Reverse-engineering ‘esotericism': how to prepare a complex cultural concept for the cognitive science of religion

Abstract

The article introduces a framework for preparing complex cultural concepts for the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and applies it to the field of Western esotericism. The research process ('reverse engineering') rests on a building block approach that, after problematic categories have been deconstructed, seeks to reconstruct new scholarly objects in generic terms that can be operationalized in interdisciplinary contexts like CSR. A four-step research process is delineated, illustrated by a short discussion of previous work on 'Gnosticism,' 'magic,' and 'religion,' before applying it to 'esotericism.' It is suggested that the implicit scholarly objects of esotericism scholarship can be reconstituted in generic terms as concerned with processes of creating and disseminating 'special knowledge.' Five definitional clusters are identified in the literature; these provide a basis for formulating research programs on the psychological and cognitive level, drawing on metarepresentational processes, event cognition, and psychological dispositions for altering experience.KEY WORDS building block approach; esotericism; cognitive science of religion; complex cultural concepts; metatheory; constructionism Religion, 2015 http://dx.

New religious movements and quasi-religion: Cognitive science of religion at the margins

“…The editors’ introduction to the volume of the journal in which these articles appear alludes to this deployment of cognitive science in a comment about ‘the professionalization of research on esotericism over the past two decades’ (Asprem & Davidsen, 2017, p. 1). A similar note can be detected in another recent paper by Egil Asprem (2016) – one of the authors of the editors’ introduction to the special issues of Aries – on ‘Reverse-engineering “esotericism”: how to prepare a complex cultural concept for the cognitive science of religion’. Implicit in the article’s rationale is the attempt to make esotericism more easily susceptible to study by another discipline (in this case, cognitive science), and thus it might be understood to reflect a secondary front the Hanegraaffian project to bring that domain nearer the centre of the conventional academic gaze.…”

“…Implicit in the article’s rationale is the attempt to make esotericism more easily susceptible to study by another discipline (in this case, cognitive science), and thus it might be understood to reflect a secondary front the Hanegraaffian project to bring that domain nearer the centre of the conventional academic gaze. That implicit purpose is made explicit in the paper’s closing words: ‘[T]he potential trade-offs are great: to rewire the field firmly at the center of the scientific study of religion and participate fully in the new era of discovery unleashed by the cognitive science of culture’ (Asprem, 2016, p. 180).…”

New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism

“…The solution to these problems seems to me fairly simple: we must separate the study of rejection processes (a valuable sub-track in research on "esotericism" and its conceptual history) from the vexed question of how to define and operationalize the concept itself for scholarly research. While I will not engage the definition debate here, it suffices to note that a number of different alternatives are on the table, from stipulating new "positive" definitions (including along neo-Faivrean lines), to taking a systematically genealogical approach to esotericism as an "empty signifier" , or even "fractionating" the concept into more fine-grained analytical concepts that inevitably dissolves "its" status as a separate, semi-autonomous entity, but opens up new vistas of comparison (Asprem, 2016; on the definition debate, see .…”

Interpretation Reconsidered: The Definitional Progression in the Study of Esotericism as a Case in Point for the Varifocal Theory of Interpretation

“…To rephrase this development with a more formal focus on the subject of esotericism: a thesis of ontological access ("we know esotericism to be x"/"we know esotericism to be constituted by x, y, z") (Faivre, 1994;Hanegraaff, 2012), has been countered by its antithesis of epistemological limitation ("we can only ever know 'esotericism' to be interpreted as x, y, z") (Bergunder, 2010), whereupon both have been sublated in the hierarchical system of the building blocks approach ("whatever the interpretation of the signifier 'esotericism,' we can scale it down to the point where we can know its constituent components and reassemble it from there") (Asprem, 2016).…”