Like other chapters in this book, this chapter sounds a minor note, a counterposition, an alternative perspective, a philosophically unorthodox point of view relative to the contents of most introductory philosophy texts. And, like the other chapters, this minor status relative to modern Western philosophical orthodoxy is not intended to mean lower or less: In its own right, esoteric is a worthy adjective, indicating a more difficult and more specialized kind of philosophy than the usual “phil 101” fare. By definition, esoteric means knowledge available only to a small group of initiated seekers, and consequently regarded as secret.
Whereas most, if not all, philosophy courses emphasize critical thinking about large fundamental questions concerning knowledge and truth, human nature and morality, God and religion, history and society, a course or text in esoteric philosophy would invite the student to consider a change in thinking, and a change in character, as a way to attain a deeper kind of knowledge. This is not a boast: Philosophers who do not study or teach esoteric philosophy choose not to do so because they are convinced that ordinary philosophy goes as deep as it is reasonable to go—and beyond that lies neither truth nor meaning, but only confusion and danger.
In addition to its risky and controversial attempt to begin where ordinary philosophy leaves off, this chapter on esoteric philosophy is slightly more unusual than the chapters on the philosophies of Africa, China, or India in that esoteric philosophy does not reside exclusively, or even primarily, within a particular culture. Esoteric philosophy is to be found as a minority presence in all, or nearly all, cultures, from ancient to contemporary times. This chapter will focus on the esoteric in the history of Western philosophy, but it could be written equally well with respect to any of the other philosophical traditions under discussion here.
Given that it is transcultural, we might imagine esoteric philosophy to be a sub-discipline such as ethics, aesthetics, or the philosophy of religion, but again esoteric philosophy is an exception: It is not so much a discipline within philosophy—such as ethics and political philosophy—as it is a different kind of philosophy. A philosopher, Plato, for instance, can philosophize esoterically at one moment and exoterically at another; his philosophy can be part esoteric, part exoteric.
An analogy might be: Esotericism is to philosophy as mysticism—the immediate experience of a divine unifying presence—is to religion. For the mystic, and for most students and followers of various mystics, mysticism is the essential center of religion; for most people in religion, however, mystics and their mysticism are entirely “other,” out of reach and unintelligible. Similarly, for the esoteric philosopher, and student thereof, the esoteric is what it is “really about,” the only reliable source of knowledge and truth, of which all other knowledge is but a pale reflection. Most authors of philosophy books as well as professors and students—though decidedly more professors than students—regard esoteric philosophy as unreliable and unscientific and, therefore, not representative of true knowledge.
By including a chapter on esoteric philosophy, this book is in effect saying that we need to study not only the philosophies of other cultures but also another kind of philosophy, one that builds on different assumptions and experiences and uses a method different from that used in modern Western philosophies. As we will see, esoteric philosophy is in important respects closer to the values and methods of other philosophies, the so-called non-Western philosophies. Although this chapter will focus on esoteric philosophy as we find it in the West, in the end we will look at the relationships, by way of comparisons, between Western esotericism and the philosophies presented in the other chapters, all of which are concerned with exoteric materials, exoterically presented.
One of the most important tasks in philosophy is defining the key terms and then working them until they take on a certain energy of their own. In the Oxford English Dictionary, esoteric is defined as follows:
Of philosophical doctrines, treatises, modes of speech, etc.: designed for, or appropriate to, an inner life of advanced or privileged disciples; communicated to, or intelligible by, the initiated exclusively. Hence the disciples: Belonging to the inner circle, admitted to the esoteric teaching. Opposed to exoteric.
This same authoritative dictionary also indicates that in ordinary conversation, esoteric means “obscure.” So, in their letter inviting the authors of this book to write for college students, the editors urged us to avoid esoteric vocabulary. In this sentence, esoteric is used in a new, more popular meaning—“highly technical.” In effect, the editors are saying: “Don’t use vocabulary familiar only to those ‘initiated’ into the ‘secrets’ of esoteric philosophical terminology.”
At the outset of this chapter, readers might want to ask the editors of this book, and me, as author of this chapter, how we intend to present a nonesoteric, nonsecret, and nontechnical exposition of esoteric philosophy! The answer must be that this chapter is a pointing. It is like a book about music; it can lead the reader to, and a little bit through, music, but it cannot supply the music. It says: Try to go beyond your ordinary thinking; try to imagine what Plato saw; and try to transform your thinking into a kind of intellectual “seeing.”
As should be expected, I deal here for the most part with the advantages of esoteric philosophy, but the disadvantages must also be acknowledged and evaluated. Obviously, few if any of us would be studying philosophy if the only method were the esoteric. A book such as From Africa to Zen would be inconceivable if that were the case. The only philosophy that would be taught anywhere in the world would be the philosophy of the master philosopher, the philosophical sage, the guru, the spiritual-philosophical master. Not only would there be no books presenting a variety of philosophical teachings; there would be no philosophy books at all!
This book is an example of exotericism in that it aims to bring philosophical teachings to the largest possible number of readers, probably few of whom will strive to develop the kind of receptive consciousness that was once required of all those who heard the teachings here summarized. Yet it represents a dramatic exception to virtually all other introductions to philosophy precisely in that it presents philosophical traditions that still honor the esoteric dimension. More than any other tradition, the Western identifies philosophy with the exoteric, with reason, with argument, with democratic inquiry—and with the exclusion of the esoteric.
All the other traditions presented in this book—at least to the extent that they have not succumbed to the approach of philosophy characteristic of the West—include teachers, schools, and practices that are closer to the method of Pythagoras than to that of Aristotle. All the philosophical traditions outside the Greek, particularly the Aristotelian model, include some amount of the esoteric and some recognition of the significant, and perhaps essential, relation between philosophy and inner schooling.
What difference would it make if the authors of the chapters in this book were known to have received such a training? For a standard chapter on nonesoteric Western philosophy, a philosophic author would be expected to be trained in the history of philosophy and in philosophical thinking, with little regard for his or her inner life or spiritual discipline. For standard Western philosophy, whether oriented toward historical or contemporary questions, there is simply no room for the kind of esoteric training given to the students of Pythagoras, the sixth-century-B.C. mathematician and spiritual teacher.
True esoteric teachers revealed their teachings only to students who would understand and respect them. It was to protect the purity of the teachings that esoteric teachers carefully screened their students and did not teach them in advance of their capacity to understand and use practices and ideas that were known to be transformative. Esoteric teachers were convinced that uninitiated students—or, in modern times, the general reader—would use presumably profound teachings for selfish or ignorant purposes. This is exactly what has happened: Despite the efforts of these teachers, and no doubt the vast majority of their students, esoteric teachings, particularly in the present century, have been rendered exoteric.
The democratic impulse has prevailed. And this, of course, has mostly been a great contribution to individual and cultural growth: Had the esoteric not given way to the exoteric, most of us would know nothing about the esoteric. And, since at one time all philosophy was esoteric, were it not for the development of the exoteric, we would not know any philosophy at all, either esoteric or exoteric. By traveling, in effect, from esoteric to exoteric, philosophy is now in a position to view, from an exotic vantage point, the widest possible range of exoteric philosophies—all the ideas that, since Aristotle, have been in principle (though obviously not in fact) available to everyone. (Because of the greater availability of higher education, it is safe to estimate that more people have studied Plato and Aristotle in the United States over the past fifty years than in the entire world during the previous twenty-three centuries.)
