Prolegomena to Agapeology: Reflections on Love as Panexperiential Phenomenon

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to reflect upon the hidden or mysterious logic of love as an ontological and panexperiential phenomenon. In our attempt, we are crossing the fields of philosophy, spirituality, and contemporary research in psi phenomena (also known as paranormal phenomena) and investigating some historical conditions of margins and disputes between the disciplines based on David Ray Griffin’s work, Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality. In the main part of this paper, we present the aesthetic theory of force by Christoph Menke and follow his rich analyses on the hidden, obscure layers of the soul. Based on these analyses, we present our own thesis on agapeology as being related both to psi phenomena and aesthetic phenomena. Throughout the history of religion and Western science, magical and miraculous events were too often relegated to the domain of faith or superstition and dismissed almost entirely. In the final parts of this paper, we aim to show that using the approaches of synchronicity (C.G. Jung) and ontology of the ground (F.W.J., Schelling) and acknowledging the phenomena known as quantum entanglement (C. Keller), we can postulate an underlying nexus, providing us with an access to the agapeistic effects of what we idiosyncratically call the phenomenon of dark love.

1. From Disenchantment to Re-Enchantment: Ventures of a Modern Era

In the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, love has traditionally held the place of an ethically or eschatologically invested liminal phenomenon, able to traverse both ‘mundane’ (as in intersubjective relations) as well as ‘supernatural’ (as in eschatology) dimensions of space and time. Among the key phenomena of religion and spirituality, traditionally and historically, love certainly holds the most preeminent position. But what is the agapeological meaning of love reflected from the ontological and synchronistic points of view? In the “Phantasms of the Living, Dialogues with the Dead” chapter of his beautiful and insightful book Speaking into the Air, John Durham Peters succinctly states that “distance and death have always been two great obstacles to love” (Durham Peters 1999, p. 137). Clearly, love somehow always traverses physical and psychical worlds and connects persons across more ‘usual’, diachronic, and, too often, limited coordinates of space and time. But in some rare moments, the workings of love sometimes open an entirely unexpected and mysterious plane of proximity, being able to connect people or effect upon persons far beyond any known spatio-temporal logic or nexus. These workings of love have historically (or more traditionally) been characterized as magical, mystical and, more recently, occult and paranormal phenomena and/or experiences. They have mainly been included under the umbrella of religious or spiritual (supernatural) fields, and in the case of the paranormal, psychological fields. In modern scientific discourse, these effects were much too often ridiculed and dismissed or simply labelled as superstitious by various philosophers of science. For this reason, we should dedicate more attention within philosophy to elaborating these agapeistic phenomena. They should also be put them into a dialogue with science, thus compensating the history of disdain and ignorance about these nonsensory (or, as we will put it, extrasensory or anomalous) experiences. David Ray Griffin was right in his important book, Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality, where he stated that the controversy between the so-called paranormal phenomena and modern philosophy of science resembles Richard Rorty’s dislike of modern scientism, according to which, science alone was capable of providing the solid basis for any serious justification of the cognitive phenomena (capable of being true and false), and thus rejecting the possibility of literary criticism (which was Rorty’s beloved example; we may add magical thinking, mystical experiences, and paranormal phenomena) of being noncognitive and thus utterly ‘nonscientific’.1 Beginning in the new era, marked with Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics in 1927 and A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality from 1929, which was followed in the late 20th and early 21st century by thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend, Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, Karen Barad and many others, paradigms in science shifted, and such dichotomies were not viable alternatives anymore. A fruitful dialogue and long-lasting friendship between C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli is one of the best examples of a need for cooperation in the field of quantum science (which was new at the time) and humanities.2

In an era of disenchantment, we are trained to never, ever, under any circumstances, take supernatural or miraculous events or facts as true. Beyond (and along with) the protestant and scientific revolutions and their decisive and important impact upon the older worldviews, the rejection of animism (in any of its forms) was one of the strongest marks of the modern era. Weonly need to mention Kant’s critique of Swedenborg’s visions in his well-known 1766 precritical essay, “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer”.3 In The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm nicely engages with this Western turn in the very beginning of his book by presenting the case of an Italian spiritualist physical medium, Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918), whose ‘occult’ powers were the focus of many celebrated scientists of that time. He reminds us how many of France’s most famous scientists personally witnessed and analysed—both in apartments and laboratories—the psychic powers of this Italian woman.4 Interestingly enough, Marie and Pierre Curie took part in these séances. As scepticism is rightly in place at such events (and indeed, many other witnesses have testified about fraud and deception caused by her magic skills and various tricks), we may still note that one of the most famous participants at this sessions, namely, Henri Bergson, began this venture “with serious doubts, but ended up producing a paranormally informed philosophy and even becoming president of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1913”.5 But we are not so interested in a truth value of this and similar cases of animal magnetism, mediumship, spiritualism, etc., in this paper (“Were they ‘real’”?). The traditions are rich and deserve a nuanced approach. In our contribution, we intend to focus on the paranormal phenomena of a more intimate character, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and related cases of nonsensory (or, better, extrasensory, i.e., broadly “telepathic”6) interpersonal communication between closely or intimately related persons (we use the term extrasensory perception or ESP in this paper), following the maxim of William James, who stated that “it takes only one white crow [i.e., one example of a paranormal phenomenon that neither cannot be explained ‘scientifically’ nor reduced to fraud or any other form of trickery, deception and so on] to prove that not all crows are black”.7 The cases we are interested in are testimonies for a hidden or obscure link or nexus manifesting within extrasensory interpersonal relations that we will aim to describe philosophically (and, in part, theologically), calling it the phenomenon of dark love. Our elaborations of this phenomenon will also include reflections on the agapeistic relationships of the living with the departed.

