According to Eric voegelin, what are the premises of hegel for his philosophical system?
According to Eric Voegelin, G.W.F. Hegel's philosophical system is built upon a fundamental act of spiritual deception, intellectual sorcery, and modern Gnosticism. In his seminal essay On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery, Voegelin argues that Hegel does not engage in philosophy in the classical, open-ended sense. Instead, he operates on premeditated premises designed to construct a closed, self-contained system of total knowledge. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Voegelin identifies several core premises that undergird Hegel's system: [2]
1. The Death of God and the "Boredom of the World" [6]
- Premise: Hegel presupposes that the Christian god has been expelled from society, leaving an era of Zerrissenheit (diremption/division) and Langeweile der Welt (the boredom of the world).
- Voegelin's Critique: Voegelin states that Hegel uses this diagnosis of historical "boredom" as an entry point to justify creating a new, synthetic religion to replace the lost divine order. [3, 7]
2. The Identity of the Human and Divine Mind
- Premise: Hegel rejects the classical boundary between human consciousness and the transcendent source of being. He assumes that human reason can expand to directly encompass the divine mind.
- Voegelin's Critique: Unlike Plato, who understood human reason as merely "kindred" to the divine cosmos, Hegel premised his system on the absolute identity of the two. He positioned himself as the ultimate vehicle through which the "World-Soul" consciously unfolds its own logic. [4, 8, 9]
3. Deliberate Spiritual Split (Egophanic Revolt)
- Premise: Hegel’s system requires the coexistence of two distinct selves within the thinker: a true human self and an imaginative, false self that acts as a divine creator.
- Voegelin's Critique: Voegelin terms this an "egophanic revolt" (the manifestation of the ego as god). Hegel must intentionally balance these two selves so that his imaginative sorcery can construct history while maintaining a mask of rigorous, academic philosophy. [10, 11, 12, 13, 14]
4. Transmuting the Metaxy into a Closed System [11]
- Premise: Hegel acts on the premise that the human "In-Between" existence (metaxy)—the tension of living between the finite and the infinite—can be permanently overcome and resolved in time.
- Voegelin's Critique: Classical philosophy treats the pursuit of truth as an ongoing, participatory mystery. Hegel alters this premise by presenting his dialectic as a tool that successfully captures, conceptualizes, and terminates this tension inside a finished system of absolute knowledge. [4, 9, 15, 16, 17]
Summary Comparison of Perspectives
| Dynamic [4, 9, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20] | Classical Philosophy (Voegelin's View) | Hegelian Speculation (Voegelin's Critique) | |---|---|---| | Human Status | Participates in a divine reality it cannot fully possess. | Overcomes finite limits to fully embody absolute spirit. | | Search for Truth | An ongoing, open-ended meditative quest. | A completed project formalized in a logic system. | | History | Formed by open tension toward a transcendent ground. | A self-contained, predictable process ending in the present. |
If you would like to explore this critique further, tell me if you want to:
- Look into Voegelin's definition of modern Gnosticism and how it links to political ideologies.
- Contrast Hegel's system with Plato’s use of myth and philosophical order.
- Examine how Voegelin applies this critique to other modern thinkers like Karl Marx. [2, 8, 21, 22, 23]
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