Tractatus Logico-Magicus: A Definition of Magic in Three Throws of the Die

Research Article © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 305 Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 Tractatus Logico-Magicus: A Definition of Magic in Three Throws of the Die* Hannu Poutiainen [email protected] Abstract The title of this essay matches its ambition: its purpose is nothing less than to define magic in modern philo sophical terms. Yet the Wittgensteinianism of the title also reflects the irony of this ambition: through the metaphor of a thrice thrown die, the essay foregrounds the aleatoriness of its argument and the elusiveness of its object. Magic, it will be argued here, is a quality that is ascribed to a given object, and it is in that ascription, in the predicative assertion that a thing possesses magic, that its logic must be sought. However, rather than scan the history of esoteric or occult thought for such assertions, the essay will draw upon Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions to argue that magic is not so much a quality in itself as it is the emotional transformation of a pre-existing quality. Following Sartre’s view that emotion effects a magical transformation upon the world, the essay will conclude by arguing that the ascription of magic to a thing is true only if the very act of assertion transforms its ascriptive logic — emotionally, and, therefore, magically. Keywords: emotion; language; logic; magic; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Feuerbach, Ludwig * This work has been supported by a postdoctoral research grant from the Kone Foundation. Imagine discovering in some distant field a small object of blackish hue. Dodecahedral, with edges too sharp and regular to be hand-hewn, each of its marmoreal faces is furrowed with groups of whitish lines, some curved and some jagged, others crossed with additional dashes; smooth and solid to the touch, it lacks the compaction of stone and the grainy cut of wood. As you weigh and ponder it, its plastic body glinting with the moisture of freshly troubled earth, it strikes you as being of immense age, as if it had lain there for centuries, absorbing time like water. And though you do not comprehend the markings, which you 306 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 think may represent a fragment of an alphabet, there appears to be a system of permutation that dictates their order and relation, and you are sure that, with the proper tools, you will be able to decipher their intent. Imagine then that this object prompts you to utter the word magic. Depending on the circumstances of your discovery, what you mean by this word will vary. Assuming that you are an anthropologist, you will perhaps hazard the guess that this object has played some minor role in a complex ritual. Alternatively, if you are a folklorist with an interest in material culture, you may find yourself enthralled by the talismanic qualities of the object: you sense there the presence of emotions once felt and beliefs once held, of vanished worlds recalled to phantasmatic life. As a literary scholar, you may compare it to similar objects as they are found in fictions, more often in fables and fantasy novels than elsewhere, which brings you a step closer to the folklorist; or, if you are an historian of science who is fascinated by the old theory that the natural sciences were built on occult foundations, you may see in this well-wrought artifact a studious effort to model, and perhaps to redirect, the peculiar energies of some heavenly body. And if in any of these incarnations you were familiar with astrological symbols, which, as per the description above, you are not, you would recognize the carvings as the ancient signs of the zodiac. But let me change the description and grant you this recondite knowledge. In some variations, you will be aware that the object is a die. In others, you will even perceive that this die is the kind that was used in role-playing games. Once considered a trifling thing, a specimen might be bought for as little as £1. But because you are living in the twenty-third century, it will be evident to you that this object was never the mere plaything that previous ages took it to be: it is a machine for generating random combinations, and the sphere of being it commands is cut from the same cloth as the unforetold and unforetellable future. An idol of twelve faces, this piece of plastic is the crafted body of tuché and ananké, of chance and fate rolled together into a single throw that, as a prophet © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 307 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 of old is remembered to have said, jamais n’abolira le hasard.1 That, you will say, is its magic, and how you will define this magic depends, again, on whether you are an anthropologist or a folklorist, a literary scholar or an historian of science, or, to add here a further and more speculative set of variants, an archeoludologist or a paleoepistemographer. For although this is the twenty-third century, you will be no closer to a systematic and consistent concept of magic than your predecessors were, and, like them, cannot use the word without venturing into a thicket of conjunctions and disjunctions, of sympathies and antipathies, that shatter the term into as many incommensurable aspects as there are incommensurable interpretations of it. The indefinability of magic remains an undisputed truth, and you, in all of your disciplinary variations, are cautious enough to know that you can never use the word in a rigorously justified way without specifying or at least signaling the interpretation to which you adhere. Accurate in one sense and erroneous in another, the word remains as splintered in its descriptions as it has been for centuries, and you conclude, not without justification, that it is best not to elevate any single one above the rest. That is