A Night in Heidelberg: Voegelin’s Letters on Heidegger

voegelinview.com/a-night-in-heidelberg-pt-1/

Myron Jackson April 18, 2012

In surviving letters we can often find those candid

expressions that help us complete a portrait of the
writer. Such is the case with the publication of the
thirtieth volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin,
Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984 (2007).1 It presents
aspects of Voegelin that will help us gain a fuller
understanding of him as a man, a man who even at times
resorted to what he termed a “peasant roughness.” 2Of
particular interest are the references to Martin
Heidegger and his fundamental ontology. The letters
contain Voegelin’s most detailed remarks assessing the
influence and success of Heidegger’s work, which work is
often seen to be marred by his early enthusiasm for
Hitler’s regime.

Voegelin scholars have long been aware of Voegelin’s impatient attitude towards anyone
who could engage in such ideological nonsense, especially given that Voegelin himself
managed to become persona non grata in Austria after the 1938 Nazi Anschluss and
barely escaped, eventually arriving in the US. While Voegelin had a tendency to
emphasize this negative aspect of Heidegger, others are apt to focus on his philosophical
contributions. Prevalent throughout philosophy, political science, and history
departments is the “theory of the ‘two Heideggers’–the good philosopher and bad
politician–[which] no longer seems tenable or adequate in light of a contemporary sense
of the entwinement of thinking and action and of knowledge and power.”3

Clearly, we would be hard pressed to find others willing to disagree with Voegelin’s
opinion of Heidegger’s murky political past. What remains in dispute is how he would
have responded to Heidegger’s philosophical insights regarding historical consciousness,
ontology, and theology. Admittedly, these topical areas must be addressed, along with
the politics so we can attempt to grasp the person as a whole through both his life and
works. This article will give a preliminary analysis of Voegelin’s assessment of Heidegger’s
philosophy found in the Selected Correspondence to complement Voegelin’s well-known
published critique.

First, we will consider the various comments on Heidegger found in the Selected
Correspondence, detailing how they coincide with some of the central themes running
through Voegelin’s thought. Next, Voegelin’s other published remarks dealing with
Heidegger will be tied to issues of ontology and consciousness. The concentration will be

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on the parallels and differences mentioned in Hughes 4 and Walsh.5 Finally, Voegelin’s
hostile judment will be weighed against the possibility that Heidegger does in fact offer a
viable political theory.

Voegelin’s Correspondence on Heidegger

Given that he was born in Cologne and served as the founding head of the Institute for
Political Science at the University of Munich for ten years, Voegelin was well acquainted
with the intellectual climate of Germany and Europe. Especially pertinent was the work
being done on Heidegger which preoccupied much of the time and attention of his
contemporaries. And it would be fair to say that Voegelin himself was interested in what
Heidegger had to say or what his colleagues thought about him.

Voegelin is widely known for his scathing critique of modern political ideologies that
resonate with gnostic predilections, but sadly he is not as widely known when it comes to
his philosophy of consciousness. His analyses of problems pertaining to historical
existence depend on his theory of human consciousness, a theory which preoccupied
him during his later years–and at a time when Heidegger remained influential.

Voegelin states that on the “problems of existence I was, of course, influenced by Jaspers
and Heidegger.” In a letter to Eugene Webb on February 16, 1977, he mentions briefly at
the end that “I have studied practically all the work of Heidegger . . . .”7 But there are
clearly too many barbs leveled at Heidegger to be overlooked, such as his 1970
observation that he might have become an existentialist too, “though he recovered
reason when he saw what existentialism in the form of Heidegger’s could become” 8

While sending the “rent money” for a three-month stay with colleague Aron Gurwitsch On
June 1, 1956, Voegelin complements him on his successful national “lecture program,”
during a troubling time for philosophy in Germany “Mainz is probably still the worst; and
Cologne still looks pretty bad, too.” And then he offers a back-handed compliment:
“Freiburg is in pretty good shape–but then again, Heidegger is there.” 9 He then shows
his curiosity by asking: “Will you visit him?”10 After reading Heidegger’s “Letter on
Humanism” in 1950, he was left with a “peculiar impression: he is much more classic-
conservative (more Platonic) than I was clear about, and at the same time a peculiar
German oddball” (emphasis added). 11

