Echoes of Infinity
Peirce, Voegelin, and the Search for the Transcendent
“When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”
-Eric Voegelin-
I've been diving into Eric Voegelin's work lately, and I'm truly amazed by the depth of his ideas and how closely they resonate with Peirce's philosophy.
Voegelin fearlessly tackles the fundamental questions of philosophy: What is the meaning of our existence? How should we structure our societies? He's equally bold in criticizing modernity, labeling it as both gnostic and as a sickness. He certainly doesn't pull his punches.
But what's truly intriguing is how closely Voegelin's ideas align with those of Peirce. Both considered materialism a significant error and approached the world with humility, perceiving it as reflecting the transcendent. Neither feared to address the foundational questions and challenge the status quo. Unsurprisingly, both of them found themselves outside the confines of academia.
It's as if they shared a symbiotic relationship. Peirce delved deep in the murky waters of philosophy, exploring its logical foundations, while Voegelin focused on human society and existential questions. They are like brothers in arms. Voegelin spearheads the charge, while Peirce provides the general logistics.
I think their convergence is not coincidental. It's a result of their shared clear perception of reality and its underlying transcendent order. They both saw the same thing, and were drawn toward it.
But what is the benefit of bringing these thinkers together?
The ideas of other thinkers are like seeds that can be planted into the fruitful field of Peirce’s framework. Without the seeds the field remains in the state of potential, and without a field, the seeds can’t grow.
Hence, this connection not only enhances Peirce's framework by showcasing its broad applicability and relevance, but also clarifies the ideas of other thinkers as they are integrated into this comprehensive logical framework. It's a win-win for everyone.
We should be grateful to Peirce for the philosophical heavy lifting that he sacrificed his life for. Now it is our duty to start to fill that framework and begin to build the philosophical edifice that Peirce envisioned.
“To erect a philosophical edifice that shall outlast the vicissitudes of time, my care must be, not so much to set each brick with nicest accuracy, as to lay the foundations deep and massive.” (EP1: 246, 1887)
So, who is Eric Voegelin and why is his thought so profound? What insights are waiting to be uncovered by relating his thought with Peirce’s logical framework?
A Philosopher of Existence and History
Eric Voegelin was born in Cologne Germany in 1903. He was educated mainly at the University of Vienna, where he studied political science, and became an associate professor in the law faculty. However, in 1938 he and his wife had to flee the Nazi regime from Austria to the United States, where he then spent most of his academic career.
Eric Voegelin is best known as a political scientist, but limiting him to this description would be a massive understatement. Voegelin is a deep thinker who penetrates into the depths of philosophy and reality. According to Charles Embry and Glenn Hughes—the editors of “The Eric Voegelin Reader”—Voegelin’s work as a whole is “a critical analysis and assessment of the entire political, religious, and philosophical heritage of the West”. Voegelin is thus better characterized as a “philosopher of existence and history”. (The Eric Voegelin Reader, ix)
Nevertheless, the “political”, in its broadest sense is at the centre of Voegelin’s thought. In his work Voegelin asks the big question: On what basis should we order our lives? And to form an answer to this question Voegelin seeks to analyse all of the symbols that have shaped us through history.
The concept of the symbol is central to Voegelin's philosophy. After completing approximately 4000 pages of text in his multivolume work called “The History of Political Ideas”, Voegelin decided to abandon the project. He came to the conclusion that societies were not based on ideas. there was something deeper at play.
When examining ancient civilizations, such as those of the Egyptians or Sumerians, Voegelin reached the conclusion that the rituals that formed the basis of these societies, weren’t actually ideas. Ideas are unstable and can become detached from experience. Symbols, on the other hand, are more stable as they are connected to the transcendent.
Transcendent is another key concept of Voegelin. It refers to the experience of the eternal, infinite and Divine. While the transcendent can never be fully defined or described, its form may be conveyed in symbols. These symbols mediate thus a form of the transcendent, thereby enabling them to serve as a basis for political order.
Therefore, symbols shouldn’t be analyzed as abstract ideas. Rather, we should go beneath them in order to discover the actual experiences of the transcendent that gave rise to them. In this search Voegelin formed his own comprehensive philosophical framework.
