a cultural history # of the Soul # E U R O P E A N D N O RT H A M E R I C A F RO O M 1 8 70 TO T H E P R E S E N T
kocku von stuckrad
PR OL O G U E The Crisis of the Soul in the Twentieth Century
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his book began with an observation: if you want to know what psychology today has to say about the “soul,” you will soon be disappointed. Many psychological dictionaries do not even include an entry on the soul. This is true of the well-regarded Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, for instance. The American Psychological Association’s online resources also seem to make do without a concept of the soul.1 One hundred years ago, things were very different. The soul was a key term in learned debates across disciplines in Europe, from psychology and philosophy to the natural sciences, medicine, art and literature, and even politics. Over against this “forgotten soul” in psychology, a second observation is also striking: in contemporary European and North American culture— and elsewhere too, as a result of global entanglements—the soul is enjoying a considerable boom. How can we explain this discrepancy? What happened to the soul in the twentieth century? When did psychology lose its soul, as it were? And why is there such a great interest in the soul outside the universities? This leads to another important question: Can a historical analysis of these processes help us to better understand the intersections of science, philosophy, spirituality, art, and politics today? I think so, and this book is an exploration of the dynamics underlying this question. In order to see the relevance of these developments, we need to have a closer look at the role that the concept of the soul has played in cultural
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debates since the nineteenth century, and how this arrangement has changed over the course of time. Where do we see continuities and discontinuities? What did the concept of the soul have to offer twentiethcentury societies in their changing dispositions? What other concepts was it linked to, which gave new meanings to the soul or preserved old meanings in new vessels? In A Cultural History of the Soul, I attempt to provide answers to these questions. What I am doing here is not a history of psychology. There are plenty such histories, many of them excellent. My book is a cultural history, which means I am locating and analyzing the soul in very different places—from literature and poetry to the sciences and the humanities, from spiritual practices to political documents. It is exactly this confluence of cultural locations, the mutual dependency of these systems, that creates meaning for large sections of many societies today. Put differently, it is in processes of societal negotiation that cultural knowledge about the soul is organized and established. The results of such processes are orders of knowledge that provide many people with direction, and often even with blueprints for action. These orders are always in flux, but they also reveal a certain persistence that historical analysis can identify. Talking of orders of knowledge does not mean that we have to decide which claims about the soul are “true” or how we should properly define the soul. I use “orders of knowledge” in the way the term has been established in cultural studies and the sociology of knowledge, namely, as a description and a reconstruction of that which groups and societies in a given context conceive of and accept as knowledge. The term has an important function in discourse research as well, and reference is often made to Michel Foucault, who was interested in the “genealogy” of our stores of knowledge and who provided important contributions to their cultural “archaeology.” By looking at very diverse—yet influential—historical contributions to societal discussions, I reconstruct the genealogies of today’s orders of knowledge about the soul. I describe how changing historical contexts have given meaning to the concept of the soul. In other words, what is at stake here are the ways in which shared knowledge about the soul was legitimized or delegitimized, stabilized or modified, and how it was entangled with other stores of knowledge.
