Egil Asprem: Ph.D. Research Project

Esotericism and Scientific Naturalism in the 20th Century: Dialogue and Polemics

This research project takes the Weberian notion of Entzauberung (“disenchantment”) as a starting point to analyse relations between the natural sciences, religion, and esoteric discourses in early 20th century intellectual culture. While Weber famously stated that all “mysterious incalculable forces” had vanished from the world partially as a result of modern science, his colleagues in biology, chemistry, and physics were forced to think twice about central concepts such as causality and mechanism. And while Weber saw a distinct chasm between science and religion, requiring the religious believer to make not only a jump of faith, but also an “intellectual sacrifice” of scientific rationality, new types of “natural theology” were being formulated by European academics in the first decades of the century, significantly influencing modern religious thought. Suggesting that disenchantment was an intellectual problem rather than an irrevocable process, this research project looks at a series of responses in the period from 1900-1939, that cut across cultural spheres from the natural sciences to the study of “psychic phenomena,” from academic and popular philosophy to “the occult.” 

The project ‘Esotericism and Scientific Naturalism in the 20th Century’ is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.