Abstract

The paper intends to examine Eric Voegelin’s philosophy of history, distinguishing its several stages. The main thesis of the paper is that Voegelin’s philosophy of history is atypical when compared to the famous representatives of the genus. For Voegelin “meaning of history” is a perverted, ideological concept, obscuring the real relationship between man and history because man cannot grasp its “meaning” from a vantage point. Voegelin attempts to provide history rather as a “web” endowed with a “noumenal depth,” rather than the linear, “historiogenetic” history, subdued to chronology. The main characteristic of history is no longer its chronological structure but its structure of an “experience of an encounter.”