In this paper, we are therefore interested in an ontologico-ethical logic of the so-called paranormal intersubjective interactions as expressions of a still obscure force of love that we wish to investigate. In our descend, as it were, towards the still unexplored field of the ontology of dark love, we first investigate the selected phenomenological examples of nonsensory/extrasensory (‘paranormal’, also anomalous) agapeistic events in order to prepare the ground for an in-depth examination of these phenomena in an ontological key. The word agapeistic, used in our elaborations, indicates the intention of a transformed subjectivity—as affected by dark love (the concept that we develop towards the end of this paper) and activated towards the other in a philosophico-ethical and religiously-theological key—and visible through a cluster of ethically invested acts of an enhanced attention, deep care, compassion, empathy, and love—traversing from, as it were, one soul to another (with a mechanism we still need to describe). In God in Post-Christianity, we stated that there must be a relationality between two temporal moments. Our time (as human beings) must be related in a yet unknown manner to the temporality of a “God” which interferes with our “ordinary” worlds through the effects that we learned to call “miracles”. In our interpersonal events, we meet halfway to each other, and these mysterious meetings are just events of one bond of love, a plane of immanence yet to be explained and revealed to humanity (and beyond humanity’s own domain) as an inner force of the cosmos that compassionately and telepathically correlates and synchronizes our apparently disassociated, yet unified lives. It is therefore our aim to further underpin and develop this hypothesis.8

2. Mysterious Workings of Love: From Aesthetic Force to Phenomenological Explorations

There is a more obscure or hidden logic of love (which could also be understood as force, as we will see) that interests us in our attempt to outline these prolegomena to agapeology. As individuals, we tend to connect or bind ourselves to larger wholes (either defined as the other, cosmos, nature, or a god) through various nexuses; love, of course, is one of the strongest binding forces. Within the aesthetic way of thinking, subjectivity can be understood as the self-relation of and with the forces and “ability (or power) comes before knowledge (…)”.9 Relevant to our reflection is Christoph Menke’s Force, in which the aesthetic subject (which first and foremost is based on sensibility!) is historically “new and fundamentally different from the rationalist I” (Menke 2013, p. 26), which causes it to radically contradict its logic or internal principle. To take this one step further, Menke agrees with Baumgarten (the excerpt is from his Metaphysics) that we have something “obscure” operating in all sensibility: “There are obscure perceptions in the soul. The collection of these perceptions is called the foundation of the soul”.10 With his gesture, according to Menke, Baumgarten therefore could invent aesthetics as he was able to interpret sensibility as cognition and thus position it as an activity of the subject. As directly related to Herder, and as further explicated by Menke, natural aesthetics operates in sensations and obscure concepts, and is thus fundamentally connected to the logic of the obscure mechanism of the soul.11 Menke explains the obscure mechanism of the soul as the grounding of practical subject and relates it to force (Kraft, also Macht or “power”). Force now means that

the one and the other exist only in operation, in the transition of the one into the other, in the emergence of the other out of the one. Thus “force” also means that the one and the other are so closely interrelated that the other is the one in another form.

(Menke 2013, p. 36)

What implications does this insight have upon the logic of interrelationality or the intersubjective connections of a practical subject? Where have these connections been grounded, or is force somehow related to the obscure or mysterious ontological grounding of all being? We are not yet at this stage. But clearly, the obscure does not refer to the conscious sphere or to the field of cognition. If this force is also not mechanical, then it is expressive, as argued by Menke. It is related to something much more fundamental and internal then any (mechanist) causation, namely, to purposeful life or an internal connection of any living being. The obscure force of the soul is, finally, understood as “a presubjective and indeed countersubjective force that constitutes man” (Menke 2013, p. 41). As based on these important aesthetic reflections, we will be arguing that—analogously to the aesthetic sense in human beings, which is capable of connecting one soul to another based on a common grounding of force and aesthetic, and thus, sensible power—we are invited to further explore, with Herder, this “deep abyss of obscure sensations, forces, and irritations”12—as an obscure logic of now interpersonal irritation (or, inspiration)—towards the other in her equally groundless and obscure soul.