The way to the esoteric is partly through the exoteric. Anyone who is willing to read, listen to, and think about philosophical ideas can then decide to look beyond, or behind, the exoteric to the esoteric, to the teachings recently made available even though intended for a privileged few. While we should be amazed, and perhaps grateful, that profound teachings once jealously guarded and available only at the expense of great personal sacrifice are now blithely summarized in college textbooks, we need to admit a negative side of this radically new opportunity: because of the democratization and popularization process, what we and other unschooled students know of the esoteric—for example, the contents of this chapter—is almost certainly thin and corrupt compared with the original, undiluted esoteric teachings.
We can be grateful to know something, however secondhand, of the great teachings of the Indian rsis, African and Native American shamans, Taoist healers, and other esoteric teacher-practitioners who have been published and popularized for the first time in the past half century, but this democratization has also had the expected, and perhaps necessary, result—widespread misinterpretation, misrepresentation, confusion, dissolution of the teachings, and prejudicial ridicule. The esoteric invites ridicule as well as suspicion and skepticism because, from the vantage point of the exoteric, and the ideal of the exoteric, there is something wrong about communicating truth to a privileged few. But if there is something really demanding about philosophy, so that truth comes only to those who serve it by personal effort, discipline, and sacrifice, then a survey by an outsider cannot claim to offer anything like a true account. This chapter is in trouble from the outset because there is something inherently wrong about an admittedly exoteric account of esoteric philosophy. I repeat, this can only be a pointing.
While these references to special states of consciousness might seem alienating to our democratic and homogenized understanding of teaching, learning, and truth, except for the philosophical tradition that began in classical Greece and has flourished over the past three centuries in the West, almost all philosophy has been built on this model. The persuasive (not to mention political and economic) power of the West, however, has resulted in the reduction and near elimination of the esoteric dimensions of non-Western philosophies. In fact, it is misleading to use the term philosophy for the wisdom traditions of the cultures discussed in this book. We can, of course, define the term as we wish, but it cannot be used univocally for the teachings of these cultures and the teachings of the modern West.
Because very few professors of philosophy are informed as to the esoteric methods of the transmission of wisdom in the premodern West, most tend to miss the uniqueness of modern Western thinking. Professors and students in philosophy courses throughout Europe and the English-speaking world seem not to question the limiting of philosophy to the exoteric. It is almost true that this limiting has not been seriously questioned since the time of Plato. This is not quite true, however, in that some of the great philosophers of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures should be regarded as esoteric thinkers, as should some modern Western thinkers.
The identification of philosophy with the exoteric leads to the elimination of esoteric thinkers from the ranks of philosophers. Increasingly, the same process of creating and re-creating a core, or canon, of philosophers according to the philosophically correct definition of philosophy as exclusively exoteric has been under way, in diverse ways and for different lengths of time, in the cultures represented in this book. This process, which has been extremely complex and controversial, represents the full range of influences that fall under the label Westernization—that is, from colonialization to democratization.
As with most new directions and disputes in Western philosophy, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle serve as precedents. In this case, we can best begin with Aristotle, who organized the field and the method of philosophy. Aristotle was the first to divide his philosophy into esoteric and exoteric. By exoteric he meant popular and nontechnical; by esoteric he presumably meant the kind of knowledge attained in mystery centers by special training, and thereafter intelligible only to the initiated few. In his philosophy, Aristotle neglected the esoteric completely, concentrating solely on the exoteric.
Because the West has followed Aristotle in omitting the esoteric, only a minority of philosophers are conscious of, or interested in, what Aristotle ignored. There are, however, texts that can be read either esoterically or exoterically, the most vivid and influential of which is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. This allegory has served as an archetypal image (original creative expression) of the esoteric consciousness in the West (albeit one that is usually read without much attention to its esoteric quality). It is here quoted in its entirety from The Republic because it is so revealing not only of Plato’s thought, and of Platonism in the West (particular Christianity), but equally of our own thinking. Is this the way we understand our mentality? Are we ordinarily separated from Knowledge and Reality, and do we need to ascend to another level of experience? Is there a “cave” and an ascent? (In this passage Socrates is the speaker.)
ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE (Republic VII: 514a–517e)
| Next, said I, compare our nature in respect of education and its lack to such an experience as this. Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets. | 514 |
| b | |
| All that I see, he said. | |
| See also, then, men carrying past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others silent. | c 515 |
| A strange image you speak of, he said, and strange prisoners. | |
| Like to us, I said. For, to begin with, tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them? | |
| b | How could they, he said, if they were compelled to hold their heads unmoved through life? |
| And again, would not the same be true of the objects carried past them? Surely. | |
| If then they were able to talk to one another, do you not think that they would suppose that in naming the things that they saw they were naming the passing objects? | |
| Necessarily. | |
| And if their prison had an echo from the wall opposite them, when one of the passers-by uttered a sound, do you think that they would suppose anything else than the passing shadow to be the speaker? | |
| By Zeus, I do not, said he. | |
| c | Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects. |
| Quite inevitably, he said. | |
| d | Consider, then, what would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly if in the course of nature something of this sort should happen to them. When one was freed from his fetters and compelled to stand up suddenly and turn his head around and walk and to lift up his eyes to the light, and in doing all this felt pain and, because of the dazzle and glitter of the light, was unable to discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw, what do you suppose would be his answer if someone told him that what he had seen before was all a cheat and an illusion, but that now, being nearer to reality and turned toward more real things, he saw more truly? And if also one should point out to him each of the passing objects and constrain him by questions to say what it is, do you not think that he would be at a loss and that he would regard what he formerly saw as more real than the things now pointed out to him? |
| Far more real, he said. | |
| And if he were compelled to look at the light itself, would not that pain his eyes, and would he not turn away and flee to those things which he is able to discern and regard them as in very deed more clear and exact than the objects pointed out? | |
| It is so, he said. | |
| e | And if, said I, someone should drag him thence by force up the ascent which is rough and steep, and not let him go before he had drawn him out into the light of the sun, do you not think that he would find it painful to be |
| 516 | so haled along, and would chafe at it, and when he came out into the light, that his eyes would be filled with its beams so that he would not be able to see even one of the things that we call real? |
| Why, no, not immediately, he said. | |
| b | Then there would be need of habituation, I take it, to enable him to see the things higher up. And at first he would most easily discern the shadows and, after that, the likenesses or reflections in water of men and other things, and later, the things themselves, and from these he would go on to contemplate the appearances in the heavens and heaven itself, more easily by night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than by day the sun and the sun’s light. |
| Of course. | |
| And so, finally, I suppose, he would be able to look upon the sun itself and see its true nature, not by reflections in water or phantasms of it in an alien setting, but in and by itself in its own place. | |
| Necessarily, he said. | |
| And at this point he would infer and conclude that this it is that provides the seasons and the courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some sort the cause of all these things that they had seen. | c |
| Obviously, he said, that would be the next step. | |
| Well then, if he recalled to mind his first habitation and what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow bondsmen, do you not think that he would count himself happy in the change and pity them? | |
| He would indeed. | |
| And if there had been honors and commendations among them which they bestowed on one another and prizes for the man who is quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences, and coexistences, and so most successful in guessing at what was to come, do you think he would be very keen about such rewards, and that he would envy and emulate those who were honored by these prisoners and lorded it among them, or that he would feel with Homer and greatly prefer while living on earth to be serf of another, a landless man, and endure anything rather than opine with them and live that life? | d |
| Yes, he said, I think that he would choose to endure anything rather than such a life. | e |
| And consider this also, said I. If such a one should go down again and take his old place would he not get his eyes full of darkness, thus suddenly coming out of the sunlight? | |
| He would indeed. | |
| Now if he should be required to contend with these perpetual prisoners in ‘evaluating’ these shadows while his vision was still dim and before his eyes were accustomed to the dark—and this time required for habituation would not be very short—would he not provoke laughter, and would it not be said of him that he had returned from his journey aloft with his eyes ruined and that it was not worth while even to attempt the ascent? And if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him? | 517 |
| They certainly would, he said. | |
| This image then, dear Glaucon, we must apply as a whole to all that has been said, likening the region revealed through sight to the habitation of the prison, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the sun. And if you assume that the ascent and the contemplation of the things above is the soul’s ascension to the intelligible region, you will not miss my surmise, since that is what you desire to hear. But God knows whether it is true. But, at any rate, my | |
| b | |
| dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this. | |
| c |
| I concur, he said, so far as I am able. | |
| Come then, I said, and join me in this further thought, and do not be surprised that those who have attained to this height are not willing to occupy themselves with the affairs of men, but their souls ever feel the upward urge and the yearning for that sojourn above. For this, I take it, is likely if in this point too the likness of our image holds. | |
| d | |
| Yes, it is likely. | |
| And again, do you think it at all strange, said I, if a man returning from divine contemplations to the petty miseries of men cuts a sorry figure and appears most ridiculous, if, while still blinking through the gloom, and before he has become sufficiently accustomed to the environing darkness, he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the images that cast the shadows and to wrangle in debate about the notions of these things in the minds of those who have never seen justice itself? | |
| e |
A person who was dragged up and out of the cave would find the light blinding, but a person who trained properly would be ready for the light (or Light). In this same work, The Republic, Plato indicates clearly that progress in philosophy, or preparing to know-see, preparing for insight, would require fifteen years of mathematical training, and that both mathematics and philosophy would require a very exacting way of life. Plato almost certainly spent some years training in centers influenced by Pythagoras, and never lost his conviction that philosophic truth can be attained only by a total, lifelong spiritual training.
