Ghosts and Enlightenment Science at the University of Basel

In 2014 I was invited to give a talk at the University of Basel as part of a public lecture series on ‘transcendent experiences’, which was organized by the biologist and philosopher Heiner Schwenke. German readers might be interested in a text of mine which is based on this lecture, and which just appeared in an edited volume with essays on Western responses to claims of ‘transcendent’ experiences, i.e. claims of experiences related to a supposed life beyond death. Edited by Schwenke, the volume was published by Karl Alber, a German academic press specializing in philosophy and other Geisteswissenschaften. (The publication of the book was funded by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where Heiner currently directs a research project on transcendent experiences.)

My contribution is essentially a German outline of some chapters of the book I’ve been working on, and distils some of the relevant scholarship on the history of early modern to nineteenth-century magic and science. Written for a broad non-historian audience, it sketches the centrality of beliefs in spirits and magic in figureheads of the Scientific Revolution such as Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, and challenges the still popular view that the Enlightenment war on magic was spearheaded by ‘naturalistic’ science and medicine.

One of the examples which I use to illustrate a standard mode of the Enlightenment warfare on magic is Immanuel Kant’s response to Emanuel Swedenborg, the famous ‘spirit-seer’ who happened to be a leading representative of Scandinavian science. Kant’s ‘critique’ of Swedenborg is still considered as one of the most effective repudiations of the ‘supernatural’ in Germany. And yet, a close reading reveals that it primarily consisted of Kant – who was a devout theist and firm believer in an afterlife – ridiculing Swedenborg, and without much ado declared him (along with the whole species of supposed spirit-seers) mentally ill. Together with many other examples, this episode illustrates that neither atheism nor impartial empirical tests of claimed ‘occult’ phenomena were responsible for the supposed decline of magic during the Enlightenment. (Heiner Schwenke dedicates a whole chapter to Kant and Swedenborg, which is one of several interesting contributions to the book.)

The chapter then gives a short preview of the main part of my projected book, i.e. the rather significant role of research into alleged telepathy, spiritualism and other controversial phenomena during the professionalization of psychology in the late nineteenth century. Hardly surprising to regular visitors of Forbidden Histories, my chapter concludes with general remarks on the question to what ends and purposes histories of science and ‘magic’ have been written.

Thanks to the generosity of Karl Alber press, a PDF file of my chapter can be downloaded free of charge here.

If you wish to cite my chapter, here is a full bibliographical reference:

Sommer, Andreas. “Geisterglaube, Aufklärung und Wissenschaft – historiographische Skizzen zu einem westlichen Fundamentaltabu.” In Jenseits des Vertrauten. Facetten Transzendenter Erfahrungen, edited by Heiner Schwenke, pp. 183-216. Freiburg i. Br.: Verlag Karl Alber, 2018.

© Andreas Sommer

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