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166 Voegelin and Heidegger Apocalypse without Apocalypse David Walsh Martin Heidegger was the culminating figure of twentieth-century philosophy . For better or worse he is the one who carries philosophy forward to the point it has reached today. The most convincing evidence of this is that his critics, at least those who actually understand rather than simply dismiss him, operate of necessity within the framework he has provided. Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida can legitimately claim to have advanced and departed from the Heideggerian project, but this is, fundamentally, to have remained within it. He remains the toweringly original figure from whom philosophy today takes its bearings. It is impossible to philosophize without taking account of Heidegger’s primordiality. To ignore him is to remain anachronistically within an earlier phase of philosophical reflection, a little like continuing to compose music as period pieces in a style no longer capable of development. This is why the question of how a thinker stands in relation to Heidegger is not simply an idle curiosity. At stake is the vitality of his or her thought. It was this intuition of the indispensable that prompted Eric Voegelin to return periodically to measure his work in relation to the widely sensed, if less widely understood , genius of Heidegger’s philosophy. The problem was that Heidegger’s innovations could not be so easily absorbed through such passing glances. Instead of reaching a comprehensive understanding, one that might well have enlarged Voegelin’s own philosophical project, they passed as ships in the night. Mutual understanding requires a deeper investment than thinkers are often willing to commit. It entails the exposure of one’s own thought to the challenge of the other. Now that task has become ours. What is the impact of Heidegger on Voegelin’s work? This may not have been how Voegelin posed the question, but it is clearly the way we must consider it. Of 7 Voegelin and Heidegger 167 course, the same question can also be asked in reverse, and it should not surprise us if we discover thatVoegelin might well have also had an impact on Heidegger’s thought.Geographically,they were not so far apart during the decade thatVoegelin spent at the University of Munich while Heidegger remained where he had always been in Freiburg. Certainly, the cosmopolitan range of Voegelin’s interests contrasts sharply with the narrowly philosophical focus of Heidegger. It might well have been possible for Voegelin to convey something of the wider amplitude of experiences and symbols of being, beyond the canonical handling within the strictly philosophical texts to which Heidegger devoted himself. One might even speculate about the possibility of Voegelin awakening Heidegger from his dogmatic slumbers about politics. There is sufficient evidence from Heidegger’s passing political references from the 1960s to suggest that his apocalyptic perspective was beginning to wane. He talked of the possibility that the modern world might endure an extended stabilization of its present condition before its irrevocable collapse. Perhaps Heidegger would have been ripe for the more coldly sober analysis of politics from which Voegelin’s own philosophical reflections flowed. The prospect of such an exchange is indeed tantalizing, especially when one considers the extent to which each had been shaped by the preoccupation with apocalypse.Voegelin by this stage had adopted such a rigorously antiapocalyptic stance that he had difficulty finding any role for the horizon of apocalypse as such, while Heidegger had dwelled so deeply on the structure of apocalypse that he had not been able to satisfactorily separate out the nonapocalyptic reality from it. In retrospect Heidegger appears the more foolish because of the“stupidity ”and even mendacity of his political judgments.1 But it is a measure of his stature as a thinker that his own thought points the way out of the apocalyptic imbalance to which he personally succumbed. By contrast,Voegelin, who aimed at the achievement of balance in relation to apocalyptic expectations, was less able to find the philosophical and linguistic means of communicating it. In other words, Heidegger’s greatness lies in the capacity even for his errors to point to their own overcoming. Ultimately, he serves a philosophical unfolding that reaches further than his own surmises about it. This is how it is possible for one of the most apocalyptic thinkers of the century to point toward the most radically nonapocalyptic conclusion. Having brought the logic of apocalypse to its limits, he shows that it has nowhere else to go and thereby...

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