Now, we return to our reflection by introducing some preliminary phenomena of our practical ways of connecting with others; based on these phenomena, we will later try to explicate the concept of obscure or dark love, beyond the aesthetics and towards ethics. Ethically, we can experience a plethora of personal (intersubjective) and social ways of connecting—from forming a friendship, a couple (as in a loving encounter), a family, parental or sibling relation (particularly strong are the ties among identical twins13), etc.—including various ways of being a member of a community, such as, of course, a Church. These ways of connecting are based on various sets of both sensory and normative impulses and acts. In this elaboration, we will be focusing on those rare and enlightened intersubjective and communal contexts where a certain transcendence (or abundance) of love is manifested through selected enhanced sensory and extrasensory effects, causing radical transformations of our subjective ways of understanding the spaces in-between these relations. Agapeology is our approach towards this transformed understanding of the human psyche: our thesis will be that the more mysterious or hidden (both in our psyche as well as in cosmos) workings of love that we mentioned above are fundamentally related to the question of the correspondence of our selves (or souls) within the broader ontological nexus. We still need to define and explain this phenomenon, and which, analogously, was explained by Menke in his seminal work on aesthetics as an obscure mechanism of the soul. In this paper, we are particularly interested in communication at distance as invested with the strongest agapeistic impulses. Let us try to investigate into these phenomena more closely now.

In his illuminative book Where are the Dead?, Peter Moore uses, as he puts it, “old-fashioned human curiosity” to investigate a broad set of questions related to various relationships between the living and the departed (the phenomena presented and explored in his book include dying, death and post-mortem survival) (Moore 2017). Clearly, the history of religion and theology, anthropology, sociology, and of course philosophy, testifies to many and varied beliefs and narrative testimonies on these links and is pregnant with myths, beliefs and doctrines on these matters. The main concern of Moore’s chapter “Between the living and the dead” is “to examine what kinds of relationships might connect the living with the surviving dead” (Moore 2017, p. 142). By presenting and describing some of the cases for these contacts, Moore is of course aware of the basic hermeneutical danger—namely that cases of any of these contacts could have been provoked or prepared for in some way without the subject being aware of it. When someone somehow feels the presence of the deceased person, this always could be underpinned by a strong wish to return the loved one back to life, and an activation of an unknown psychic energy is at work in any of such experiences. The closer the bond once was, the stronger the wish to reunite. Among the most interesting testimonies for this bond are the so-called end-of-life experiences, which may be anecdotal (and thus, subjective experiences) or otherwise registered by third parties, comprising the so-called deathbed visions and near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and near-birth experiences.14

Related to these constellations, let us look at the excerpt from Catherine Keller, which can serve as an underpinning for the mysterious (or not yet fully revealed or known) bonding energy we were considering in these and similar experiences. This also serves as a transition to our elaboration of telepathy:

We are learning of an immediate connectivity operating across the widest distances, where there is not empty void but rather an infinitely plastic body of mysterious energy. And the very energy of the expansion may flow from the intimacy of the entanglement. Never mind the math. Consider the metaphor! The ancient mystical trope of the “brilliant darkness”—the glowing darkness of the infinite whom we have nicknamed God—seems to be growing (in theory) a subtle body. A body of energy, no thing, but pulsing webs, strings, and fields, the entangled intensity of everything that is, in some sense, everywhere.15

We may guess whether this body of energy (everything that is, in some sense, everywhere) also includes a subtle bond between the energies of the living and of the deceased. A partial answer could already be offered by Moore, who, while being extremely cautious about any naïve or simplified arguments on the post-mortem phenomena, concludes his thoughtful book with the following observation: “There is indeed a huge body of empirical data which it would be perverse not to consider as constituting at least putative evidence for post-mortem survival”.16

We now intend to focus on one peculiar kind of extrasensory phenomena, namely telepathy, as it is most closely related to what we understand by agapeistically invested intersubjective communication. But first, let us recall an important testimony by one of the major Western thinkers—Jacques Derrida. In his “Telepathy” essay, which is a testimony to Derrida’s own conversion to telepathy (being a trace of Freud’s report of his conversion to telepathy from 1926), we find this excerpt from a letter, dated 10 July 1979:

When you asked me the other day: what is changing in your life? Well, you have noticed it a hundred times recently, it is the opposite of what I foresaw, as one might have expected: a surface more and more open to all the phenomena formerly rejected (in the name of a certain discourse of science), to the phenomena of “magic”, of “clairvoyance”, of “fate”, of communications at a distance, to the things said to be occult. (…) Everything, in our concept of knowledge, is constructed so that telepathy be impossible, unthinkable, unknown. If there is any, our relation to Telepathy must not be of the family of “knowledge” or “non-knowledge” but is of another kind.17

This testimony indicates clearly that our concept of knowledge must allow for another (‘deeper’) sensitivity of the other—one that is not only based on cognitive and sensuous knowledge (or mere on science), but also one that could be expanded (and, as such, nurtured) towards the extrasensory plane of proximity and love.

