Review of Tilo Schabert (ed.), The Philosopher of Reality: Readings of Eric Voegelin

The title of this book – The Philosopher of Reality – succinctly points to the relevance of Eric Voegelin’s ideas today, when powerful technological, social and political forces operate to systematically detach us from reality. Artificial intelligence, social media, the condition of being permanently online, the permeation of everyday life by commercialised news and entertainment, or gene editing technologies which hold out the potential for remaking the substance of life itself, are only some of the ways in which modern technoscience imposes a filter between our experience and any original or unmediated reality. Meanwhile, political debates have increasingly become conflicts over the nature of reality itself, rather than discussions of policy between parties who possess a shared view of the goals of politics and the issues at stake. In this context, describing Voegelin as a thinker focused, in the words of the Tilo Schabert’s ‘Introduction’ to this volume, on ‘the conflict between imagined realities and reality as it is’ (9) positions him as someone who speaks directly to contemporary concerns. The various contributions that follow make it abundantly clear that Voegelin was not just a mid-twentieth century thinker who analysed the ideological misrepresentations of reality produced by Nazism and Communism, but one who can help us grasp the distortions produced by ideology masquerading as science today.