A Cultural History of the Soul

Kocku von Stuckrad’s A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present is an essential historical work in religious studies, philosophy, and the environmental humanities whose primary focus is the evolution of Euro-American understandings of the soul throughout the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries.

As a scholar specializing in the European history of religion and esotericism, Stuckrad’s greatest strengths as a writer are demonstrated by his historical analysis of European thought, scientific movements, and literature. Stuckrad traces multiple genealogies of distinct types of knowledge that followed from varying geographical, historical, and cultural processes. Stuckrad describes these as being shaped by societal negotiations whose discourses converge, generating what he refers to as “discourse knots” that facilitate the birth/rebirth of new meanings and expressions of the soul. Stuckrad’s main argument “is that analyzing the soul in its discursive arrangement with other concepts enhances our understanding of the place and the function of the metaphysical in human thought and action in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (xix).

The book comprises ten chapters and an epilogue. The chapters are structured into two broad periods consciously divided by WWII. In part 1, Stuckrad summarizes the essential foundations of modernist ideas of the soul in Europe, which can be traced back to antiquity. Simultaneously, Stuckrad describes the historical evolution of dualistic interpretations of the soul, pointing to its enduring influence on Christian philosophy and theology. Lastly, Stuckrad points to the distinction between varying ideas of the soul in philosophical thought—one is associated with life force, immateriality, the cosmos, and, by extension, theological divinity, and the other is related to natural philosophy. This lays the groundwork to explore understandings of the soul related to Western mind-body dualism, which is followed by an examination of the soul and nature in romantic philosophy in the 19^th century. Through romanticism, Stuckrad seeks to understand the 19^th century’s fascination with occultism, mysticism, or the supernatural before pivoting to a discussion of the institutionalization of the scientific framing of the soul, which occurs through the establishment of modern psychology. With each theme and discipline under discussion, the reader is led back and forth in time, demonstrating how each sphere of social discourse has influenced the other.

In this first part of A Cultural History, Stuckrad attempts to explain that although “linking ‘soul’ to discourse strands of life-nature-knowledge-cosmos” (26) had for centuries been common practice, what made the 19^th century unique is how intellectual debate in Europe rearranged these discourses and tied concepts of science, psychology, and occultism into new arrangements. Stuckrad draws our attention to the fact that discourse about the soul is transdisciplinary. The reader is also reminded that not all discourses on the soul are positive. In chapter 3, as part of his decolonial analysis, Stuckrad outlines the intermingling of thought that generates discursive knots that can lead to destruction. Through his astute knowledge of German and European literature, Stuckrad details “the discursive entanglement of soul, nature, mysticism, religion and race” (65) that facilitated the rise of antisemitism and divided Europe along ethnic lines leading up to WWII. In the last chapter of part 1, Stuckrad invites the reader into a discussion of monism, vitalism, and the soul's migration away from the natural sciences and increasingly towards spirituality and the occult, leaving both academia and psychology void of “soul” at the onset of the war.

Part 2 of the book feels like we have been transported to a new world; here, the reader enters the world of transpersonal psychology, first in the lineage of Sigmund Freud and later in the evolution of the New Age movement in California, where Euro-American and Eastern Wisdom meet. Through this introduction to the transpersonal movement, Stuckrad explores the contributions of Fritjof Capra, Stanislav Grof, and Ken Wilbur. In this world, the soul moves beyond the personal to the collective conscious and unconscious. Through the work of Richard Tarnas, Stuckrad explores the evolution of consciousness studies, the rebirth of cosmic consciousness, and the development of the planetary soul, analyzing the connections between soul-psyche-consciousness. “These discursive entanglements–which were particularly concerned with questions of the nature of reality, the position of the human in the dynamic planetary system, and the metaphysical potential of science–gave rise to new ethical discussions and spiritual practices,” Stuckrad writes (156). From here, the reader is briefly guided back to Europe, where we encounter the establishment of the deep ecology movement, alongside related discourses on nature-based spiritualities. It appears as if the “soul” of European philosophy is restored through an embrace of animism, whose resurgence is experienced through the practice of shamanism, paganism, and neopaganism as a new form of religion or spirituality.

In the last two chapters, Stuckrad makes his final pivot by directing the reader back to North America, towards nature writing and nature writers who would contribute significantly to inspiring the North American environmental movement. This leads Stuckrad into his closing arguments, where he explores the critical works of influential environmental authors like Rachel Carson and Barry Lopez. Here, Stuckrad emphasizes that the primary interest of his work lies in how we humans use the discourse of the soul to negotiate the creation of a future multispecies planetary community. He writes that “a cultural and discursive history of the soul . . . provides information on how discourse communities in Europe and North America have negotiated the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world philosophically, scientifically, artistically, literarily, politically, and spiritually” (245).

In conclusion, Stuckrad's approach in this latest work concerns reframing and resituating a more complex understanding of Western metaphysics that rejects the notion of a clear and distinct linear development of thought through time. Stuckrad’s historical analysis of the soul in Euro-American discourse in the modern period is an ambitious and essential contribution to our understanding of “how the concept of the soul was instrumental in the negotiation of key ideas about the human position in the world” (xvii).

Chantal Noa Forbes is an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at Randolph-Macon College and an adjunct lecturer of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Chantal Noa Forbes

Date Of Review:

June 29, 2023