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44 Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel Cyril O’Regan It would challenge credulity to claim that contrary to appearances Voegelin’s relationship with Hegel is positive. The tone Voegelin adopts toward modern thinkers in general, and Hegel in particular, is so consistently vituperative that it does seem partially to justify the characterization of Voegelin as a “demonologist .”1 In addition, while Voegelin’s critique of Hegel is both episodic and unsystematic, in that one has to patch together a Voegelinian view on Hegel in the absence of any one text offering a definitive statement, the substance of his objections to Hegel’s views cuts deep and necessarily puts Voegelin in the company of other Hegel “naysayers,” such as Kierkegaard, Adorno, Heidegger, and even Derrida, even if his criticisms repeat none of them exactly. Still, Voegelin continually returns to Hegel, and illustrates the more than biographical truth of Derrida’s remark that “we have never finished with a reading or rereading of Hegel.”2 If Hegel is frequently mentioned in passing, he is also the object of more sustained analysis at various junctures throughout Voegelin’s long writing career. Especially important statements on Hegel are found in volume 5 of Order and History, in “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” in “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation,” and in “The Eclipse of Reality,” although it is important not to ignore what Voegelin says about Hegel in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism and From Enlightenment to Revolution.3 The continual recurring to Hegel, despite all reservations, suggests that Voegelin’s negative tone and substantive opposition to Hegel are in some real way a function of the conviction that of all modern thinkers Hegel enjoys an “authority” in excess of the phenomenon of a manufactured reputation,4 and, specifically, that if Hegel is wrong, he is wrong in the way that only a genuine philosopher can be wrong, one who asks real questions, one for whom genuine inquiry is not alien. It is true that Voegelin thinks that in the end Hegel’s level of philosophical accomplishment does not rise to the level of the classical thought of Plato and 2 Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel 45 Aristotle. This is not to say, however, that Hegel has not made a significant contribution to the understanding of modernity, the relation between reason and history, as well as the relation between the discourse of philosophy and the discourses of art and religion. In fact, these positive contributions are what is presupposed in Voegelin’s critical engagement with Hegelian philosophy, which, if in the end judged a derailment, is not understood to be just another instance of intellectual dwarfism of the sort whose basic anatomy is provided by that cadre of European writers that included Karl Kraus, Elias Cannetti, and Robert Musil, whose understanding of the modern Weltanschauung he respected more than that of any philosopher. There are two main movements in this essay. In the first, I bring out the positives presupposed in Voegelin’s critical reading of Hegel by attending to what Voegelin either explicitly says or what can be inferred from his reading of Hegel’s depiction of modernity, of Hegel’s articulation of the relation between reason and history, and, finally, of Hegel’s elaboration of the relationdifference between philosophical discourse and other high-culture discourses that make serious claims to meaning and truth. If Voegelin departs from Hegel at critical points, nonetheless, it could be said that Hegel is a genuine conversation partner in Voegelin’s own inquiries. In the second movement, however, I focus solely on the negative. Specifically, I attend both to the core constructs of “second reality” and “between” that Voegelin uses to designate the essential flaw of Hegelian thought and to the core genealogical constructs of “apocalyptic ” and “Gnosticism” that he deploys to plot Hegel in line with premodern discourses that he takes to be plenary examples of discourses that are at once totalizing and self-justifying, and thus the shame rather than the glory of philosophy . As I attend to this double pair, I will pay special attention to the way in which Voegelin figures Hegel as finally misunderstanding the relation between history and truth and failing to think through the necessary hospitality of philosophy to the discourses of art and religion if it is to be most nearly itself. Hegel: The Ineluctable Contributions Although nothing in Hegel will ultimately escape Voegelin’s criticism, this is not to gainsay that...

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