The Ghost-Seer

"The Ghost-Seer" is a novel written by Friedrich Schiller, the German playwright, poet and philosopher. The story was published in the 1780's, and Schiller eventually left it unfinished. While this is no doubt annoying, the work nevertheless has a certain interest.

The main character is a German Prince who is manipulated by unknown forces during a visit to Venice. At first, the Prince is moral, pious and intellectually curious, but unfortunately his religious convictions are of a simplistic Pietist kind. He is also very superstitious and easily lead. A group of conspirators, led by a mysterious Armenian, takes advantage of this. First, they stage a Spiritualist seance during which the spirit of the Prince's best friend is conjured up. Next, they reveal that the seance was just a hoax. By this double bluff, the conspirators make the Prince loose his religious faith, and turn him into an out-and-out sceptic.

As a sceptic, the Prince becomes immoral, lustful and completely uninterested in serious philosophy. He begins to advocate what's essentially an early version of Nietzscheanism: life is meaningless, and the only thing that matters is brute power. How or why power is won, is irrelevant. Eventually, the Prince realizes that his new "philosophy" only brings him personal unhappiness. How can anyone be happy, if life is meaningless?

Unfortunately, the Prince doesn't want to end his immoral lifestyle. He wants "meaning" only for the sake of his own personal consolation. At this point, the conspirators strike again, and eventually converts the Prince to a false religion: Catholicism. The conversion is facilitated by stage-managing an unhappy love affair with a devout Catholic woman. In other words, the Prince embraces Catholicism for reasons of lust, rather than reasons of faith or intellectual conviction.

During his stay in Venice, the Prince goes deeply into debt, to finance his new, libertine lifestyle. At the end of the story, he begins to contemplate a coup in his German principality, and perhaps an assasination of the legitimate heir to the throne, simply to get his hands on the family fortune. The story ends with the Prince attending a mass celebrated by the Armenian, who turns out to be a Catholic priest.

What strikes modern readers as most odd with the story is that Schiller sees scepticism, libertinism and Catholicism as part of the same problem, even the same conspiracy. Perhaps this is how German Protestants and Deists saw Catholicism during the Enlightenment? The story becomes more comprehensible to modern readers if Catholicism is seen as a symbol of false religion. After all, somebody might argue that New Age and interest in the occult is simply the flip-side of Western libertine, libertarian materialism. New Age promises the believer quick fixes, and some versions of it are notoriously commercialized. And isn't worship of raw power typical both of certain "atheist" philosophers (Nietzsche) and some "New Religious Movements" (Satanism)? When the Prince slips from immoral "atheism" to immoral "religion", he only thinks of his own individual well-being, his own quick fix.

At the same time, Schiller obviously didn't sympathize with good ol' religion either. Schiller could perhaps be described as a Deist, and one of the reasons why the Prince falls for the machinations of the Armenian, is that his own religion is simple-minded and uncouth. He also nourishes a superstitious belief in the supernatural, including communication with the spirits of the dead. Although there is a certain sympathy in Schiller's description of the Prince's old faith, it's nevertheless obvious that it's regarded as dangerously out-moded, and incapable of withstanding the allurements of a purely negative scepticism. Schiller's alternative seems to have been a spiritual form of the Enlightenment, as described in his "Aesthetic Letters".

Schiller lived during a time when the old religions were increasingly being challenged by materialism and scepticism, and he seems to have resented both camps. This, I take, is the main point of "The Ghost-Seer".

PS. For some unfathomable reason (another double bluff, perhaps?), this edition of "The Ghost-Seer" carries a preface by one Martin Jarvis, who treats this philosophical masterpiece as if it was a literal story about...conjuring tricks, a kind of "how to" manual for the aspiring stage illusionist. My God, whatever gave him *that* idea???