The Eric Voegelin Reader describes Voegelin’s mature thought as “unconventional, not fitting into any of the contemporary philosophical schools”. Could Voegelin find a home in the Peircean edifice?
Reclaiming the Transcendent
Voegelin's philosophy can be seen as a resistance and rejection of positivism, which he defines as the belief that only physical phenomena are real. For positivists the reality consists solely of that which is clear, precise and quantifiable. Truth is seen as a set of value-free propositions concerning the various states and behaviour of physical objects.
According to Voegelin the positivists recognize only a part of Reality. The problem is not the utilization of quantitative methods, but reducing all reality to physical objects.
In contrast to positivists, Voegelin begins from what he calls “the full range of human experience.” This encompasses not only the material concrete world but also the symbols we participate in. For Voegelin, these symbols point towards a deeper transcendent reality that lies beneath and beyond the mere spatial and temporal realm of physical objects.
In a parallel to Voegelin, Peirce's philosophy can be viewed as a resistance and rejection of nominalism. Nominalism means the belief that only the world of particulars is real, rejecting any notion of real generality. This aligns with the definition of positivism provided in the Eric Voegelin Reader.
Nominalism is a more general concept than positivism. However, positivism can be seen as a specific historical instance of nominalism. Thus, both thinkers share a similar disdain for nominalist thinking.
Peirce’s categories—metaphysically interpreted—clarify the issue at hand. The universe of 2ndness is the immanent universe of brute action and forceful existence, the materiality of the world, which can be seen, felt and touched. This is the only real universe for nominalists and positivists.
On the other hand, the universe of 3rdness remains out of sight and is invisible, though hints of it percolate into our minds through perception. It encompasses universality, generality, lawfulness, and continuity. Believing in the reality of 3rdness is what makes someone a realist.
According to Voegelin, scientific inquiry must start from this "full range of human experience":
“Science starts from the prescientific existence of man, from his participation in the world with his body, soul ,intellect, and spirit, from his primary grip on all the realms of being that is assured to him because his own nature is their epitome.” (The Eric Voegelin Reader, 39)
Peirce agrees, as the full range of human experience constitutes philosophy’s object of inquiry:
“[Philosophy] contents itself with a more attentive scrutiny and comparison of the facts of everyday life, such as present themselves to every adult and sane person, and for the most part in every day and hour of his waking life.” (EP2, 146, 1903)
For Peirce, the object of philosophical inquiry is the full spectrum of everyday experience, encompassing everything that can be commonly observed, including all the universes of experience. It would be a significant philosophical error to restrict the scope of philosophy solely to physical objects, thereby limiting inquiry to just one of the universes of experience.
This error stems from the wrong ordering of the sciences. Philosophy takes precedence over special sciences, like physics, in the hierarchy of sciences. Consequently, the natural sciences cannot provide a framework for philosophy. Instead, physics must acknowledge and incorporate philosophical considerations in its own observations and methods. Voegelin recognized this problem in positivism:
“For this second assumption, [of viewing the methods of natural sciences as a criterion for theoretical relevance in general], subordinates theoretical relevance to method and thereby perverts the meaning of science. Science is a search for truth concerning the nature of the various realms of being.” (Voegelin Reader, 39(
Peirce says almost the same thing:
“[Philosophy’s] principal utility, although by no means its only utility, is to furnish a Weltanschauung [world view], or conception of the universe, as a basis for the special sciences [physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology etc.]” (EP2, 146, 1903)
Immediately the fruitfulness of bringing these thinkers together is manifested. Peirce looks at the issue from the most general possible level diving deep in the foundations of logic itself. For him nominalism is incompatible with logic and scientific inquiry itself. Nominalism, by denying the reality of generalities and universals, must view the logic as a natural science that inquires how humans think. For this reason, if we adopt nominalism, we must give up logic as something truly normative and universal.
On the other hand, Voegelin approaches the issue from existential, civilizational and political perspectives, albeit in a broad sense. For him positivism is an inadequate way of answering the human condition. Humans and civilizations can’t properly order themselves, if they deny the reality of the transcendent. The denial of the reality of transcendent order results in “nothing else than a confession that a science of human and social order did not exist” (The Eric Voegelin Reader, 49).