According to Griffin, who completed extensive research on all possible kinds and testimonies of paranormal phenomena, a remark by Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) started the new era. After focusing on mathematics and philosophy of science in his early career, in Science and the Modern World (Whitehead 1925), Whitehead became convinced that “the supposed basis in science for mechanistic materialism as a worldview had been completely undermined by developments in science itself, including evolutionary theory, relativity theory, and quantum theory” (Griffin 1997, p. 36). Although this was not his primary or even his secondary aim of studies, Whitehead mentions telepathy positively. In the same time, we are also witnessing an interesting ‘conversion’ towards telepathy by Sigmund Freud, who, after an initial (i.e., total) scepticism, embraced it towards the end of his life in his private letters to his close friend Ernst Jones.18 To return to Whitehead: as based on his later works (including, of course, the seminal work Process and Reality), and Whitehead’s notion of “prehension” as expressing the original nonsensuous perception of the world, Griffin summarizes his points as follows:

He does not believe that sensory perception is our only, or even our primary, means of receiving information about the world beyond ourselves. Rather, he says, “sense-perception, despite its prominence in consciousness, belongs to the superficialities of experience”. What is primary is a nonsensuous perception of the surrounding world, which Whitehead coined the term “prehension” to express.

(Griffin 1997, p. 38)

Griffin adds that when Whitehead speaks of prehension, he generally does not think of extrasensory perception, but he does mention telepathy in some places, referring to it as a possibility “that we can detect in ourselves direct aspect of the mentalities of higher organisms”.19 Importantly, for Whitehead, there exists a causal power “beyond that recognized by current physics, so that all events need not be explained in terms of its four forces” (Griffin 1997, p. 39). This energy is called “full-blooded creativity”20 and comes very close to the evolutionary theological concepts of the cosmos, as proposed by Teilhard de Chardin. And indeed, in The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, the Teilhardian thinker and theologian Ilia Delio (who relies on the insights from systems biology and quantum physics) presents a fascinating story about how love is much more deeply embedded in the fabric of universe than one would be willing to admit.21 For Delio, following Teilhard de Chardin, love is the cosmological force—“the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center” (Delio 2013, p. 43).

But let us now try to outline some more methodical traits as related to elaborations of telepathy. The key problem of any study of extrasensory phenomena or telepathy is the veracity of the data and methodology. For this reason, let us begin with the example of Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), who was among the most learned British philosophers of the 19th century. The case of Sidgwick is among the key arguments in Griffin’s key book on parapsychology and philosophy. It is noteworthy to add that Sidgwick has later agreed to become the president of then established Society for Psychical Research. Towards the end of his career, he was reluctant to affirm the possibility of empirical evidence of the existence of the individual after death, yet he was convinced (like his friend William James) that there was sufficient evidence for telepathy. James contended this in one of his testimonies:

My own white crow is Mrs. Piper [Eleonora Piper, 1857–1950]. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape.22

With this historical example of a mediumistic personality and its telepathic capabilities, we, of course, do not implicate any agapeistic element. It simply serves as empirical evidence of supernormal knowledge we yet cannot specify or classify within the scientific knowledge even of our time. For our aim, the so-called telepathic impressions are far more interesting as they implicate an invested ethical and thus agapeistic content, usually operating between deeply connected individuals in a relation, where care, emotional attentiveness, compassion, empathy, and love are in the forefront. For us, such telepathic impressions present the hidden or obscure ground of agapeology as an ontologico-ethical event that still need to be investigated upon. In our God in Post-Christianity, we already pointed to the possibility of telepathy and argued that, while we are still not in possession of the scientific methods that could be used to entirely verify these hypotheses (or, even better, explain them, as numerous surveys have already been conducted that have verified them (Cardeña 2018)), for Jung, these phenomena were taken as psychic and regarded within the context of the activation of the archetypal plane of our psychical life. As highlighted by Andrea Kropf in her extensive work on Schopenhauer, Jung, and the paranormal, it was Jung’s firm conviction that there was a theoretic proximity between the fields of parapsychology, depth psychology, and modern physics, and that they all “culminate in the conception of the archetypes as psycho-physical natural constants and as creative world-shaping factors”.23 One example from Griffin’s book might help us to shed light on these agapeological connections. The event Griffin discusses was well reported, and it is unlikely that the whole family involved would have intentionally falsified it. In 1949, Ms. Joicey Acker Hurth was living in Cedarburg with her husband. It started sometime after midnight, when Joicey awakened with a feeling of deep sadness and the impression that something was wrong. She started to cry and had a terrible ache in her heart. Due to this sadness, she did not sleep for the rest of the night. The next morning, during breakfast, she suddenly exclaimed “It’s my father! Something is terribly wrong with my father!” Griffin reports that she had no reason to make such a statement; her father was healthy, and no sign or knowledge of illness had been reported to Joicey previously. Then the telephone rang, and her aunt informed Joicey that her father was in a coma and dying, a thousand miles away. Her mother then took the phone and asked Joicey: “Didn’t you receive my letter? I wrote you that your father was very ill”. But the letter had never arrived at her home as bad weather had grounded all planes, and the mail was thus not delivered.24

We believe that there is an obscure nexus or bond operating in the interpsychic spaces and temporalities—and, as we will try to show—and we also believe that these intuitions can be related to the traditions of Giordano Bruno, Arthur Schopenhauer, F.W.J. Schelling, C.G. Jung, Catherine Keller, and many other key Western thinkers, delving into the ontological phenomena and excavating what we would like to designate as an ontologico-ethical plane of dark love. It is our aim in the following, third part of this paper, to elaborate some of the possibilities in this regard.

