racist voegelin (was re: Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?)

[Terrance]

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original and influential
philosophers of our time. Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the
University of Vienna, where he became a professor of political science
in the Faculty of Law. 
In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, emigrated to the United
States. They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of
his career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich, and
the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During his lifetime he
published many books and more than one hundred articles. 

Recall that Voegelin was the first professor at the University to teach
political science after the death of Max Weber in 1920. Voegelin's
critique of Weber's "value free" science may have attracted Thomas R.
Pynchon to his works. 

His application of "gnostic" to the new "political religions" is exactly
what we find in Pynchon's novels. 


What did Voegelin say and write about race?  

>From The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 2

Race and State

Edited with an Introduction by Klaus Vondung
Translated from the German by Ruth Hein

"The best historical account of race-thinking in the pattern of a
`history of
ideas."'--Hannah Arendt from Origins of Totalitarianism




Race and State is the second of five books that Eric Voegehn wrote
before his emigration to the United States from Austria in 1938. First
published in Germany in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the study
was prompted in part by the rise of national socialism during the
preceding year. Yet Voegelin neither descended to the level of
contemporary debates on race nor dismissed these debates by way of value
judgments. Although still young when he wrote this book, Voegelin
already demonstrates his singular analytical capacity as well as his
ability to put political phenomena into a new perspective.

In Part I Voegelin analyzes contemporary race theories by placing the
question of race in the context of the more comprehensive philoiophical
problem of the interrelationships of body, mind, and soul. He
demonstrates the intellectual shortcomings and theoretical fallacies of
current theories; more important, he contributes to the development of a
modern philosophical anthropology that aims, as Helmuth Plessner put it
in a review of Race and State, "at a concept of the human being that
does justice to its multilayered existence as a physical, vital,
psychic, and intellectual being, without making one of these layers the
measure and explanatory basis for the others."

In Part II Voegelin deals with race ideas, which he distinguishes from
race theories. Race ideas, like other political ideas, form a part of
political reality itself, contributing to the formation of social groups
and societies. Voegelin shows that the modern race idea is just one
"body ideal" among others, such as the tribal state and the Kingdom of
Christ, each offering a different symbolic image of community. He traces
the rise of the modem race idea, analyzes its function to structure
community, and offers an
answer to the question of why race ideas became successful in Germany.

Voegelin's meticulous sifting of all the Nazi race literature finally
arrives at this blunt statement regarding its overall validity: "In
order to preclude even the slightest possibility of a misunderstanding,
let us again point out emphatically that the contrasting descriptions of
the Semitic and the Aryan, the Jewish and the German character . . .
contain little that is true about the nature of Jewishness." 



In The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus, Eric Voegelin places
the rise of the race idea in the context of the development of modern
philosophy. The history of the race idea, according to Voegelin, begins
with the postChristian orientation toward a natural system of living
forms. In the late seventeenth century, philosophy set about a new
task--to oppose the devaluation of man's physical nature. By the middle
of the eighteenth century the effort of philosophy was to place man,
with his variety of physical manifestations throughout the world, within
a systemic order of nature. Voegelin perceives the problem of race as
the epitome of the difficulties presented by this new theoretical
approach.

Part I covers the development of race theories from the English
naturalist John Ray to Blumenbach and Kant. Voegelin, anticipating
fairly recent genetic insights, explains that human beings must be seen
as one speciesdifferent races must not be interpreted as emerging from
separate species. In Part II, Voegelin discusses the evolution of the
concepts of the body, the organism, and the person. The finite image of
the person as a body-mind unit in which body is equal to mind in value
provides the basis for
Carl Gustav Carus' theory of race, the first significant racial
ideology, in Voegelin's estimation.

Voegelin's complex analysis levels a scathing critique at Nazi
pretensions. He writes: "Compared to its classical form, the current
condition of race theory is one of decay. . . . [T]hese men, with no
eyes for the brilliance of the German spirit, want to interfere in human
relations and ultimately presume to explicate the German nation to us
and to the world--an undertaking with evil consequences. . . . [The]
great thinkers of the past would have been orrified at somebody finding
in himself all the traits of the
Nordic race with the help of a book on anthropology and then imagining
himself to be somebody special who does not have to do anything else.

"Let us now take a look at contemporary race theory--we will see an
image of destruction. . . . It is a nightmare to think that we should
recognize the people whom we follow and whom we allow to come near us
not by their looks, their words, and their gestures, but by their
cranial index." Ultimately, Voegelin dismisses any attempt to reduce the
human being--his existence, appearance, or actionsto a lower level: "Man
as mind-body and historical substance cannot be 1explained' by an
element that is less than man himself."