Explore the Esoteric, psychological, and philosophical interpretations of this artwork, Philosopher in Meditation.
In a lecture given at the Goetheanum in Dornach (1916), the ex-theosophist and founder of the Anthroposophical Society, Rudolf Steiner, described the Louvre Philosopher as the "purest expression of light and dark... All that you see here—the architecture and all the other features—merely provided the occasion for the real work of Art, which lies in the distribution of light and dark." This, he held, was precisely the essence of Rembrandt's art. As it was, he showed only a "lantern slide" of the companion painting by Salomon Koninck discussed above.With his inversion of the title, Aldous Huxley (1954) sums up most of the "deeper" interpretations of the painting: "There hangs in the Louvre a Méditation du Philosophe, whose symbolical subject-matter is nothing more or less than the human mind, with its teeming darknesses, its moments of intellectual and visionary illuminations, its mysterious staircases winding downwards and upwards into the unknown.
The caption to an illustration of the painting (reversed) in the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung's Man and His Symbols (1964) reads: "The inward-looking old man provides an image of Jung's belief that each of us must explore his own unconscious."Jean-Marie Clarke (1980) advanced a psychological interpretation based on the circular form of the composition and the Yin-Yang-like distribution of light, reading the painting as a Mandala in the Jungian sense: an archetypal symbol of the integrated Self. The chiaroscuro treatment and the presence of many straight lines that are structured by curved lines speaks for an effort at reconciling oppositions. Further, Clarke interpreted the concentricity of the composition and wealth of circular motifs as metaphors for the underlying theme of the painting: the eye and vision. Like Julius Held, Clarke believes that the drawing dated ca. 1630 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Benesch 64) with the caption "HARMAN GERRITS van der Rhijn" written in Rembrandt's hand that shows his father in a pose similar to that of Tobit here, suggests that he may have been blind at the end of his life. Accordingly, the figure of the blind old man (Tobit) would stand for Rembrandt's father (d. 1630), who opposed his son's wish to become an artist and whose vision the young Rembrandt (Tobias) "healed" with the help of the archangel Raphael ("God heals", a name that also symbolizes Art). More recently, Clarke published an interpretation on the internet that relates Rembrandt's composition to the design of his signature in 1632.Jean-Pierre Dautun (1983), a student of the French philosopher Raymond Abellio, offered a detailed phenomenological reading along Gnostic lines, interpreting the central motif of the painting (the basketwork tray) as "the navel, the omphalos of the luminous hermetic secret that Rembrandt wishes to transmit: the phenomenological secret that the eye of the genius will be given to those who will conquer the genius of the eye. It is the ineffable secret of this transmission itself, the 'thou art that' of this mutus liber that is his painting, as if to permit an Occidental satori to a koan of his own devise." The German art historian Karl Clausberg also pointed out the "ocular nature" of the scene and gave it a conceptual framework in his 1999 book "Neuronale Kunstgeschichte." The French philosophy professor Régine Pietra (1992) published an essay in which she used the painting to illustrate the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis; Rembrandt's painting, with its interplay of light and dark, renders the experience of philosophical meditation visually perceptible.
The Dutch philosopher Otto B. Wiersma (1999) published an article on the internet that he summarizes in these terms:
"The painting of Rembrandt Philosophe en méditation (1632, Louvre Paris) can be characterized as a pictorial meditation on the miracle of vision. A better title would be Méditation visionnaire, because the painting catches the eye in more than one sense."
A discussion of the Philosopher in Meditation along essentially Gurdjeffian lines can be found on the Objective Art website (2011).
theosophist Raphael Raymond Abellio Gnostic psychoanalyst Gurdjeff Oxford omphalos Goetheanum Karl Clausberg Louvre Aldous Huxley C. G. Jung Ashmolean Museum Rembrandt hypotyposis thou art that chiaroscuro koan Tobit Yin-Yang Paris Anthroposophical Society Salomon Koninck philosophy Mandala satori Rudolf Steiner