undoubtedly the right thing to do. Yet as you do so, you inadvertently repeat a particular error, a confusion, that has been repeated for centuries before you. Granted, this confusion is indeed inadvertent, born as it is from the effort to ward off a more serious one, yet a confusion it nonetheless remains: a confusion which consists in assuming that this thing called “magic,” being irreducible to its merely linguistic formulations, cannot be better understood through a reflection on the word “magic” as it is used in a predicative sentence of the form “magic is x” or “x is magic.” In other words, it is assumed — if it is possible to assume a notion that does not even cross the threshold of thematizing consciousness — that the question of what magic is cannot be clarified through an analysis of the linguistic forms in which it is captured: whatever magic is, whatever magics there 1. The sage in question, of course, being Stéphane Mallarmé. See Mallarmé, Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard. On Mallarmé as sage, see Robert McGahey, The Orphic Moment, 75–100. 308 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 may be, linguistic reflection of a formal nature is too linguistic and too formal to have anything of value to contribute. On the contrary, the assumption goes, a linguistic analysis of “magic,” unless it focuses on the “discursive construction” of “magic,” can only muddle the picture: it mistakes what is said of the object with the object itself — and thereby leads to an irremediable confusion of two levels that ought necessarily to be kept separate. Such, at any rate, is what I, as a philosophically inclined literary scholar, have been able to adduce as the central bit of reasoning that is shared across all the disciplines in which “magic” is a central critical concept: from the fact that there is no one sentence that incontestably expresses the essence of magic — “magic is x and nothing but x” — it is concluded that it is impossible for magic at all, as a singular object, to be fitted within the constraints of a sentential form. Yet that is the error; there lies the root of the confusion. And this is the confusion which the present essay will seek to clarify. If this claim strikes you as overstated, consider what all of your scholarly avatars are doing. And not only the fictional ones, but the real ones as well. First of all, in offering their partial impressions of the things they find “magical,” they will necessarily identify certain qualities by which this putative “magic” is identified. And this they will necessarily do, whether expressly or implicitly, in descriptive sentences of the form “magic is x” (where x is ritual activity, reanimation of the past, causal efficacity, etc.). Secondly, however, they im mediately efface this descriptive dimension — this stating that “magic is x” — by passing over to the side of the object: since we can speak about magic, it evidently is something, but because the things we say of it are not all commensurable, the definition of magic must not be sought by conceptual means, by trying to define the contours of magic as magic, but rather by looking at the multiple contexts in which the term is used and the various things which are meant by it. As a consequence, though it is impossible to speak of magic without using predicative language, the only legitimate way to examine magic as magic — not as such but rather as something thus nameable — is to remember that all this language merely serves © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 309 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 — and this is true even in the case of the “discursive construction” of magic — to indicate where the real focus of attention lies. In this view, the best a sentence can do is to state a particular aspect or instance of something that is called “magic”; everything else that it can bring to this question is best left unbrought. What the following pages will seek to address is this “everything else.” And what they will bring to the question is a perspective that, as yet, has not been tested in any of the fields where magic is a central object of interest. My hope with this essay is that such a test might be undertaken in the future. In his preface to The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice, Christopher Lehrich calls for a truly interdisciplinary study of magic,2 and it is as a response to this call that I wish my intensely abstract and professedly challenging contribution to be taken: it will be useful, I believe, for anyone interested in magic to have a more detailed and consequential understanding of what it means to use the word “magic” in a truthasserting sentence, and if this essay has any grander objective, it is to facilitate this understanding without thereby disenchanting the central object of inquiry. Hence the irony — the ironic literalism — of the essay’s title. In his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein patiently and rigorously bares the propositional bones of everything that factually takes place in the world, and it is with similar patience and rigour — though, I should hope, with a greater dose of humour — that this essay will seek to clarify the propositional structure by which the factual existence of magic is adduced. Briefly, the argument to be put forward here consists of three parts, or, metaphorically, of three throws of the magical die. Having shown in the first section that the lack of a universally valid concept of magic does not entail its dispersal into pure polyvalence, I will argue that the elusiveness of “magic” is partly due to the fact that it can function equally well as the subject term and the predicate term of a propositional sentence. In the second section, I will show that “magic,” when examined as a subject term, is in all cases reducible to a set of underlying predicates by which another thing 2. Lehrich, The Occult Mind, xiii–xiv. 