In simpler terms, rather than viewing societal order as reflecting some universal cosmic order, it's seen as merely a matter of convention. Instead of politics being focused on maintaining this order, it boils down to a struggle for power between different groups.
But what Voegelin means by the human condition? Why it requires an answer?
The Search for the Ground of Existence
For Voegelin the most elementary fact of human existence is that it is an embodied participation in reality, which is driven by a conscious search for meaning. Thus, the fundamental question for each person becomes: What is the meaning of my existence?
Because our existence does not cause itself, it cannot explain itself. Therefore, we must look outside of ourselves and search for origins or a source, which Voegelin calls “the ground” of existence.
The ground is both the source of our existence, and the end toward which our minds tend. It represents both the beginning and the end of our inquiry; the alpha and omega. Therefore, our consciousness can be seen as the tension towards the ground, structured by its desire to know. But here comes the kicker, the core move of Voegelin, central to his philosophy.
According to Voegelin, consciousness only recognizes this tension in itself, when it discerns that the ground of reality is unconditioned by time and space—that is, when it recognizes the ground as transcendent and Divine.
Put simply, it's the realization that the origin of our existence isn't solely explained by the universe itself; rather, our existence is connected to something beyond and independent of the universe—to something transcendent.
Our entire existence is defined by this search, which nothing "earthly" can satisfy. Despite this, we primarily pursue such goals: wealth, possessions, indulgences, power, and status. We believe that by attaining these immanent goals, we’ll find meaning in life. But nothing immanent can ever truly satisfy the search for the ground.
In the West the Greeks were the first to carefully articulate the structure of the consciousness, known as the soul (psyche), which is informed by the intellect (nous). The intellect has the capacity to grasp the transcendent reality because it participates with it.
According to Greek philosophy, human consciousness is both bodily based and participating in the eternal and divine intelligence that grounds all of reality. As such, consciousness serves as the meeting point or an intersection between time and timelessness, the immanent and the transcendent. An idea that is also expressed in the Christian view of the cosmos.
Therefore, the fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human is shared between the two major pillars of Western tradition: the Greeks and Christianity. Both view the purpose of humans as mediators between the world and the transcendent, the heaven and the earth, bringing the eternal cosmic order, the kingdom of God, into existence.
Peirce didn’t grapple as much with existential and historical questions like this one. He was, I think, once again a step deeper. Instead of inquiring the historical emergence of the idea of reason as transcendent, he approached reason, from the perspective of logic.
In one of the lectures given at the Lowell Institute in 1903, Peirce asks the question: What is the ultimate aim of man. He ends up pondering the nature of Reason claiming that “in the first place, it is something that never can have been completely embodied” (EP2, 254, 1903). Peirce continues:
“The essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected. It always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth. […] No son of Adam has ever fully manifested what there was in him. […] This development of Reason consists […] in embodiment, that is, in manifestation. […] Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to execute our little function in the operation of the creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is “up to us” to do so.” (EP2, 255, 1903)
Let us unpack this. For Peirce, reason is something that can never be fully embodied. Reason is not static, but dynamic, living, and growing, seeking to extend itself through manifesting in the world. Metaphysically, then, our cosmos has the tendency to become increasingly reasonable, or more precisely, the concrete manifestations of reasonableness become more prevalent.
By doing “our little function” we aid the transformation of the world towards greater concrete reasonableness. Therefore, humans are in-between Reason and the world in which it can manifest itself.
Once again, we see how Peirce expresses a similar idea, but on a more fundamental, sub-metaphysical level. But what about the transcendent nature of the ground? Do we find that idea in Peirce’s thought?
Already early in his life Peirce recognized that the laws of logic are independent of our minds. In contrast to other logicians, like John Stuart Mill, who regarded logic as the study of how humans think, Peirce explicitly rejected this view and claimed the laws of logic to be independent of our thinking.
