Modernist esotericism: Neither religious nor secular

I've been invited to a colloqium organised by the Social Science Research Council at NYU in May. It won't involve formal papers but rather short position statements circulated in advance and then discussion (a little like the Viennese event). This invite was received yesterday and it'll be useful to note my first thoughts on my contribution.

I am interested in two formations:
1 . the everyday social intersections between the secular and the religious in what we can think of as "modern" social existence. My example is John Byrom, the eighteeenth-century English Tory mystic, much influenced by Malebranche, William Law, Behmenism and the French quietist tradition who, in his commercial dealings in London and Manchester, is constantly confronted by the question of how and where to act and think religiously and how and where not to. The application of his mystic Anglicanism is a continual problem for him, which leads him to a consistent lack of transparency in his social dealings. His truer self is expressed in his diary and his poems (which were not for print).
2. the emergence of a high-cultural zone that is neither secular nor religious and that explores the everyday ethical consequence of the absence of God and cosmic telos. This zone really only comes into existence after Schopenhauer who seems to me is the philosopher who transports Humean scepticism into the heart of European theo-metaphysics. Schopenhauer's solution is to interrupt the workings of the cosmic blind will, under whose compulsions we live, by the truth of fragmented aesthetic experiences. And this solution is given literary form and expression and it ethical and political implications are explored in Joseph Conrad's early fictions as well as in his 'Preface' to Narcissus. In particular it leads to Conrad's theory of the 'sentimental lie' which binds society but which the artist and the participant in the Schopenhauerian 'neither religious nor secular' stand apart from, having a privileged and esoteric relation to truth. This can be thought of as a form of cultural modernist esotericism.

The point of placing these two formations along side one another is not to try to find analogies or similarities between them (although no doubt there are some) but to point to the ways in which the problem of everyday esotericism works outside of any model of secularisation, and does so by not having to take the religion/secular opposition as foundational. There's a genealogy of lived esotericism which intensifies under modernism.

The other interest of this line of thought would be to connect it to the role of 'transparency' both socially and politically, and the notion that the process of secularisation is also a process of extending tranparency. Here Hannah Arendt's chapter on 'The Social Question' in her book on revolutions, Leo Strauss's theory of accomodation and Starobinski on Rousseauvian transparency would all be useful reference points.

These remarks are obviously only a beginning.


What connects these two formation most interestingly it seems to me is the question of esotericism though of as secreted knowledge of the highest things.