310 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 is determined as the thing that it is. As subject, it is all predicate; as predicate, it crumbles into a dust of further predicates; and at this stage it becomes wholly impossible to determine how the word should be understood and why it should be used in the first place. In the third section, which is the last and lengthiest of the essay, I will solve this dilemma by showing that an underlying predicate must be understood as the criterion by which a given sentence about magic is judged to be either true or false: poetry, for example, is magic when it is extraordinarily poetic. From this basis, drawing on Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, I argue that magic exists only as the emotional transformation of this criterial predicate: wherever there is talk of magic, there must be, somewhere in the picture, an experience of this kind. However, rather than conclude from this that magic is nothing more than a matter of emotion, the figment of a consciousness led astray by the irrational power of its affects, I demonstrate, by way of deepening and generalising Sartre’s claim, that it is emotions themselves that are magical, that this emotional transformation is not a transformation of the predicate by emotion but rather the emotionally apprehended self-transformation of the criterial predicate itself: the quality named by the predicate becomes magical, in and beyond the sense intended by Sartre, when it is removed from its pragmatic and causally determined context and revealed in experience as being infinitely what it is. Revealed, in other words, in its essence. This last sentence points at the ultimate aim of my argument. Rather than offer a definition of magic as such, one that is true for all instances where this word is or may be used, my wish is to transform Sartre’s philosophical definition of magic into a properly philosophical magic, a magic internal to philosophy, which inverts the relation between explanandum and explanans by asking what happens to the criterion itself when it is magically revealed as infinitely itself. To put it briefly and still enigmatically: if philosophy can give a definition of magic, this is because definition is the magic of philosophy.3 Thus, still within the third section 3. By philosophy, of course, I mean here modern philosophy, understanding by that word the form of © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 311 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 of the essay, I conclude with the suggestion, more than slightly provocative, that there cannot be a philosophical concept of magic, let alone a philosophy of magic, that is not oriented in some mode or degree towards a belief in magic. Not towards an assertion that it is real, which would mean that one cannot theorize magic without believing in it, nor towards what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a “belief without belief,” a “disowning intertwined with an ‘as if’” for which magic could only have a fictional existence,4 but rather towards an act of naming. If magic is something, I will argue, it exists as something that can give its name to the otherwise unnamable event of a thing being revealed as infinitely itself. Such as, for example, the chance discovery in a distant field of a strangely marked black object, the object being unnamable to the precise extent that its discovery is also the discovery of what this thing portends about itself. That, at any rate, is the line of thought to be pursued in the following pages. Whether the argument fits the description above — whether, in other words, the dice fall with the same sense of urgency and fascination as they are thrown — remains to be seen; my only wish in this respect is that it will take less than two centuries for us to find out. 1. First throw of the die: there is no universally valid concept of “magic” In their editorial introduction to the anthology Defining Magic: A Reader, Bernd-Christian Otto and Michael Stausberg argue that the concept of magic should no longer be used as an overarching category in the study of religion: in addition to being ethnocentrically biased and ideologically problematic, the word is semantically too diverse and conceptually too heterogeneous to function properly in the role that it is typically assigned.5 However, since the word shows no signs of rational thought that begins with Descartes and still constitutes the foundation of our contemporary episteme: one in which, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes, the ancient differentiation between human and divine knowledge has given way to a unified cogito for which no human experience counts as knowledge unless it is sanctioned by science. See Agamben, Infancy and History, 17–24. 4. Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, 95. 5. Otto & Stausberg, “General Introduction,” 10. 312 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 going away, the authors attempt to square this circle by showing that the concept of magic does not need to be abandoned but may instead be rescued in and by its inherent multiplicity. Indeed, as Otto and Stausberg show, the plurality of meanings and practices that make it unable to stand as a “supreme metacategory” may itself be made more exact by being subjected to a degree of formalizing pressure.6 To this end, rather than speak of magic as such, of magic itself, they argue that we should speak of patterns of magicity, of “forms and conditions of structural stability” that permit certain characterizations and conceptions of “magic” to occur and re-occur across discursive, cultural, and temporal differences.7 It is on these recurrent characterizations and conceptions that the formalizing pressure is applied. After disowning all pretensions to scientificity, the authors devise a notation which brings those same pretentions fully and ironically into play: word magic is graphed as “MWOR,” sign magic morphs into “MSIG,” while the attempt to control the desires of others acquires the abbreviated form of “MDES” — and so on and so forth.8 Here, each use of the word “magic” is indexed to a particular context of interpretation that is indicated by the subscript letters, and because each context can be treated as a relatively stable totality of beliefs and practices, the semantic and historical vagueness that plagues the word, with one sense of “magic” smudged into another by the passage of time, is effectively broken up into chunks or modules that would together constitute the proper object of the field.9 Thus, for example, the formula “MWOR” “is derived from the recurrent observation that humans tend to ascribe efficacy to the utterance of specific words in ritual sequences and that this pattern of ascription is attested cross-culturally in a multiplicity of sources.”10 Similarly, “MEVA” refers to “modes of evaluation of ritual activities conducted by specific actors and the views on, and social position of, such actors.”11 For this reason, the patterns 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. See Asprem, “Patterns of Magicity,” 132. 10. Otto & Stausberg, “General Introduction,” 11. 11. Ibid. © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 313 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 “do not automatically involve ‘MAGIC’ (as the supreme meta-category), nor are they ‘magic’ (as referring to ontological features), but they are a way of dealing with cross-culturally attested observations. ‘Magicity’ acknowledges the fact that they were traditionally assigned to the overall category ‘MAGIC’ in which we have stopped believing.”12 If it is not immediately obvious whether this yields any greater clarity, the attempt, at any rate, is commendable, for, as may be seen from the following list, there is indeed a great deal of clarifying to be done. Magic, the authors write, has been described as being: - coercive; - manipulative; - seeking to exercise control of others or change the state of things or other human beings; - interventionist; - purely mechanical; - powerful, self-efficacious ritual action; - analogical/symbolic/sympathetic; - typically operative in the form of contagion or similarity; - imitative and/or mimetic; - instrumental ritual action with limited aims and scope; - a practice of obtaining ordinarily unavailable this-worldly benefits; - a ritual counter-measure against “witchcraft” attacks; - performed on “critical” occasions; - based on associative thinking; - immune to falsification; - compulsive, hallucinatory behaviour; - based on a non-ordinary “participatory” worldview or consciousness; - derived from strong emotions such as anger or fear, related to desires; - related to (supernatural, invisible) agents or agency typically distinct from gods; 12. Ibid. 320 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 quality may be called “magical” if and only if it is able to serve as a qualitative substrate for “magic” (i.e. if and only if its semantic content can be passed over to “magic” as the proper definition of the latter). As may be seen from the litany cited in the previous section, magic is very near — very near, but not all the way — to being parasitic on such qualities: an (apparently) empty term with no (clear) identity of its own, it cannot function (as far as we can tell) without a host. Whether this characterization is too negative — essentially, rather than merely rhetorically — remains to be seen. Yet, grounded in this way, what is certain is that “magic” finds itself defined by a set of predicates that is selected according to another set of predicates: poetic predicates in the context of poetry, ritualistic in the context of ritual, occulting in the context of the occult, ecstatic in an ecstatic context.19 This, as we prepare for the next throw of the die, will prove to be decisive for my attempt to grasp the problem of “magic” beyond its dispersal into semantical and historical vagueness. Whenever the word “magic” is used in a sentence, there is an underlying predicate or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite. Speaking generally, the spells or equations of ‘classic’ art invoke the beauty of the normal, and spells of ‘romantic’ art are said to invoke the beauty of the unusual” (Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 14). For Pater’s view on the mixture of strangeness and beauty, see his Appreciations, 246–47. Another perspective is offered by Reuven Tsur in On the Shore of Nothingness. Tsur draws upon Roman Jakobson in disputing the equation of poetry and magic: “In verbal magic and mysticism, the signifier is frequently indistinguishable from the signified. God, and the name of God, have sometimes the same powers. The sounds of the name of God, and the letters that signify those sounds (e.g., the tetragrammaton), have sometimes the same magic power. In this respect, poetry is diametrically opposed to verbal magic. In a complex cultural situation of human society in which the automatic identification of signifiers with their signifieds may be the source of maladaptive behaviour, the signifiers and signifieds must be properly kept apart. It is here where poetry comes in” (Tsur, Shore, 209). Bronislaw Malinowski might not agree: magic, he writes, “seems to stir up in everyone some hidden mental forces, some lingering hopes in the miraculous, some dormant beliefs in man’s mysterious possibilities. Witness to this is the power which the words magic, spell, charm, to bewitch, and to enchant, possess in poetry, where the inner value of words, the emotional forces which they still release, survive longest and are revealed most clearly” (Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, 51). 