How To Begin To Study Voegelin's Anamnesis

This article takes Voegelin's magnum opus Anamnesis as the subject matter,thus intending to shed light on Voegelin's philosophy of order which based on his theory of consciousness.The introductory part gives a preliminary account of the following points: the implication of the title of this article;Voegelin's academic approach with its internal development;and the thematic structure of Anamnesis.The first chapter,which starts from Voegelin's critique on Husserl's phenomenology,is devoted to his theory of consciousness.It elucidates the point that,although the two thinkers both share a huge amount of premises,the discordance between them takes place on their respective understanding on the concept pair'immanenz-transzendenz'.Husserl conceives this concept pair in terms of consciousness and world,which leads him to the conception of transcendental phenomenology,while Voegelin conceives it in terms of world and God,which turns him to a certain type of study on consciousness where the experience of transcendence is taken as the subject matter.However,the boundary characteristic of this kind of experience renders great difficulty when it attempts to enter into the finite human language.In order to solve this problem,Voegelin returns to classical literature,from which he discovered that myth,tragedy,literary of prophets and philosophy to some extend respond to the same quest,that is,the quest for the order of being.Accordingly,Voegelin starts to establish a philosophy of order where human history reveals as the series in search of order.The second chapter demonstrates that the quest for reality in a critical and empirical manner is the kernel of order philosophy,which is named as 'episteme' by Plato.However,dominated by positivism,modern science defies this kind of research as illegitimate,thus,the first step realizing its restauration is the purification against positivism.Subsequently,through an inspection on Voegelin's analysis on Aristotle's concept of physei dikaion(natural right)and physis(nature),we arrive to a preliminary understanding on episteme.The third chapter deals with a possible refutation which claims that the preference of classical experience is nothing but a nostalgia of the thinker.Through a critical reading on Mark Lilla's The Shipwrecked Mind,we dismiss this kind of refutation as untenable.In epilogue,we provide a glimpse on the current situation of philosophy.In combination with an analysis to the similar condition in Chinese history,we arrive at such insight: anamnesis,in its strict sense,is an art resisting dogmatization,namely,the oblivion in history.