Voegelin remained interested in Heidegger despite the fact that “the night in Heidelberg
in the winter of 1929 in which I devoured Being and Time like a detective novel is long
gone.” 12 As he tells Karl Löwith in 1952, Heidegger’s “temperament” and “technical
competence” was “impressive” and “moved” him). 13 But he was never sympathetic
philosophically, as he wrote much later, in 1975:

“In Kyoto I was surprised to find all the people who are somebody to be deeply involved in
German philosophy of the Husserl-Heidegger-Gadamer type, because they all have studied in
Germany–not exactly my taste (emphasis added).”14

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In a 1965 letter to Max Müller, Voegelin explains how Heidegger’s philosophizing remains
within a limited “horizon” through his misguided interpretation of Plato and Aristotle. 15
In Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle we find him emphasizing the
“four causae” in opposition to the divine ground of being (aition), but he wrongly
associates aition as a cause, used in the proofs of God. This was the Aristotle of the
Scholastics, “the post-Aristotelian commentary- and school-metaphysics.”

Heidegger ignores the fact that:

“ground-aition still has for Aristotle the compact meaning of the ground or the beginning in
the sense of the myth–myth, in the strict sense of a story that explains the present from its
beginning, is a basic language form of the exegesis of being endowed with form as well as
duration–in a duration that does not yet differentiate between time and eternity but has the
symbolic form of the Time of the Tale, as I have called this symbolism.”16

This criticism of not acknowledging the myth contained within Aristotle’s prote
philosophia is also leveled at Heidegger’s critique of Plato’s philosophy as overly “eidetic.”

A Fundamental Misapprehension of Plato and Aquinas

Relying on his belief in participation (methexis), Voegelin finds that the language of the
forms (eidos) found in the Phaedo expresses the “mysteries” of “presence (parousia) and
the community” (koinonia). The ideas penetrate and “constitutes the reality” of a thing in
the same way God, or the gods, speak the “Word” (logos) to prophets or tragic Heros. 17
Heidegger should have known better since he works with Ionic symbols, which were
advanced in a kosmos “full of gods.”

Four years later in a letter to Michael Murray where he attempts to address philosophical
problems, Voegelin suggests that they “will dissolve if one simply does not focus all
philosophical attention on what Heidegger considers to be the difference between Being
and beings.”18 The ontological difference that Heidegger popularized in his fundamental
ontology not only contains “a residuum of myth,” but “should be eliminated from
philosophy.”19 For what justification does Heidegger give that “Being should be the
ultimate category of philosophy?“20 Besides “the difference between a Grund and an
Abgrund is nothing extraordinary.” 21

Once again, Voegelin attacks Heidegger based on his misunderstanding of myth because,
“he mixes up the intracosmic Gods of myth and the Abgrund of the mystics.”22 Aquinas is
praised as having already addressed the issue in three phases “as the depth structure in
the experience of God of (1) God as Being; (2) God as person with a name; and (3) God as
the nameless, impenetrable substance.”23 And Voegelin does not believe that a
reconciliation of Heidegger and Aquinas is possible, which is why he has not studied Karl
Rahner carefully.24 So Voegelin is convinced that Heidegger does not know the Abgrund
of the mystics when he talks of God on the ontic level, as a particular being.

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Voegelin tells Alfred Schütz that in speculating on God, if “fallacies are to be avoided,”
then Aquinas’ “Tetragrammaton” notion must remain in differentiating the Trinity of the
dogma:

“The first of these experience is that of the radical transcendence of God (Thomistically
heightened: the God of philosophical speculation, ‘being’; the God of theological speculation,
the personal God who has a ‘name’; the personless, nameless, radically transcendent God of
the Tetragrammaton”–a masterly phenomenology, by the way, of the experiences of
transcendence)” (emphasis added). 25

Notice the words “masterly phenomenology” and the context of traditional Trinitarian
theology.

Distorting Schelling

This is a crucial point at which Voegelin and Heidegger diverge in their interpretations of
Friedrich Schelling’s process theology. In his 1936 lecture course on Schelling, Heidegger
took the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) to be working towards an existential analytic of
Dasein despite remaining within the tradition of ontotheology (1985).26 With the
explanation given of the Godhead’s movement and structure in Schelling, Heidegger
believed him to go beyond all prior philosophical theology by giving a phenomenological
account of the Godhead. God has a “shadow,” or a “ground” which “is in” Him but “is not”
Him, such as is nature. Thus, there is a “presence and absence” or “revealing and
concealing” structure by which Schelling has formulated God’s self-consciousness.

