Voegelin and Aristotle on Nous: What is Noetic Political Science?
David D. Corey
Voegelin and Aristotle on Nous: What is Noetic Political Science? - Volume 64 Issue 1
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Cambridge Core
The article examines Voegelin's understanding of nous as the ground for theorizing, and relates this back to Aristotle. Aristotle is shown to have understood the activities of nous in two distinct ways. On the one hand, nous is the divine activity of the soul exploring its own ground. But nous is also induction (epagôgê) of the first principles of science through sense perception, memory and experience. The two basic activities of nous are related, but they have different values when it comes to the world of particulars. The argument is that a substantive ethical and political science—one that sheds light on particulars—must include the inductive employment of nous and that the exclusion of this from Voegelin's political science results in some discernible limitations.

The limitations of Eric Voegelin—s work are sometimes difficult to keep in view, particularly while he is expounding upon the totality of Being, the myriad dimensions of human consciousness, and the nature of order in personal, social, and historical existence. But in fact Voegelin's work is more limited than his magisterial tone might suggest. The argument of this article is that while Voegelin offers his readers profoundly important insights into the structure of human consciousness and into what Aristotle called first philosophy, the study of being qua being, he does not offer his readers much in the way of a substantive ethical or political science.

1. There is a sizable literature on Aristotle's analysis of nous, not all of which is directly relevant to the present study. I have benefited most directly from Byrne, Patrick H., Analysis and Science in Aristotle (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997)Google Scholar and from Reeve, C. D. C, Practices of Reason: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. On Eric Voegelin's understanding of nous, the most helpful works to date include McPartland, Thomas J., Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001)Google Scholar, especially chap. 9, entitled “Noetic Science: Aristotle, Voegelin, and the Philosophy of Consciousness”; Thompson, William M., “Philosophy and Meditation: Notes on Voegelin's View,” in The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience, Hughes, Glenn, ed (New York: Rowan and Iittlefield Publishers, 1999), pp. 115–35Google Scholar; Morrissey, Michael P., Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 22, 61–5 and 76–8Google Scholar; Hughes, Glenn, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 26–8 and 53–6Google Scholar; and Webb, Eugene, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), pp. 95–103 and 181–5Google Scholar. While several of these authors (McPartland, Hughes, Morrissey, and Webb) focus upon the connection between Voegelinian and Aristotelian noetic science, no one has yet adequately reconciled Voegelin's view of nous with certain passages from Aristotle that I bring forward in this essay. McPartland, who acknowledges the difficulty, does not resolve it: he argues that for Voegelin and Aristotle alike nous is a matter of science. The present study takes this thesis for granted, but asks further—“nous of what?” and “science of what?”—and develops the consequences of these questions for understanding Voegelin's political science in relation to Aristotle's.

26. Aristotle restricts the meaning of science (epistêmê) in Ethics, 4, to its most precise sense—conclusions reached by demonstration concerning things that are imperishable, exist of necessity and cannot be otherwise (one thinks of demonstrations in math and logic). But Aristotle often uses epistêmê in a less restricted sense to refer to knowledge (however tentative or imperfect) in fields where the subject matter is by nature changeable and conclusions hold only for the most part (hôs epi to polu) (see e.g., Metaphysics 1027a20–l, 1025b26 ff; Ethics 1180b13–23; 1094a26–28); the study of ethics and politics are described as such, as are myriad other sciences such as physics, biology and zoology. For the purposes of this paper, I intend the word science to denote the less restrictive of these two senses, so that ethics, politics, biology and physics, as well as math and logic are all potential branches of science. What all these fields have in common, despite their many differences, is a structure in which first principles are attained by noetic induction and further conclusions are reached by deduction. For a more detailed treatment of Aristotle's several meanings of science and the role of nous in them, see Reeve, , Practices of Reason, pp. 7–30Google Scholar.

28. In fact, in Nicomachean Ethics, 10. 7Google Scholar, Aristotle explicitly refers to the activity of nous as divine. On the close relationship between human and divine nous in general, see Lear, Jonathan, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 135–41 and 293–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who discusses important passages such as On the Soul, 3. 5Google Scholar, and Metaphysics, 12. 6–10Google Scholar, that space does not permit me to discuss here. Let me also stress that I am not at odds with a thesis like Lear's; I grant that nous has divine aspects. What I am arguing here is simply that nous, divine aspects and all, can be disposed in different ways, and that the way it is disposed when doing noêsis is not the same as the way it is disposed when engaged in ethical and political science.