Although most of the philosophy taught in this book, and discussed on the basis of this book, is exoteric, Plato’s allegory gives each reader an opportunity to examine how far he or she wishes to go in search of an alternative, and purportedly superior, way of knowing. Plato, in contrast to Aristotle, intends his readers—or, more accurately, his listeners—to experience an invitation to find ordinary consciousness stifling and unbearable. He in effect says, if you think that you are in a cave of consciousness, in a blind alley of awareness, taking shadows for realities, there is another reality, and a way to it. Further, Plato himself allows his readers to believe that he is not speaking abstractly, or at secondhand, but knows firsthand whereof he speaks:
One statement at any rate I can make in regard to all who have written or who may write with a claim to knowledge of the subjects to which I devote myself—no matter how they pretend to have acquired it, whether from my instruction or from others or by their own discovery. Such writers can in my opinion have no real acquaintance with the subject. I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining.
Besides, this at any rate I know, that if there were to be a treatise or a lecture on this subject, I could do it best. I am also sure for that matter that I should be very sorry to see such a treatise poorly written. If I thought it possible to deal adequately with the subject in a treatise or a lecture for the general public, what finer achievement would there have been in my life than to write a work of great benefit to mankind and to bring the nature of things to light for all men? I do not, however, think the attempt to tell mankind of these matters a good thing, except in the case of some few who are capable of discovering the truth for themselves with a little guidance. In the case of the rest, to do so would excite in some an unjustified contempt in a thoroughly offensive fashion, in others certain lofty and vain hopes, as if they had acquired some awesome lore. (Seventh Letter, 341c–342a)
To sum it all up in one word, natural intelligence and a good memory are equally powerless to aid the man who has not an inborn affinity with the subject. Without such endowments there is of course not the slightest possibility. Hence all who have no natural aptitude for and affinity with justice and all the other noble ideals, though in the study of other matters they may be both intelligent and retentive—all those too who have affinity but are stupid and unretentive—will never attain to an understanding of the most complete truth in regard to moral concepts. The study of virtue and vice must be accompanied by an inquiry into what is false and true of existence in general and must be carried on by constant practice throughout a long period, as I said in the beginning. Hardly after practicing detailed comparisons of names and definitions and visual and other sense perceptions, after scrutinizing them in benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy, at last in a flash understanding of each blazes up, and the mind, as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light. (Seventh Letter, 344a–344b)
This is the characteristically Platonic—and esoteric—attitude and intent that does not find its way into the writings of Aristotle or into Western philosophy generally. Although some readers might find some of the discussions in this and similar books entirely too esoteric (technical, and as though intended for a privileged few), none of the material in this book is intentionally esoteric. Aristotle’s philosophy is occasionally quite esoteric in its degree of technicality and in its appeal to only a small number of people favored with philosophic aptitude, but he clearly does not intend any part of his philosophy to be secret.
When Aristotle says that his philosophy is exoteric—that is, intended to be understood, at least in principle, by any and all readers—he has in mind a clear distinction between his way of doing philosophy and the way of some earlier philosophers, for example, Pythagoras, whose teachings were intended to be secret to all but his highly trained disciples. It is this kind of philosophy that is under discussion here—though, I hope, in a way that is no longer secret and not so technical that it cannot be understood, in principle, by beginning readers.
Although it is easy for us to agree that Aristotle was right to democratize philosophy, it might be worth asking whether there was something true and necessary in the Pythagorean training. Of course, it would be difficult for us to evaluate Pythagoras’s method of training since philosophy has few if any examples of such special training, or special teachers capable of guiding such a training. Yet it is the task of this chapter to explore precisely this question—what, if anything, is there about philosophy that would benefit from a Pythagorean-style training, one that would proceed according to a strict hierarchy of esoteric schooling?
We have already pointed to the contrast between the exoteric philosophy of Aristotle and the partly esoteric philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. By now we should understand that there is something wrong with the question “What did Pythagoras teach?” The question awaits the distinction—what Pythagoras really taught, that is, esoterically, and what he is exoterically reported to have taught. The exoteric in this case might be due to the passage of time and state of consciousness: A student might summarize exoterically what he had learned while he and Pythagoras shared an esoteric state of mind. (It would have been a “he” because we are told that only men were members of the esoteric schools, but this was so of exoteric schools as well. This may be shocking but not surprising considering that the women of Athens, the source of Western democracy, were not citizens.)
Or Pythagoras himself might have summarized in an exoteric state of mind, and for an exoteric purpose, an approach to or the implications of his esoteric teaching. But Pythagoras was a typical esoteric teacher in that he did not publicize his esoteric teachings. More to the point, even if his esoteric teachings had been widely publicized—even by Pythagoras himself—they would automatically have ceased to be esoteric. The link between ancient and contemporary interest in the esoteric is precisely this characteristic—the exceptional state of mind of the teacher and student. Aristotle’s philosophy is not esoteric because he does not insist on a special state of consciousness necessary to hear and hold the truth that he seeks to communicate. Pythagoras, however, did insist on a specially achieved mental state that was presumably possible for students who followed his prescriptions for meditative thinking.
The entire process of replacing esoteric by exoteric philosophy in Greek civilization was realized within three generations—essentially by three astonishing thinkers. Aristotle represents the complete neglect within philosophy of esoteric methods and claims. But because he was a Greek of the fourth century B.C.—and for twenty years Plato’s student—what Aristotle meant by exoteric is not at all what it means in the West of the late twentieth century. If we approach Aristotle’s writings, as we typically do, we might miss the affinity between Aristotle the exoteric philosopher and the amount of esotericism that was an essential element in the achievements of all Greek genius, including the philosophy of Aristotle.
The habit of treating Socrates and Plato as though they were contemporary Western philosophers has been established by the texts for introductory philosophy courses used throughout the English-speaking world. As a senior professor and chair of a philosophy department in New York City, each semester I observed beginning instructors in introductory philosophy courses striving to establish the contemporaneity of Socrates and Plato. Establishing the relevance of Socrates and Plato for those who are encountering them for the first time is made easier by a combination of introductory philosophy textbooks, some of Plato’s own statements, and the cultural filters through which we see the past. (We should bear in mind that references to Socrates are references to the character in the dialogues written by his student Plato; Socrates, like Lao Tzu, Confucius, Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus, did not record his own thoughts, but had them recorded, more or less accurately, after his death.)
