The Vertical Intuition of Reality: Franz von Baader’s Theosophic Hierarchy and the Reintroduction of the Analogia Entis
In an age intoxicated by Hegelian synthesis and Kantian critique, the works of Franz von Baader (1765–1841) emerge with a curious, luminous force, ignored chiefly due to their theosophical tincture and their allegiance to a scholastic mysticism deemed obsolete by mainstream Enlightenment rationalism. Yet it is precisely within this archaic twilight that Baader’s subtle genius flickers. Among the several forgotten tracings within his massive and often cryptically symbolized corpus, I aim to draw attention to a seemingly minor yet ontologically pregnant assertion within his “Fermenta Cognitionis,” namely, his delineation of ‘vertical intuition’ as both epistemic mode and metaphysical structure. This seemingly innocent phrase contains within it a radical reinterpretation of participation and ontological hierarchy, one that evokes not merely the medieval analogia entis, but attempts to restore it through a dynamic, eroticized cosmology.
Baader, trained as both a physician and a mining engineer, brought a rare hybrid of empirical clarity and speculative breadth into the theological sphere. His departure from the shallow empiricism of his epoch was marked by an intense dissatisfaction with anthropocentric rationalism; he sought, like Jacob Boehme and Meister Eckhart before him, to reinsert the soul into the fabric of Being. Central to this mission is his concept of Erhebung — the soul’s “elevation” or “ascension” — not merely as moral striving or Platonic recollection, but as a metaphysical ability to intuitively recognize and participate in higher orders of reality. It is in this act of intuitive elevation that his notion of “vertical intuition” arises.
The term occurs sparsely in his writings and remains underdeveloped from the standpoint of systematic exposition. Yet its implications metastasize throughout his oeuvre. To understand its force, we must situate it within Baader’s rejection of Cartesian dualism and his repudiation of Enlightenment autonomy. For Baader, the cogito does not individuate but isolates; it is inverted communion, thus inherently diabolical. True knowing, for him, is an eros of the intellect that does not merely contemplate but ascends into participation. Vertical intuition means precisely that the soul ascends by knowing—even knowledge is an ontological event. The structure of reality is not horizontal, measurable, spread in Euclidean magnitudes, but vertical, infused with gradients of Being descending from the divine plenitude to material attenuation. In denying this ontological verticality, modernity collapses essence into function and participation into representation.
We may further delineate vertical intuition as tripartite. Its lowest stratum corresponds to what Baader calls tactile sapientia—the wisdom of things perceived through sympathy and resonance rather than abstraction. The middle stratum, theosophic intellectus, is the soul’s erotic penetration into divine archetypes, a mode reminiscent of Eckhart’s Seelengrund. The highest stratum, however, is the unio mystica, the supra-intellectual union in which knowledge ceases to be discursive and becomes identificatory — where knower and known converge in the flame-point of divine recollection.
Baader’s verticality recalls Dionysius the Areopagite more than Aristotle, for hierarchy is not to be confused with submission but is instead pneumatic conductivity—the higher elevates the lower not through domination but by eliciting its hidden form. It is in this sense that Baader radicalizes the notion of the analogia entis. For him, analogy is no idle figure of speech; it is ontological nutrition, the bread by which Being feeds itself up the ladder of Form. And crucially, this analogy is dynamic, not static; it is enacted through the very motion of vertical intuition.
Baader does not permit knowledge without eros. Echoing the Orthodox mystics, he posits that any ascent must be made with burning sandals. This introduces into epistemology a liturgical quality, an invocation of divine names which recasts the act of knowing as a form of co-creation. The vertical intuition thereby distinguishes itself from both Kantian categories and Hegelian dialectic by refusing to tether itself to the cognitive autonomy of the subject. Instead, Baader echoes the old mystical adage: “God known by God in the soul.”
The subtlety of Baader’s contribution should be contrasted with his contemporaries. While Schelling eventually flirted with theosophical ideas, he never abandoned the philosophical rigour of his transcendental idealism. Baader, conversely, insists that rigour itself is impossible without God—that abstraction, if not rooted in analogical participation, decays into nominals adrift in semantic deserts. The act of “reasoning upward” is, to Baader, a sacramental liturgy performed within the substanceless vaults of modernity’s broken church. One could argue that this renders his philosophy anachronistic, but I contend it makes him a metaphysician of the future, waiting for his time.
Moreover, there is a social-political dimension to Baader’s vertical conception. The decay of intuitive hierarchy contributes to the nihilism of enlightened leveling. What democracy does to governance, empiricism does to knowledge: it abolishes mystery. In losing the vertical, we transform knowledge into information, and wisdom into data. Baader’s theosophy resists this degradation by insisting that all cognition is moral, and all ontology sacramental.
It is perhaps in this sense that Baader’s resonance with later thinkers such as Simone Weil becomes audible. Weil’s notion of decreation echoes Baader’s elevation; both are losses into a higher gain, movements against the centrifugal ego. But it is in Baader that we find a vocabulary adequate to the sacred verticality of such acts.
In conclusion, while vertical intuition may seem but a poetic flourish in Baader’s baroque Latinized German, it encapsulates a profound inversion of Enlightenment epistemology. In reclaiming the analogia entis as lived ascent rather than scholastic doctrine, Baader offers us a vision not merely of knowledge, but of salvation. His greatest crime in the eyes of modernity is to have fused these two realms — to have seen philosophy not as the love of wisdom but the wisdom of love.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
theosophy, verticality, Baader, analogy of being, mysticism, epistemology, eros