3. Mysterious Workings of Love: Prolegomena to Agapeology

In The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason A. Josephson Storm nicely presents the 19th century nostalgic inclination in German philosophy, and Romanticism in general (including, of course, the 20th century echoes in Heidegger), toward mythology. We find this impulse particularly strongly presented in Schelling’s philosophy, as already stated in his System of Transcendental Idealism: “In mythology there was a medium [for science in poetry], before the occurrence of a breech that now seems beyond repair” (Josephson-Storm 2017, p. 64). A new mythology should therefore come into the world as a new medium to communicate some of the more delicate, hidden or obscure ‘truths.’ For Josephson Storm, this new myth was not something like a new narrative of Asian (Aryan or Teutonic) revival of our culture (or, a newly revived Ur-myth of a German nation); instead, he pointed toward another return—towards something more indistinct, as it were, “a myth in search of myth”, going beyond the narrative that had been present from the birth of Greek philosophy to the Renaissance and onwards to the Enlightenment, that “the darkness of superstition, myth, or religion began to give way to modern light, exchanging traditional unreason for technology and rationality” (Josephson-Storm 2017, pp. 64–65). We have already indicated the price of such a gesture in the beginning of this paper—as related to the reductionism or purely rationalist views within modern science—and aesthetics (as presented by Menke in his Force) was one of the ways out of this train of thought. Now, to more closely look into some of the key thinkers of this era, we already know that Schopenhauer expressed a strong interest in ‘animal magnetism’ (i.e., as a common name of his era for the cluster of paranormal phenomena of his era). He firmly believed that

apart from the outer connection between the phenomena of this world on which the nexus physicus [physical connection] is founded, there must exist another besides, passing through the very essence in itself of all things: a subterranean connection, as it were, by means of which immediate action was possible from one point of the phenomenon on to every other point, through a nexus metaphysicus [metaphysical connection].25

In Schopenhauer—as we interpreted in our recent reflections on telepathy—this connection might be related to the magical power as an inherent part of the Will or Ding-an-sich, which is now a necessary step towards a new understanding of the world based on a thesis of telepathic coordination and correspondence, as a possibility of compassion, understood as sympathy, which, in our reading of Schopenhauer’s animal magnetism essays, was extended through telepathy into our newly invented panpathy.26

Schelling was thus among those thinkers of his era that were interested in the paranormal, and we aim to connect his philosophy of the abyss and love to our previous reflections on paranormal phenomena, especially to telepathy, as a part of our newly presented agapeology. In his beautiful and tender work on spirituality of death, Clara (which was written in 1810 after the unexpected death of his wife Caroline in 1809 and Schelling’s personal mourning), the main character, Clara, argues that there is a link or communication between this world and the world of the deceased. Schelling knew that such a thesis—in the midst of the Enlightenment era—would certainly raise many eyebrows within the philosophical circles around him. For this reason, he pointed out in the Introduction to Clara that

before they can raise their usual complaints against this undertaking, they will first have to prove that there is such a chasm between nature and the purely spiritual world as they assume, or at least they will have to knock down our proofs that there is a natural connection between them.27

According to our understanding of this dialogue, there must be a pre-eminence of love hidden, as it were, behind the still ‘mundane’ or material acts of our mourning (bodily and emotional suffering, tears, …) and related acts of dedication (mourning, burial rituals…) to the souls of the departed. In Clara, Schelling therefore does not offer an ontological grounding to his tender yet more phenomenological (or spiritualist) observations. We need to look more closely into his other texts for further clues on how to unveil the obscure mechanism of the soul—namely, Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom (from 1809) and his earlier dialogue Bruno (from 1802).

Schelling begins his dialogue Bruno by mentioning ancient Greek mysteries. We know that in these sacred mysteries, we are witnessing secret rituals, operating in the closest vicinity of the fear of death and its overcoming.28 The most famous mysteries were the Eleusinian Mysteries, dedicated to the cult of the ancient Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone, which had a decisive role as yearly purification rituals for the Athenians. As related in the etymological sense to the initiation (the word mystéria originates from myeîn, ‘to initiate’), the dialogue invites us to explore (and be initiated into) some of the most fundamental and obscure questions of philosophy. The dialogue was written as Schelling’s response to the criticism of Fichte and brings, in our opinion, some of the most delicate teachings on the nature of things from his entire philosophy. Let us investigate into some of its ideas. In discussing the nature of ancient Greek mysteries, Lucian, Anselm, and Alexander (the characters in the dialogue) in the beginning of the dialogue, Bruno (representing both Giordano Bruno and Schelling itself) is invited to join the discussion. Bruno is told that he “should describe the kind of philosophy he thinks the mysteries must have taught”, and he begins with the proposal that “the world consist[s] not in life alone, but in death as well, and not in body alone, but in soul too” (Schelling 1984, p. 135). In discussing the nature of the universe between its finite and infinite forms, Bruno states the following:

Now precisely because the true universe is an infinite fullness where nothing is divorced or excluded from anything else, where everything is absolutely integrated into one, in the image world it is forced to spread itself out over a boundless expanse of time (…) then this unity seems to require for its development a time span so great that it could have neither a beginning nor an end.

