A Reflection on Mystical Anarchism in the Works of Gustav Landauer^203expressed in symbols. From 1924 onwards experience was at the
centre of Voegelin’s thought, and he became occupied with ex-
ploring the trails of such symbolisms.
In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, Voegelin published
Race and State and The History of the Race Idea, investigating
the symbols of race science and the emergence of the Nazi ideolo-
gy’s racist idea of the state.^20 Therein, he clarified that the author-
itarian state was not a theoretical concept but a political symbol
which rested on the dogmatic reduction of the human experience
of reality to its physical dimensions, discounting mind, spirit
and history, thereby radically mutilating the unity of the human
form. Unsurprisingly, the works were banned in Germany almost
immediately.
In 1938 Voegelin fled to the United States, where he became
a citizen in 1944. His project for the coming decades was the
formulation of an extensive history of political ideas, as a side ef-
fect of which Voegelin developed his philosophy of consciousness,
a maturation of his previous explorations of experience and its
symbols. At its centre and at the heart of his future philosophical
endeavours was the explication of the experience of consciousness
as the first reality, one that is forever caught between immanent
and transcendent poles of existence.^21 After World War II Voegelin
used this argument to theorise that political ideologies, especially
totalitarian politics, were quests for an absolute reality, one in
which the in-between state of consciousness could be overcome.
Yet, as the search for certainty requires eliminating evidence of the
contrary, the desire for absolute reality limits the individual’s view
of human reality. The resulting alienation from reality can only be
overcome, Voegelin argued, through the creation of an alternative,
“second reality”, which would make the individual’s curtailed vi-
sion of reality appear absolute.
In 1958 Voegelin returned to Munich University, taking up
a chair in political science. In his famous lecture series “Hitler
and the Germans” he argued that the refusal of some Germans
to accept their responsibility for Nazism was a dramatic example
of such a second reality. Voegelin returned to America in 1969,
joining Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, where he
remained until his death.