their control, they still retain moral agency. Whether she was historically correct in her analysis in this particular instance is less important than the fact that she was emphasizing the moral agency of individual persons more emphatically than she did at the time of her debate with Voegelin. Her thinking had developed since 1953.
Rather than taking Eichmann to be a Jew-hating monster, as the prosecution tried to paint him, she surprisingly described him as “an average, ‘normal’ person”:
Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts. … However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.” This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.Footnote 59
As Bernstein points out, these lines are easy to misconstrue.Footnote 60 The point was that, “under the conditions of the Third Reich,” as Arendt put it, Eichmann was nothing special.Footnote 61 He had so totally imbibed the pseudo-reality which the Reich had created and fostered that he was somehow unable to truly question what he was doing. The problem was “that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”Footnote 62
Arendt is saying that everything, from his bourgeois upbringing, the encouragement of his superiors, down to the apparent cooperation of some Jews, made it obvious to him that he was just a functionary in a process that exceeded his own powers of understanding. Like other members of the superfluous masses, he was caught up in the sweep of history. His capacity to stand in moral judgment on such large historical forces was diminished. Arendt notes Eichmann’s realization, upon seeing how eager elites, not only in the SS or the Nazi Party, but even Civil Service members were “fighting with each other for the honor of taking the lead in these ‘bloody’ matters.” He commented that “‘At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.’”Footnote 63 It was “well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong.”Footnote 64 This was also manifest in his open admission that “‘Officialese (Amtssprache) is my only language.’”Footnote 65 He was unable to speak with anything but the most hackneyed clichés:
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.Footnote 66
The pseudo-reality of the regime had so infiltrated his thought that Eichmann’s ability to conscientiously respond to the events in which he was taking part was somehow impaired.Footnote 67 Elsewhere, Arendt asks “Who was he to judge? Who was he ‘to have [his] own thoughts in this matter?’”Footnote 68 He had become incapable of accessing what Arendt called “reality as such”.Footnote 69 And yet, she still thought that Eichmann deserved death. Regardless of the historical causality involved, he retained a responsibility for his actions.
Voegelin on the Schuldfrage
Arendt had an unlikely ally in Voegelin on these questions of moral responsibility. He was also focused on the question of the German peoples’ memory of the Nazi regime. This came to a head in his lecture series Hitler and the Germans, originally given in 1964, in which he cites Arendt’s book on Eichmann several times.Footnote 70 While not reacting specifically to the Eichmann trial, Voegelin’s lectures might be best characterized as a set of extended reflections on the question of German guilt that had become pressing in light of recent events in Germany.Footnote 71
Voegelin begins by critiquing and ultimately rejecting two clichés, prominent at the time in German society: “mastering the past” and “collective guilt.” For him, “mastering the past,” if it is to mean anything at all, must mean something like living in the present in relation to that which stands outside time. There is no final stage of mastery; a proper stance toward the past is indelibly a part of existence, nothing that we can ever master and set aside. The past is always a concern for human being, while the present means right orientation toward that which transcends this moment.Footnote 72 Second, collective guilt does not exist, for only individual persons exist in relation to this existential transcendence: “guilt is always something that can be attributed to a person.”Footnote 73 This gives rise to what Voegelin calls the “Buttermelcher syndrome,” one’s reluctance to call a leader they once followed contemptible simply because they themselves were once held under his or her sway.Footnote 74 This is why the question of who Adolf Hitler really was continued to dog Germans at the time Voegelin was writing.Footnote 75 The many awkward accounts of Hitler’s “charisma” or supposedly effective aspects of his leadership cited in the book suggest that the Germans were continuing to struggle with who Hitler was because of their own inability to come to terms with the fact that they had been persuaded by him. There were many former Nazis who had yet to level with their own (albeit in most cases indirect) complicity. Here Voegelin is laying his finger on the moral catastrophe that presaged and characterized Nazi totalitarianism; he calls it “stupidity.”
Voegelin uses the term in a technical sense.Footnote 76 Stupidity describes those who are incapable of opening themselves up to a truth outside the phenomenal facts of their own situation. Echoing Arendt, he calls this a “loss of reality”: “Stupidity shall here mean that a man, because of his loss of reality, is not in a position to rightly orient his action in the world in which he lives.”Footnote 77 This was an important aspect of Voegelin’s larger project at the time. He was intent on showing how transcendent truths, when articulated in language or other forms of symbolization, constituted an essential moment in the coming-into-being of political communities.Footnote 78 Conceptually speaking, these truths find their ultimate source in the “Divine Ground.” As he explains in a 1965 essay, “The Ground of existence is an experienced reality of a transcendent nature toward which one lives in a tension.”Footnote 79 But this Divine Ground is non-objective, meaning it cannot be fully captured by intentional consciousness. It is on some level accessible to intentional consciousness but as a whole it transcends it. Any assertions about it must be reified into symbols in order to be made communicable to intentional consciousness. This is a necessary step in the founding of any society. As Voegelin puts it in The New Science of Politics, “Articulation is the condition of representation. In order to come into existence, a society must articulate itself.”Footnote 80 The articulations help one retain a sense of reality, so long as they can evoke something of the original experience of the Divine Ground.
