God is in the TV
Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media
Zone, 256pp, £19.95, ISBN 9781935408352
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The authorised version of the European Enlightenment holds that sovereign human reason, borne aloft on the currents of scientific investigation and discovery, put to rout the irrational forces of superstition and immaterial belief, bequeathing us an intellectual culture in which there would be absolutely no justification, say, three centuries later, for people still to be arguing about the existence of God. What this tidily linear narrative misses is that the immaterial was of continuing interest to philosophical inquiry, not as the object of some kind of negative fiat, the Nietzschean let-there-not-be-God, but as the abiding figure of the forever evasive truth of which philosophy remained in quest.
For Plato, the highest metaphysical principle is the Idea, for Descartes the thinking ego. The great intangible in Rousseau is the general will, consciousness of which will function in Kant's moral philosophy as the categorical imperative. Hegel's dialectical thinking sets out in pursuit of absolute knowledge, while for Schopenhauer, it's again all a matter of will, but a more primal, instinctual, biological force that prepares the crudest bestialities as well as the highest attainments of the human spirit. Even classical economics has its unseen power, in the invisible hand that guides the apparently irrational convulsions of the market.
Thinkers in the German Idealist tradition that descended from Kant were to remain not only highly preoccupied, but consistently ambivalent, about the notions of ghostly manifestations, telepathy and clairvoyance, as this hugely suggestive and important short study by Stefan Andriopoulos shows. Kant's essay Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766) proposes what we would now recognise as a psychologistic interpretation, in which spectral apparitions might well be externalised hallucinations that correspond to internal mental or spiritual influences, actual projections of the mind that have no concrete presence in themselves. The unreality of such apparitions is in direct continuity with what would become the argument in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that empirical appearance (the same word, Erscheinung, serves both contexts in German) is the mere surface impression of the unknowable thing-in-itself.
A key feature of illusions is that their impression of reality persists even when we know they are illusions, as in perspective distortions or, for that matter, Kant's own transcendental apperception. Similarly, despite all the intricate recent understandings offered by brain science, we go on stubbornly believing in the chimeras of subjective consciousness and independent agency. Friedrich Schiller thought there might be something like a 'nerve spirit' as the mediating element between mind and body, even while writing one of the more sceptically tempered – and riotously successful – scare-stories, The Ghost Seer (1787-89).
The ambivalence in all the attention afforded to the supernatural in Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer is weighted on the sceptical side of the balance by the enormous popularity in the late eighteenth century of magic lantern shows and phantasmagorias, which spooked the willing audiences of the day with back-projections on to hidden screens amid guttering candlelight, wafts of smoke and muffled wailing voices. These divertissements, though, didn't necessarily preclude the idea that some manifestations might be genuine. Kant appeared paradoxically to feel that ghost-stories, refutable individually as the product of overactive imaginations, nonetheless gained credibility in the mass, although he would later repudiate this attitude. Schopenhauer's essay On The Will in Nature (1836) may surprise those who would have expected the choleric old curmudgeon to have had nothing to do with such feeble-minded gullibility for the solemn credence it grants to the most thinly supported of ghostly newspaper reports.
Andriopoulos traces this fascinating ambiguity through the emergence of the Gothic novel in Germany and in England, where Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1769) held an entire generation spellbound in blood-boltered horror, much as Schiller's work had done on the continent. Moralists began to be concerned that, as print culture assumed unprecedented penetration among the semi-educated bourgeois, impressionable minds – especially those of young women who ought to be about their housework – were falling into the grip of something called 'reading addiction', or 'reading rage', in which the balance of their minds was disturbed by the power of more or less literary prose. The less scrupulous writers would insist on the pure factuality of their tales of the unexpected, while others adopted the standard mendacity still at work in supernatural claims today, that the features of the story are being laid out in a purely objective fashion so that the reader can make up his or her own mind, appealing to the recipients' credulity by flattering their evaluative skills.
The genteel shrieks that greeted smoke-and-mirrors shows in the drawing-room may have been emitted in full knowledge that the illusions were just that, but that didn't make the moment of terror any less sublime, or any less real in itself, as Kant would posit of more serious claims of ghost-visions. Andriopoulos sets forth a genealogy of that productive ambiguity over roughly a century and a half, from the phantasmagorias to the dawn of the age of electrical communication, following its lineal descent as assiduously as any Gothic novelist traced the family ancestry of the haunted castle. The story could have borne a more detailed account of the séances and mesmerism of the Victorian spiritualist obsession, but the final chapter was always going to be the eerie climax of the tale.