In contrast we have Voegelin appealing to a more modest phenomenology of “pure act”

that still accounts for mystery, ineffability, and incomprehensibility of the divine. This is
the direction in which Schelling moved towards the end in his private thought, which was
published posthumously when dealing with mythology and revelation–something of
which Heidegger was most certainly aware but for some reason ignored! Perhaps this is
why Voegelin tells Gurwitsch that he has “reservations” about Husserl’s “Transcendental
Consciousness”:

“And these reservations seem to have a certain significance, for one must not forget after all
that Heidegger (let not his name be used in phenomenology) broke out into ontology
because of his dissatisfaction with the status of the problematic. And what a bad ontology–
since it shares with Husserl’s position the refusal to discuss the premises of philosophizing
(emphasis added).”27

A Failure of Transcendence

While still recovering from “a complicated gall bladder operation,” Voegelin comments on
a poem by Wallace Stevens and its connection to Heidegger, Nietzsche and Hegel. It
deals with the “’failure of transcendence’ [which] does not mean the transcendence has

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failed, but that something is existentially wrong with the man who is the victim of such
failure.” 28 Voegelin appeals to the title of Stevens’ poem, “The Course of the Particular” as
the precise characterization that accompanies this “deformation of existence.”29

The “particular” individual caves in on itself, so to speak, by refusing to let the universal,
absolute ground (God) operate, through which all things are manifested. When one wills
or craves to be the ground it becomes “regrettable,” a case, Voegelin writes, with “which I
could have pity, but I am unable to admire it, even if the experience is perfectly
expressed (as it is also in the cases of Heidegger and Nietzsche).”30

This assessment is consistent with other harsh comments found in two letters on the
Selected Correspondence dealing with Heidegger’s connection to religious experience.
Commenting on a paper written by Jacob Taubes, Voegelin states that “Heidegger is
much more deeply tied up in the intellectual problematic of our time than it would seem
on the surface, since the good man never makes footnotes to indicate the sources of his
motives for thought.”31

In a letter to Francis G. Wilson at the University of Illinois, Voegelin states that Heidegger’s
meaning of existence means “specifically human existence,” which can be read as a revolt
(apatheia) towards the transcendental pole of existence expressed through the
Beginning and the Beyond.32 He then speculates “that a good deal of Heidegger is better
understood if one assumes that he read Simmel’s Lebensanschauung and was fascinated
by Simmel’s ‘Immanenz der Transzendenz.’ ”

Heidegger’s Concealed Immanence

Heidegger’s transcendence is really a “concealed” immanence, which fails to “take

seriously” those experiences of faith:

“in an ontic sense (faith for example in the sense of Martin Buber, as human entering into
divine being through penetration of divine being into the soul). The philosopher has the task
to explore the logos of being–a spiritual presentation of the universe–that does not deny the
being that is given in the experiences of transcendence. If he does that, like Heidegger, then he
is no longer a philosopher but an atheistic ideologe (emphasis added).”33

Again this theme picks up on an earlier statement made to Löwith in 1952:

“And it seems certain to me that Heidegger is not a philosopher, but belongs to the ‘genus’ of
prophet, and within this genus, to the ‘species’ ‘false prophet’ . . . . As you know, Plato called
this type the philodoxos [lover of opinion] in order to distinguish it from the type of the
philosophos [lover of wisdom]. In whatever terms a similar attempt at classification would
turn out today, [it is certain] that world-immanent speculation can no more be philosophy
than a sect that rejects original sin and thereby denies Christ his role as savior can be
‘Christian.’ In short, I would have attacked in a rougher manner. On the other hand I was very
pleased that you cast light on Heidegger’s Nazi period and did not just pass over it in polite
silence.”34
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Heidegger, like so many in contemporary “philosophy” and social science, does not
recognize the “reality to which we have access today through the vast development of the
physical and historical sciences.” Heidegger also gets a pass that most would not as
when Voegelin writes:

“Why should Heidegger have the privilege of impudently falsifying history [misinterpretation of
Nietzsche’s concept of value] and only being gently criticized for it, when a doctoral candidate
who did the same thing would fail his exams and be verbally abused for it?”35

