Western Esotericism: A Concise History

4 From Romantic Knowledge to Occultist Programs

4 From Romantic Knowledge to Occultist Programs I. The Era of Naturphilosophie and the Great Syntheses 1. Nature Philosophy in the Romantic Era (1790–1847) In the last decade of the eighteenth century, a new manner of approaching the study of Nature emerged, which lasted about fifty years and barely reappeared thereafter. This is Naturphilosophie, which is especially part of German romanticism in the broad sense. In several of its representatives, it takes an aspect that pairs it directly with the theosophical current. In its most general form, it is, as Friedrich W. J. von Schelling describes it, an attempt to bring to light that which Christianity had always repressed—namely, Nature. Three factors contributed to this dawning. First is the persistence of the idea of magia among chemist-physicists such as Oetinger (chapter 3, section I, 2). The second factor is the influence exerted by certain philosophers: French naturalism (GeorgesLouis de Buffon, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert), not lacking in speculations on the life of matter; Immanuel Kant, who appeared to see in the universe a product of the imagination, of the synthesizing and spontaneous activity of the mind; Baruch Spinoza, in whom people believed they then discovered that Nature is something spiritual and that the whole of the finite world proceeds from a Spirit, a focus of energy. The third factor is the atmosphere proper to the preromantic period, which has a taste for animal magnetism, galvanism, electricity (experiments of Galvani in 1789, Volta battery in 1800), and which 69 70 ❖ W E S T E R N E S O T E R I C I S M sees the publication of bold syntheses developed by great Kulturphilosophen such as Johann Gottfried Herder. Now, three fundamental tenets seem to characterize Naturphilosophie: 1. The “identity” of Spirit and Nature, considered as the two seeds of a single common root. Nature rests on a spiritual principle: a Spirit inhabits it, speaks through it (a natura naturans is hidden behind the natura naturata), and she has a history: She is, like the Spirit, engaged in a process of a highly dramatic character. 2. Nature is a living net of correspondences to be deciphered and integrated into a holistic worldview. It is full of symbolic implications and its true meaning escapes merely empirical examination. Consequently , rigorous experimentation is never more than a necessary first step towards a comprehensive, holistic knowledge of both visible and invisible processes. 3. Naturphilosophie is by definition multidisciplinary. Its representatives are all more or less specialists (chemists, physicists, physicians, geologists, and engineers), but their thinking extends to eclectic syntheses striving to encompass, in its complexity, a polymorphous universe made of different degrees of reality. The compartmentalization of Nature into strictly distinct subjects here gives way to the attempt to grasp a Whole animated by dynamic polarities. These three characteristics imply that the knowledge of Nature and the knowledge of oneself must go together, that a scientific fact must be perceived as a sign, that the signs correspond with one another , and that concepts borrowed from chemistry are transposable to astronomy or to human feelings. Little wonder that animal magnetism (cf. infra, section I, 3) is, in this philosophical current, a subject of avid interest. The major contribution of Naturphilosophie to the science of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the unconscious—by the works, notably, of Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (Die Symbolik des Traums, 1814). In this very romanticism, in fact, psychoanalysis has deep roots, which began to develop with Eduard von Hartmann (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869). In this context, too, modern homeopathy came to birth with Samuel Hahnemann. Furthermore, it is not surprising that Christian theosophy, because of its own characteristics (chapter 2, section II, 2), could have inspired many Naturphilosophen. F ROM ROMANTIC KNOWLEDGE TO O CCULTIST PROGRAMS ❖ 71 Moreover, the foundation myth underpinning a number of their discourses is that of the “Redeemed Redeemer”—in other words, the theosophico-romantic narrative of a captured Light, captive but capable of being awakened (“redeemed”) by another Light that had remained free. Hence the frequent use of the two terms “light” and “gravity” (Licht and Schwere) in such discourses—“gravity” rather than “darkness—the latter understood as something by which the primitive energies had originally been engulfed, but from which they tend to re-emerge. Here, the relationship with alchemy is obvious. As the historian of philosophy Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron recently mentioned, Naturphilosophie...