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Hence this book is not only a cultural history; it is also a discursive history of the soul. Since the use of the term discourse has become so common as to lose some of its meaning, let me briefly explain how I use the term in this book.2 For me, an “open” definition of discourse is very helpful, for instance, in the way Franz X. Eder has suggested: discourses are practices “that systematically organize and regulate statements about a certain theme; by doing so, discourses determine the conditions of possibility of what (in a social group at a certain period of time) can be thought and said.”3 Consequently, discourse analysis looks not only at the textual and linguistic dimensions of a topic, but also at the practices that support or change orders of knowledge. This includes institutions. For instance, if a new discipline called “psychology” is established at universities, this represents a societal manifestation (or “reification,” from the Latin for “becoming a thing”) of a certain order of knowledge; conversely, the existence of such a subject of study legitimizes and further stabilizes this very order of knowledge. The same is true for the creation of associations and organizations, for the publication of popular books and journals, and for juridical and political decisions. Discourse researchers sometimes call these institutional vehicles of discourse “dispositives.” Dispositives constitute the “infrastructure” that carries a discourse and helps to spread it. Dispositives can change discourses simply by existing—examples would include the United Nations as a new global organization, the Internet as a new technology, or even algorithms, which currently constitute a dispositive with a lot of power over “the conditions of possibility of what (in a social group at a certain period of time) can be thought and said,” as Eder’s definition of discourse has it. Thus meanings of and knowledge about the soul emerge from highly diverse sources and contributions to societal discussions. In these conversations, the term soul never arrives on its own. The simple term soul has no meaning in and of itself. As is the case with all discourses, the concept of the soul gains its specific meaning only in combination with other terms. For instance, if soul is combined with cosmos and conceptualized as the world soul, or if it is linked to concepts such as life, breath, or mind, such an arrangement changes the order of knowledge that gives meaning to the
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concept of the soul. Discourse researchers call this a “discursive knot”: discursive knots combine or entangle several discourse strands (i.e., individual concepts such as soul or life), resulting in a discursive arrangement that generates meaning only through the entanglement of its individual strands. What I am doing in this book is actually quite simple: I look at a large number of historical sources and analyze the respective discursive knots that generate meaning around the concept of the soul. I have not limited my selection of sources to specific genres; rather, everything that has the potential to influence shared social opinions is a candidate for discourse analysis. This procedure of putting relevant data together is what Michel Foucault calls “grouping.” In The Archaeology of Knowledge, he notes that this analytical method frees us from associations and connotations that are often taken for granted, subsequently enabling us “to describe other unities, but this time by means of a group of controlled decisions. Providing one defines the conditions clearly, it might be legitimate to constitute, on the basis of correctly described relations, discursive groups that are not arbitrary, and yet remain invisible.”4 In combination with textual or other historical documents, I also look at the respective dispositives that support and spread the ideas under consideration. The popular work of a Nobel laureate in physics or a best-selling novel have more discursive impact (and hence “power”) than some other sources; the establishment of a university discipline, as well as of associations and academies, is an institutionalization of stores of knowledge that in turn influence discourses. Reiner Keller, a sociologist of knowledge, once said in a discussion that discourse analysis is manual labor. This is certainly true. The amount of material one could use to reconstruct a discourse is huge, and the decisions about which discursive formations one wants to study in depth (Foucault’s “controlled decisions”) are very much dependent on the concrete needs of the respective study as well as on scholarly preferences. Hence, there can be no such thing as the discursive history of the soul (or of any other term). The present book is just one of many possible cultural histories of the soul in the twentieth century. I do not claim that my analysis is comprehensive— not least because this study does not cover all possible aspects of the
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theme. As the modern concept of the soul originates from Euro-American histories, I address contributions (often with very different terms and meanings) from outside this cultural location only if they are directly entangled with Euro-American discourses on the soul, mainly through processes of colonialism and globalization.5 The first part of A Cultural History of the Soul focuses mainly on Europe, where major developments took place between the rise of Romanticism and the end of World War II, creating a discursive arrangement that is still operative today, despite a number of changes, which I address in my analysis. Within Europe, much of my data comes from German-speaking countries and from the United Kingdom; discourse communities in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom have been crucial in the formation of the orders of knowledge this book engages. While I also include some material from France, southern Europe, and the Netherlands, the intellectual contexts of these countries are not the main focus of my study; the same is true for Scandinavia and central and eastern Europe. I invite colleagues with the respective expertise to compare my account with data from those areas and thus to paint a more nuanced historical picture. In the second part of the book, the focus shifts to the United States of America, because it was in this context that discourses on the soul experienced their most important adaptations and transformations after World War II. I should also say that, for pragmatic reasons, I have excluded the whole field of music, as the discursive history of “soul” in music would require a book of its own (not to mention expertise I do not have); and finally, while I include quite a bit of literature and poetry in my analysis, I touch upon the arts only when there is a direct link to my line of argument. Hence it should be clear that although I cover a broad range of data and topics, my analysis is still limited in scope. Nevertheless, despite these caveats about the nature of my approach, I am convinced that the knowledge arrangements I have reconstructed here—the groupings and new unities— are representative of influential cultural developments in Europe and North America. They demonstrate how the concept of the soul was instrumental in the negotiation of key ideas about the human position in the world, about the link between material and spiritual dimensions of reality, and about the evolution of human and planetary life. They also show that
