Kevin Korczyk

Karl von Eckartshausen (1752–1803) is usually remembered for his short book on Christian mysticism—The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary (1802)—that inspired many later esoteric thinkers in Britain and the continent. Although mostly known during his lifetime as a popular Catholic author, Eckartshausen was also discussed by his German Romantic contemporaries—including Hamann, Novalis, Goethe, and Schiller—notably earning Herder’s admiration. Eckartshausen also formatively influenced Franz von Baader, who shared his affinity for Martinist theosophy and helped transmit Jakob Böhme’s mysticism to Hegel and Schelling. This article situates Eckartshausen within the history of philosophy by examining his original theosophical reception of Kant’s idealism, and more provisionally, by relating his ideas to post-Kantian thought. Discussion centers on Eckartshausen’s Neopythagorean “number-theory” and his notion of a latent “spiritual sensorium” that opens with the moral “regeneration” of the will and enables intuition of things-in-themselves.

The paradoxical nature of intentional self-deception has led many philosophers to view self-deception as predominantly non-intentional. I propose that approaching self-deception from an agency-theoretic perspective allows us to rescue the idea that self-deception can at least be driven by intention. By modeling the ‘acting as if’ method of self-deception with agential layering, developed by Nguyen [2020. Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press], I argue that intention-driven self-deception is no more mysterious than other activities that involve self-effacing ends: ends we must pursue indirectly. That is, self-deception can occur when agents pursue the self-effacing end of forming what they take to be an epistemically unjustified belief by submerging themselves in a layer of agency in which they can act as if they already hold that belief. By intentionally adopting this pretense and shaping their agency around it, they forget that their agency is layered at all, and may thereby form a full-fledged belief. This model avoids objections to views that treat self-deception itself as intentional and does so while appealing only to resources already used to explain our everyday activities. I then apply my model to a core case of bad faith from Sartre to show that intention-driven self-deception can clarify how we are responsible for inauthenticity.