In his chapter on Eric Voegelin, John von Heyking writes that Voegelin’s understanding of

teaching drew directly from Plato’s description of it as the “art of periagoge”: the turning of
the person from focusing on transient and temporal goods to eternal and permanent ones.
However, periagoge is not a religious or mystical conversion per se but rather a heightened
awareness and openness to all reality that emanates from the true, the beautiful, and the
good. The teacher’s role is to help turn the student’s soul to the true, the beautiful, and the
good, although the teacher ultimately cannot do it for the student: the student must be able
see these things for himself.
As a teacher Voegelin began the task of periagoge by starting with a student’s common
sense – his experiences of the common world and the ability to reflect upon them – in order
to lead him to an explicit noesis, a theoretical reasoning that was clear of ideological
thinking. Ideological thinkers, such as Marx, sought to fundamentally transform reality by
claiming to master history and thereby deny our role as questioners. By contrast, the noetic
thinker repudiates the possibility of a fundamental transformation of reality. Because we will
always have an imperfect understanding of reality and consequently our place in it, we will
never reach a point where we know the totality of reality and therefore cease to be
questioners. We will always continue to ask the question why.
This underlying but continual existential disquiet of the why, the doubting and desiring for
something more than oneself, is a form of erotic restlessness to which students find
themselves drawn from the true, the beautiful, and the good. By his mastery of complex
material that was communicated extemporaneously and clearly, Voegelin was able to
invoke this erotic restlessness in his students. But for Voegelin, this erotic restlessness can
never be satisfied: we live in a state of tension between transcendence and immanence
and consequently will always remain searchers for the true, the beautiful, and the good.
Inviting his students to think with him on his own exploration, Voegelin became a model of
thinking devoid of ideological rant in the students’ own quests for these goods.
Thus, teaching for Voegelin was not the insertion and playback of knowledge by students
but rather the elicitation of eros within their souls. It was the cultivation of desire to see
reality in all its dimensions for oneself. Of course, this entails risk, for students may mistake
relativism for the true, nihilism for the beautiful, and ideology for the good; and the benefits
of success are not apparent to either the modern mind that demand absolute certainty or a
culture characterized by consumption and production. Yet this is the nature of our condition
and what we aim to transpire between teacher and student. The student desires to step
outside of his state of uncertainty and the teacher shows him that it is a condition not from
which to escape but rather to embrace, for the true, the beautiful, and the good are what we
long for – and what we hope for – in our life. To do otherwise is to engage in ideological
thinking.
LEE TREPANIER
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/01/teaching-in-age-of-ideology-eric.html