Voegelin

I’m reading Eric Voegelin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism for my political science class.

Prior to this, required reading included Machiavelli’s The Prince (which I happily indulged in—again) and Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

The translation I chose by accident (meaning I chose one off the shelf) for The Prince, I believe, takes some liberties but also remains faithful, in the sense that the translator made Machiavelli sound contemporary and logical to the audience of this time. While I read that translation I imagined often Machiavelli sitting across the table saying what he wrote with a deadpan expression, being entirely serious but also entirely not. Hence now I am forever stuck with the image of Machiavelli as a troll—an extremely high level one.

Marx, on the other hand, wrote his piece in German (I think) and at its time it was translated already into multiple languages, since all his buddies wanted not just Germany (Prussia) in revolt, but for Europe itself to overthrow the capitalists. I don’t think I read the original English translation, but what is there is remarkably entertaining, in the sense that he is splendidly candid about how he thinks everyone else is a complete buffoon. Marx is not a troll; he is just too serious for the rest of us.

I think the church and religion is also too serious for the rest of us.

Prior to all of this I was given Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to read, and while I liked it, I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to pick up a red pen and makes marks all over the paper in frustration. I have no sense of Greek, so perhaps I am wrong in wanting to clean up the bloody translation, but the excess verbiage is stiflingly obtuse. Running a multi-level spiral until you get to the point is not a good path to understanding.

Augustine is less obtuse but as a consequence inexcusably dull and boring, as every paragraph merits ‘God’, ‘sin’ or in whatever way he can call every system on this Earth flawed and shitty. His explanation for everything is God. Often I wondered during my reading that if he was so enamored with God and life in the next world why he didn’t just kill himself and get his life in this world over with. If the next world does exist, I hope he was disappointed by it.

At this point I stop and wonder if crafting a philosophy is like crafting a battle system: often needlessly complex or overly simple.

Voegelin, on the other hand, is 1968 material, having also lived and taught in America, close enough to present time to be contemporary and writing in English. My summation: he is a god-guy different from Augustine but worse because he makes the pretense of science. Voegelin’s science of politics and philosophy is really just a focus on semantics and taking the written words of philosophers to the literal extreme. The first part of his Science, Politics, and Gnosticism is a giant fart of quotations from everyone he wanted to accuse of something, but I still have no idea what his argument is because his own words are hidden under a mess of “these words here clearly mean these words and those words are particularly specific for these words”. For all his accusations of Marx’s wordplay, Voegelin himself suffers from wordplay as well, to the point where he becomes one of the things he accuses Marx of: an intellectual swindler.

And it is indeed possible for him to be clear in his writing, evidenced by his methodical (albeit still bleh at times) writing in the second part of his book, titled “Ersatz Religion”. But that stuff is also clouded by lists and rundowns and nowhere near closes in on his argument for a while. He spins so much yarn that by the time he gets to what he honestly wants to say, most likely you have to be listening hard to understand what he is saying. And I’d say his little essay is a bomb because he doesn’t say anything significant at the end at all.