Students and professors alike find the Socrates and Plato they expect to find—typically, the first and second generation, respectively, of Western rationality. It is true that Socrates was a martyr for philosophy: He favored free inquiry against government-sponsored religious beliefs and practices. Perhaps more important, he examined attitudes and convictions that for his fellow citizens were too obvious to question. But what should we make of the fact that Socrates launched his lifelong career as a philosopher on the advice of an oracle? (An oracle, from the Latin oraculum, is a prayer or divine communication.) Or that throughout his life Socrates followed the advice of his daimonion, an inner voice that forbade him to perform certain contemplated actions. These nonrational factors in Socrates’ life tend to be reduced to a literary or psychological device by modern interpreters, but it is clear from the text that both Socrates and Plato took them seriously as esoteric realities.
At his trial for impiety and corruption of the youth of Athens—obviously politically motivated charges—Socrates admitted that he had spent his life testing the oracle’s statement that Socrates was the wisest of men. The oracle in question, one of the oldest and most famous in Greece, was the shrine of Apollo, the foremost of all Greek gods in relation to human affairs such as religion, law, and civilization. The pronouncements of Apollo were mediated, or channeled, by a woman called the Pythia. Apparently the Pythia communicated to a friend of Socrates, Chaerephon, while Socrates was not yet conscious of his philosophic mission, that Socrates was the wisest of men.
Socrates subsequently set out to disprove, or at least to test, this assertion. As is well known to all students of Western thought and culture, Socrates was at first bewildered by the oracular pronouncement because he was so aware of his ignorance concerning really important issues like virtue. In time, however, after entering into dialogue with those with reputations for wisdom, Socrates concluded that they did not really know the truth, and Socrates was alone in acknowledging that he did not really know.
Plato, who was in his early twenties when Socrates was tried and executed for not believing in the state religion, focused on the “really”: If Socrates did not really know, who did, and how would one know if and when one were really to know? The task of knowing and of knowing whether we are really knowing (and not, like those who argued with Socrates, accepting opinions as though they were true knowledge) was given central place in Plato’s brilliant and uniquely influential philosophy, but neither Socrates nor Plato turned his skillful skepticism on the oracle.
In addition to the fascinating question of the oracle and its importance in the career of the model for Western philosophers, there is also the question of Socrates’ diamonion, or inner voice, which told Socrates what not to do. Some interpreters casually regard Socrates’ daimonion as a kind of conscience, and some others maliciously regard it as a sign that Socrates was maladjusted, but in fact we are here confronting another sign that Socrates, whom the entire West claims as its first philosopher, was also involved with esoteric practices and teachings. Plato tells of Socrates’ trances, in one of which he stood in a rapt mystical state for more than twenty-four hours. It is clear that Socrates was familiar with both Pythagorean initiation (mystery-schooling) and with the religious practices surrounding Orpheus.
As Socrates is the initiator, the archetypal or symbolic first example of the philosopher, his student Plato is the first creator of a full-scale philosophy. Plato’s early works are referred to as Socratic because they concern, and are obviously influenced by, the life and ideals of Socrates. His middle dialogues are more ambitious, and as typified by the Symposium and The Republic, represent Plato’s unsurpassed ability to combine speculative imagination with rigorous analysis and argument. In the third period, Plato’s dialogues tend to be analytic and without the confident speculative power of his middle dialogues, but there in the third period we find Timaeus, with its mix of cosmology and myth.
The most dramatic evidence that Plato maintained a close relationship to the esoteric is provided by his many references to exceptional states of consciousness and to teachers who have benefited from such states, some of whom teach others how to achieve these unusual states of awareness. In the Symposium, for example, Socrates presents, with approval, a theory of beauty—or, more precisely, True Knowledge of the Idea of Beauty—that he learned from Diotima, a priestess who is clearly identified as an esoteric teacher. In The Republic, Plato separates human experience, or consciousness, into two levels: the lower level, concerned with ordinary states of mind, mostly with appearances, or sense perceptions of ordinary objects, and the upper level, concerned with True Knowledge of Reality. To move from the lower to the higher level would be like moving out of a cave, out of a world of shadows into the Light. In such a text as this, the mystical and esoteric finds one of its fullest and most influential expressions.
Although so brief a discussion as this cannot do justice either to esoteric philosophy or to the Greek philosophy, I hope that it has been able to depict Plato as a fascinating example of the way in which the esoteric and exoteric can be mixed, and the degree to which a perspective committed to the exoteric can miss the esoteric dimension of one of its most important representatives. It might also serve to establish a pattern of neglect with respect to the esoteric in other periods of Western philosophy. Esoteric philosophy is an unbroken tradition from the Egyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks through the Christian West and continuing to the present. Philosophy texts and courses nevertheless give the impression that all philosophy is exoteric, or, if a teaching, teacher, or idea is esoteric, then it is not philosophy.
This neglect of the esoteric did not happen all at once. The process that began with Aristotle continued to gain scope, depth, and confidence through the Christian centuries until in the modern West of the past three centuries, the esoteric has been excluded not only from philosophy but from knowledge and culture as well. If the story here told is accurate, then it would seem to be, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet well stated, that
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (I: v. 166–67)
The more unusual things together with ordinary things from unusual perspectives are the special concern of esoteric philosophy.
Philosophy in the West took a decisive step with Aristotle’s determination to focus on the logical and rational to the exclusion of the kind of knowledge attained in the mystery centers, but esoteric philosophy did not disappear. Rather, the impulse that led men to join the esoteric academy of Pythagoras was presumably the same as that which led seekers of spiritual wisdom in later centuries to join Christian monasteries, and in recent centuries to join communities guided by modern esoteric teachers. Although the content and methods of Greek mystery centers differ from those of medieval monasteries, and both differ from those of modern esoteric communities, the commonalities are important and revealing for our understanding of the history of Western thought and culture, and for our orientation.
Essentially, the Greek mystery center—of which that of Pythagoras was the best known—offered a comprehensive way of life, requiring a strict ascetic regimen, including a plain diet, sexual abstinence, exact meditation requirements, and model teachers who guided the seeker toward deeper insight into mathematics, music, and philosophy. As the example of the Pythagorean school clearly indicates, esoteric philosophy assumes a necessary relationship between various transformative disciplines and the attainment of deep knowledge. It assumes that such knowledge is attainable only by means of what is now referred to as an altered state of consciousness.
In effect, Socrates and Plato continued to regard such altered states as necessary for philosophic wisdom, whereas Aristotle, while insisting on contemplation as the highest level of thinking, nevertheless did not build on, or recommend, the practices developed in Greek mystery centers. But Platonism continued as an alternative to Aristotle’s philosophy from their time to the present. It is sometimes claimed that all thinking people in the West fall into one of two types—Platonist or Aristotelian. But it must be admitted that Aristotelianism represents the kind of thinking that is more typically regarded as characteristically Western—that is, rational and, in recent centuries, rational-scientific.
This broad characterization is unfair to both Plato and Aristotle, but it does remind us of the competing qualities, not so much of the philosophies as such but of the “isms.” Whereas the Aristotelian is closer to nature and the body, and to the facts of experience, the Platonic is identified with the pure form, with the ideal, and with the spiritual. This is significant for our focus on the esoteric because the Platonic tradition from Plato to the present has been identified with spiritual disciplines as ways to special knowledge. As is evident in the passages quoted from Plato’s Republic and the Seventh Letter, the Platonic tradition calls for special disciplines that reportedly lead to special (particularly spiritual) knowledge. Special/spiritual knowledge is not ordinarily attainable except by a path of purification and meditative thinking.
