Eric Voegelin's early writings: his debt to Max Scheler
Nicoletta  Stradaioli unnipg.academia.edu
Eric Voegelin's early writings: his debt to Max Scheler
The article briefly presents Eric Voegelin, the Austrian-American political philosopher who is not well known in Poland. Voegelin radically questioned the methods and practices used in modern social sciences. The great development of exact sciences in the time of the scientific revolution led to a belief that their methods could be successfully employed social sciences. In due time, this view eliminated other methods and acknowledges experience, inductive reasoning and mathematical logics as the only acceptable methods in scholarly research. Positivism made the methods the only criteria of scholarship. For Voegelin science requires methods that are adequate to the nature of scientific examination. Individual wants to know and acquires knowledge not as an external observer but as a participant, through internal consciousness and meditation. History is a process of “attunement” of human cognition to the existing order of existence. The consciousness of the transcendent source of existence has always been in man and woman. At first cosmological civilization reflects this order. A leap in being towards the source of being takes place in Ancient Israel and finishes in Christianity. This leap makes individuals abandon their myth and begin life in history. Science is to help in the attunement to the order of existence and its transcendent source.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, a close friend of Max Scheler since 1907, wrote this assessment of Scheler’s personality and philosophical style in 1928, just months after Scheler’s death. (Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Max Scheler als Personlichkeit,” Hochland 26, no. 1 [1928/29]: 70—80.) He explores the extraordinarily rich lived contact with being out of which Scheler philosophized. At the same time he acknowledges the lack of philosophical rigor in many of Scheler’s analyses. He brings out the restlessness of Scheler’s mind and person that resulted from a one-sided passion for coming to know things; Scheler was not able to dwell with things or persons once he had come to know them. Von Hildebrand also explores the relation of Scheler’s thought to Catholicism and offers an interpretation of Scheler’s abandonment of Catholicism in his last years.