19. This is not to say, of course, that magic has only one definition or interpretation in a given context. Contexts are not necessarily cut off from each other, and the qualities that are magic-bearing in one context will often be found to have carried their magic into another. © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 321 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 that bears it. And whenever a sentence mentions “magic,” this mention does something to the magic-bearing predicate. Qualifying the quality to which it is added, it transforms this quality and the thing determined by this quality into something more and something other than it was before: more potent, more beguiling, more efficaciously present than it might otherwise be. This is wh y its emptiness is not the emptiness of an illusion and its parasitism the parasitism of an error. Or, to be more precise, this is why its emptiness is not simply a pure absence and its parasitism not just a superficial and surreptitious addition. To the contrary: it may well turn out to be the case that “magic” has nothing else to commend itself except this capacity for heightened presence. 3. Third throw of the die: there is always a criterion which decides whether “magic” is attributable to a thing Magic as capacity for heightened presence? Ludwig Feuerbach, for one, would not abide by such claims. In The Essence of Christianity, this ingraspable sense of something more — the sense of a thing being itself, but with an added and strange degree of profundity — is seized as an opportunity to excoriate religion in general — and “Christian sophistry” in particular — for its obfuscatory and obscurantist tendencies. Near the beginning of a chapter that deals with the contradiction inherent in the divine nature — namely, that God is at once universal and personal, infinite and individual — we find this striking paragraph: A peculiarly characteristic artifice and pretext of Christian sophistry is the doctrine of the unsearchableness, the incomprehensibility of the divine nature. But, as will be shown, the secret of this incomprehensibility is nothing further than that a known quality is made into an unknown one, a natural quality into a supernatural, i.e., an unnatural one, so as to produce the appearance, the illusion, that the divine nature is different from the human, and is eo ipso an incomprehensible one.20 20. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 212. 322 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 In the previous paragraph, having first stated that the “essence of religion is the immediate, involuntary, unconscious contemplation of the human nature as another, a distinct nature,” Feuerbach observes that this “projected image of human nature,” as it is taken up as the object of theological reflection, “becomes an inexhaustible mine of falsehoods, illusions, contradictions, and sophisms.”21 Against this relentlessly critical background, the passage quoted above functions as a transition to another discussion, lengthier and yet more acerbic than the one preceding it, that deals with the properly imaginary quality of divine incomprehensibility. By treating it as imaginary, of course, Feuerbach does not mean that incomprehensibility should be seen as a sign and a spur for profounder learning, as Friedrich Schlegel argued in one of his fragments some four decades previously: that would be much too romantic, much too ironic for his purposes.22 Rather, his point is to show that the idea of an inscrutable God emerges from eminently scrutable elements that are rendered mysterious and inhuman only by the spontaneous removal of everything that determines them as human: finitude, dependence, measure. Furthermore, because this removal is indeed spontaneous — or, in Feuerbach’s terms, “immediate,” “involuntary,” and “unconscious” — it lends itself effortlessly to the kind of dismantling that Feuerbach is engaged in. “In the truly religious sense,” he writes in the next paragraph, “incomprehensibility is not the dead full stop which reflection places wherever understanding deserts it, but a pathetic note of exclamation marking the impression which the imagination makes on the feelings.”23 This association of feeling and imagination explains why, for Feuerbach, “the incomprehensibility of God has only the significance of an impassioned expression.”24 What takes us by surprise, Feuerbach argues, elicits from us the exclamation that it is “incredible” and “beyond conception,” and since these exclamations are thoroughly 21. Ibid., 211–12. 22. Schlegel, Fragments, 257–71. 23. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 212, my emphasis. 24. Ibid. © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 323 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 imbued with a pathetic note, a note of pathos, the incomprehensibility that is ascribed to God turns out to be nothing other than the imaginatively exaggerated and intellectually hyperbolized form of a quintessentially human feeling. For the human imagination, many things feel incredible and beyond conception; yet God is that which feels absolutely incredible and beyond all conception. This is what Feuerbach means when he says of the imagination that it is “the original organ of religion.”25 Defining this faculty as “the limitless activity of the senses” and the nature of God as “the nature of the imagination unfolded, made objective,”26 Feuerbach describes religion as the intellectual infinitization of a finite feeling. In religion, everything that limits the imagination is negated, and the imagination, thus freed from the dross of human finitude, is granted to a God that feels infinite and therefore is infinite. Here, the parallels to my argument as I have developed it thus far become evident, and they are nowhere more so than in the specific act by which, as Feuerbach writes, “a known quality is made into an unknown one, a natural quality into a supernatural, i.e. an unnatural one.”27 From a strictly formal perspective, what this act of imagination comes to effect is nothing other than the transformation of