ABSTRACT

Increasing the intensity of spiritual life in a certain area leads to the emergence, within it, of a dense spiritual space. In my two books, Noology (2001) and Noopolitics (2005), I coined the concept and initiated the analysis of the dynamics of societies and civilizations based on the hypothesis of dense spiritual spaces. Noologic or spiritual densities cannot be explained historically, but they can participate in the explanation of historical and spatial variations. The presence of the good in the world (love, mercy, chastity, innocence, prayer, law, morality etc., in general, all the frames of actualization of spiritual latencies), and its scaling as well are measurable through specified effects such as the decrease in the number of crimes, violent acts, acts of injustice and unfairness, wars, anarchy etc. Noologic densities are phenomena which materialist sociology ignores, but which are decisive for the state of the world, for the quantity of order in the world and for the quality of this order. Through such a method, Max Weber identified the modern capitalist order and the new (ascetic) vitalism related thereto (he correlated technological inventiveness in the European space with protestant ethics and discovered at the crossroads between these two phenomena a new order and a new vitalism, meaning an unmistakable noologic density). He also determined the differential efficiency of economic morality in relation with the bourgeoisie’s belonging to various religious spaces and thus positioned the capitalist groups of the modern world, headed by the European ones, precisely starting from the noologic density (which is attested by their activity in the moral configuration of the modern world system). Durkheim underlined the efficiency of the religious factor, highlighted by the belonging to the three Christian confessions, as a factor of protection of the European family against the risk of suicide. Therefore, in the world there are dense spiritual spaces and diffluent spaces, the last ones having low spiritual density (i.e. low noologic power). Historical periods are differentiated themselves according to the same criterion, which enables us to delineate cultural epochs. The period at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century is marked by a growth of the noologic density in Europe from the North towards South, a growth which is attested by the emergence of a new stylistic configuration entitled the “1900 style” or Secession. This stylistic epoch ended with the beginning of the First World War. The present study insists on the theories which compete to explain the emergence of spiritually dense spaces and revisits my own theory as it was used in my book, Noopolitics, in order to explain the great crises of the European spirit during the two millennia after Christ.

Keywords: dense space, mental inputs, spiritual/soul latencies, noological frames, social fatigue.

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