(Schelling 1984, p. 151)

Translated into the ontotheological language, this now means that (with Bruno, and recalling the philosophy of Giordano Bruno29) in God, “no concept of any individual is excluded from the concept of all things that are, or were, or will be (…)” (Schelling 1984, p. 151). Now, this spatio-temporal unity of all things in God is related to what is designated by Bruno as a “sacred abyss from which everything springs forth and to which everything returns”,30 thus leading us towards the ontological ground of everything, which we now are proposing to be understood as a matrix, as it were, of all being and all relationality. With Bruno:

In this way, the universe sleeps in an infinitely fruitful womb, as it were, along with the profusion of its shapes and forms, the kingdom of life, and the totality of its developments; all its forms, inexhaustible within time, are here simply present in the eternal identity; the past and the future, each one an infinity for finite [consciousness] are not separated, but lie together under a common cloak.

(Schelling 1984, p. 159)

The universe in which distinctions between the natural and divine principle are now suspended, is “intertwined [or, rather, entangled?] with itself”31, and all its beings strive towards the oneness—to ultimately become one soul and one body. These pantheistic and Spinozistic thoughts (the highest power is now understood as God or nature—a being that is intertwined in a sacred unity, where neither would transcend the other) continue throughout the dialogue where—in the course of this argument—substance becomes form, and vice versa. Now, as the thoughts are fully developed, perhaps the most important thought is revealed by Alexander: that there is one destiny for all things. More concretely, it is

one life, one death. No one thing takes precedence over its fellows, for there is one world, one plant, as it were, wherein everything that exists is merely leaves, or blooms, or fruit, differentiated not according to essence, but only according to rank; there is but one universe, and everything within it is splendid, truly godlike, and beautiful; but in itself, it is uncreated and equally eternal with absolute identity itself, since it is the latter’s unfading and only-begotten offspring.

(Schelling 1984, p. 208)

The universe therefore unfolds as an actuality of various things intertwined in their sacred and (eternally-)lived substance qua materiality (form is matter, and matter is form; and the substance of all substances is called God), or, translated into a more modern jargon—in its psycho-physical complexity. Schelling concludes the dialogue again with mysteries—equipped with a new knowledge and after penetrating into the secrets of nature, we are now celebrating both the eternal incarnation of God and the divinization of humankind for we have been initiated into the mysteries of “immortal excellencies” (Schelling 1984, p. 223). All these thoughts of course relate to the scope and nature of mysteries. But what is the agapeologic logic of these thoughts?

To answer this question, we need to make a step further in our descent, towards the obscure origin of love in our soul. In his 1809 work, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom, which is a masterpiece of ontology, Schelling identifies the secret of all love as a part of his ontology of the primal ground, as a being before any duality or difference (i.e., as an absolute indifference). If Bruno’s arguments are still wrapped into a cloth of pantheism, here we now have pure philosophy of the ground, revealed in all complexity and dynamism:

We have already explained what we assume in the first respect: there must be a being before all basis and before all existence, that is, before any duality at all; how can we designate it except as ‘primal ground’ [Urgrund] or, rather, as the groundless [Ungrund]?32

This notion of groundless precedes all basis, for Schelling, and it also precedes the division or antithesis between good and evil. But, again, in an idiosyncratic dialectical manner, Schelling does not stop here: the essence of this basis is therefore groundless, and thus, abyssal. We know that in Bruno, the spatio-temporal unity of all things in God was named the sacred abyss. But in Philosophical Investigations, the abyss, or the groundless [Ungrund], now further “divides itself into the two equally eternal beginnings” (Schelling 1989, p. 89) (of ground and its basis, or essence). In order to become one in this division, the mystery of love is invoked, namely: “this is the secret of love, that it unites such beings as could each exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other” (Schelling 1989, p. 89). The ground of nature is now finally designated as “dark”33 by Schelling, and we may recall the obscure mechanism of the soul (Menke) here; it is this ontologico-agapeological secret of love that we now wish to designate idiosyncratically as dark love. This mysterious working of love resides in the depths of the ground while also working or effecting the world from the ground in synchronistic ways we cannot fully describe or comprehend. It will be our task in the concluding, fourth part of this paper, to elaborate on the logic of dark love.