a human quality into a God-bearing quality; furthermore, because this formal efficacity does not pass unnoticed by Feuerbach, he is able to redefine the language of religion, and specifically of theology, as tantamount to a set of God - -referring expressions. Or, more precisely, a set of God-referring pathetic exclamations. But that is not the end of the matter. If imagination is the organ of religion, it is equally the organ of magic. Yet magic and religion are not the same, which is why it remains to be asked how this organ of emotional infinitization works in this somewhat shadowier realm. This, of course, is a nearly intractable question. However, though answers are hard to find, they are, happily, not altogether nonexistent: for, by a stroke of luck, if not of magic, it is precisely this that Jean-Paul Sartre comes to elucidate, 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 324 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 without exactly intending to, in his early essay Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. In this short work, which gives an overview of then-current psychological theories of emotion before supplementing them with a relatively detailed phenomenological analysis, Sartre deploys the notion of magic in a way that makes up in conceptual inventiveness what it lacks in descriptive accuracy.28 What this inventiveness consists in will be dealt with shortly. On the latter score, it should be noted here that its shortcomings are glaring indeed, and apart from a brief mention in Randall Styers’s landmark book Making Magic, which examines the way in which “magic” is posited as the counterpart to a putatively rational “modernity,” it is no surprise that the ideas put forward in the essay have passed undiscussed by scholars of the subject.29 This choice snippet, quoted by Styers in a different translation, gives a good idea of where Sartre is coming from: The magical, as Alain says, is “the mind crawling among things”; that is, an irrational synthesis of spontaneity and passivity. It is an inert activity, a consciousness rendered passive. But it is precisely in that form that others appear to us, and this, not because of our positions in relation to them, nor in consequence of our passions, but by essential necessity; ... It follows that man is always a sorcerer to man and the social world is primarily magical. Not that it is impossible to take a deterministic view of the inter-psychological world or to build rational superstructures upon it. But then it is those structures 28. By “descriptive accuracy,” I simply mean the extent to which Sartre’s concept of magic can be reconciled with everything that historical and empirical investigation has been able to say about “magic” — in other words with Otto and Stausberg’s “patterns of magicity” (and it is, among other things, merely one pattern among others). Furthermore, it should be noted that Sartre’s theory of magic is fundamentally a theory of the imagination and as such would be able to do without the former concept. (On the equivalence that Sartre draws between the magical and the imaginary, see O’Shiel, “Sartre’s Magical Being.”) In the following reflections, what I am aiming at, ultimately, is the deconstruction of Sartre’s theory of the emotions through its appeal to the concept of magic. In other words, the argument will consist, to quote Jacques Derrida, “in making appear — in each alleged system, in each self-interpretation of and by a system — a force of dislocation, a limit in the totalization, a limit in the movement of syllogistic synthesis” (Derrida & Ferraris, A Taste for The Secret, 4). As will be seen, magic is precisely what exceeds Sartre’s system, his phenomenological theory of the emotions, even as it gives this theory the force that it needs. 29. Styers, Making Magic, 179. © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 325 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 that are ephemeral and unstable, it is they that crumble away as soon as the magical aspect of faces, gestures and the human situations becomes too vivid. And what happens then, when the superstructures laboriously built up by the reason disintegrate, and man finds himself suddenly plunged back into the original magic? That is easily predicted; the consciousness seizes upon the magic as magic, and lives it vividly as such.30 “Crawling,” “passivity,” “inertia”: that would seem to say it all. For a scholar of magic, claims such as these are debatable at best, and their sole merit, if merit there is, bears solely on the structure of emotional experience that the essay investigates. Or does it? Note, at the end of the quotation, these two crucial expressions: magic as magic, magic as such. I drew your attention to these objectifying expressions in the introduction and will do so later on. Before that, however, let us read what Sartre writes only a couple of pages earlier: Indeed, there is a world of emotion. All emotions have this in common, that they evoke the appearance of a world, cruel, terrible, bleak, joyful, etc., but in which the relations of things to consciousness are always and exclusively magical. We have to speak of a world of emotion as one speaks of a world of dreams or of worlds of madness. A world — that means individual syntheses in mutual relations and possessing qualities.... We are living, emotively, a quality that penetrates into us, that we are suffering, and that surrounds us in every direction.31 In the world of emotion, then, magic is found in qualities. In other words, there is no need to add any magic to a quality. Emotion itself, for Sartre, is nothing other than a magical relation to a quality, and if Sartre’s argument holds, we may propose, as a hypothesis, that the converse is also true: magic is nothing other than an emotional relation to a quality. But emotional in what sense? The answer to this question entails a decisive turn. Thus far, I have adduced my broader argument only abstractly and without any certainty that it might hold true of any given object. Yet Sartre’s account changes all this. There, the word “magic” does not refer to yet another “pattern of magicity.” Nor, for that matter, does the essay deal with a phenomenon that 30. Sartre, Sketch, 56–57. 