But this essential step in the formation of communities (i.e., the articulation of the originating experiences of the Divine Ground) can end in what he calls a “linguistic failure,” that is, “a loss of the linguistic expression for the description and treatment of this sector of reality, so that distortions in the representation of reality occur.”Footnote 81 One’s inability to linguistically identify and communicate aspects of reality as indices of participation in it leads to a deficient relation to reality. In this case, the linguistic indices of reality have become opaque to the original experiences of transcendent reality.Footnote 82 Elsewhere, Voegelin writes that a sense of reality “would be lost if [one] were to make reality into an object of knowledge from a standpoint outside of reality. Insight into reality is insight from the perspective of man who participates in reality.”Footnote 83
Voegelin therefore differentiates these classes of phenomena into “first” and “second reality.” He remarks that “reality and experience of reality are replaced by a false image of reality. The man, thus, no longer lives in reality, but in a false image of reality.” A genuine first reality based in linguistic expressions of experiences of transcendence is obscured behind the second reality of totalitarian ideological existence. “There are then … two realities: the first reality, where the normally ordered man lives, and the second reality, in which the pneumatically disturbed man now lives and which thus comes into constant conflict with the first reality.”Footnote 84
Such a second reality can become compelling insofar as it seems to stand apart from anything that a person can affect, as Eichmann’s tragicomic invocation of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy during his defense shows. Eichmann had argued that “he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.”Footnote 85 We might plausibly surmise Voegelin’s interpretation of this defense stratagem. Eichmann’s understanding of Kant is completely cut off from reality insofar as it does not evoke Kant’s original insight as to the universal rational basis of morality. Kant’s philosophical symbolism ideally evokes first reality for those who read his philosophy. Taken this way, Kant’s moral thought requires not only a commitment to duty, but a responsibility for the universality of one’s moral precepts, and a duty never to treat other rational creatures as ends.Footnote 86
The key step for Eichmann was his reformulation of the categorical imperative to accord with the second reality he inhabited: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.”Footnote 87 Once a sense of first reality is lost, even the most humane philosophy might be grotesquely twisted to meet any end. Kant’s words have become dead objects to Eichmann. They are nothing more than tools one might freely manipulate to whatever purpose seems expedient, in this case in order to justify Eichmann’s instrumental role in mass murder.
Voegelin warns that: “Although we are compelled to speak in terms of objects because of the intentionality of consciousness, the linguistic terms used do not have the character of concepts or definitions referring to things. They have no meaning apart from the movement in the realm of reality of participation.”Footnote 88 Even though symbolization is an essential step in the process of community formation, reality can only be known through participation. Eichmann and the former Nazi fellow travelers Voegelin critiqued in Hitler and the Germans were guilty of relinquishing this participation. They yearned for a sense of absolution insofar as the moral responsibility lay elsewhere. As Arendt said of Eichmann: “he no longer ‘was master of his own deeds,’ … he was unable ‘to change anything.’”Footnote 89 But a sense of first reality demands participation. Even though one might live in a second reality, even though they might be wholly ensconced in the practices, language, and belief systems of their cultural milieu, they are always claimed by something that transcends the present, that reaches beyond the given facts of their immediate situation. Getting involved is required: “man is conscious of reality as a process, of himself as being part of reality, and his consciousness as a mode of participation in its process.”Footnote 90
Toward an understanding of moral reality
Arendt’s “reality as such” and Voegelin’s “first reality,” taken together, are the core of my argument for these two thinkers’ convergence. “Convergence” in the sense I’m using it here does not mean that they agreed on every point. Yet they do occupy surprisingly similar positions when it comes to the practical import of their sense of a certain moral responsibility that characterizes human being: we are responsible for something which transcends the present phenomenal reality in which we are always ensconced. But they begin from different starting points. For Arendt, reality as such finds its origin in the act of speaking and acting in common, of having a world with others. For Voegelin, it was more about a right ordering of the soul toward the eternal which is communicated to others in an effort to evoke the originating experience of transcendence.Footnote 91
Nevertheless, the two positions are not mutually exclusive. Although Voegelin articulates this dimension in explicitly transcendent terms and Arendt locates it within the worldly structure of plurality, they converge on the claim that moral obligation emerges from a reality that surpasses human volition and cannot be reduced to social construction. Both saw the moral hazards inherent to disconnection from what might be called “moral reality.” Arendt and Voegelin arrived at a shared insight that we are responsible for our actions even when the pressures of history or the laws of nature seem to determine them. Moral reality as I mean it is the source of this awareness within the experience of actual human beings, whether viewed as emerging out of the shared world of mutual appearance in speech and action, or through an experience of the eternal within time which is then evoked symbolically in others. It is not known in itself conceptually, as in, for example, the way we know mathematical concepts, but through a positive sense of one’s own participation in its unfolding. It manifests itself most obviously in concrete situations. It is a non-objective moral horizon which encompasses the manifold phenomena of human existence, and exceeds any given configuration of historical existence, yet makes moral demands within it.
