Frogpondian deformations of faith and the egophanic frogpondian revolt

Submitted by Martin J. Malliet (Belgium), Sep 4, 2018 at 15:02

Why Eric Voegelin is so much less known than Leo Strauss I don't know. The lecture he gave at the symposium "Between Nothingness and Paradise: Faith" at Hillesdale College in 1977 is a good introduction to his thoughts and style, so I supply again a link at voegelinview. It contains his main argument against Marx as an 'intellectual swindler' and his treatment of John Rawls's 'theory of injustice'. - An excerpt for those without time: "If the fool's part in the positive propositions – that the positive propositions are in answer to a fool's negative propositions – is forgotten, there is always the danger of derailing into the foolishness of believing their truths to be ultimate without recourse to the experiences which justify them. But that assumption of ultimacy would make indeed these positive propositions as empty of experiential truth in the background as the fools pretend them to be. (...) The concept of reason in the classic sense [is] the only concept of reason that we really have (the original one). You cannot operate with an 18th century concept of reason which is already a deformation into instrumentalism. The concept of reason always meant, in all contexts where the problem appears, an exploration of the fides in quest of its own understanding, the faith that looks for understanding. You can't separate the two: that was Coleridge's insight too. If you separate the two and pretend that the faith from which you start is not the symbolization of an experience but a proposition, or piece of propositional knowledge which you can doubt, then you have to deny its truth and then you have to recreate the truth because you cannot live without the truth (normally–perhaps there are exceptional cases) and construct a false truth, a deformation. Such deformations have always to assume rational form because, if they don't have rational form, you have nothing to stand on in the topical connection of the history of mankind, because every true faith is at the same time a rational faith, has a rational structure, and, when you get a false faith, it also must have a rational structure."

https://voegelinview.com/deformations-of-faith-pt-1/

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