SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions

Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939

Egil Asprem

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the "disenchantment of the world." Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of "magic" and "enchantment" in people's everyday experience of the world created an intellectual problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge.

Part One

FROM PROCESS TO PROBLEM

Chapter One

FROM PROCESS TO PROBLEM

You need to beware of the word Entzauberung as cautiously as you beware of the word secularization. Both describe processes where it is easy to have fanciful pictures of an earlier age, and as easy to have illusions of our own generation. We got rid of imps and demons but we pushed them into the subconscious and called them by different names. We got rid of witches by learning to take no notice of their spells.

— OWEN CHADWICK, Secularization of the European Mind, 258

AT THE END OF 1917, WHILE GERMANY WAS EXHAUSTED BY WAR AND REVOLUTION loomed, Max Weber proclaimed to a congregation of students at the University of Munich that ‘the fate of our times’ is the ‘disenchantment of the world’.1 The ominous prophecy certainly suited a time of deep crisis. It was also a statement that resonated with deep-seated intuitions about modern society and culture. The understanding that mystery, magic and sacredness were disappearing from a world increasingly dominated by industry, bureaucracy, science, and technology had its intellectual roots in German Romanticism, where it had found expression in the works of Novalis and Friederich Hölderlin.2 This evocative term, Entzauberung, has had a deep impact on theories of modernity developed by following generations. The phrase ‘the disenchantment of the world’ appeared on the very first page of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s influential Dialektik der Auklärung (1944), used there to characterise the project of the Enlightenment in its totality.3 After the Second World War the concept of disenchantment has been used in a number of diverging ways, from fine-grained socio-historical analyses of the processes of rationalisation, intellectualisation, and modernisation,4 via historical analysis of the decline of magic,5 the revival of magic through re-enchantment,6 and the proliferation of new religious movements and spiritualities,7 to a range of thoroughly pessimistic caricatures of a disenchanted and spiritually desolate modernity.8 This latter category includes some of the intellectuals following the rising tide of postmodernism, who would blend scholarship with activism and employ disenchantment in a polemical discourse that ultimately called for a re-enchantment of the world.9

In this opening chapter I propose a reconceptualisation of disenchantment in terms of Problemgeschichte. I shall argue that moving from an understanding of disenchantment as process to an understanding in terms of intellectual problems has significant benefits for analysing the complexities of modern Western intellectual culture. In order to make this argument and clarify its scope I will first take the opportunity to review the most relevant post-Weberian theoretical discussion on disenchantment, re-enchantment, and rationalisation, before returning to some of Weber’s own most salient formulations of the disenchantment of the world. As flagged in the introduction, my aim is constructive rather than exegetic: I do not seek to “rectify” Weberian modernisation theories, or make a contribution to the largely exegetical field of “Weber studies”.10 Instead, my engagement with the concept of disenchantment is aimed at constructing an analytical framework for the study of a complex intellectual field that defies easy categorisation in terms of “science”, “religion”, “philosophy”, or “esotericism”. My argument is that a problem-historical operationalisation of disenchantment helps us develop new interdisciplinary perspectives on modern Western religious history, grounding key concerns of the history of religion in a broader context of modern intellectual history.

WEBERIANS ON DISENCHANTMENT: RATIONALITY, MODERNITY, AND WESTERN CULTURE

Disenchantment and modernisation typically go together. Weber scholars commonly state that ‘the disenchantment of the world [lies] right at the heart of modernity’, that it is ‘definitive of [Weber’s] concept of modernity’, or even that it is ‘the key concept within Weber’s account of the distinctiveness and significance of Western culture’.11 Other leading Weberian theorists reserve this central place for rationalisation rather than disenchantment, writing, for example, that the rationalisation process is a ‘thread running through Weber’s life work’, or that ‘rationalism and rationalization are particularly well suited for an overall interpretation of Weber’s position’.12 However, a serious challenge facing interpreters of Weber’s work is that key terms—disenchantment, rationality, rationalisation—are not employed systematically with specific and stable meanings, but rather take on different meanings and functions in different parts of his work. As Friedrick Tenbruck has shown, this is in part a question of chronology: the vision of a full-blown process of the disenchantment of the world, for example, took shape very late in Weber’s authorship, at which point he went back and edited some of his older work to cohere with it, sometimes rather artificially.13 In the 1919/1920 edition of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for instance, Protestantism is characterised in the following sentence—which is not to be found in the 1904 original—as the culmination of a disenchantment process: ‘That great religious historical process of the disenchantment of the world, which disavows all magical ways to salvation as a superstition and sacrilege, found its conclusion here’.14 What had originally been a thesis on the relationship between the rationalisation of ethical conduct in Protestantism and the subsequent emergence of the capitalist economic system was now presented as part of a world-historical process spanning thousands of years.