4. Dark Love, or the Obscure Agapeistic Synchronicity of the Ground

In elaborating upon Christoph Menke’s Force as a concept of what he calls aesthetic anthropology we have seen that aesthetic subject necessarily outgrows and deepens the historically predetermined logic of a rationalist I and its subjective modes. With the very invention of aesthetics by Baumgarten, sensibility was for the first time understood as cognition, operating, as further explicated by Herder, in sensations and obscure concepts. With Menke’s elaboration of the aesthetic anthropology, practical subject was grounded in force and understood as a relation. The obscure force of the soul was understood as “a presubjective and indeed countersubjective force that constitutes man” (Menke 2013, p. 41). This presubjective and fully expressive interrelationality of the soul was related to various phenomena, including poetic enthusiasm and inspiration, or broadly, to the workings of the aesthetic sense of the human beings, connecting one soul to another in various ways. As we will see, these phenomena are already closely related to what constitutes the field of synchronicity and related research on psi phenomena. We have also already indicated, that in this elaboration, we will be focusing on those intersubjective events or meaningful coincidences where a certain abundance of love is manifested through an enhanced sensory and extrasensory effect, causing radical transformations of our subjective ways of understanding the spaces in-between these relations. Through reading Schelling’s Clara, we have seen, for example, that behind the visible acts of longing or mourning (such as melancholy and sadness, mourning and grief, with tears as its material signs, etc.), there is a more obscure or hidden psycho-physical mechanism of the ‘soul,’ operating from ‘behind.’ We have already conjectured that these transformations might be related to the not yet fully understood correspondence of our selves (or souls) within the broader ontological nexus. Our initial thesis therefore was that the more distant these extrasensory phenomena of love (translated into mourning, sadness, and other forms of ‘deep’ care and intense compassion—even with the departed in their ‘new’ ontological state), the stronger the impulse (or force) of love is at work in these workings. These connections may now be related to what we understood as the effects of dark love, first visible in various intersubjective events that we explained earlier—from forming a friendship, a loving couple, and so on—and then also in a more mysterious effects of telepathic expressions and similar ‘synchronistic’ events. Our thesis now is that these mysterious (including telepathic) effects originate and spring from their common ontological matrix, understood by Schelling as a sacred abyss, where they have been intertwined in their synchronistic dynamism. What now is the nature of this synchronism?

One good way to elaborate on synchronicity is recalling the well-known Stockholm fire incident, in which the famous Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg was involved. As it is now widely known, at a dinner party in Gothenburg (it was in 1759), he

had a vision of houses on fire nearly 500 kilometres away in Stockholm. An account of this fire, including such details as the time of the fire, and when it was put out, was given by Swedenborg to guests at the party held by a Mr. William Castel. Though the fire had consumed 300 houses, Swedenborg was relieved that the fire had stopped three doors from his own house (a fact which was confirmed later). The same account was given later to the Gothenburg city authorities. It took two or three days for news from Stockholm to reach Gothenburg by courier.

(Storm 2025, p. 2)

Now, the father of the synchronicity thesis is of course C.G. Jung. Jung was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer’s thought, but as already mentioned, he also closely collaborated on quantum-related phenomena with his friend the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known in the scientific circles of his era for his paranormal abilities.34 Throughout his life, Jung was under the strong influence of paranormal phenomena which led him to believe that, apart from the ordinary personality or psyche, there must be another, more primordial, ancient, and deeper psyche, which was closer to dreams, nature, or God. For Jung, distant knowing or knowing of future events is possible since within the unconscious, these phenomena or events co-exist beyond the ordinary causal space-time continuum. As stated in one of his essays:

For the unconscious psyche space and time seem to be relative; that is to say, knowledge finds itself in a space-time continuum in which space is no longer space, nor time time. If, therefore, the unconscious should develop or maintain a potential in the direction of consciousness, it is then possible for parallel events to be perceived as ‘known’.35

On the ontological level—and as based on our thesis that the more distant the anomalous (or extrasensory) phenomena of love, the stronger the impulse of love must be in these workings that are still mysterious to us—we can now try to interpret Schelling’s philosophy of the spatio-temporal unity of all things in what was designated as the sacred abyss, where distinctions between matter and form, or the material and the psychic, are also suspended on an ontological level. In Jungian terms, on the abyssal level of our psyche (or soul), love is the secret that is able to unite “such beings as could each exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other” (Schelling 1989, p. 89). Dark love (analogous to yet not be revealed or understood as dark matter in physics), is the noncognitively and ‘anomalously’ (as opposed to the spatio-temporal logic of the so-called ordinary ethical phenomena) presented and still obscure aspect of our psychic life, reaching toward the ground of everything, with the sacred bond of love as proximity. In his beautiful work Cross and Cosmos, the theologian John D. Caputo wrote:

Each thing is entangled with everything else in a common field of potentiality, a common (under)ground of being, a sea of entangled potentiality, a wavy undulating boundlessness, a tehom. Theologically, this resonates with a Deus-sive-natura panentheism.