During the centuries after Plato, this emphasis on purifactory and meditative exercises as a way to spiritual insight evolved both within religion, particularly Christianity, and as an alternative to religion. Within Judaism, Platonic philosophical ideas were developed by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (15 B.C.–40 A.D.). Christian theologians began to develop a Christian Platonism as early as the mid-second century. St. Augustine (354–430) developed a full Platonic Christian theology, at the core of which is an essentially Platonic insistence on the superiority of the soul over the body, and the corresponding belief that the soul can be illumined directly by God.
The source of Augustine’s Platonism was Plotinus, a non-Christian mystical philosopher. Plotinus represents a kind of pagan spirituality—pagan, in this context, meaning not belonging to an established religion. Because of its spiritual dimension, Platonism serves part of the function of religion. So does all esoteric philosophy in that it requires the kind of transformative discipline by which the seeker after wisdom strives to develop receptivity to divine knowledge. While philosophy as studied at the present time is ordinarily regarded as opposed to religion—and indeed generally is—it is not unusual to find a philosopher, particularly in the Platonic tradition, practicing philosophy in a way similar to how someone would practice religion. For such a person, Plotinus’s non-Christian Greek mystical philosophy represents a kind of pagan, or secular, scripture.
During the Christian Middle Ages, from approximately the fifth to the fourteenth centuries, a series of Christian spiritual teachers and theologians developed Platonic thinking within the context of Christian revelation and medieval culture. Owing to the virtual monopoly on thinking and culture exercised by the Catholic church during these centuries, there were no major esoteric alternatives to the Christian Platonism within the Christian West. Platonism and the subsequent mystical Platonic philosophy of Plotinus were not tied to any religious orthodoxy even though they were appropriated by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers as theoretical supports for their religious worldviews.
What is lost in all this wrangling over orthodoxy and its habit of appropriating or suppressing is the ideal of philosophy in general, and of esoteric philosophy in particular: that the aim is to prepare oneself to receive the maximum amount, and purest version, of truth about reality of which we, in our mortal frame, are capable. It is worth studying the early centuries of the Christian West if for no other reason than to see something of how teachings considered to be spiritually profound and selfless can nevertheless get tangled in ideological and institutional prejudices. This is extremely important for us because we live in a time of intense ideological and institutional prejudice, one in which the disagreements between the presuppositions of esoteric and exoteric philosophies, as well as within these two kinds of philosophies, have led to the widespread conviction that no one really knows and that no one can know.
The intellectual climate in the contemporary West is similar to that of Socrates’ time, when the Sophists (who were essentially lawyers—people paid to make the weaker argument appear the stronger) were in charge of truth. But do we have a Socrates or a Plato or an Aristotle to offset this sophistic relativism? Now that we have had a glimpse of Platonism and the general evolution of esoteric philosophy in Greek thought, and its complex evolution within the Christian West, how can we set about determining whether any of these worldviews is true? When we study this mix of thinking and practice generated by Platonic vision and Christian revelation, the first and most difficult task is to determine whether, or the extent to which, the unusual claims in this tradition are the result of actual, believable experience.
Do such ideas as those of the Trinity, the Ideas in/of God’s mind, Truth and Light, grace and salvation come from esoteric practice and insight? To make this judgment fairly and reliably, we need to exercise a level or kind of insight similar to that exercised by the Christian Platonist. Or, if the Christian part of this combination proves to be an obstacle, we could try to glimpse something of what Plato or Plotinus saw: By working through their texts, we could try to ascend the ladder of knowledge and reality. And if the Christian part seems right, we might then follow Augustine in arguing that the Christian scriptures provide the missing piece in the Platonic vision, namely Christ, which, for the Christian, is the link between the spiritual ideal and the limitations of the physical.
The medieval Christian culture, however, regarded the spiritual and the ideal—the primary concerns of Platonism—as the first priority, and the material as of secondary value. The philosophy of Aristotle, with its attempt to bring spirit and matter into a closer, in fact indissoluble, conjunction, would have provided a helpful polarity for the otherworldliness of Christian Platonism, but the major texts of Aristotle were scarcely known during these centuries. Consequently, Platonism came to be the dominant teaching of the Christian Middle Ages, and, with the aura of orthodoxy bestowed by its intimate association with the increasingly powerful church, virtually eliminated all non-Christian esoteric teachings during these centuries. It was not until the forceful return of the texts of Aristotle that the Platonist grip was loosened.
One of the phenomena we will notice in this history is the way in which each teaching appears true in what it affirms but less convincing in what it rejects. So, we might want to conclude that Platonism is on to something true when it insists on the independent reality of Ideas, or Ideals, such as Truth, Beauty, Love, or Justice, but not convincing when it is stingy in assigning meaning to the physical world. All of the Platonic schools and texts, from Plato in the fourth century B.C. to Plotinus in the third century A.D., agree that Ideals (Truth, Beauty, and so on) are independent of the sense world, and are knowable directly by a nonsensory or intuitive mode of knowing.
The Christian Platonists were convinced that they were developing a balanced worldview that combined a full account of the divine reality with a rich account of the created world. The Platonic account of the Ideal, particularly the Idea of the Good, which Plato referred to metaphorically as the Sun, the Source of Light and Insight, fit neatly with the Christian idea of God, the Creator and Provider of life. For the intellectually alert Christian of the early Middle Ages, Platonism and the philosophy of Plotinus (called Neoplatonism) provided additional support for the belief that the deeds, teachings, and status of Jesus Christ were not only experientially vivid but intelligible as well.
Christian Platonists also believed that, because they followed the transformative practices developed out of both Platonic and Christian traditions, they were capable of receiving, or discovering, whatever truth was available to an honestly striving seeker. They were very skilled at seeking, finding, and articulating a vast array of spiritually and philosophically efficacious ideas; they were also, perhaps predictably, less adept at appreciating the spiritual insights of others.
Christian Platonists of the Middle Ages regarded some esoteric teachings of the Greek mystery centers, such as Pythagoreanism, as compatible with Christian revelation, and they included them in orthodox Christian theology; other Greek esoteric teachings and practices, such as those of the Gnostics, were eventually, after several centuries of theological and institutional conflict, declared by the Christian winners to be heretical and were repressed. Platonism was able to be absorbed into orthodox Christianity because it lent itself to a systematic articulation. The Gnostics, by contrast, were inherently unorthodox, or anti-orthodox, in their thinking.
In the early centuries after Christ, when the Christian church was involved in the complex task of defining its doctrines and establishing its practices, many Gnostics considered themselves Christians; almost certainly, many others would have wanted to be Christians, and would have been, had the church not been involved in a process of increased Romanization; that is, under the influence of Rome, the church entered a process of transforming itself into a law-giving, orthodox institution.
What happened to the Gnostics, and thereby to Gnosticism, is instructive for our present situation. If we do not look too closely, we might imagine that the kind of authority exercised by the Christian church does not exist in the democratic West, for example, northern Europe or the United States. In his Adventures of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead, one of the truly wise philosophers of this century, observes that the present reign of scientific rationalism imposes an orthodoxy similar to that exercised by the medieval Christian church.