Voegelin goes further in 1969 by finally shutting the door: “I believe indeed that the type
of philosophy still represented by Heidegger is no longer compatible with our present
state of knowledge concerning experiences, symbolic forms, and their development.” 36

Voegelin’s Response to Heidegger’s “Magic”

As one may already suspect, Voegelin had little patience or sympathy for “the little
magician from Messkirch.” This was Heidegger’s nickname given by his students,
according to Karl Löwith, who had been one of his most exceptional students, which is
saying a lot considering the others–Strauss, Arendt, Marcuse to name only a few. Löwith
describes Heidegger’s masterful techniques that would razzle and dazzle his audiences:

“He was a small dark man who knew how to cast a spell insofar as he could make disappear
what he had a moment before presented. His lecture technique consisted in building up an
edifice of ideas which he then proceeded to tear down, presenting the spellbound listeners
with a riddle and then leaving them empty-handed. This ability to cast a spell at times had very
considerable consequences: it attracted more or less psychopathic personality types, and,
after three years of guessing at riddles, one woman student took her own life.”37

Voegelin was not willing to be taken in by the magic, especially since he had the
opportunity while still in his twenties to visit and study in the US where he was
introduced to a different tradition of thinking. He underwent a “cultural shock” which left
him less patient and sympathetic to the problems and traditions he was familiar with in
Germany and central Europe.

As he put it in Autobiographical Reflections, his experience in America caused his reading

of Heidegger’s Being and Time to “. . . just run off. He did not impress me at all with Sein
und Zeit,” he says, “because in the meanwhile, with John Dewey at Columbia and with
Whitehead at Harvard, I was acquainted with English and American commonsense
philosophy.”38

Heidegger had suffered as a “victim of his upbringing under the pressures of an

orthodox environment.”39 In a public lecture entitled, The German University and the Order
of German Society: A Reconsideration of the Nazi Era, given after his famous lectures Hitler
and the Germans, Voegelin looks at “a philosopher, a pastor, and an historian” as
prototypes reflecting “the character of German public life . . . .”40

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Heidegger is the “philosopher”–a public figure of “social dominance” living in the
“estrangement from spirit, [which is] the closure and the revolt against the ground.” 41
Heidegger “had great linguistic and linguistic-philosophical ambitions, but in the matter
of language had such little sensitivity that he was taken in by the author of Mein
Kampf.”42

“Zeigenden Zeichen des Zeigzeugs”

Voegelin describes Heidegger’s famous formulations found in Being and Time as

transposing “[factual] relationships of our everyday world into a linguistic medium that
begins to take on an alliterative life of its own, and thus loses contact with the being
itself. Language and fact have somehow separated from one another, and thought has
correspondingly become estranged from reality.”

The alliterative character of Heidegger’s philosophical terminology is so vast that one can
“. . . construct something of a philosophical dictionary, from A to Z; and proceeding
through it, from the Anwesen des Answesenden [the presence of that which is present], to
the Dingen des Dings [thinging of the thing] and the Nichten des Nichts [nothinging of the
nothing], and on over finally to the zeigenden Zeichen des Zeigzeugs [pointed sign of the
pointing implement], we could whip ourselves up into a reality-withdrawing state of
linguistic delirium.”43

This follows in line with Voegelin’s observation that this is a phenomenon of “second
realities,” a termed coined by Robert Musil where false images of reality are
superimposed for the benefit and pleasure of the constructor. He says something similar
in Hitler and the Germans, commenting on using language as the “house of being,” which
is “nothing less than the rendering of Being transparent through the language of
beings.”44 Voegelin points out that this is a deeply troubling move:

“[N]ow it is certainly not Heidegger’s intention thus to characterize language as second reality,
but he has in fact done that. That is to say, if language speaks, then the contact between
thinking and language and between object and reality is interrupted, and these problems arise
because one is no longer thinking in relation to reality.”45

In a final section of the Hitler lectures entitled “Nonexperience of Transcendence Leading

to Dehumanization,” Voegelin comments on Heidegger’s “compromise” in explaining
Being and how it will “not do justice to the world-immanent existing things, to our
experiences of transcendence, or to history.”46 Instead of discovering a path to overcome
the mistaken belief that “all reality that does not have the manner of being of world-
immanent existing things sinks into nonreality,” Heidegger offers his own “energetic
contraction.”

