The sub-sequence which leads into empirical science would seem to be the
opposite of the occultist branch; and indeed the proponents of these two paths
have often been explicit enemies. Wang Ch’ung and the “rationalists” of the
Old Text school were energized and focused by their oppositional space carved
out against the Han Confucian occultists. But this path too can be retrograde
on the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. To be opposed to occultist reification
does not necessarily lead onward into further philosophical creativity, nor for
that matter into empirical-scientific discovery. To puncture stories of ghosts
and portents with mundane “rational” explanation, as Wang Ch’ung did, is
to be tied to the occultists through the very process of conflict, much in the
same way that twentieth-century opponents of parapsychology are locked into
debates that do not produce anything to move the forefront of discovery.
Periods when a naturalistic, anti-occultist movement dominates tend to be
periods of opposition to metaphysics generally, as we see in both the European
Enlightenment of the 1700s and its contemporary, the rationalism of the Jinsai
and Sorai schools in Tokugawa Japan.
Science per se does not constitute the main path upward on the abstrac-
tion-reflexivity sequence; it emerges from a particular point on that sequence,
but it is a separate branch.^6 From this point of view, the vexed question of the
relations between science and magical occultism may be briefly addressed.
Science originates within the intellectual networks whose central concern has
been philosophy, and is subject to many of its dynamics.
Empirical science throughout most of history has been a version of clas-
sificatory scholasticism: not so much as applied to texts (although it may be
that too) but applied to natural observations, travelers’ tales, collections of
minerals and gems, and so on. Intellectual action and competition take the
form of quantitative extension, much like what textual scholars do with their
categories, but consisting now in accumulating facts and imposing rubrics upon
them. As in the textual classificatory mode, the level of abstraction generally
remains constant. Naturalistic treatises ranging from Pliny to Albertus Magnus
have this shape; classificatory scholasticism continues after the “scientific revo-
lution” adds another mode of doing science, both in the “cabinet of wonders”
popular among aristocratic science buffs in the 1600s and 1700s, and in
Linnaean-style taxonomic enterprises.
Naturalistic observations overlap with occultism, since the latter takes the
form of correspondence schemes among the different realms of reality, includ-
ing the natural world. Occultism too is a version of classificatory scholasticism,
differing from the pure form, so to speak, by mixing concepts derived from
intellectual abstraction with the concrete interests of lay audiences in applied
magic.
The “scientific revolution” in Europe around 1600 changes not the natu-
806 •^ Meta-reflections