Logic is “the study of the essential conditions to which signs must conform in order to function as such”, which, according to Peirce, is more closely related to mathematics than to psychology (EP2, 309, 1904). Actually, logic is independent even of metaphysics:
“But I, for my part, cannot for an instant assent to the proposal to base logic upon metaphysics, … on the contrary, [metaphysicians] have no secure basis except that which the science of logic affords.” (EP2, 257, 1903)
Put simply, the laws of logic stand independent of the metaphysical nature of Reality. The laws of logic would hold true in any conceivable universe. Thus, the laws of logic transcend time and space, being eternal and transcendent. Recognizing the reality of this transcendence becomes essential for a proper understanding of logic and reason. Peirce doesn’t shy away from this insight: "It so happens that I myself believe in the eternal life of the ideas Truth and Right." (EP2, 123, 1902)
The belief of transcendent is important to both Voegelin and Peirce. The cosmos, in itself, cannot be the source of the ground. Voegelin concentrates on how the immanent can’t truly satisfy our search for meaning, and according to Peirce, logic loses its objectivity, if it is seen as a product of the universe.
Why does this sounds so odd to us? Why it is so difficult for us to even entertain the idea of the transcendent, let alone the idea of God? The answer lies in our modern mind. As children of modernity, we’ve become sick.
The Sickness of Modernity
According to Voegelin, civilizations that have discovered the transcendent reality undergo a significant transformation. The transcendent reality becomes the invisible ground, perceived as the source and endpoint of being. Thus, this idea fundamentally alters the view on both consciousness and the cosmos.
Through this discovery, the cosmos differentiates into the finite and infinite, the immanent and the transcendent. However, Voegelin emphasizes that these are not two separated chunks of being, but a fundamental unity, albeit with tension.
According to Voegelin, this discovery is so profound, that we are still grappling with it. Despite our society believing it has moved beyond any “superstitious” belief in the transcendent, we are far from being settled with this idea. Quite on the contrary. Voegelin traces the sickness of our modern society precisely to our abandonment of the transcendent.
Modernity attempts to relocate perfect goodness and truth back to the worldly realm. This eradication of the transcendent gives rise to the cult of progress; the notion that science, in itself, can solve all problems, address all questions and mysteries, and eliminate all superstitions and religions.
For Voegelin, this denial of the transcendent ground is a fundamental mistake. It restricts perfectibility solely to the immanent reality, which leads to various utopias trying to achieve absolute immanent perfection. The purpose of humans becomes confined to this world, rather than it being a participation with the eternal and infinite.
Voegelin labels this error as the “existential closure to the transcendent ground”, which very much pervades our society. For instance, consider this short speech by Christopher Hitchens:
In this video, Hitchens persuades us to shift our gaze from the transcendent to the world by presenting us visually tempting images and contrasting them with known Biblical images of the Divine. He claims that “those of us who do not believe we are divinely created, let alone divinely supervised, are not immune to the idea of awe, and beauty, and the transcendent.”
But in reality, Hitchens is reducing beauty to feeling. He is not advocating for a sense of meaning and purpose, but for a simple feeling of awe. Beauty is separated from the transcendent and reduced to a visually pleasing composition of matter.
Instead of understanding the beauty of this world as mirroring the transcendent beauty of the eternal, beauty is contained within itself, becoming self-referential. Things are beautiful simply because they make us feel good, not because they conform to some ultimate ideal or purpose.
I find it interesting that when this fear of losing beauty by adopting a materialist worldview is brought up, pictures of galaxies and stars are immediately pulled up as the ultimate instances of beauty. Rarely is there a depiction of a mother holding her child or a man helping his neighbor. It's always some colorful nebula or the helix of DNA.
Could it be that materialists struggle to recognize beauty that isn’t visually stimulating? Perceiving beauty in human interactions might also be challenging because within a strict Darwinian framework, human interaction is often interpreted as a brutal struggle for survival and competition, rather than as potential participation in the Divine Love. Perhaps I am being overly hyperbolic.
But back to Voegelin. In addition to criticizing modernity for the “existential closure to the transcendent ground”, Voegelin is perhaps best known for characterizing modern political philosophy as inherently gnostic in nature and orientation.
Ancient Gnosticism viewed the world as an alien and evil place, from which we can be saved by returning to our true spiritual home. This return occurs through the attainment of the required knowledge, known as gnosis.
For Voegelin, modern political movements are inherently gnostic because they promise that through special— often occult and esoteric—knowledge, wielded only by “experts”, this world can be transformed from a realm of disorder and evil to one of social perfection. The modern gnostic mindset seeks to exert human control over reality and dominate it.
