Tilo Schabert

The title of this article evokes the problem in the pursuit of which Eric Voegelin, one of the foremost political philosophers in the twentieth century, produced his work. To inquire into what is called here “the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness,” Voegelin progressively differentiated his language concerning “reality” and “consciousness.” In fact, language itself became for him a central theme. In his late essay The Beginning of the Beginning he added to the notions of reality and consciousness that of “language,” in one and the same “complex”” It is through language, he maintained, that reality becomes present to consciousness. To know reality means to enter into the “story” that reality is. In his quest for a theory of consciousness, the acme of his theory of politics, Voegelin found himself compelled to develop a theory of language.

Thinking is a festival and thus human beings experience, through cogitation, the sociable structure of their thinking. As they think, speak and listen they listen and speak and they are in the company of others. It was Plato, the sociable one, who thus spoke and was listened to: “And thinking, is it the same thing to you as to me?” This is the question that Plato puts in Socrates's mouth, when faced with Theaetetus in a dialogue named after him. Theaetetus in turn asks a question: “How do you describe it?” And Socrates replies: “As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. …, but I have a notion that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.”