31. Ibid., 53–55. 326 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 can vaguely be called “magical.” Rather, the word “magic” is used there, as it is elsewhere in Sartre’s work, because it accurately describes the phenomenon that Sartre is trying to understand: when he says that the magical is “an irrational synthesis of spontaneity and passivity,” when he describes it as “an inert activity, a consciousness rendered passive,” this passivity is not primarily a qualitative state, although it is that too, but first and foremost it is the state of being an object for the other, which, in this case, is not another consciousness, another subject, but rather a quality “that penetrates into us, that we are suffering, and that surrounds us in every direction.” For this reason, despite the connection that scholars and thinkers like Malinowski or Collingwood have drawn between magic and emotion,32 what Sartre is grappling with here is in fact something altogether different: of all the shorthands available to him, “magic” is the one that best expresses a situation in which both mind and world are gripped and transformed by a power that is wholly other to either of them. The implications of this are of paramount importance. For, even if Sartre’s broader description of magic is disputed, it nonetheless satisfies, concretely and materially, the two conditions that have been elaborated in the two preceding sections. Formalized, they are as follows: 1) A magic-referring expression is true only where it refers to a magic-bearing quality: the latter is the criterion of the former. 2) Magic cannot be defined by reference to putatively “magical” qualities: when used in a true proposition, the word indicates only that an identifiable quality has been transformed into a magic-bearing quality. Together, these conditions must be understood as stating that a definition of 32. In an earlier part of the essay, Sartre comes close to Malinowski’s view that the function of magic is the management of emotion (cf. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, 51–55). From a related perspective, R. G. Collingwood notes in The Philosophy of Enchantment that the perception of a magical connection between objects is emotionally motivated (Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 196–207). More recently, Giorgio Agamben has made the unexpected argument — which is the kind of argument that he prefers to make — that magic consists in the felicitous knowledge of a thing’s secret name (Agamben, Profanations, 19–22). © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 327 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 magic is always specific to its object: a true definition of magic for x is not necessarily true for y or z (i.e. where x = emotion, y = physics, and z = poetry). Furthermore, it must be noted that a definition may be simultaneously true for more than one class of objects (e.g. for emotion and poetry), whereas for others (e.g. physics), there is and cannot be a true definition of magic (in other words, the laws of physics preclude, in domains governed by these laws, the existence of a physical magic). Bearing this in mind, the single merit of Sartre’s essay is that it succeeds in laying out the conditions of truth for the definition of magic that it proposes: judged to be true, a given description is believed to meet these conditions; judged to be false, it does not. Because of this, and strictly within these theoretical bounds, it is a completely immaterial question whether Sartre’s theory is true or false either partly (i.e. for some aspect of its object) or as a whole (i.e. for the object in all its aspects). Whether it stands or falls, it stands or falls according to its own criterion, and what matters is that such a criterion can be asserted. But what is this criterion? Where is it found? And to what extent is Sartre aware of its criterial quality? Here, we must return to the two phrases, the two philosophemes, that I evoked twice above: “magic as magic” and “magic as such” (“the consciousness seizes upon the magic as magic, and lives it vividly as such”33). The most important thing to be observed about these phrases is that they function in Sartre’s analysis as phrases of objectification: through them, the active attention of the theorist passes over to the thing itself. Yet another question immediately follows: from what does the attention of the theorist pass over to the thing itself? The answer takes time to formulate, and we must begin with what Sartre says immediately after the sentence just quoted. “The categories ‘suspicious’ and ‘disquieting,’ etc.,” Sartre writes, “designate the magical, in so far as it is being lived by consciousness or tempting consciousness to live it.”34 The magical: another formula of objectification, now designated by emotional categories 33. Sartre, Sketch, 57. 