Fortunately the scholastic age of Alexandrian scholarship dominated Europe for centuries, and bestowed upon civilization priceless treasures of thought. It was an age of immense progress. But a scholarly age works within rigid limitations. Fortunately a revival of Hellenism overwhelmed the Hellenistic unity of the Middle Age. Plato arose as if from his tomb. Vagrant speculation and direct observation broke up the scholarly system. New interest, new Gods, prevailed. The new basis for thought was the report upon facts, directly observed, directly employed. Fortunately, in the subsidence of the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the drama of the transference of culture from Athens to Alexandria was again repeated. Europe gradually entered upon a new scholarly age. The modern historian appeared, the modern critical literature appeared, the modern man of science appeared, modern technology appeared. The old Egyptian metallurgists, the Semitic mathematicians and the mediaeval scholastics were avenged.
But modern scholarship and modern science reproduce the same limitations as dominated the bygone Hellenistic epoch, and the bygone Scholastic epoch. They canalize thought and observation within predetermined limits, based upon inadequate metaphysical assumptions dogmatically assumed. The modern assumptions differ from older assumptions, not wholly for the better. They exclude from rationalistic thought more of the final values of existence. The intimate timidity of professionalized scholarship circumscribes reason by reducing its topics to triviality, for example, to bare sensa and tautologies. It then frees itself from criticism by dogmatically handing over the remainder of experience to an animal faith or a religious mysticism, incapable of rationalization. The world will again sink into the boredom of a drab detail of rational thought, unless we retain in the sky some reflection of light from the sun of Hellenism.1
When we deal with the life of nature, however, we might find ourselves longing for the Aristotelian complement, for the other side of our nature—as the masculine and feminine in our natures, and our culture, each long for the other. Someone who is not ideally balanced will presumably stay with one “ism” to the exclusion of the other. But two dauntingly difficult problems will inevitably remain: (1) How balanced is the “ism” itself? Is Platonism, or Aristotelianism, balanced? And (2) In my approach to polarities such as mind/matter, natural/divine, individual/cultural, Truth/experience, am I capable of a perspective that is balanced?
We might argue that the best way to join, or rejoin, the spiritual and the physical is to avoid the Platonic framework in order to develop a philosophy along the lines laid down by Aristotle. This is what the Christian monk Thomas Aquinas accomplished in the thirteenth century. Though seemingly incompatible with Christian revelation, Aristotle’s philosophy was integrated by the patient genius of Aquinas. But Thomas Aquinas was himself a Christian Platonist when he set out on his radical task of reconciling Christian revelation and Christian theology, which was thoroughly Platonic, with the philosophy of Aristotle.
As a result of the Muslim conquest of Syria and Egypt, and the work of Thomas Aquinas, a brilliant synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism was soon forged. It is important for readers who identify with Western history and culture, and particularly for anyone with a Jewish or Christian historical bias, to understand that it was in the Muslim world, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, that the spiritual, philosophical, and practical implications of both Platonism and Aristotelianism were developed.
If the account of the esoteric (in relation to the exoteric) in this chapter is accurate, then it would seem to follow that esotericism in the West has evolved along parallel lines, within Christianity, particularly through Platonism and Neoplatonism, and outside, through Pythagoreanism, aspects of Platonism, Gnosticism, and Plotinus. It would also seem to follow that esotericism is of necessity a bit unorthodox, and to the extent that Christianity insisted on dogma and rigid prescriptions, it drove out the esoteric. But by the time of the Renaissance in the West, beginning in the fifteenth century, philosophers and especially artists were ready for a truly profound expression of the Platonic and the Aristotelian.
Just as no one can look at the architecture of Persian and Arab cultures and doubt the ability of these cultures to think through and live out the intimate relationship between timeless ideals, or Platonic Forms, and the Aristotelian concern for the physical, so no one can look at Renaissance churches or sculpture without appreciating the exquisite balance between form and physicality. The Renaissance was a time of elegant and passionate expression of the spirit in intimate creative relation to matter.
It would be interesting as intellectual history, and certainly revealing of esotericism, to trace the interplay of Platonism and Aristotelianism from the Renaissance to the present. All the great thinkers would appear on the stage of Western thought: The brooders and transformers, the celebrators and critics would play their parts in the dramatic play of ideas. But as our task is to focus particularly on the esoteric, this discussion will only summarize the general ways in which the impulse to the esoteric has survived and reasserted itself in the face of the emerging dominance of scientific rationality. Very briefly, the role of the esoteric in this phase of Western thought amounts to a call for an alternative mode of knowing, one that links the inner, or spiritual, of the knower with the inner, the spiritual, of the knowable.
This formulation does not so much distinguish the Platonic from the Aristotelian as it does this way of knowing from the usual way, from the scientific and analytic ways. As a result of the creative celebration of the ideal and the physical in the Renaissance, the Platonic and the Aristotelian could both serve as ways to a more transformative way of knowing. More typically, neither serves the esoteric enterprise: The Platonic perspective often perpetuates the hierarchical dualism between upper and lower, Reality and appearance, Knowledge and opinion, while the Aristotelian often represents commitment to the practical and the sensory at the expense of the Ideal and Transcendent.
The task of the present time, then, would seem to be the creation of a Platonism—an attention to ideal form—that attends to the particularity of the ordinary world, in combination with an Aristotelianism that penetrates the ordinary world so deeply as to discern the ideal form sustaining every particular and enabling it to transcend itself. Happily, there are at least three major thinkers whose thought represents precisely this combination:
The esoteric in various forms was a deep concern of William James, the most original and influential American philosopher. James did not use the term esoteric, and he did not practice an esoteric discipline, but he was deeply involved in the study of mystical, parapsychological, and esoteric experiences.
Born in New York City, James was a member of New England’s most prominent family of letters. His father, Henry, Sr., was a religious thinker in his own right as well as a student of the eighteenth-century Christian esoteric teacher Emanuel Swedenborg. William James’s brother, Henry, was America’s most distinguished novelist and literary critic. His sister, Alice, although overshadowed by her two world-famous brothers, was the author of highly introspective and insightful diaries published only recently, more than seventy years after her death.
After training as a painter, William studied medicine at Harvard University, where he subsequently taught physiology, psychology, and then philosophy. In addition to his writings on pragmatism, which popularized the characteristic perspective of the American philosophical tradition, James authored two masterpieces—one in psychology and one in the study of religion. His monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) remains the primary alternative to the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud. It shows James’s gifts for the observation and description of human experience, including perception, habit, and memory, and his chapter on the “Stream of Consciousness” has generated our most powerful aesthetic metaphor. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) remains the classic study in the field of religious experience, rivaled only by Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932).
But James had yet another interest, one that has been largely ignored by students of his psychology, his philosophy, and his study of religious experience: for the last thirty years of his life, James worked tirelessly as a psychical researcher, that is, as an investigator into the claims for telepathy, the ability to move physical objects by thinking, preknowledge of events, and channeling messages from the dead. James’s primary purpose in this extremely frustrating research was to hold the middle ground between scientific skepticism and uncritical credulity. James sought to rein in both these extreme and mutually exclusive positions by showing them to be inattentive to the facts of observable experience. James was in search of “one white crow,” which could be put on display as a means of showing that although almost all experience is of one kind, there is nevertheless another kind, however rare it may be.
Although psychical research might seem to be quite a different topic from esoteric philosophy, the difference is perhaps not so great and can be attributed to the distinctive requirements of modern Western thought. For Socrates, the meaning of virtue was subject to careful scrutiny, but the oracle of Delphi, his daimonion, and the immortality of the soul seemed to him indisputable facts. For Plato, the beliefs of Socrates were still valid, but he felt the need to defend the possibility of another reality and another kind of knowledge. After three hundred years of Western scientific philosophy, James could philosophically assume the truth neither of Socrates’ beliefs nor of Plato’s case for an exit from the cave.
