How do (new) communication and information technologies contribute to the development and maintenance of modern, democratic societies? Do they promote emancipation, enlightenment, and autonomy or do they lock us hermetically into the sparkling world of images and consumption, so that we are guided by false promises and pseudo-needs? Current questions like these make it necessary to revise the concept of spectacle. This term, originally coined by Debord, has again become the focus of cultural-critical debates with the increasing power of new social media. Debord raised the spectacle to a theoretical perspective by describing it as a “society’s worldview that is transferred into the material.” On the other hand, it is precisely this totalizing claim of Debord’s concept of spectacle that is now coming under increasing pressure. Facing this problem, Juliane Rebentisch (2007) suggests suspending the concept of spectacle, as hardly any other concept has been received so unscathed and uncritically of late. I will make a plea for a long overdue revision of the term from the perspective of theater studies. With a few exceptions, the fact that the spectacle itself already has a long (pre-Debordian) history is generally not taken into account. The scope of the spectacle cannot be understood merely within the confines of Debord’s totalizing concept; moreover, it turns out to be an extremely heterogeneous and promising field of investigation, which is far from being sufficiently explored. Here, I would like to stress a potential implementation of the spectacle that, in theater theory, is traditionally placed in opposition to its role in socio-political engagement. The critical potential of the spectacle can only be opened up when the technical conditionality of the spectacle is directly related to the technical conditionality of modernity. This aspect has so far been largely ignored in the critical debates around this concept.

When we feel that all beings are interconnected – how can we reconstruct this in philosophical terms, avoiding ideology and scientific-evolutionary or religious big pictures? This text looks at Bergsons notion of intuition and Rentschs notion of negativity and the transcendental conditions of life in order to describe a secular mysticism. Love is a core aspect of this mysticism since love protects singularity (Rentsch), sees potentials of development (Scheler) and can connect us with the world (Bergson).

In his work “On the Origin of Natural Philosophy from the Spirit of Mysticism” Karl Joël refers several times to Schelling and his thinking about nature without elaborating on this references. The article discusses the thesis, whether the concept of conversion, which seems to be essential for Joëls philosophical approach, could be seen as a link between him and Schelling. It substantiates that both authors find in the conversion of human beings a condition for a non-reductive insight into nature.

According to Joël’s study from 1906, natural philosophy, religious feeling or thinking and poetry are not separate cultural phenomena, but rather are interrelated. This contradicts the prevailing view around 1900 and so his work can be understood as an attempt to develop a new view of cultural horizons. Joël sees “feeling” and “mysticism” directed at nature as the main impulse. These two terms, which were completely shaped by the psychological ideas around 1900, cannot, however, come close to the life of early antiquity and obstruct the view of the novelty seen by Joël: the determination of a special cognitive disposition of a time that permeates all cultural phenomena.

The volume is devoted to the approach of the philosopher Karl Joël, which he presented under the title “Der Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste derMystik” in 1906. Although the times have changed, it is worth pointing out the sources from which Joël drew, according to the conviction that gave rise to the present volume. Just as he himself asks about the origin of the philosophy of nature, so the contributions to this volume will enquire about the origin of his own thought. After a presentation of Joël’s concept (Schwaetzer), the three epochs to which he primarily recurs will be considered: Antiquity (Schneider), the Renaissance (Cuozzo) and German Idealism (Hueck), including Late Idealism (Hernández). Finally, there is a view from the present (Thomas). In a narrower sense, the question of the present volume is situated in the area of a philosophy of nature of the Anthropocene. It discusses the thesis that the philosophy of nature arises from mysticism without being dissolved in it, but that the former must not deny its origin Joël thus offers a concept of science that productively questions current understandings and is at the same time embedded in an anthropology that also takes seriously the mental and spiritual in man and the cosmos.