The Problem of Occult Reciprocity in the Philosophy of Gustav Fechner
In the teeming cacophony of nineteenth-century metaphysical speculation, the name of Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) remains largely confined to the annals of psychophysics, where he is revered as a founding figure. Yet to limit one’s engagement with Fechner to his quantitative analyses would be to lose sight of the vibrant metaphysical undercurrents that pervade his ostensibly scientific writings. There is, buried within his doctrine of the “Day-View” (Tagesansicht), a subtle but profound principle I shall term “occult reciprocity”: the tacit ontological assumption that every act of perception is not merely receptive but co-creative, and that the object perceived exerts not only physical influence but metaphysical intention upon the perceiving subject.
This notion, which Fechner never explicates directly, emerges across his metaphysical oeuvre—chiefly in _Zend-Avesta_ (1851) and the lesser-known _Nanna, oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen_ (1848). It lies dormant like a smoldering ember among the more luminous expressions of his panpsychism. Occult reciprocity constitutes the linchpin of his experiential metaphysics, giving coherence to the epistemological bridge Fechner attempted to build between soul and nature, between psyche and cosmos.
Fechner’s monistic worldview was built upon the conviction that all of nature is imbued with consciousness—not merely in its higher manifestations, such as in men and animals, but in stars, stones, and the delicate vegetation of the forest understory. In _Nanna_, he proclaims with startling frankness the psychic life of plants, not merely as a metaphor for growth or responsiveness, but as a literal phenomenological assertion. The subtlety arises when we discern that these vegetal souls do not merely receive light, water, or the gaze of human observers—they reciprocate in kind.
Within this doctrine, perception becomes a dyadic operation, collapsing the Cartesian dichotomy of subject and object. When I perceive a tree, I impress upon it not only photons bounced from its bark to the optic nerve, but send forth—so to speak—an ontological invitation. In Fechner’s metaphysical physics, the tree perceives me in turn, if not as an individuated human then as a modulated feature of the cosmopsychic totality. This reciprocity operates beneath the threshold of empirical verification, and yet it is the very foundation of Fechner’s extension of psychophysical law into metaphysical intuition.
It is imperative to attend here to the structural isomorphism between Fechner’s mathesis of perception (most famously encapsulated in the Weber–Fechner law) and his metaphysical aesthetics. The underlying relation is logarithmic: the increase of perceived sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus. This non-linear dynamic implies, when transposed to ontology, that finer gradations of soul-like activity may be distributed across phenomena seemingly devoid of vibrancy. Hence, a stone’s perception, ungraspable by our crude cognition, may yet exert a genuine ontological pull. To deny this would be, in Fechner’s framework, no less irrational than to suppose the soul were restricted to the frontal cortex.
The subtlety of occult reciprocity lies in its refusal to articulate itself in propositional form. It is not formulated as a principle but insinuated as ambience. That is its cunning. Fechner situates the reader within a cosmos already imbued with sentience. He does not argue for the soul of nature; he assumes it, and in so doing, models the very reciprocation he claims as foundational. The reader reads, and the text reads back.
This notion blossoms most vigorously in the _Zend-Avesta_, a curious textual edifice that borrows the name of Zoroaster’s sacred scripture to effuse a cosmo-poetic speculation. Here, Fechner posits an Earth-soul (Erdsoul) analogous to the human soul’s relation to the body. He casts planetary bodies as spiritual organisms, whose orbits are not mere mechanics but liturgies. The Earth-Soul’s awareness, he suggests, is not limited to the musings of philosophers or the tremors of tectonic plates, but encompasses a superordinate awareness in which all sub-awarenesses (ours included) participate. This is no timid pantheism—it is a robust theopanpsychism, a metaphysics of mutual gaze.
To this, the skeptics will no doubt object: can a metaphysics be coasted on feelings of universal sympathy? But this criticism misses the profundity of Fechner’s gesture. For him, the individuation of feeling is not an interpretive frailty but the very vehicle of metaphysical truth. A mineral’s warmth, a plant’s heliotropism, and an infant’s smile participate equally, if gauged through the proper scale—a scale whose logarithmic nature ensures that value is not proportionally tied to complexity or visibility.
It is by this alchemy of scale that Fechner’s occult reciprocity attains its paradoxical invisibility. We do not see it because we cannot see it; it operates below the threshold of empirical cognition. Its operations are registered in the symphonic detritus of the everyday—the murmured tug of water in a basin, the leaning of a houseplant toward neglected sunlight, the dream which includes the tree outside one’s window as a character with intentionality.
We must, if we are to take Fechner seriously, accept that knowledge extends beyond the vine-curtained window of the human sensorium. Indeed, to interpret his theories in the flattening tongue of empirical psychology is to commit the gravest of philosophical errors—that of mistaking measurement for reality and quantity for quality. The reciprocity in question is not the mutual causation of billiard balls or neurons, but the interpenetration of being itself, whereby subject and object are not opposites but polarities.
Therein lies the true radicalism of Fechner—to rescue feeling from its epistemological exile and grant it metaphysical centrality. Understood thus, the perception of any phenomenon becomes a sacrament, whereby the observer and observed commune. What is shocking is not that a man might perceive a tree, but that the tree might perceive back. This is what constitutes the occult in reciprocity: not its hiddenness, but its inversion of perceptual hierarchy.
To modern metabolic thinkers, obsessed with the brain’s wet circuitry and digital simulacra, this will no doubt appear as poetic delirium. But one must remember that Fechner came to these views not in mystic stupor but in convalescence—a man reborn after a series of mental and physical breakdowns. After emerging from twelve years of blindness (brought on by photometric experiments that damaged his eyes), he experienced a revelatory dawn: he began to see again, and with it, to see the world anew, bedecked in soul. The notion that nature perceives us—as we perceive it—was not a belief but a vision, not metaphysics as system, but as testament.
To dismiss this vision is easy. To live according to its premise is far more difficult—and perhaps, in our age of hyper-fragmentation, necessary. For if the world does not gaze back, what remains but the empty loop of self-regard we mistake for knowledge?
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
panpsychism, Fechner, occult reciprocity, metaphysics, vegetative soul, 19th-century philosophy, sense-perception
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1. Fechner, Gustav. _Nanna, oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen_. Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1848.
2. Fechner, Gustav. _Zend-Avesta: oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits_. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1851.
3. Skrbina, David. _Panpsychism in the West_. MIT Press, 2007.
4. Machamer, Peter, and Darden, Lindley, _Thinking About Mechanisms_. Philosophy of Science, Vol. 67, No. 1 (2000).