Emanuel Swedenborg

Carl H. Flygt

February 2007

In his famous 1837 oration “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson pays tribute to a man of genius whose literary value, he says, has never been rightly estimated, and whose philosophy of life, one must infer, is identical with Emerson’s own transcendentalist point of view. That man is Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), and Emerson admires him for producing a purely rational ethics and attempting to engraft it onto the Christianity of his time. Swedenborg saw and showed the connection between nature and the affections of the soul, and pierced with inner vision the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible and tangible world. Swedenborg, in other words, was at once clairvoyant and mystical, his consciousness filled with spirit presences and visions, some of which appeared to bear on physical situations, such as the Stockholm fire of 1759, and at the same time perfectly competent with the material sophistication of his time, with chemistry, metallurgy, anatomy and other natural sciences.

Emerson’s admiration of these combined faculties of rationality and clairvoyance is reproduced in the esteem of other important writers and thinkers of the Western world, including William James, Carl Jung, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake, and was reflected in an earnest and critical appraisal of Swedenborg by a young Immanuel Kant, who concluded that although the doctrine of spirits is based on mere speculation, it nevertheless retains credibility because it strengthens hope and stands in sympathy with an already decided inclination in us toward existence after death. The historical importance of Kant’s philosophical stance in epistemology and moral theory, of course, is hard to overstate. Kant wished to show the limits of speculative reason and the domain of valid truth claims, and he succeeded in abolishing the impulse toward metaphysical speculation ungrounded in experience and consensual evidence. He also wished to show that moral actions were good in themselves, and not subject to constitutive influences from outside, and his analysis of the moral will has exercised an influence on human thought beyond any proportion to its length. Kant’s success in those philosophical projects lends weight to an attitude that concludes, in regarding Swedenborg, “We must wait until we are instructed, perhaps in the future world, by new experiences and new concepts about the powers in our thinking self that are still hidden from us.”

I believe that future world is a little closer to this one than we may think, or perhaps, for personal, political or economic reasons, closer than we may be willing to acknowledge. The seeds for that instruction were sowed by the introduction in the 1960s into popular culture of powerful psychoactive substances, and have grown and been extended by the generations and by technological advances which have now made it possible to claim that there exists a nascent science of human consciousness. A real and mature science of consciousness, of course, would represent a very significant social interest, leading conceivably to power struggles and culture wars on an unprecedented scale, because the nature of human consciousness impinges on the most profound ontological, ethical and cultural questions that can be asked: the nature and purpose of human life and death, the causal power of moral actions, the dimensions and structure of space and time. Such a science in addition will necessarily implicate cultural and sociological trends affecting the future forms of life on earth, including quite naturally cultural norms and the form of society, but also quite possibly the physical form of the planet on which we currently live. The conclusions we reach in the science of consciousness can only be informed responsibly by the experiences of men like Kant and Swedenborg, who exhibited a clear competence with the material of this world and simultaneously retained either a respect for or an acquaintance with the material of the next.

I have recently formulated a program in the philosophy of language which I believe will qualify a great number of persons in this dual competence, and thus enable a complete science of human consciousness to emerge. Without language practices that add up not just to intellectual and conceptual rigor, but also to moral and energetic lawfulness, technological advances impinging on human consciousness cannot portend anything other than imprisonment and menace, where dissatisfaction reigns as the norm and not as the temporary goad to secure settlements and accommodations. If however I have made a correct beginning on a general theory of conversation, as I believe I have, that rigor and that lawfulness can serve to introduce a technology of consciousness into a world that otherwise would derive considerable bewilderment and trouble from it. The application of a theoretically unproblematic theory of conversation by specialized groups of individuals, and communication between them, together with increased technical facility with the substrates and realities of human self-consciousness, should portend a stage of evolution to be reached in the future by the greater part of humanity.

References:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The American Scholar. Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Cambridge, MA. 1837.

Flygt, Carl H. Conversation: A New Theory of Language. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2006.

Kant, Immanuel. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Gregory R. Johnson, ed. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2002.

Tucson Center for Consciousness Studies. University of Arizona, Tucson. Bi-annual conference on Science and Consciousness, 2006. http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/tucson2006.htm.