A consequence of what Tenbruck demonstrates is a very real ambiguity and lack of thematic unity in Weber’s work is that, with basis in different aspects of Weber’s writings, several disenchantment theses, several theories of rationalisation, and several partially conflicting accounts of the causes, processes, and forces driving these socio-historical developments have been articulated. Thus, the ‘tacit assumption’ among post-Weberian theorists that rationalisation and disenchantment are roughly ‘equivalent’15 is made problematic by the fact that there are several forms of rationalisation, and different phases to the disenchantment process in Weber’s writings and among his interpreters. We find a number of different concepts of rationality, rationalism, and types of rationalisation in specific spheres.16 With no overarching conceptual map having been drawn up, the task of systematising the different terms and concepts in a coherent way has been left to later theorists. One leading systematiser, Wolfgang Schluchter, distinguishes three forms of “rationalism” in the context of Weber’s theories on Western rationalisation: 1) scientific-technological rationalism (the capacity to explain, manipulate, and control the world through calculation); 2) metaphysical-ethical rationalism (the intellectual systematisation and elaboration of meaning patterns and “ultimate ends”); 3) practical rationalism (the achievement of a methodical way of life).17 According to Schluchter, analysing the rationalisation of the West means looking at how the first two forms of rationalism relate to each other in changing ways through history, and how they affect and form “practical rational” conduct.18 The ‘theory of the disenchantment of modern occidental culture’ follows from such an analysis of rationalisation processes.19

The above scheme is complicated even further, however, by noting correlations and conflicts with the rationality concepts embedded in Weber’s fourfold typology of social action: instrumental-rational (zweckrational), value-rational (wertrational), affectual, and traditional/habitual action.20 The first of these (which, if we follow the influential interpretations of Schluchter and Habermas, brings the means, ends, values, and consequences of action into subjective, rational consideration) would appear related to scientific-technical rationalism, while the second, or value-rational action type (which relates rationally to means, ends, and values, but not to consequences) may be related to ethical rationalism.21 The multifaceted nature of any historical process of rationalisation built on these foundations should be readily apparent. However, as noted in Habermas’s critique of Weber, and reaffirmed in Austin Harrington’s defence, there is nevertheless an implicit hierarchy of rationalities at play: instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) is the ‘primary model of rationality’ in Weber; the four action types are, for example, hierarchically organised from the most rationalised to the least rationalised form of social action.22 Thus, describing a rationalised society as a society where an increasing portion of social action is in accordance with instrumental rationality, as opposed to unreflective “traditional” action, coheres well with at least some of Weber’s contrasts between “modern”, “rationalised” society and “primitive”, “traditional” ones.23 In this sense, then, a process of rationalisation means an increasing dominance of means-end rationalities in social systems.

So what about the “disenchantment of the world” that, according to interpreters and systematisers such as Schluchter, Schroeder, Jenkins, and others, results from, is connected with, or even identical to, “occidental rationalisation”? Jenkins encapsulates the connection with rationalisation in his definition of “disenchantment”, provided as part of his programmatic article on the current status of this thesis:

[The disenchantment of the world] is the historical process by which the natural world and al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Limits of Reason
• Part 1 From Process to Problem
• Part 2 New Natural Theologies
• Part 3 Laboratories of Enchantment
• Part 4 Esoteric Epistemologies
• Conclusion Implications for the Study of Science, Religion, and Esotericism
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Back Cover