Subj : Back again
To   : RICHARD M. MEIC
From : Frank Masingill
Date : Fri Jul 13 2001 09:49 pm

 > It may very well be one ofthose phrases where the origin has been
 > forgotten.  I have an interest in the origins of thoughts.  I will begin
 > my search with St. Augustine.  Thank you.

    Although after he had what ran to eight volumes of a _History of Political 
Ideas_ written, Eric Voegelin refused to submit it for publications [Only 
published after he died] he was well-known for searching for the origin of 
ideas.  Having shifted to the emphasis on experience and symbolization of which 
he found ideas to be only the detritus, he repeated very often the obseration 
that the absence of novelty was, indeed, assurance to him that thoughts on 
reality and the nature of man were valid.  He would have been suspicious of 
novelty, considering the "order of history" to be the "history of order," i.e., 
based on repeated, though differentiaed revelation of cosmions ("islands of 
order") in the human experience.   His greatest intolerance was the lapes of 
even such admired scholars as Hegel into "system-building," i.e., imagining 
that history had essentially ended after some imaginary "straight line" or 
"phased" series (age of myth, philosophy, then science).

    For example, referring to the modern symbol of the "death of God"(Hegel) or 
"murder of God" (Nietszhe)  he said that as far as he knew, the Marquis de Sade 
had first advanced such language in the modernity of the enlightenment and 
beyond.

Frank

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 * Origin: Frank's House (1:396/45.12)

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