30. The terminological distinction is my own, not Aristotle's; and I do not mean for it to imply that divine insight is somehow uncertain or unscientific compared to insight in the sciences. I am merely attempting to distinguish between insight into being itself on the one hand, and into “things” on the other. I have chosen the word “theological” to describe the noêsis of On the Soul, 3. 5Google Scholar, and Metaphysics, 12. 7Google Scholar, only after rejecting several alternatives such as “metaphysical” and “ontological,” which would have probably made Voegelin cringe. I derive support for the term “theological” from Voegelin's late essay “Anxiety and Reason,” pp. 106–107Google Scholar.

34. Nicomachean Ethics 1101b35–1102a4: “eudaimonia is one of the goods that are worthy of honor and are final. This again seems to be due to the fact that it is a starting point since for its sake all of us do everything else” (translation Ostwald); Nicomachean Ethics 1139a36–b5: “Thought itself moves nothing, only thought which is directed to some end [heneka] and concerned with action.…the end of action is an end simpliciter: either the good life [eupraxia] is the end [telos] or desire directed toward the good life. Thus choice is either nous motivated by desire or desire operating through thought, and in this sense, man is a starting point of action” (translation mine, relying on Barnes and Ostwald); See also Reeve, , Practices of Reason, pp. 56–61Google Scholar

36. See Byrne, , Analysis and Science, p. 195Google Scholar. It is noteworthy that Aristotle does not mention the divine aspects of human nature until book 10 of the Ethics, and, even there, cuts his analysis short on grounds of irrelevance: “The moral virtues, being connected with the passions, belong to our composite nature; and the virtues of our composite nature are human, just as the life and the happiness that correspond to these. But the excellence of nous is quite separate; we must be content to say this much about it, for to describe it precisely is a task greater than our present purpose requires” (1178a20–24, translation mine).

46. This may be a fault in the translation. What Voegelin seems to want to do is to raise the question of the precise relationship between the limit of human action and the limit in the ground of being (or, in other words, the limit reached by scientific nous and the one supplied by theological noêsis). And although this is not a question that Aristotle himself raises at this point, it is a tremendously important one. Voegelin's answer (as best I can make it out) seems to go like this: there would appear to be two “limits” discovered by nous, one human and one divine; but to recognize this distinction is to beg the question of the relationship between the two; and the only way to understand their relationship is to have an understanding of the divine ground; which would mean turning our attention to the divine (engaging in what I have called theological noêsis); therefore, the very fact of the human limit necessitates theological noêsis and the whole distinction between the human and divine limit ought to be dropped. See especially ibid. p. 86; and cf., p. 66.

52. Voegelin's emphatic assertions throughout the New Science of Politics that he is following an “Aristotelian procedure” are, I think, to some extent misleading (e.g., pp. 28, 31, 34, 52, 80, etc.). It is certainly an Aristotelian procedure to begin from political phainomena and endoxa as Voegelin does in his lecture “Representation and Existence” (pp. 27–51)Google Scholar. But to launch a full-fledged inquiry into the standards of truth and into the ground of truth according to which political theorists clarify the endoxa (as Voegelin does, pp. 52ff), is to my mind no longer Aristotelian political science; it may well be Aristotelian, and it may well be a kind of science; but it does not follow that it is political science. Hence we run into the problem here with which this essay has been concerned all along: Voegelin's so-called “new science of politics” is more a science of the divine than it is a science of politics.

55. There may be grounds here for a Voegelinian critique of Aristotle's Ethics: in isolating the human good in his study of ethics, and in seeking the noetic first principles of ethics while paying insufficient attention to the divine ground, Aristotle may be seen as violating Voegelin's “principle of completeness.” A passage from Voegelin's “What Is Nature” even hints at such as critique: “Aristotle's idea of man as an immanently formed thing having its fulfillment in a this-worldly happiness is something definitely influenced by the model of an organism.” (See “What Is Nature?” p. 84Google Scholar): But if such a critique is to be found in Voegelin's work, it is certainly muted, to say the least.