I have argued that Arendt and Voegelin were able to demonstrate their sense of moral reality most clearly through its absence in certain Germans who were incapable of understanding why they were responsible for their indirect roles in the Nazi atrocities. Their lack of a sense of participation or connection to reality as such prevented them from garnering a sense of their own culpability in the tragedy. It is a sense of this moral reality on which Voegelin and Arendt converge, despite starting from different conceptual assumptions. While it exhibits a non-thing-like nature (i.e., the impossibility of capturing the whole in intentional consciousness), it is knowable in part in certain concrete cases.
A positive example comes in Arendt’s retelling of the story of Anton Schmidt, a German soldier who had helped hundreds of Jewish refugees escape arrest by the Wehrmacht. He was eventually found out and executed. The contrast of this story, which came up during witness testimony during the Eichmann trial, with the darkness of Eichmann’s defense, inspired a spontaneous moment of silence in his honor during the trial.Footnote 92 The story illustrates this moral reality, which cannot be exhausted in conceptual speech but only fully manifests itself in praxis. It appears as an awareness that we are situated in time yet responsible for that reality which is always making claims on us, whether we are affected by historical forces or pretending to a “theoretical attitude.”
There remain important differences in the way that Arendt and Voegelin understand the sources of what I have called here “moral reality.” Yet even given these substantial differences, the respective approaches of these two thinkers offer reciprocally supportive and complementary points of view. Despite these different emphases, however, both thinkers are, to some extent, aware of the importance of the aspects the other emphasizes. As we have seen, Voegelin writes extensively on the problem of symbolization as essential for experiences of order in the soul. For him, truth is available as a source of political order insofar as it is symbolized in art, religion, philosophy, etc. “The truth conveyed by the symbols, however, is the source of right order in human existence; we cannot dispense with it; and as a consequence, the pressure is great to restate the exegetic account discursively for the purpose of communication.”Footnote 93 Socrates, as the archetypal statesman, exemplifies the structure: an experienced love for the good, which is communicated to others.Footnote 94 This communication establishes political community: “Community in the nous, carried by that noetic self, is for Aristotle the basic political virtue.”Footnote 95 As a result, Voegelin asserts that philosophy is actually a “social enterprise.”Footnote 96 Elsewhere, he writes “Communication [in the sense of persuasion through rational discourse] is the process in which the substantive order of a community is created and maintained.”Footnote 97
Similarly, Arendt allows a role for rational or philosophical truth in her description of political life. For example, in her notion of “exemplary truth”: “This transformation of a theoretical or speculative statement into exemplary truth—a transformation of which only moral philosophy is capable—is a borderline experience for the philosopher: by setting an example and ‘persuading’ the multitude in the only way open to him, he has begun to act.”Footnote 98 Rational truth as such is not therefore categorically excluded from the public realm for Arendt.
Conclusions
In their 1953 debate, Arendt and Voegelin disagreed strenuously over points that they had grappled with before, and would continue to refine afterwards. This warrants a renewed reading of their debate in the broader context of these two thinkers’ development over the course of their careers. In particular, their convergence on a sense of the practical import of what I have called moral reality emerged in their respective handlings of the Schuldfrage and the Eichmann phenomenon. Voegelin’s first reality and Arendt’s reality as such, though they have differing metaphysical origins, evoke a sense of totalitarianism as at least in part a moral catastrophe. The two approaches, though different in many respects, are far from being mutually exclusive or contradictory.
Thus, there is a clear payoff for those willing to do the extra work of grappling with the longer arc of these two thinkers’ development, especially in terms of how we understand the relevance of totalitarianism today. Totalitarianism reveals itself in this debate as in part a moral crisis. Both had taken a sort of “via negativa” to a firmer grasp of each person’s responsibility for the moral fabric of political life. To be sure, the ultimate nature of this moral reality is not always perfectly clear, conceptually speaking. But it is possible to get a sense of it in practice. This is made clear in Arendt and Voegelin’s case in the Schuldfrage and Eichmann debates. Each had taken different paths to similar forms of praxis. Reading them together in this way shows that a constantly renewed sense of moral reality will continue to be essential as we deal with the specters of totalitarianism that continue to appear in our post-totalitarian world.
