Reviews for Phenomenology of civilization

The average rating for Phenomenology of civilization based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-22 00:00:00 Clairette Simard I'm not qualified to review this book. The best I can offer is an unbefitting and crude account of Voegelin's project (insofar as I'm able to appreciate it; even if I don't fully understand it, I'm convinced this is a writer to whom I should dedicate my attention). I&R fits into a larger program of understanding the meaning and substance of History: the work that is necessary for the preservation of Order. History, for Voegelin, is not merely one humane interest among others. It is the source from which the community of persons derives its meaning. Order and History is a synthesis of the following genres: philosophy of history, history of religious ideas, intellectual history, and a history of political symbols. The book begins with a summary of Voegelin's method: by reading the original documents of the complex societies under investigation (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel), the analysis seeks to identify the relationship between the society's writings and, then, the real experiences of order they, the society's writings, symbolize. Like I said, I'm not qualified to judge how successful or accurate Voegelin's analysis truly is. What I can be sure of, though, is that he has digested more material on the covered topics than I have, and his writing never rests on a purely rational or political-realist interpretation: he respects the Mystery of History, and is sensitive to the importance of humanity's spiritual experience (he takes it seriously: he doesn't vulgarly discount it as a failure of reason or superstition). As far as philosophy of history goes, as far as it is possible in our global situation to do work in philosophy of history, Voegelin's scholarship is my high-water mark. I don't want to disparage other theorists in order to praise Voegelin, but I'm unfamiliar with any contemporary philosopher who covers the range of topics, and does so in a non-eclectic way, as he does (non-eclectic in the sense that, behind each analysis, there is definitely a larger meaning being worked out, a purpose being striven for: I don't detect this sense of a sane-holism in any other modern thinker). Bibliography: Voegelin's Israel and Revelation - William M. Thompson

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-18 00:00:00 Jocelyn Gagnon Voegelin is the rarest of writers and philosophers: the sort who will take you on a thousand-year journey that will, by it's nature, completely and utterly break all of your preconceptions about the ways of the world. "Israel and Revelation" does so by contrasting the way and order of being of ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians to that of a peculiar people who suddenly emerged in their midst - the ancient Hebrew tribes, viz. the people who would be known as Israel. In the process of unfolding the stories of these parallel orders, Voegelin shows just how alien ancient, cosmological civilizations are to our actual, post-cosmological experience. He also subtly reveals just how much of the Western understanding of time (i.e. as "history"), of the representative function of rulers (i.e. as simply the existential representatives of a people in pursuit of pragmatic, worldly goals), secularization, and of an understanding of a transcendent calling to personal morality even in spite of or in opposition to society and the world, is a consequence of the breakthroughs in the thousand-year struggle of Israel, it's Patriarchs, Judges, Priests, and Prophets. "Order and History" is a necessary read for anyone wishing to break free of the mental straight-jacket of modern Western ideological thinking. He will leave you with no historical materialism, no historical idealism, no romanticism, no -ism's whatsoever. What he'll leave you is an understanding of what people actually experienced, what they wrestled mightily with, and their struggles to communicate it.