When Voegelin proposes classifying “the realms of reason and the spirit as nonexistent
reality” he contrasts his usage with Heidegger:

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“At all events, this manner of speaking seems actually clearer than Heidegger’s attempt to
claim the expression ‘existence’ for the transcending being of man and, further, to connect it
with the problem of historicity, since this attempt at a compromise will not do justice to the
world-immananet existing things, to our experiences of transcendence, or to history.”47

Again, this is a case of an immanentization of Being concealed through the use of the
expressions like “existentz” to suppress transcendence. As Voegelin stated in the Selected
Correspondence Heidegger “has somehow [gotten] stuck in 18 th century categories of
metaphysics.”48

Avoiding Leibniz’s Second Question

Analyses along these lines continue for Voegelin, one such being found in the essay, “On
Debate and Existence,” where Heidegger’s thought is compared with Gottfried Leibniz’s
metaphysics.49 There are two questions that were most fundamental to Leibnitz: (1)
Why is there something rathert nothing? and (2) Why is something as it is, and not
different?

Voegelin complains that he “neglects the second one” that results in his “fundamental
ontology” being “based on an incomplete analysis of existence.”50 So again this is a point
of “classifying” the “techniques of construction” of “Second Realities,” when parts of
reality are “omitted” or “neglected.”51 In his inaugural address at Munich University in
1957, entitled Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Voegelin depicts Heidegger as a gnostic
legend who clearly neglected certain modes of human experience:

“Heidegger’s speculation occupies a significant place in the history of Western gnosticism. The
construct of the closed process of being; the shutting off of immanent from world-
transcendent being; the refusal to acknowledge the experiences of philia, eros, pistis (faith),
and elpis (hope)–which were described and named by the Hellenic philosophers–as the ontic
events wherein the soul participates in transcendent being and allows itself to be ordered by it;
the refusal, thus, to acknowledge them as the events in which philosophy, especially Platonic
philosophy, has its origin; and finally, the refusal to permit the very idea of a construct of a
closed process of being to be called into question in the light of these events–all of this was, in
varying degrees of clarity, doubtless to be found in the speculative Gnostics of the nineteenth
century.”

“But Heidegger has reduced this complex to its essential structure and purged it of period-
bound visions of the future. Gone are the ludicrous images of positivist, socialist, and super
man. In their place Heidegger puts being itself, emptied of all content, to whose approaching
power we must submit. As a result of this refining process, the nature of gnostic speculation
can now be understood as the symbolic expression of an anticipation of salvation in which the
power of being replaces the power of God and the parousia of being, the Parousia of Christ.”52

And as Voegelin stated in The Ecumenic Age, this important German thinker not only
suffered spiritually, politically, and historically for his troubling political affiliations, but
also philosophically–he “waited in vain” for the “parousia” of “epigonic Being.”53 This is
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characteristic of the modern variant of gnosticism. As Ellis Sandoz wrote: “Modern
gnosticism is especially distinguishable from ancient gnosticism by renunciation of
“vertical” or other-worldly transcendence and its proclamation of a “horizontal”
transcendence or futuristic parousia of Being (Heidegger) or intramundane salvific
doctrines as ultimate truth.”54

Two Appreciations: Walsh and Hughes

My goal has been to demonstrate that there is no affinity between Voegelin and
Heidegger on issues of theology, ontology, and most certainly, politics. In a 1980 letter to
Professor Kenneth Dorter, who had sent him a manuscript review of Anamnesis that
suggested Voegelin had been influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Voegelin replied:
“But can one really call it an “influence,” when I have struggled for more than ten years
with their various theories of consciousness to get away from their “influence” and find
my way to philosophy?”55

When one philosophizes the nature of humanity will have to be at least implicitly
assumed, something Heidegger in the Beiträge is not willing to do. Voegelin does it. He
clearly gives a classical-Christian conception of human nature by declaring that “[the]
nature of man is indeed in historical process in the sense that not the nature but its self-
understanding is progressing historically.” (emphasis added).56

It is Heidegger’s inability to produce a viable philosophical anthropology to which we now

must turn in the analysis of Hughes57 and Walsh58 in their understanding of Voegelin’s
and Heidegger’s projects. David Walsh discusses the parallels in tone between Voegelin’s
very personal work Anamnesis and Heidegger’s “meditative” character displayed in the
Beiträge. “Forgetfulness of Being, which begins, as Voegelin and Heidegger agree, in the
advent of metaphysics, derives from forgetfulness of the source from which the
differentiations of philosophy have derived.”59