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scientific and nonscientific ideas and practices have strongly influenced and enriched each other. What we see at work here is a discourse community that has created meanings around the term soul through the interplay of various cultural productions. In A Cultural History of the Soul, I reconstruct some of the main lines of this discursive formation. To reveal the various discourse strands in the sources I introduce, I sometimes have to include longer quotations. I do not want to assert a certain discursive arrangement without sufficient evidence, but rather to reconstruct it from the sources. Readers can then make up their own minds about the continuities and discontinuities in the cultural and discursive history of the soul in the twentieth century. In the first chapter, I introduce the basic components of what would become the strands constituting the discourse on the soul in the twentieth century. For instance, in order to understand the close link between the two discourse strands of “soul” and “animism” in my analysis, it is important to know that the soul had animistic connotations in ancient Greek philosophy, and that these connotations have influenced our understanding of the soul up to the present day. Readers who are already familiar with—or simply less interested in—this historical context may wish to begin with the second chapter. The patterns this reconstruction and regrouping help to uncover are even more significant for contemporary culture than I had expected at the beginning of my research. At first glance, it is perhaps not self-evident why we should be interested in a history of the term soul. But once we see how intricately ideas of the soul are woven together with concepts such as consciousness, evolution, nature, matter, energy, art, and cognition, things start to look quite different. This reconstruction becomes even more interesting when we extend our analysis to allegedly “secular” contexts—to areas that have done away with old-fashioned “religion” but are still interested in metaphysical and ethical questions that integrate the human being into larger frameworks, even cosmic ones.6 This is why I am particularly interested in those discourses that emerge from entanglements of “secularscientific” and “spiritual-metaphysical” contributions, rather than in discourses on the soul that have formed in more traditionally “religious” locations—mainly in Christian theology.7 Indeed, it is precisely the ability of discourses on the soul to playfully bridge “religious” and “secular” points
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of view that makes the cultural and discursive history of the soul from the Romantic period until today so fascinating.8 My main argument is that analyzing the soul in its discursive arrangement with other concepts enhances our understanding of the place and the function of the metaphysical in human thought and action in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One implication of such an approach is that this book is not only about the soul; it is also a contribution to the discursive history of nature, science, consciousness, politics, spirituality, ecology, religion, and philosophy. Put differently, this book is about discursive arrangements that transmit knowledge about the soul; my grouping of discourse strands into historical arrangements of knowledge allows me to reconstruct the data in a way that showcases the enormous influence of these ideas and cultural practices. Sometimes I give names to (specific forms of) these arrangements, such as the “Orphic web” I use as a blueprint to analyze continuities and changes. Moreover, grouping discourse strands allows me to identify a “discourse on the soul” even where the term soul has been replaced by related terms, such as consciousness, psyche, or life force. The orders of knowledge are still intact, even if the terms in the arrangements change. Therefore, readers who are specifically interested in my take on what the soul “really” is, or how we should conceptualize it, may be disappointed. But readers who are interested in how our understanding of the soul has been shaped by philosophy, science, the arts, politics, spirituality, and religion between 1870 and today will, I hope, find some inspiration in the following chapters. The soul continues to be part of a complex arrangement of knowledge. In the end, maybe it is not the soul that is in crisis. Maybe our academic and cultural perception simply needs to catch up.
THE SOUL, WHICH DOMINATED MANY intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture—from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements. This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and North America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines a fascination spanning philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the study of religion, as well as occultism and spiritualism, against the backdrop of the emergence of experimental psychology. He then explores how and why the United States witnessed a flowering of ideas about the soul in popular culture and spirituality in the latter half of the century. Von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements— ranging from Ernest Renan, Martin Buber, and Carl Gustav Jung to the Esalen Institute, deep ecology, and revivals of shamanism, animism, and paganism to Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Harry Potter franchise. Revealing how the soul remains central to a culture that is only seemingly secular, this book casts new light on the place of spirituality, religion, and metaphysics in Europe and North America today.
Praise for the German edition: “A useful reference guide for twentieth-century notions of the soul and related themes such as nature, animism, consciousness, energy, and vitalism.” — Religious
Studies Review
KOCKU VON STUCKRAD is professor of religious studies at the University of Groningen. He is the author of several books, including Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (2005) and The Scientification of Religion: A Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000 (2014).
columbia university press / new york cup.columbia.edu
Cover image: Blue Fox, 1911 (oil on canvas), by Franz Marc (1880–1916). Courtesy Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany / Bridgeman Images. Cover design: Lisa Hamm