Harmonisation

Key Information

A first meaning for “harmonization,” which is one of the key-concepts of the New Age movement, can be found in the romantic philosophical traditions of the nineteenth century: the ideal of self-building (as in Simmel’s thinking), understood as a slow and careful perfection process (D’Andrea 2000). In this concept, harmonization implies a voluntary perspective of individual choice, more focused on an interior landscape than on the opening to the world and decentralizing of the subject. Another possible conception of “harmony” as freedom from external constraints can also be found in the set of ideas which sanctifies the individual self, so akin to this movement (according to Heelas 1996).

These transits around the harmonization locus, either centered on voluntary individual projects or more disseminated on the universal immanence, can be understood in the propositions by Amaral (2000), when she argues that New Age religiosities slide between two vast directions for...