Although the Pythagorean mystery center and the shrine of the Delphic Oracle were no longer available for James’s scrutiny, he wondered whether there might not be individuals whose experiences were comparable to those of the esoteric teachers or their students. James performed a similar service with respect to individuals whose religious experiences pointed to another reality, “a wider self’ that is continuous with the “something more” through which saving experiences come.2 But in addition to studying religious experiences such as conversion, saintliness, and mysticism, James wanted to evaluate, and perhaps make a case for, exceptional experience that could be shown to be noetic, that is, a source of reliable knowledge about realities on the other side of the ordinary.
In the end, James was rather disappointed in the results of his psychical research. Essentially he learned enough to be personally convinced of the possibility of psychic experiences, but not enough to convince anyone who was previously unconvinced. In “Confidences of a Psychical Researcher,” written the year before his death, James filed this report:
For twenty-five years I have been in touch with the literature of psychical research, and have had acquaintance with numerous “researchers.” I have also spent a good many hours (though far fewer than I ought to have spent) in witnessing (or trying to witness) phenomena. Yet I am theoretically no “further” than I was at the beginning. . . .
The peculiarity of the case is just that there are so many sources of possible deception in most of the observations, that the whole lot of them may be worthless, and yet that in comparatively few cases can aught more fatal than this vague general possibility of error be pleaded against the record. Science meanwhile needs something more than bare possibilities to build upon; so your genuinely scientific inquirer—I don’t mean your ignoramus “scientist”—has to remain unsatisfied. It is hard to believe, however, that the creator has really put any big array of phenomena into the world merely to defy and mock our scientific tendencies; so my deeper belief is that we psychical researchers have been too precipitate with our hopes, and that we must expect to mark progress not by quarter-centuries but by half-centuries or whole centuries.3
Unfortunately, psychical research seems not to have progressed significantly since James described the situation in 1909, but in view of the opposition to the idea of exceptional states of consciousness—and even the concept of consciousness—any case for psychical experience must be counted as positive. In the midst of widespread “new paradigm” thinking, to whom or to which movement or position would one turn for an informed and insightful account of experience not accounted for by standard, thoroughly exoteric, philosophies? I think it must be said that within the orthodox core of Western philosophy, James stands out for his efforts to extend the range of philosophy and to validate the significance of the esoteric and psychic for a philosophical account of experience.
Outside the walls of orthodoxy, that is, outside the topics and methodologies that are ordinarily treated in journals of philosophy, presented at philosophy meetings, and included in textbooks, there are hosts of teachers, movements, practices, claims, and studies that are potentially significant for philosophy. Of these, the most promising would seem to be the esoteric or, specifically, spiritual-scientific philosophy of Rudolf Steiner.
In the field of philosophy, as in education, the social sciences, and the arts and sciences, Rudolf Steiner is a bewildering figure. He defies all categories except esoteric: He is a Platonic Aristotelian, a scientist-artist, a Christian exponent of karma and rebirth, and a cosmological visionary who offers detailed suggestions on curriculum and pedagogy appropriate for grades K through 12. He wrote approximately fifty books, and his lectures on many fields within these broad categories were collected in more than two hundred volumes. In addition to writing on science in general, he offered advanced insights into physics, medicine, nutrition, and agriculture, and in art he suggested original and highly influential innovations for painting, sculpture, and architecture, developed a new art form called eurythmics, and presented a series of mystery dramas tracing the inner logic of karma and rebirth over several generations.
All this was possible because Steiner possessed an esoteric capacity—an ability to see/know spiritually or supersensibly. How can we best think of this capability? Metaphorically, or allegorically, we can say that Steiner was one of those who went up out of the cave. Steiner himself, however, would not use this image: Rather, he presents his supersensible capacity in terms closer to Aristotle’s conception of active thinking. On studying Steiner’s vast and overwhelming spiritual-scientific research, we would do well to follow his lead in thinking of his methodology in Aristotelian terms, but there is nevertheless something entirely Platonic about his way of grasping reality. Perhaps it is accurate to say that his method is Aristotelian, while the result—the astonishing quantity and quality of his works—is more like a Platonic seeing of the Forms, of the inner, ideal qualities that render all experience intelligible.
Yet this division into Aristotelian method and Platonic result is not quite adequate because the reverse seems also to be true: The method is also Platonic because it involves the kind of meditative and transformative discipline characteristic of a mystery center, and the kind of practical result we associate with Aristotle. In fact, Steiner understood himself to be the initiator of a modern mystery school, one that strives for the ideal synthesis of scientific objectivity with spiritual inferiority. This combination requires a new way of thinking, one that incorporates feeling and willing.
In a letter to Carl Jung in 1911, a year after Jung was elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Sigmund Freud urged Jung not to let his impulse toward the study of the occult take him beyond the bounds of orthodox, or Freudian, psychoanalytic theory and practice:
I know that your deepest inclinations are impelling you toward a study of the occult, and do not doubt that you will return home with a rich cargo. There is no stopping that, and it is always right for a person to follow the biddings of his own impulses. The reputation you have won with your Dementia will stand against the charge of “mystic” for quite a while. Only don’t stay too long away from us in those lush tropical colonies; it is necessary to govern at home. . . .4
Unfortunately for their relationship, Jung did not take Freud’s advice; instead, he stayed in the “lush tropical colonies” of the occult for the next fifty years, until his death in 1961. From Jung’s point of view, however, he was both following “the biddings of his own impulses” and governing at home. For Jung, “home” included a vast and complex variety of myths, symbols, and images as revealed through world literature, art, and religion, as well as through the dreams of his patients. By resisting Freud’s advice, and Freudian orthodoxy, in favor of these researches into the role of comparative mythology and symbolism in the theory and practice of mythology, Jung was inevitably labeled “mystic” by Freud and others.
What Freud did not realize was the full extent of Jung’s impulse toward the so-called occult. Not even Jung’s associates and students knew the depth of this impulse until after Jung’s death, when his autobiography, revealingly titled Memories, Dreams and Reflections, was published. Had Freud had the opportunity to read the following statement, he would have realized that Jung would not be returning to the fold:
What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis [from the perspective of eternity], can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life.
Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth.5
This passage represents the final victory in Jung’s life of the mythic side over the scientific side. When reflecting on his early years as a student and as a young psychiatrist, he called this mythic side “personality number two,” whereas “personality number one” impelled Jung into science, medicine, and psychiatry. At no time in his life was Jung merely a dreamer or visionary. Even in his earliest years, and again in his latest years, when the mythic side was stronger than the scientific side—the reverse of his middle (professional) years—Jung was invariably reflective, practical, and scientific.
But even at his most practical, the influence of his “second side,” his lifelong involvement with dreams, visions, symbols, and myths, continues to be felt. As his autobiography begins with a series of childhood dreams and visions, it concludes with the moving confession that his destiny required of him both creativity and loneliness. To a remarkable degree, Jung’s life, to use his favorite symbol, came full circle:
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious.6
Jung’s emphasis on the unconscious, on the universality as well as the particularity of myths and symbols, renders his lifework a model for the present generation of new paradigm thinkers. He is also an example of one who has conducted his own explorations into esoteric experience. Through his voluminous writings (seventeen enormous volumes articulating more than sixty years of intense research), Jung functioned as a model, as an exemplar of the lonely journeyer, but also as a bridge between generally orthodox science, particularly psychiatry, and his own uncharted examination of the myths and symbols of widely disparate peoples.
Jung carefully studied the esoteric traditions, ancient and contemporary, of Europe and, to a lesser extent, of Africa and of the Native Americans, and in all these materials he sought patterns that had proved psychologically beneficial. He did not, however, attempt to sort out his findings with respect to philosophical traditions, or in a way that would advance philosophic understanding.
