The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya, 1799.

Lately, I’ve been reading Hitler and the Germans, the 1964 lectures that political philosopher Eric Voegelin gave in Germany on the question of how to come to terms with Hitler and the history he had dominated between 1933 and the defeat of Germany in 1945.

What did people’s choices look like in Germany while the Nazi regime was in power? How should blame and accountability be distributed now? How should people behave next time if – God forbid – there should be a “next time”?

Voegelin gave these lectures at a time when he was safely berthed, mostly at American universities, and when “the free world” looked like a high and unshaken platform. Today – when the denouncers on the Left (the wokesters) and the fans of a would-be tyrant on the Right crowd our political landscape – such a perch “above the battle” looks a lot less sturdy, and less secure than it did in 1964. Which makes me curious to see how Voegelin’s 1964 insights look to me in 2026, in our time.

When societies break down, what is overthrown in Voegelin’s view is the human norm. That norm was first discovered in two locations: the Hellenic society and the Israelite society. 

“In the Hellenic society, man was experienced by the philosophers of the classical period as a being who is constituted by nous, by reason. In the Israelite society man is experienced as … a pneumatic being who is open to God’s word. Reason and spirit are the two modes of constitution of man … .” Through the two modes, “the loving reaching out beyond ourselves toward the divine in the philosophic experience and the loving encounter through the word in the pneumatic experience, man participates in the divine.” [Voegelin, op. cit. 86f.]

In the light of this norm, Voegelin can define the Nazi deviations from the norm. What Hitler precipitated was a “loss of dignity … through the denial of the participation in the divine, that is, through the dedivinizing of man.” 

When we are dedivinized, we are also dehumanized [ibid. 96] – involved in a “revolt against the spirit” — a condition Voegelin terms “pneumopathology” [ibid, 101]. 

In that condition, one lives in what Voegelin calls a “second reality” – in fact, a perverse unreality. That unreality has two aspects. On the intellectual level, one constructs systems of thought that claim a false comprehensiveness. And on the practical level, one lies.

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Reading all this, I wondered whether it corresponded to any experience of my own. I thought of one personal encounter that I’ve had, but have never really understood. Perhaps looking at it again might allow me to see such a “dedivinizing” change in someone I knew. 

The person I knew – let’s call him Amos – was a philosopher who taught at Hunter College of The City University of New York, where my father also taught philosophy. In fact, my father had helped him get the job. And my father became a kind of spiritual authority for him. Over time, Amos and his wife became family friends. They drove to visit my parents in Maine. When my father died, Amos delivered one of the eulogies at his memorial.

So matters stood when, after the death of my mother – suddenly and unaccountably – Amos began to make speeches all over town vilifying Jews! After hearing what may have been the first of these speeches, on my way home I had a striking experience, a vision of my own. 

Waiting for the East Side train, I looked up at the cavernous darkness of the subway and silently asked two questions: What is a Jew? and What is an anti-semite? 

Regarding the first question, the answer I received is that a Jew is someone who loves God – and not any kind of God but a God sufficiently distinct from ourselves to be able to see and care about us as persons whose acts matter. 

As to the anti-semite, he or she would be someone who hates that God – the God who can see us and care about everything we are and everything we do. 

Encouraged by a collegial friend to share this vision with Amos, I met with him at a neighborhood cafe. Our meeting was not successful. Amos did whatever he could to delay, distract and throw me off track regarding the experience I’d hoped to share with him. In fact, he’d been startlingly rude! We never met again.

*. *. *

What in the world had happened? Voegelin might say that Amos was no longer under the guidance of reason (Athens) or spirit (Jerusalem). But I saw no outside benefits or incentives, as there had been in the German case described by Voegelin. No dictator threatened Amos’s job. At that time, there was no fashion of anti-semitism as there had been in Germany in the thirties or more recently in our country. In Voegelin’s account of the German situation in the 1930’s and 40’s, much came down to the simple matter of going along to get along. But in the case of Amos, there was no such social or economic pull or pressure – certainly no threats from a police state.

But actually, there might have been pressure of another kind. In the real world, there is not just Reason and Spirit as Voegelin believed. Against that reality, there is also a competing reality. Voegelin is right to call it a “second reality.” But he is mistaken if he supposes that it merely exists downstream from the first reality, meanwhile lacking any special attractive force of its own. 

In fact, the perverse second reality can draw its energy from an alternative attractive force. While it lasts, that force can’t just be ridiculed away. Pulling social or aesthetic rank, as Voegelin does, will not suffice and might even show a class-based narrowness of its own. Defeating it may well require a serious fight, such as one puts up against something that one takes a hundred percent seriously.

There is more suction, more magnetism – a dark force beyond mere stupidity or vulgarity – at work in what Voegelin calls the shift to a second reality. That kind of shift alters the landscape, the scenery, the surrounding past-and-future of the person who turns in its direction. 

Sooner or later – as the terrain becomes unrecognizable – 

so does the person.

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Related Content: Athens versus Jerusalem?