(Caputo 2019, p. 203)

This comes very close to one of David Bohm’s statements, namely that the “essential feature in quantum interconnectedness is that the whole universe is enfolded in everything, and that each thing is enfolded in the whole” (Bohm 1986, p. 155). Maybe we indeed are a part of a mysteriously weaved cosmos, as a potentiality, providing us with an impulse of agapeistically induced connections between the loved ones, proximity of an encounter, and an ongoing mystery of the two. The obscure force of the soul might thus be revealed as love, pulsating and undulating as an energy of the ground, between-us and inside us.

A new materialism in philosophy as well as related constructive theology both affirmed that, in the 20th century, we have been able to finally reject or overcome traditional hierarchical ontologies—such as “distinctions between spirit and matter, life and nonlife, or sentience and nonsentience”, without again “embracing a straight reductionism, whether to cells, particles, or any purported fundament”.36 Now, for Keller, further on her path towards a new constructive theology of, as she calls it, apophatic matter, “dark matter is incomprehensibly different (…) than baryonic matter”. We therefore live “in a cosmic network, a network of forces and fields, of nonlinear quantum connections and nonlinear, creative matter”.37 And, further along this line of thought, we may add a beautiful and insightful paraphrase of the Nicene creed by Jane Bennett, who stated: “One matter-energy, maker of all things visible and invisible” (Keller and Rubinstein 2017, p. 125). As for theology of apophatic entanglement, matter and God designate different yet not separable becomings; there is one differentiated yet ontologically not separable becoming of dark love within our abyssal (dynamic and synchronistic) agapeistic ontology. It is the mysterious becoming of love from within the abyssal ground that continually affects all our loving encounters. This undulation of the ground in love is the flux of a matter-energy in which even life and death are fluctuating—as in an echo of the Nietzschean teaching of eternal recurrence—in a superposition of a life and pre-life, life and after-life, beyond the spatio-temporal continuum, and also well beyond any ordinary dichotomies or concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In every single agapeistic phenomenon (‘ordinary’ or ‘anomalous’) there resounds a hidden, yet ethically observable echo of love-energy and fullness of life in all its manifestations. Within this agapeology, love implicates, as it were, all our strivings, including our sufferings and blessings, and binds us with a hidden force that is comparable to the force of gravity. Our attempt to introduce and reflect upon the agapeistic phenomenon of dark love could now be summarized as follows:

Originating in the ground or sacred abyss of the soul, dark love is a synchronistic and panexperiential phenomenon, uniting beings of the cosmic network through distant binding effects of sympathy, telepathy, and, in some cases, panpathy. These synchronistic correspondences between humans (and, sometimes, of humans and other living beings) are based on nonlocal and psychic-material occurrences where a common nexus (agapeistic bond) is attested. Agapeistic phenomena are visible signs of dark love, revealed as philosophico-ethical (when thought of in human terms) and/or religiously-theological acts (when thought of about gods), and evident as enhanced attention, deep care, compassion, and absolute love (ἀγάπη).

It may be useful to conclude with Whitehead’s observation on his contemporary situation, in what he terms as a change from materialism to organic realism; he proposes and defends it as follows:

In the language of physical science, the change from materialism to ‘organic realism’ —as the new outlook may be termed—is the displacement of the notion of static stuff by the notion of fluent energy. Such energy has its structure of action and flow, and is inconceivable apart from such structure. It is also conditioned by ‘quantum’ requirements. (…) Mathematical physics translates the saying of Heraclitus, ‘All things flow,’ into its own language. It then becomes, All things are vectors. Mathematical physics also accepts the atomistic doctrine of Democritus. It translates it into the phrase, All flow of energy obeys ‘quantum’ conditions.

(Whitehead 1978, p. 309)

5. Conclusions

We may not affirm that it is still not possible to attest the quantum entanglement as an explanation for the mysterious workings of love—such as mentioned by Cardeña in his survey of the current state-of-the-art in the field of parapsychological phenomena as related to quantum mechanics—that “psi phenomena—such as a sudden death affecting a loved one at another location—are consistent with a nonlocal view of the universe” (Cardeña 2018). In this vein, we may affirm with Ernest Simmons that despite scientific doubts that dynamic states might not scale up to the level of molecules (and further to the cells, and so on), “[q]uantum events must in some manner be connected with classical, everyday life”. In the sense of a deep Incarnation, Simmons even argues that “God is always ‘with us’ as the divine superposition within the midst of the creation” and concludes his paper with the following thought: “Understanding that love as thoroughly enfleshed and entangled with creation connects it to all sentient creatures and perhaps to the cosmos itself”.38

In conclusion, for us, and as based on our philosophical, spiritual, and theological reflections on ontology of the ground, agapeology is able to convey our deepest longings into the workings of love that binds persons and living beings, heals their wounds, and protects and nurtures us. The genealogy of life reveals as the agapeology of the abyssal and dark love-energy.39 Let us share our hope for the scientific collaboration between philosophy, theology (and spirituality), and science to continue to grow closer in the future, in matters that connect and even bind us across the known and still unknown coordinates and fields of our universe.