The Philosopher’s Vocation: The Voegelinian Paradigm

The philosopher is first and foremost a human being whose humanity must be served by his academic profession if it is not to be irremediably pretentious, farcical, and corrupt. This is the Voegelinian paradigm. The present essay argues that anybody who is seriously interested in understanding Eric Voegelin as he understood himself is obliged to come to grips with the issues evoked by the perspectives this statement suggests. It is further argued that several general consequences follow: (a) underlining the loving tension toward divine Reality in open existence as central; (b) abandoning doctrinal fixation of separating faith and reason as supernatural and natural, respectively; (c) discarding as egophany the arrogant pretense of autonomous reason as its originator in self-sufficient human speculators; and (d) constantly remembering that devotion to the discipline and conventions of inquiry and of society must ever defer to devotion to the truth of existence.