试从《天下时代》看沃格林对哲学的理解

A Preliminary Study of Voegelin's Understanding of Philosophy in The Ecumenic Age

尽管“哲学”一词如今被用在各种场合,但“什么是哲学”,却远非一个清楚明白的问题。作为20世纪最著名的历史哲学家,沃格林为我们提供了探索该问题的一个独特视角。在其晚期的重要著作《天下时代》中,沃格林提出一对解释性的概念——“理智性的”与“灵性的”——来建构其观念史。本文指出,此对概念实际上取自使徒保罗的《哥林多前书》,其中蕴涵属人的理智或属人的智慧远远低于属神的灵的主张。通过探究沃格林对保罗、斐洛和柏拉图的解释,本文进一步表明,沃格林将哲人对“理智性运动的参与”理解为“对神显事件的一个回应”,取消了哲学的自主性。沃格林甚至声称,“向哲人们显现的神……就是向摩西启示自身的同一位神”。然而,这样一种观点在海德格尔和施特劳斯这样的哲人看来是很有问题的。他们认为,哲学与启示不共戴天,且哲学在根本上具有无神论的性质。

While the word“philosophy”is widely used in different contexts and becomes popular in our time,the question“What is philosophy?”is by no means clear and evident.Eric Voegelin,the philosopher of history in the 20th century,provides us with a unique example to explore this question.In his Ecumenic Age,Voegelin proposes a pair of core interpretive concepts,noetic and pneumatic,for his construction of the history of ideas.This article points out that this pair of concepts is in fact taken from Paul's First Corinthians 14 and its context,which advocates that human mind or human wisdom is far inferior to divine spirit.By investigating Voegelin's interpretation of Paul,Philo and Plato,the article further discloses that Voegelin understands philosopher's“participation in the noetic movement”as mere“response to a theophanic event,”therewith eliminates autonomy from philosophy.Moreover,Voegelin goes so far as to claim that“the God who appeared to the philosophers...was the same God who revealed himself to Moses.”Yet such a view is problematic in the eyes of the philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss,who think that philosophy and revelation are mortal enemies,and that philosophy is“radically atheistic”.