Between the mid-1890s and the late 1920s, rapid advances in communications technology furnished the modern world with its habits of seeing and hearing. Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraph opened up the possibility of conducting conversations between continents. A box from which disembodied voices spoke of the doings of the world outside was soon a standard feature of the home. Moving-picture shows brought new dimensions of light, emotion and psychological acuity to dramatic production, and at the precise moment that the cinema was able to add sound to its pictures, television added pictures to radio.
Extraordinarily enough, these technologies proceeded hand-in-hand with investigations into the occult. Spiritualists seized on the concept of wireless transmission as providing supporting evidence of their own age-old advocacy of the power of mind over matter, of telepathy, seeing not just a homology but a precise homogeneity between spiritual emanations and what were termed 'electrical rays'. But it wasn't just a case of spiritualists versus scientists, as Andriopoulos demonstrates. They were often the same people. Two of the British pioneers of optical media, William Crookes and Oliver Lodge, were successive presidents of the Society for Psychical Research, and believed as adamantly in ectoplasm as they did in cathode rays. 'Television', and its cognate German term Fernsehen, were each coined significantly earlier than the technology that bears their names. 'Remote seeing' was the work of mediums and mesmerists before it was the stock-in-trade of the BBC.
It remains impossible to locate the origins of TV in one single domain of knowledge, and Andriopoulos argues that it wasn't invented to serve a pre-existing need, but came about because of investigations into ways of amplifying ethereal, or (as they would come to be) electrical, signals from the beyond. Occultist researches were a principal driver of the technology. We might also wryly note that early verdicts on TV as a form of home entertainment stressed its balefully hypnotic nature, a cultural trope still wearing well today in condemnation of anybody who watches the kind of rubbish you wouldn't be seen dead near, and which was the precise charge once levelled at the Gothic novelists.
The story that winds from ghostly visions to television is at least as absorbing as, if considerably more edifying than, anything on Channel 4, and Andriopoulos tells it well. In that over one-third of the book's slender extent is given over to footnotes, the presentation is perhaps more concise than it absolutely needed to be, and the author has a determinedly recapitulative approach to quotations, which are often aired two or three times in the course of a chapter to which they may already have formed an epigraph, but in the age of screen-driven attention deficit, there is nonetheless plenty to ponder here.
For Plato, the highest metaphysical principle is the Idea, for Descartes the thinking ego. The great intangible in Rousseau is the general will, consciousness of which will function in Kant's moral philosophy as the categorical imperative. Hegel's dialectical thinking sets out in pursuit of absolute knowledge, while for Schopenhauer, it's again all a matter of will, but a more primal, instinctual, biological force that prepares the crudest bestialities as well as the highest attainments of the human spirit. Even classical economics has its unseen power, in the invisible hand that guides the apparently irrational convulsions of the market.
Thinkers in the German Idealist tradition that descended from Kant were to remain not only highly preoccupied, but consistently ambivalent, about the notions of ghostly manifestations, telepathy and clairvoyance, as this hugely suggestive and important short study by Stefan Andriopoulos shows. Kant's essay Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766) proposes what we would now recognise as a psychologistic interpretation, in which spectral apparitions might well be externalised hallucinations that correspond to internal mental or spiritual influences, actual projections of the mind that have no concrete presence in themselves. The unreality of such apparitions is in direct continuity with what would become the argument in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that empirical appearance (the same word, Erscheinung, serves both contexts in German) is the mere surface impression of the unknowable thing-in-itself.
A key feature of illusions is that their impression of reality persists even when we know they are illusions, as in perspective distortions or, for that matter, Kant's own transcendental apperception. Similarly, despite all the intricate recent understandings offered by brain science, we go on stubbornly believing in the chimeras of subjective consciousness and independent agency. Friedrich Schiller thought there might be something like a 'nerve spirit' as the mediating element between mind and body, even while writing one of the more sceptically tempered – and riotously successful – scare-stories, The Ghost Seer (1787-89).