As a critical ontology, Heidegger’s thought attempts to take Being seriously again and this
is praiseworthy, especially when seeking to defossilize metaphysics. But Heidegger was
less willing than Voegelin to “struggle against the intentionality [object-subject] model . . .”
while “struggl[ing] against the confines of language itself, thereby rendering his own
philosophic constructions ever more idiosyncratic or retreating into the poetic.”60
Perhaps this is why in critiquing the pitfalls of modernity Heidegger set out to make
technological advancement into a “metaphor for the modern world” in a way Voegelin
did not. “A more immediate concern for Voegelin was the political manifestation of the
same Promethean Spirit–a fatality to which even Heidegger succumbed.”61

Glenn Hughes states that the most likely “cousin” to Voegelin’s theory of consciousness in
modern philosophy is Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein.62 They both maintain
that human consciousness is “the site in finite existence where meaning itself is
illuminated.”63 Also, they hold that our “intrinsic awareness” of not being our own ground
or origin by which we independently move through reality–for Heidegger there is

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“throwness,” and Voegelin the pull of the divine.64 “Unlike Heidegger, [however] he does
not see his philosophical perspective as revolutionary.”65 Hughes then quotes from
Voegelin’s essay “Equivalences of Experience”:

“The validating question will have to be: Do we have to ignore or eclipse a major part of the
historical field, in order to maintain the truth of the propositions . . . or are the propositions
recognizably equivalent with the symbols created by our predecessors in the search of truth
about human existence? The test of truth, to put it pointedly, will be the lack of originality in
the propositions.”66

Hughes concludes that Heidegger’s Dasein as the “there” of the “clearing of Being” is in
many ways equivalent with Voegelin’s “luminous participation” as consciousness in a
“tension towards the ground.”67 Voegelin and Heidegger serve as thinkers who have
sought to “deconstruct” the “anthropology of confrontation, in which consciousness and
world remain in fixed alienation as the subject and object of finite being . . . But of the
two it is Voegelin who has provided, not only the more satisfactory philosophical
anthropology, but also a detailed philosophy of history consistent with understanding
the primary fact of conscious existence to be participation in the Mystery of the Whole.”68

One Heidegger, Early and Late?

Some scholars see two Heidegger’s, others three, and the debate continues on. But I
suggest that Voegelin would say there is only one Heidegger: a spiritually closed figure
who first takes up the call to “authentic resoluteness” through “power and struggle” and
then later comes to “play” and “letting-be.” This is harsh personal criticism rather than
philosophical argument. But it can be no harsher than the cold calculation with which
Heidegger ignores practical, experientially based approaches to politics in favor of an
abstract poeticizing that is so preoccupied with essence that it never reaches beyond it.

Voegelin was never one to shy away from controversy, and as he told Karl Löwith
regarding his critique of Heidegger, “that it was not hard enough.”69 Richard Polt
summarizes this succinctly in a recent article on Heidegger’s philosophical confrontation
with National Socialism.70 Heidegger became disillusioned with the movement he
thought contained “an inner-truth and greatness,” so he retreated to the serenity of
academic life.

But this also had callous consequences because “[he reduced political and national
issues] to metaphysics and the history of being, [which] is to obliterate a genuine domain
of [social and political] experience.”71 Heidegger’s aloofness led him to distort human
nature and allow being to be annihilated ontologically, while “[failing] to face up to the
‘complete annihilation’ of particular human beings [Jews, etc.] that he himself had
endorsed in 1933.”72 Let me close with one of my favorite lines from Voegelin in the
Selected Correspondence. It rings with the thunder of Edmund Burke’s great
counsel:“Indecency thrives where others are silent out of politeness.” 73

References
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Dallmayr, Fred. 1993. The Other Heidegger. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom . trans. Joan
Stambaugh. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Hughes, Glenn. 993. Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press.

Löwith, Karl. 1995. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. ed. Richard Wolin. Columbia:
Columbia University Press.

Polt, Richard. 2007.“Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger’s Secret Resistance.”

Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 35(1): 11-40.

Porter, Clifford F. 2002. “Eric Voegelin on Nazi Political Extremism.” Journal of the History
of Ideas 63(1): 151-71.