This attitude has been prevalent in every revolutionary ideology since at least the French Revolution. In our contemporary world, this inclination is synonymous with the technocratic attitude.
However, in contrast to ancient Gnosticism, modern Gnosticism doesn’t promise a removal from this world. Rather it promises a complete transformation of the world itself, shifting our gaze completely off of the transcendent.
This becomes feasible only when the ground of reality is deemed fully immanent. If the ground is viewed as transcendent, it would remain beyond our control, as something to which we must conform. This latter notion hurts the ego of the modern mind due to its lack of humility, which is the driving force behind revolutions and utopias.
Modernity seeks to apotheosize the immanent and divinize the humanity. This is a very dangerous path as evidenced by the atrocities of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies. However, its falsehood becomes apparent even on a personal level.
If our fundamental human condition is a search for meaning, and if only the transcendent can satisfy that search, it becomes evident why our positivist, materialist, atheist pursuit of science struggles to uphold our civilization. Based on Voegelin's ideas, the prevailing state of our society, where a sense of meaninglessness and aimlessness prevail, emerges as an anticipated outcome, from losing the transcendent.
By reducing everything to material reality, we have shifted our focus from the transcendent to ourselves. Seeking the meaning of life within ourselves is fruitless, and leads to narcissism and pride. By disconnecting from the eternal, we confine humanity within the immanent.
The death of God has revealed the thirst for the transcendent among modern people, which they cannot satisfy, leaving them unfulfilled and anxious.
Peirce thought that through earnest scientific inquiry we are led into increasing conformity with the eternal verities. By adopting self-controlled habits of action, we participate with the underlying transcendent order, or what he called the “living generalities”.
Peirce wrote a magnificent passage in a book review in 1901 which addresses many of the insights brought up by Voegelin. In it Peirce paints a picture of the deep motivations working in a scientific man. Since it's a lengthy quote, I'll break it down into parts.
“The man of science has received a deep impression of the majesty of truth, as that to which, sooner or later, ever knee must bow. He has further found that his own mind is sufficiently akin to that truth, to enable him, on condition of submissive observation, to interpret it in some measure.”
As already discussed, Peirce viewed logic and truth as independent of human thought. Truth is something that in the end every sincere inquirer will ultimately embrace. Thus, we can’t make up the truth. On the contrary, we have to conform to it.
“As he gradually becomes better and better acquainted with the character of cosmical truth, and learns that human reason is its issue and can be brought step by step into accord with it, he conceives a passion for its fuller revelation.”
We can participate with Truth. The conformity to it, brings about sense of meaning and purpose that cannot be found elsewhere. The more one gets to know the transcendent, the more it draws the inquirer into its life.
“He is keenly aware of his own ignorance, and knows that personally he can make but small steps in discovery. Yet, small as they are, he deems them precious, and he hopes that by conscientiously pursuing the methods of science he may erect a foundation upon which his successors may climb higher. This, for him, is what makes life worth living and what makes the human race worth perpetuation.”
However, the inquirer must not become proud. Peirce always emphasized humility as a great and necessary virtue of the scientific mind. Peirce’s whole doctrine of fallibilism is a direct attack on Gnosticism as characterized by Voegelin. According to Peirce we can never claim to possess any ultimate knowledge. Rather our knowledge is always provisional and hypothetical.
“The very being of law, general truth, reason,—call it what you will,—consists in its expressing itself in a cosmos and in intellects which reflect it, and in doing this progressively; and that which makes progressive creation worth doing,—so the researcher comes to feel,—is precisely the reason, the law, the general truth for the sake of which it takes place.” (EP2: 58-59, 1901)
The transcendent expresses itself in this world, which mirrors it. And by mirroring it more and more, by embodying the transcendent, by participating with the Divine, the inquirer finds meaning and purpose in life, as the mediator between the infinite and finite.
So, how to participate in that mediation? How does one draw closer to the transcendent? These are essential questions of philosophy. But what is the nature of philosophy?
The Heart of Philosophy
Firstly, philosophy is a loving search for wisdom. The philosopher must love his object of inquiry, which is experience in its fullness. Voegelin puts it beautifully:
“Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it.”