The ambivalence in all the attention afforded to the supernatural in Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer is weighted on the sceptical side of the balance by the enormous popularity in the late eighteenth century of magic lantern shows and phantasmagorias, which spooked the willing audiences of the day with back-projections on to hidden screens amid guttering candlelight, wafts of smoke and muffled wailing voices. These divertissements, though, didn't necessarily preclude the idea that some manifestations might be genuine. Kant appeared paradoxically to feel that ghost-stories, refutable individually as the product of overactive imaginations, nonetheless gained credibility in the mass, although he would later repudiate this attitude. Schopenhauer's essay On The Will in Nature (1836) may surprise those who would have expected the choleric old curmudgeon to have had nothing to do with such feeble-minded gullibility for the solemn credence it grants to the most thinly supported of ghostly newspaper reports.
Andriopoulos traces this fascinating ambiguity through the emergence of the Gothic novel in Germany and in England, where Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1769) held an entire generation spellbound in blood-boltered horror, much as Schiller's work had done on the continent. Moralists began to be concerned that, as print culture assumed unprecedented penetration among the semi-educated bourgeois, impressionable minds – especially those of young women who ought to be about their housework – were falling into the grip of something called 'reading addiction', or 'reading rage', in which the balance of their minds was disturbed by the power of more or less literary prose. The less scrupulous writers would insist on the pure factuality of their tales of the unexpected, while others adopted the standard mendacity still at work in supernatural claims today, that the features of the story are being laid out in a purely objective fashion so that the reader can make up his or her own mind, appealing to the recipients' credulity by flattering their evaluative skills.
The genteel shrieks that greeted smoke-and-mirrors shows in the drawing-room may have been emitted in full knowledge that the illusions were just that, but that didn't make the moment of terror any less sublime, or any less real in itself, as Kant would posit of more serious claims of ghost-visions. Andriopoulos sets forth a genealogy of that productive ambiguity over roughly a century and a half, from the phantasmagorias to the dawn of the age of electrical communication, following its lineal descent as assiduously as any Gothic novelist traced the family ancestry of the haunted castle. The story could have borne a more detailed account of the séances and mesmerism of the Victorian spiritualist obsession, but the final chapter was always going to be the eerie climax of the tale.
Between the mid-1890s and the late 1920s, rapid advances in communications technology furnished the modern world with its habits of seeing and hearing. Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraph opened up the possibility of conducting conversations between continents. A box from which disembodied voices spoke of the doings of the world outside was soon a standard feature of the home. Moving-picture shows brought new dimensions of light, emotion and psychological acuity to dramatic production, and at the precise moment that the cinema was able to add sound to its pictures, television added pictures to radio.
Extraordinarily enough, these technologies proceeded hand-in-hand with investigations into the occult. Spiritualists seized on the concept of wireless transmission as providing supporting evidence of their own age-old advocacy of the power of mind over matter, of telepathy, seeing not just a homology but a precise homogeneity between spiritual emanations and what were termed 'electrical rays'. But it wasn't just a case of spiritualists versus scientists, as Andriopoulos demonstrates. They were often the same people. Two of the British pioneers of optical media, William Crookes and Oliver Lodge, were successive presidents of the Society for Psychical Research, and believed as adamantly in ectoplasm as they did in cathode rays. 'Television', and its cognate German term Fernsehen, were each coined significantly earlier than the technology that bears their names. 'Remote seeing' was the work of mediums and mesmerists before it was the stock-in-trade of the BBC.
It remains impossible to locate the origins of TV in one single domain of knowledge, and Andriopoulos argues that it wasn't invented to serve a pre-existing need, but came about because of investigations into ways of amplifying ethereal, or (as they would come to be) electrical, signals from the beyond. Occultist researches were a principal driver of the technology. We might also wryly note that early verdicts on TV as a form of home entertainment stressed its balefully hypnotic nature, a cultural trope still wearing well today in condemnation of anybody who watches the kind of rubbish you wouldn't be seen dead near, and which was the precise charge once levelled at the Gothic novelists.
The story that winds from ghostly visions to television is at least as absorbing as, if considerably more edifying than, anything on Channel 4, and Andriopoulos tells it well. In that over one-third of the book's slender extent is given over to footnotes, the presentation is perhaps more concise than it absolutely needed to be, and the author has a determinedly recapitulative approach to quotations, which are often aired two or three times in the course of a chapter to which they may already have formed an epigraph, but in the age of screen-driven attention deficit, there is nonetheless plenty to ponder here.