There is a sense in which philosophy, even in its contemporary academic forms, remains a kind of base-level occult practice; it just doesn’t recognise itself as one. This doesn’t mean that metaphysics is disguised Hermeticism or any such claim. The connection in a way is more fundamental.
To see it we just have to take the understanding it gives of a kind of contingency of various relations. Whether we have a sense of this contingency seemingly from ourselves or we are struck with it from our study doesn’t really make any difference. Either way it is one of the things philosophy does to us.
It makes us consider whether a relation is necessary, whether the world is necessarily as it seems, what it means that it seems one way, what an object is, what it means to consider something an object at all, what it means for us to consider things as having value and so on and so on.
Before philosophy (in a given person) there is a much more naive relation to the world. Things are what they are, time is time, a person is a person, morality has a kind of obvious sense to it, causation is incoherently clear, language adequately conveys the world. The conceptual nature of these phenomena are obscured to us, they appear simply as reality.
To study some philosophy meaningfully challenges many of these and forces us to recognise the various problems entailed by them. This cognitive effort of endless and territorial conflict we call philosophy. However whilst a lot of it is performed under a kind of hegemonic materialism (even its idealist strands largely wish to maintain the strict rationality of materialism), from an esoteric perspective even this (in itself somewhat pointless) activity supplies the foundation for deeper understanding.
People often wonder what philosophy does? Well what it actually does is loosen our relations to the accretions embedded in us that hold us firmly to the world. This is certainly a form of esoteric practice, it just is never addressed that way. But surely to be doing esoteric practics you have to be doing magick or meditiation or something? These things certainly count but actually without philosophical reflection of the vast conceptual contingency of things one can end up in a reified world naive occultism (new age movement).
Of course since philosophy has been co-opted by rationality, all the amazing senses of wonder and mental vertigo are just interesting cognitive experiences, as opposed to the loosenings of the other aspects of the organism that they sort of actually are (and when they are dismissed in this way they do not develop). A certain freedom is achieved, but it is largely a cognitive freedom. Existentialism could be said to achieve a superior freedom, however it is a kind of unhinged freedom that will still not be properly realised, because the organism remains under too much accretive control.
In the language of curvature caused by the accretions recently employed we may say that philsophy enables us to see how we are curved but does not, at least only a tiny bit, allow us curve pneuminous field ourselves. To do this we must move beyond this purely cognitive activity and begin to do something more practical with it.
What is probably weirder is that whilst enlightenment thought massively eroded the relation between the two, the connection of esotericism and philosophy is historically strong. Good evidence suggests Plato had an esoteric teaching that was not written down and even if he does represent only a rational philosophy, it is one based on earlier teachings that were previously certainly mystery school teachings. The world of forms was the other world of gods and spirits. This was a place to receive wisdom from, to be healed from (as Iamblichus tells us) and not simply to contemplate.
Another, more recent example is Jakob Böhme. Often treated as a mystic rather than a philosopher, yet his speculative account of God, contradiction, emergence and manifestation becomes enormously important for later German philosophy. Hegel explicitly recognised Böhme as a profound precursor, seeing in him an intuition of the dynamic movement through which determinations emerge through opposition and reconciliation. The Hegelian dialectic is a direct descendent of Böhme’s spiritual alchemy; a practice that requires understanding to enable the work that will liberate us through Christ (and Sophia).
So this linkage of deeper loosening with conceptual understanding as the base is not new; what is maybe a bit sad is the cognitive loophole trap that modern philosophy has found itself in (become); now ironically too rational to allow for the possibility of a different knowledge, from which it ultimately came.
Meditation, ritual, contemplation, magical practice, dream work, ascetic disciplines and deliberate symbolic practices attempt to carry the destabilisation beyond the level of the the conceptual destabilisation that philsosophy performs and into perception, attention, behaviour and identity.
Philosophy asks: could the world be otherwise? Esotericism asks: what happens to the operator (and maybe the world) when they actually try to experience the world as otherwise? From the standpoint of accretive ontology, both are forms of liberation. However the sustained form of the latter takes the former to places it cannot go (though arguably as mentioned above, the latter cannot go there with any depty without the former).
Centre For Experimental Ontology 