Postponed: “A Spiritual Resemblance Within Our Own Mind”: The visualisation of Jacob Böhme’s philosophy

This event has been postponed. New date TBC.

Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) often remarked on the need for visual aids when discussing deep philosophical issues that exceed human language and conceptualisation. His work is dense with imagery taken from everyday sensory experiences, and on occasions he asks his readers to follow him on visual thought experiments, including the famous “philosophical sphere”, a diagram that should be seen in motion, and that represents the dynamics of creation.

In my paper, I consider Böhme’s use of such images in relation to the work of one of his most important followers and interpreters: Dionysius Andreas Freher (1649-1728). Freher had recourse to a combination of text and images to enable a new English readership to immerse themselves into Böhme’s philosophy, even without direct access to Böhme’s work, which was available in English through translations that Freher considered to be inaccurate.

This is one reason why images come to play the central role for Freher, who exploits Böhme’s taste for visualization in order to ask deep-reaching questions: does philosophy necessarily need images to be understood across cultural and linguistic boundaries? And is there something special about mystical philosophy in this respect?