Why, then, should we consider Jung in this chapter on esoteric philosophy? I think we should admit that there are not many contemporary esoteric philosophers, certainly none of Jung’s significance. Further, because the thought of this century seems to me, at least, to have been most radically altered by psychology and anthropology (and not by mathematics or the physical or life sciences, as is ordinarily assumed), a major esoteric philosophy would have to include, and perhaps be based on, these two disciplines. And this is precisely what Jung offers: a view of human nature, illness and disorder individually and culturally considered, with profound, if unarticulated, philosophical implications.
Like James, Jung is a thoroughgoing empiricist who honored a lifelong commitment to observable findings, describable and analyzable psychological phenomena; but unlike James, Jung did not describe his cross-cultural, multilayered research in philosophical terms. Yet Jung’s work on the esoteric (or occult) may prove philosophically even more significant than James’s work on psychical research because Jung’s data are so rich and suggestive for a new view of human nature and culture.
Essentially, Jung’s works would commit us to a novel, and perhaps radical, understanding of the self: “The Self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality.”7 The self attains self-realization by a process Jung calls individuation:
Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and insofar as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.”8
Individuation is the complex, lifelong process, culminating in the second half of life, by which the self gradually replaces the ego as the center of the personality. When the ego dominates the self (when the self is not, or not yet, individuated), the unconscious exercises an unhealthy influence. Jung’s work would be an essential contribution to contemporary philosophy if only for its brilliant analysis of the ills that at present beset the ego—and consequently the self. Jung shows that both the illnesses of his patients and the obvious illness of our culture—wars, depression, addiction, and so on—issue from an unhealthy image of the ego, of the ordinary conscious “I.”
In his effort to find healthy antidotes to the illness he found characteristic of modern Western culture, Jung made a deep and detailed study of other cultures, focusing particularly on their health-giving myths and symbols. Such myths and symbols are derivative of even deeper unconscious creative forces called archetypes. (Arche is the Greek word in the first sentence of the Greek translation of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning,” or, just as accurately, “in the original structure, or originating form.”) Jung spent the major part of the last decades of his life searching for the myriad manifestations of archetypal images such as the earth mother, the wise old man, death and rebirth, circularity, triangularity, quaternity, the Self.
This anthropological and comparative dimension of Jung’s thought constitutes a challenge to the method and dominant assumptions of modern Western (exoteric) philosophy. For a healthy self, and a healthy view of humanity and culture, would seem to require, in addition to the scientific rationality characteristic of philosophy during the past three centuries, a completely different source of insight, one with deep roots in the unconscious and free from the control of the willful, conscious ego.
Unlike Steiner, Jung did not articulate a methodology for the attainment of esoteric knowledge or create an esoteric mystery school, but he did show by dramatic example his own way to the secrets of the unconscious. In order to experience the interplay of conscious and unconscious in his own life, he spent two years playing the same games he had played as a child. In order to experience the unconscious balancing power of the ancient image of the mandala (a complex form using the triangle, square, and circle), Jung spent two years painting mandalas. He discovered that the mandala offers a picture of the self, or lack of self, in the psyche:
My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which were presented to me new each day. In them I saw the self—that is, my whole being—actively at work. To be sure, at first I could only dimly understand them; but they seemed to me highly significant, and I guarded them like precious pearls. I had the distinct feeling that they were something central, and in time I acquired through them a living conception of the self. The self, I thought, was like the monad which I am, and which is my world. The mandala represents the monad, and corresponds to the microcosmic nature of the psyche.
I was being compelled to go through this process of the unconscious. I had to let myself be carried along by the current, without a notion of where it would lead me. When I began drawing the mandalas, however, I saw that everything, all the paths I had been following, all the steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point—namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.9
To the extent that self is dominated by the ego or conscious mind, the unconscious will probably be unable to generate a mandala at all, or if it does it will not generate the interplay of quaternity and circularity characteristic of a self-realized psyche. While the ego dominates, the unconscious will not represent itself as centered. Because this egocentric psyche fails to realize “the almost irresistible compulsion and urge to become what one is,” the resulting representation of such a psyche will be a visible distortion of the ideal mandala shape.10 By contrast, the individuated self will generate a mandala that is centered, harmonious, and depicted by quaternity and circularity, the two shapes that invariably symbolize wholeness.
Jung was convinced that the modern West, including of course exoteric philosophy as a characteristically rational discipline, would not recover its wholeness or health until it gave full and honorable sway to its unconscious life. In order to expose the limitations of Western thought and culture, Jung searched for myths and symbols in virtually every religious and artistic tradition, ancient and contemporary. In this respect, Jung’s work is itself a kind of archetype for the last decades of this century and for the next century. While we now know that Jung’s understanding of some of the cultures he interpreted was limited by his time and methodology, he nevertheless showed that in the future any attempt to interpret humanity will have to include images and ideas heretofore not dreamed of in modern Western philosophy.
The so-called new paradigm—the emerging new framework, or set of assumptions, for contemporary thought and culture—will almost certainly be characterized by multiculturalism, or globalism. Slowly, but with an undeniable inevitability, we are coming to recognize some of the ways in which modern Western culture is inseparably joined with other cultures, east and west, north and south. The most obvious force for integration is the ecosystem. We breathe the same air, are dependent on the same resources, live by, and off, the same sun, moon, and galaxies.
The second force for integration is the near-global economy. As with the ecosystem, individuals and societies differ in their relation to the world economy (the gap between haves and have-nots, for instance, widens at an alarming rate), but that there is only one system, with no loose ends, is now nearly a fact of life. The third such global bond is technology, particularly communications and transportation. My candidate for the fourth global integrator is music, technologically transmitted—that is, music available by compact disc or cassette. The fifth candidate for global status is the most important, yet least predictable—the impulse toward democratic government and values.
Comparative thought——cross—cultural or multicultural philosophy—has not yet reached the status of these five forces for globalization, but it is proceeding along the same path. If or when a new paradigm does emerge, it seems almost certain that it will be built up out of multicultural and comparative philosophical traditions. If we can judge from current trends, this newly dominant global mode of thinking will be psychologically and anthropologically sophisticated but indifferent to historical specificity.
The new paradigm will almost certainly take as its guru thinkers such people as Jung, for his multicultural psychological insight, and Joseph Campbell, whose thought is derivative of Jung’s, for global mythology. Attempts at constructing a new paradigm will continue to build on Jung and Campbell for the extent of their cross-cultural reach and for the extent to which their thought provides a constructive substitute for religion.
Although American culture and values were fashioned out of a profound understanding of history, in recent decades, perhaps owing to the unprecedented mobility and technological speed of daily life, popular culture is now characterized by an appalling indifference to historical context. On its positive side, this ahistorical attitude enables American culture to draw freely from very diverse cultures, ideas and practices that are beneficial; on the negative side, this ability to import and integrate is often cavalier and superficial. Contemporary American culture is in the process of absorbing and Americanizing such “non-Western” teachings and practices as meditation techniques, all forms of Buddhism, teachings on karma and rebirth, Asian art disciplines, and shamanism. Only rarely, however, do individuals and groups who borrow these teachings attend to the philosophical moorings that make them intelligible.
Similarly, the American exports—especially economics, the arts, and democracy—will need to be framed in, or at least accompanied by, the philosophical ideas that support them in the American cultural situation. All this sharing, borrowing, adapting, and comparing will require cultural sympathy born of historical knowledge and philosophical multiculturalism.
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas (London: Free Press, 1967), p. 118.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 508, 515.
James, Essays in Psychical Research (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 361–62.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), p. 363.
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 356.
Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), p. 238.
Ibid., p. 171.
Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, pp. 195–96.
Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1969), p. 357.