Kocku von Stuckrad: Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 186) Leiden & Boston: Brill 2010 See the Abstract and Content

From the Preface

This is a book about junctures. I have always been fascinated by the way people make differentiations and distinctions. Of course, this is a necessary procedure if we want to find our place in the world; at the same time, it is a highly complex maneuver, with arbitrary elements and structures, the full power of which is usually outside our awareness. If we look at these processes on a larger scale, on the level of groups, communities, and even societies, we see the same maneuvers and strategies at work, and it is the task of the scholar to critically engage these processes of identity-building—even if he or she is part of the structures and thus never really independent of them.

European identities are a complex phenomenon. While Westerners like to portray themselves as rational, enlightened, and scientifically enhanced inhabitants of the modern world, recently such a narrative of modernity has been called into question, making room for a more nuanced analysis. The customary narrative does not explain the continued presence and power of religious identities in western Europe, a fact that reveals a transformation of religion rather than a process of secularization during the past three hundred years. What is more, if we put these processes into historical perspective, we see that the terms and concepts that are applied in order to distinguish the ‘modern mind’ from pre-modern or non-Western conditions are in fact of very recent origin and charged with a high degree of polemic. They are the result of a post-Enlightenment process of disjunction: in an ideology of modernity, European thinkers differentiated magic from religion and science, Hermeticism from rationality, astrology from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry, and so on. It would be wrong to assume a conscious decision here; rather, what we see at work is the power of a newly emerging episteme, that is—according to Michel Foucault—a general and undeniable agreement about what can be reasonably thought about the world. This episteme and the discourse related to it have had an impact on all areas of society, including the historical narratives that were set up to justify the superiority of the modern world. At the same time, it provoked counter-reactions that idealized the non-Western and premodern worlds as powerful alternatives to the modern West. It is this dialectic that has shaped modern Europe, even if the key terms of European “spirit,” identified by Karl Jaspers in 1947 as “freedom, history, and science,” are still functioning as normative identity markers.

This book is not a tract against rationality, science, or historical understanding. It is about processes and complexities. One of the most unfortunate problems of public—and academic—debate is the misunderstanding that relativism means arbitrariness. Against this biased presentation of ‘postmodern’ cultural analysis and philosophy, I want to stress that relativism takes seriously the relation of an identifiable object with its surrounding structure. Relativism, thus, is the very opposite of ‘anything goes,’ because it addresses the influences that define the positions of actors, opinions, and currents in a field of networks. In contrast to realist interpretations, however, such an approach will no longer claim any knowledge that lies beyond those structural relations.

Being informed by the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as by philosophies that critique the realist position, particularly that of Richard Rorty, the chapters in this book engage the structures that have formed European identities. Looking at the genealogies of knowledge about ‘ourselves’ reveals the complexities and disjunctive processes of European history of culture. Since I am particularly interested in junctures, this book focuses on ‘locations of knowledge’ that have fallen prey to those strategies of ‘exorcism’ (Charles Zika), but which are dialectically still influential even in contemporary discourse. Between 1200 and 1800, astrology, alchemy, magic, kabbalah, experiential philosophy, and Hermeticism were integral parts of European cultures of knowledge; they were involved in a plural field of knowledge claims, in which various actors claimed superiority and competed for recognition and social capital. Although this pluralism was highly polemical, the underlying polemics were not the same as those that are operative today.

The cultures of knowledge that I am engaging in this book form the material of a field of academic research that has become known as Western esotericism. After having wrestled with the concept of “Western esotericism” for years, I now prefer to talk of “esoteric discourse in Western culture.” The noun “esotericism” tends to suggest that there is an objectively identifiable ‘tradition’ or coherent ‘system of thought and doctrine’ that can be studied as a separate topic. Talking of “esoteric discourse” avoids this suggestion and puts the emphasis on the discursive operations that are at work in Western culture, including its academic study. What I am trying to show is that—in contrast to what many scholars in the field argue—the esoteric components of Western cultural history actually have not been marginalized; even in modernity they have been transformed into dialectic processes, despite—or rather, just because of—the disjunctive strategies of post-Enlightenment Europe. Viewed from a structuralist perspective, ‘esoteric discourse’ provides an analytical framework that helps to reveal genealogies of identities in a pluralistic competition of knowledge.

My argument unfolds on three levels. The basic level is formed by historical sources. No sound argument about genealogies and histories can be made without falling back on historical evidence; the material presented here is offered as a case study in the classic sense, which means that the selected cases should represent more than just a historical incident. They also respond to the Kantian dictum that “thoughts without content are empty.” But in addition Kant argued that “intuitions without concepts are blind,” which calls for a second level of analysis. Examples should serve theoretical interpretation; and they become meaningful only in combination with an explicit interpretational framework. The theory I am applying to the exempla is the notion of a two-fold pluralism that determines European history of religion. On a third level of analysis I turn a critical eye toward the categories that have been developed in modern historical imagination. I interpret these academic tools of interpretation as formations or materializations of discourses that affect how the modern ‘West’ wants to see itself.

Although some chapters of this book are more theoretical, while others engage historical cases in detail, those three levels of analysis together form the red thread that runs through this study. Its structure is quite simple. Part One sketches the analytical framework of my analysis and attempts to integrate the study of esotericism into the study of European history of religion. It explains the notion of the two-fold pluralism: a pluralism of religious convictions and constructions of tradition on the one hand, and a pluralism of claims of knowledge, located in various cultural and societal systems, on the other. Part Two looks at the critical junctures between religious systems and identifies a number of ‘shared passions’ that fostered the development of philosophy, science, and religion in Europe between 1200 and 1800. Some of that period’s guiding ideas about the cosmos and the place of the human being in it are still visible in contemporary Western discourses. Part Three addresses the junctures that differentiate and at the same time connect various societal systems. It argues that the esoteric search for perfect knowledge had its impact on many fields of societal activity in medieval and early modern Europe; the ‘interferential patterns’ of esoteric truth claims are discernible in various locations of culture.

Needless to say, it is not the intention of this book to present a decisive or complete picture of esoteric discourse in Western culture. My goal is much more modest and preliminary: I want to frame the academic discussion about esotericism in a general analysis of European history of religion and make clear that when we talk about esotericism, we are actually talking about processes of identity formation on the one hand, and about the competition of knowledge claims in historical perspective on the other.