Sandoz, Ellis. 2004. “Editor’s Introduction.” In Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Wilmington,
DE: ISI Books.

Voegelin, Eric. 2007. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 30, Selected Correspondence,
1950-1984. ed. Thomas A. Hollweck. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press.

_____. 2004. Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books.

_____. 1999. Hitler and the Germans. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

_____. 1990. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, Published Essays, 1966-1985. ed.
Ellis Sandoz. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press.

_____. 1989. Autobiographical Reflections. ed. Ellis Sandoz. Columbia: University of

Missouri Press.

_____. 1987. Order and History: In Search of Order . Vol. 5. Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press.

_____. 1984. The Beginning and the Beyond. ed. Fred Lawrence. Chico, CA: Scholars Press.

_____. 1974. Order and History: The Ecumenic Age. Vol. 4. Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press.

Walsh, David. 2002. “Editor’s Introduction.” In Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and
Politics, trans. M.J. Hanak. Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 6. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press.

Notes

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1. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin will be referred to in these notes by “CW” followed
by the volume number. Thus Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence,
1950-1984 (2007), CW 30, will be referred to simply as CW 30.

2. CW 30, 112.

3. Dallmayr, Fred. 1993. The Other Heidegger. Ithaca: Cornell University Press., 2.

4. Hughes, Glenn. 1993. Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press.

5. Walsh, David. 2002. “Editor’s Introduction.” In Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and
Politics, trans. M.J. Hanak. Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 6. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press; CW 30.

6. Voegelin, Eric, Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984 (2007), CW 30, 766.

7. Ibid. 822.

8. Ibid. 682.

9. Ibid. 285-86.

10. Ibid. 286.

11. Ibid. 56.

12. Ibid. 111.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid. 794.

15. Ibid. 489-492.

16. Ibid. 491.

17. Ibid. 490.

18. Ibid. 634.

19. Ibid. 635.

20. Ibid. 634.

21. Ibid. 635.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

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24. Ibid. 728.

25. Ibid. 128.

26. Heidegger, Martin. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom . trans.
Joan Stambaugh. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

27. CW 30. 285.

28. Ibid. 665-66.

29. Ibid. 666.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid. 178.

32. Ibid. 357. 1984. The Beginning and the Beyond. ed. Fred Lawrence. Chico, CA: Scholars
Press.

33. Ibid. 178-79.

34. Ibid. 111-112.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid. 635.

37. Löwith, Karl. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. ed. Richard Wolin. Columbia:
Columbia University Press. 1995, 4.

38. Voegelin, Eric. Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Ellis Sandoz.CW 34.Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press. 1989. 113.

39. Voegelin, Eric.In Search of Order, CW 18, (Order and History, Vol 5). Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press.2000, 79.

40. Voegelin, Eric. Published Essays, 1966-1985. ed. Ellis Sandoz., CW 12.Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press. 1990. 7.

41. Ibid.

42. CW 12, 8-9.

43. Ibid.

44. Walsh, David. 2002. “Editor’s Introduction.” In Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and
Politics, trans. M.J. Hanak. Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 6. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press.1990, 13.

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45. Voegelin, Eric.Hitler and the Germans, CW 31.Columbia and London: University of
Missouri Press.2007, 250.

46. Ibid. 261.

47. Ibid.

48. CW 30, 635.

49. CW 12, 43-44.

50. Ibid. 43.

51. Ibid. 51.

52. Voegelin, Eric. Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, in Modernity without Restraint, CW 5.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press.2000, 276.

53. Voegelin, Eric.The Ecumenic Age CW 17 (Order and History, Vol 4), Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press. 2000, 75.

54. Voegelin, Eric. 2004. Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books,
quoting from the introduction by Ellis Sandoz for this special paperbound edition, xiv.

55. CW 30, 854.

56. Ibid. 634.

57. Hughes, Glenn. Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press. 1993, 57.

58. Walsh, Op. cit. CW 30.

59. Ibid, 23.

60. Ibid, 13.

61. Ibid, 18.

62. Hughes, 11.

63. Ibid, 12.

64. Ibid, 13.

65. Ibid, 12.

66. Ibid, 12-13., CW 12.

67. Ibid, 116.

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68. Id.

69. CW 30, 112.

70. Polt, Richard. “Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger’s Secret Resistance.”
Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 35(1): 11-40. 2007.

71. Ibid. 35.

72. Ibid. 36.

73. Burke’s saying was: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing.”

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