On the Occultic Modalities of Will in Gustav Fechner’s Animistic Panpsychism
Amongst the gallery of semi-forgotten intellects whose footsteps echo faintly on the marbled corridors of metaphysical thought, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) emerges as a singular and oddly luminous figure. Known more prominently within psychophysical circles and as a progenitor of experimental psychology, Fechner’s speculative metaphysics remains persistently sidelined, ignored both by the German Idealists who followed and their mechanistic progeny. It is in one particular, subtle articulation within his doctrine of panpsychism, however, that we find an embryonic kernel whose implications reverberate far beyond the scope of psychometric inquiry—a nuanced modality of will that functions not merely as an animating force, but as an occultic conductor of unity across being itself.
It is Fechner’s ambitious attempt to reconcile mind and matter through a dual-aspect monism that forms the setting for this hidden pearl. In his work *Zend-Avesta: On the Things of Heaven and the After-Life*, notably in the second volume, Fechner proposes that not only organic entities possess soul or consciousness, but that consciousness pervades all matter—indeed, that the Earth itself is a living being, thinking, perceiving, loving in scales and rhythms alien to human temporality. The Earth-soul hypothesis, considered quaint or theological by mainstream academia, contains within it nonetheless a proto-ecological holism ahead of its time.
But our interest lies not in this holistic framework per se, but in a delicate turn Fechner makes regarding the operations of what he calls the “inner will,” a concept nestled ambiguously between affect and drive, beneath both conscious volition and innate mechanism. He writes: “Where perception is the outer gate, will is the inner necessity veiled in appearance. What awakens itself through us does so also through the tree and the stone.”^1
This concept of “inner necessity veiled in appearance” operates contrapuntally to Schopenhauer’s brute Will. Unlike Schopenhauer’s endlessly striving Will-to-Life, eternally frustrated and blind, Fechner conceives of will as differentiated, serially configured across the levels of being. Each entity participates in a cosmic will according to its own mode, tempo, and geometry, rendering Fechner’s will neither unitary nor chaotic, but polyphonic. Though often interpreted as a pantheistic flourish, this notion precipitates a metaphysical revolution: for Fechner, will does not merely drive the individual; it indexes the participation of that individual in a greater being. It is here that we must pause and recalibrate our metaphysical instruments.
The misstep of prior interpreters has been to read Fechner’s animism as a benign form of theological abstraction, a sort of poetic Naturphilosophie replete with sentimental overtones. Yet this overlooks the rigorous terms set by his psychophysical parallelism. For Fechner, each phenomenal datum has its psychical counterpart, and this mapping is not symbolic but ontologically real. Thus, “will,” in Fechner’s model, emerges not as metaphor but as a discrete ontological vector—a conduit between levels of being.
This subtle interpretation becomes more salient when we consider his reconfiguration of perception. Fechner contends that we do not perceive with our senses per se, but through them—that is, sensory organs are relay stations, and perception is the harmonization of internal will with external phenomena. “Perception,” he writes, “is the skin of the soul.”^2 This image, inflected with Spinozistic resonances, reveals will to be the core agency not just of action but of receptivity. The will orchestrates what appears before the subject, not by selection, but by sympathetically vibrating at determinate frequencies of reality. Here we find a precursor to Whitehead’s notion of prehension, though in Fechner such processes are placed under a participatory metaphysical monadology.
The significance of this emerges most forcefully in Fechner’s treatment of earth-soul. “The Earth does not simply contain life; she is alive; her will is the memory of all wills, her sense the gloom in our knowing.”^3 This assertion should not be reduced to allegory. If we take seriously Fechner’s modal ontology, then the Earth’s will is not merely larger or more complex, but qualitatively distinct. Her memory of all wills suggests an archiving function, a cosmic mnemonic, wherein she retains and integrates the teleologies of all beings composing her. The terrestrial will is thus not additive but recursive.
This recursive quality implies a dimension of temporality often neglected. Whereas human will is flawed by future-orientation and existential lack, Earth’s will is essentially retro-temporal. She wills not what shall be, but what has been sufficiently willed. This move is radical, for it reconfigures causality: causation becomes not a linear progression from antecedent to consequent, but a reciprocal echo between instantiated volitions. Thus, in Fechner’s metaphysics, the inner necessity is not merely proactive, but retentive, affirming what deserves to have been.
Were we to transpose Fechner’s model into more contemporary idiom, we might say he prefigures a form of panpsychic retrocausality—a metaphysical postulate conspicuously absent in both analytic and continental philosophies, preoccupied as they are with forward-becoming and the primacy of the Subject. Indeed, Fechner’s Subject is distributed; the locus of agency is not the ego but the intersection of wills—the harmonic convergence of multiple necessities.
Furthermore, the “veil of appearance” operates not as an epistemological barrier but as a metaphysical necessity. The veil is not what hides being but what generates the necessary difference that allows participation in being. Without differentiation of will across modalities, there would be no structure to the world, no spine of metaphysical causation—it would all collapse into a singular monistic roar, the kind Schopenhauer feared. Fechner thus saves us from the abyss not by denying strife, but by dispersing it into intelligible polyphonies.
A curious corollary of this is that inanimate objects, too, possess will—not in the naïve animistic sense, but as loci of necessity. The will of the stone is its gravity; the will of the mountain is its silence. The human fails to recognize this stratum not because it is absent, but because the frequencies differ. Our tragedy, according to Fechner, is that we will noisily what the world wills in silence.
In light of ecological collapse and the desacralization of matter, the retrieval of Fechner’s nuanced modality of will is more than merely of academic interest. It is a metaphysical imperative. For in recognizing the will of the world, we may yet learn to will less, and thereby live more.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
panpsychism, neurophenomenology, occult metaphysics, German romanticism, psychophysical parallelism, will, cosmology
—
^1 Fechner, Gustav. *Zend-Avesta II: Über die Dinge des Himmels und das Leben nach dem Tode.* Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1851, p. 84.
^2 Ibid., p. 121.
^3 Ibid., p. 205.