34. Ibid. 328 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 such as the two he mentions. But let us keep reading. Halfway through the next paragraph, the answer gains additional depth: there is a shift from the internal to the external that further blurs the boundary between emotion and object. “Consciousness,” Sartre writes, taking as his example the image of a staring face that incites terror, “plunged into this magic world drags the body with it in as much as the body is belief and the consciousness believes in it. The behaviour which gives its meaning to the emotion is no longer our behaviour; it is the expression of the face and the movements of the body of the other being, which make up a synthetic whole with the upheaval in our own organism.”35 Note these last words: a synthetic whole with the upheaval in our own organism. What magic is, then, prior to its objectification as magic, is a synthesis which involves the external dimension in the internal and the internal in the external: when the subjective consciousness is an object for the other, the other is thereby brought into the innermost sphere of the subject, into the heart of its intimacy with itself, and makes it quake with an intensity of affect that no natural occurrence can incite. And this happens because the body believes in the magically transformed quality. This, I feel, is where the answer to the question posed above begins to gain real momentum. Returning to the passage quoted above, now reading it at greater length, what can be found there is a point of upheaval that is as emotional as it is philosophical: it is one in which the author — the abstract organism without which no such thing as the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions would exist — forms a synthetic whole with the object of his discourse. Indeed, there is a world of emotion. All emotions have this in common, that they evoke the appearance of a world, cruel, terrible, bleak, joyful, etc., but in which the relations of things to consciousness are always and exclusively magical. We have to speak of a world of emotion as one speaks of a world of dreams or of worlds of madness. A world — that means individual syntheses in mutual relations and possessing qualities. But no quality is conferred upon an object without passing over into the infinite. This grey, for instance, represents the units of an infinity of real and possi35. Ibid., 57–58. © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. 329 Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 ble abschattungen, some of which will be grey-green, some grey seen in a certain light, black, etc. Similarly, the qualities that emotion confers upon the object and upon the world, it confers upon them ad aeternum. True, when I suddenly conceive an object to be horrible I do not explicitly affirm that it will remain horrible for eternity. But the mere affirmation of horribleness as a substantial quality of the object is already, in itself, a passage to the infinite. The horrible is now in the thing, at the heart of it, is its emotive texture, is constitutive of it. Thus, during emotion an overwhelming and definitive quality of the thing makes its appearance. And that is what transcends and maintains our emotion. Horribleness is not only the present state of the thing, it is a menace for the future, it is a revelation about the meaning of the world. The “horrible” means indeed that horribleness is a substantial quality, that there is horribleness in the world. Thus, in every emotion, a multitude of affective protentions extends into the future and presents it in an emotional light. We are living, emotively, a quality that penetrates into us, that we are suffering, and that surrounds us in every direction. Immediately, the emotion is lifted out of itself and transcends itself; it is no ordinary episode of our daily life, but an intuition of the absolute.36 My aim in the preceding discussion has been to discover the criterion by which Sartre’s notion of magic may be judged either true or false. In searching for it, I noted that Sartre passes at a key juncture of his discussion from an unobjectified magic to an objectified magic expressed in the formulas “magic as magic,” “magic as such,” and “the magical.” Finding it imperative not to judge in advance what that unobjectified magic might be, I drew several interconnected quotations from Sartre’s essay in order to locate the specifically argumentative place, the architectonic rather than simply textual locus, where that passage occurs and Sartre finds it possible to begin speaking of “magic as magic,” of “magic as such,” of “the magical.” Reading the citation above, we may see that it is here that this locus is found, in this passage where Sartre affirms that there is horribleness in the world, and it is found as having stared us in the face all the time: in describing emotion as magical, in the very act of transforming emotion into magic, Sartre’s discourse enters into the emotional structure it describes 36. Ibid., 53–54. 336 © 2019 Hannu Poutiainen. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Poutiainen / Correspondences 7, no. 2 (2019): 305–337 stinct completes the work of morphology: the Kallima symmetrically aligns itself with a real leaf, its lower wing appendage in the spot that a real leaf stalk would occupy. The Oxydia attaches itself perpendicularly to the tip of a branch, for the marks imitating the median vein require it to do so. The Brazilian Cholia butterflies settle in a row on little stalks so as to form bellflowers like those on lily of the valley sprigs, for example.47 An incantation frozen at its high point and that has caught the sorcerer in his own trap: such is the philosophical magic of which I have tried to give an example here. To assure yourself of this, of the veracity of this description, take another look at the die you have found and spent the last few hours deciphering. If you are still certain that a die is what it is, I congratulate you on the hardiness of your convictions: mine have long since wavered. Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London & New York: Verso, 1993. ———. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Asprem, Egil. “Patterns of Magicity: A Review of Defining Magic: A Reader.” Correspondences 3 (2015): 127–39. Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Edited and translated by Claudine Frank. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Collingwood, R. G. The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology. Edited by David Boucher, Wendy James, and Philip Smallwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 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