The philosopher must thus seek to understand the reality in its own terms, approaching it with a loving openness. Peirce echoes this perspective.
Suppose, for example, that I have an idea that interests me. It is my creation. (…) I love it; and I will sink myself perfecting it. It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. (EP1: 354, 1893)
The love of being must extend all the way to the transcendent reality that grounds everything. The philosopher can’t be a gnostic who hates the world seeing it as an evil place ruled by evil. Obviously, this requires faith, and thus, for Voegelin, the essence of truth is trust. Peirce shares this sentiment:
“But the saving truth is that there is a Thirdness in experience, an element of Reasonableness to which we can train our own reason to conform more and more. We should at once hope that it is so, since in that hope lies the only possibility of any knowledge.” (EP2: 212, 1903)
Peirce’s concept of musement aligns with Voegelin's idea of loving openness. Musement entails a playful and innocent attitude toward all three universes of experience. The underlying transcendent ground of the universes—logos—is perceived as inherently good. Thus, a hateful musement would be an impossible thing.
Moreover, Peirce explicitly asserted that the primary evolutionary force of reality is unconditional love—agape. Therefore, embracing a loving openness toward the real appears to be the attitude that most closely embodies and mirrors the Divine.
“It interests me to notice that these three sentiments [of logic] seem to be pretty much the same as that famous trio of Charity, Faith, and Hope, which in the estimation of St. Paul, are the finest and greatest of spiritual gifts.” (EP1: 150, 1878)
Secondly, philosophy is an unending pursuit. According to Voegelin, wisdom can never be attained completely, because the philosopher is a participant in the very process of reality. In other words, the philosopher's viewpoint exists within the reality that the philosopher is inquiring.
Additionally, reality isn't a static collection of objects that could be described with a set of propositions. Instead, it's an ongoing process, akin to a poem, as Peirce describes it. And the meaning of a poem can never be fully exhausted or explicitly defined. It remains vague, filled with interpretational possibilities and potential meanings.
Ultimately, the transcendent ground remains a mystery. It is infinite and eternal, allowing us to approach it for eternity, continuously learning and discovering deeper meaning within it. However, we can never reach a full and complete understanding of its nature.
“Of course I do not think it is the final word to be said […] for such finality is not yet known, thank God, in any modern science, should such ever take possession of scientific minds, it will forebode either the speedy extinction of the human race, or else an era of intellectual epilepsy.” (EP2: 471, 1913)
Thirdly, philosophy is deeply personal. As philosophy encompasses the entirety of human experience, practicing philosophy demands wholehearted engagement. Engaging in philosophy should lead to a transformation in individuals, ideally bringing them closer to the Divine. The Eric Voegelin Reader states how “the quality of philosophical thinking inevitably reflects the philosopher’s openness, existential authenticity, and personal acumen and development”. (xxiii)
In essence, philosophy is not just an intellectual pursuit but a way of life. By pursuing earnest, open, and humble philosophical inquiry toward the Truth, we are transformed into the likeness of the Divine:
“The soul’s deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with, will by slow percolation gradually reach the very core of one’s being; and will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they are ideal and eternal verities.” (EP2: 42, 1898)
Summary
Based on this superficial exploration on the thought of these profound thinkers, it appears that there are numerous similarities between Peirce and Voegelin.
Although their perspectives differ—Peirce being more logical and Voegelin more existential philosopher—they share a similar philosophical outlook. In essence, they both had the same gut instinct about the nature of reality and the role and essence of philosophy.
Certainly, while it's important to acknowledge their differences—Peirce as a logician primarily active in the 19th century, and Voegelin as a 20th-century political scientist—I still see significant potential in comparing and uniting their ideas. My hope is that Voegelin's insights could greatly enhance our understanding and application of Peirce’s ideas.
Thank you for reading!
Sincerely,
Markus
They may have things in common, but a distinction is necessary: Peirce never recognized any transcendent or a priori basis in his philosophy. On the contrary, he bases his philosophy on logic (semiotics) as the basis for metaphysics. This would lead us to understand that the transcendent is only a logical hypothesis and not an underlying basis, as Voegelin's endeavor seems to be.