From the Supernatural to the Supersensible (and Back):
Occult and Scientific Epistemologies of the Invisible in the 19th Century (Working Title)

PhD project by Jonas Staehelin

My research project investigates the scientification of occultism in the 19th century. I shall argue, that this process should be understood within a larger historical framework of what I call the scientification of the invisible. Throughout the 19th century, the scientific investigation of the invisible gained strong momentum: Aided by all sorts of technical apparatuses, areas such as chemistry and physics began to construct an invisible world populated by atoms and electrons – a truly wonderous world of ethereal undulations, electrical discharges and magnetic forces. Fields of scientific enquiry such as energy physics or non-Euclidean geometry formed discursive networks acting as multiplicators of the invisible. The world, as the exact sciences increasingly came to describe it, was literally occult.
The supersensible world of science and the occult are always close at hand, and the separation of the one from the other has perhaps never been entirely accomplished – a fact historians of science have been slow to acknowledge. My dissertation underscores this porosity between scientific practices and the investigation of occult worlds. Differing somewhat from previous studies, however, I want to get a more systematic view of this porosity by contextualizing oc-cultism within scientific epistemologies of the invisible. I want to propose locating occultism within the interplay between invisibility and visibility. In particular, I want to situate occultism within the tensions, ambivalences and epistemic uncertainties arising from this movement. Shying away from generic definitions of the occult, I instead understand the occult as a dynamic category, a term in circulation.
Viewing occultism in such a manner raises new interesting questions my dissertation wishes to investigate. My central hypothesis runs as follows: Accessing the invisible scientifically held the promise that the invisible objects, which had hitherto belonged to a merely speculatively acces-sible transcendental beyond, could now be naturalized and made visible as “occult knowledge” with the newly acquired theories, methods and techniques of science. For occultists, this wasn’t just a question of rhetoric or legitimacy, it wasn’t simply about making an antiquated tradition fit into a supposedly disenchanted modernity. Modern science may have rid the world of the supernatural, but in its stead the supersensible became the bearer of the great mysteries of the universe. And occultists were eager to plunge into this new realm.