Rearticulating History and Universal Visions

Abstract

So far, we have explored two different, but related, cosmopolitan religious features: first, the fervent attempt to revise or addend materialism, and second, how such disdain for the purported exclusivity of materialist worldviews became reforged to generate a theory of the immortal soul and spiritual science under the guise of spiritual evolution. Heeding the exhortation of Hesse’s narrator to beware of historical invention, I contend that cosmopolitan religious thinkers explored the hidden or spiritual with disguised “objectivity,” with poetic sagacity, and with novel illusions. They invented a fiction, to borrow Hesse’s term, in order to claim and zealously assert that spiritual science provided a consummate and more placating model of knowing in the world—a kinder, gentler, a more human-reassuring form of meaning-making. In more concrete terms, they insisted that spiritual science served as a vehicle for reconstituting a spiritually intact worldview, in which human subjectivity and spiritual accord could be re-conflated with material science—biology, chemistry, geology—rather than remaining ossified in contradistinction, even opposition, to conventional scientific models and outcomes. Moreover, as we have explored in the previous chapter, their formulation of spiritual science manifested an attempt to legitimize a cosmopolitan religious worldview through their assertion that it conformed to the conventions of valid empirical science. To put it differently, their pseudo-scientific treatises attempted to prompt the mis-recognition of spiritual science as a verifiable empirical method that provided a fuller, more meaningful determinate for knowledge of the human being and human life—in their view an acutely needed corrective to exclusively materialist models.

Freilich wissen wir ja das Verborgene nicht und wollen nicht vergessen, daß Geschichte schreiben, auch wenn es noch so nüchtern und mit noch so gutem Willen zur Sachlichkeit getan wird, immer Dichtung bleibt und ihre dritte Dimension die Fiktion ist.

Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel, 45–46

Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history – however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity – remains literature. History’s third dimension is always fiction.

Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016): 45–46; The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 48