The Philosophy of Order: Essays On History, Consciousness and Politics (review)

424 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ung), since it transposes man into that openness which constitutes the essence of freedom. Section Three shifts from Being toward man and points to a discord, a dispersal, which corresponds to that in Being itself. Heidegger portrays this discord as a matter of man's being situated between two unsurpassable limits: Thus we stand between two limits unsurpassable in the same way: on the one hand, insofar as we think it and say of it "Being 'is,' " we make Being into a being and thereby deny the proper work of Being: Being is disavowed by us. But, on the other hand, we can never deny "'Being" and the "is" as long as we experience any being (80). The place between these two limits is the proper abode of man. One cannot help but be struck by the radicalness of the advance that Heidegger has made here beyond the discussions of the hermeneutical circle in Sein und Zeit. Even less can one fail to be impressed at the radicalness of the advance that Heidegger 's eightfold delineation of the Zwiespalt des Seir~ makes beyond, for example, his efforts at the end of Die Grundprobleme der Phdnomenologie to carry out at the level of Being the project originally envisaged in the Introduction to Sein und Zeit. One must hope that the other lectures from the Freiburg period and especially the unpublished treatises from this period (e.g., "Vom Ereignis"; "Uber den Anfang") will serve to fill out and to extend the radical sketches ventured by Grundbegriffe. JOHN SALLIS Loyola University of Chicago The Philosophy of Order: Essays On History, Conscioz~s'nessand Politics. Edited by Peter J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. 491 pp. This Festschrift on the occasion of Eric Voegelin's eightieth birthday, in addition to twenty-one essays in English, German, and French covering a considerable range of topics in philosophy of history, history of ideas and politics, offers a valuable exchange of letters from the early fifties between Voegelian and Alfred Schi~tz which go to the heart of both men's work; Voegelin's "In Memoriam" essay on Schiitz; and a complete bibliography of the works of Eric Voegelin. The volume is introduced by a fifty page aperfu of Voegelin's accomplishments by one of the editors, Peter J. Opitz, an excellent way into the rich thought of this important philosopher of history. Despite the contributions of many excellent scholars, including some widelyknown personages such as Raymond Aron, Helmut Kuhn, J. L. Talmnn, Gerhart Niemeyer, Nikolaus Lobkowitcz, and Geoffrey Barraclough, I remain, on the whole, disappointed with this w)lume, on two counts. For a Festschrift, it does not do enough to get across the greatness and uniqueness of Voegelin's contribution. From reading this collection one would not necessarily realize that Voegelin is the most significant living Christian philosopher of history, one whose work deserves BOOK REVIEWS 425 to join that of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Toynbee, and Heidegger in any effort to think through the situation of man. The second problem perhaps explains the first deficiency: Even those essayists who elected to highlight some aspect of Voegelin's thought were, with one or two exceptions, peculiarly shy about dealing with the very heart of his conception: the conviction, gained from careful reading of the texts which have come down to us, that the quest for order in society has taken the direction it has in Western history because of either divine revelation or a truth-denying massive turning away from that revelation. My guess is that many contributors to this Festschrift, all presumably admirers for one reason or another of Voegelin's prodigious accomplishments, are uncomfortable with his contention that the central fact of history is man's relationship to a transcendent dimension that has proven capable of taking something rather like personal initiatives towards man, to which we are free, as with any other personal initiatives, to respond or turn away. If my guess is anywhere near right, then this volume itself ironically makes Voegelin's point about the fundamental tragedy of our time: Many of the best spirits are unwilling to confront squarely the evidence for...