The following articles
were downloaded from – http://www.marxists.org with no apparent
copyright restrictions placed on them.
Hegel and the Hermetic
Tradition
Glenn Magee, (
Introduction
“God is God only
so far as he knows himself. his self-knowledge is, further, a
self-consciousness in man and man’s knowledge of God, which proceeds to
man’s self-knowledge in God.”
— Hegel, Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences
1.
Hegel as Hermetic
Thinker
Hegel
is not a philosopher. He is no lover or seeker of wisdom — he believes he
has found it. Hegel writes in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit,
“To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal
where it can lay aside the title of ‘love of knowing’ and be actual
knowledge — that is what I have set before me” (Miller, 3; PC, 3).
By the end of the phenomenology, Hegel claims to have arrived at Absolute
Knowledge, which he identifies with wisdom. Hegel’s claim to have
attained wisdom is completely contrary to the original Greek conception of
philosophy as the love of wisdom, that is, the ongoing pursuit rather than the
final possession of wisdom. His claim is, however, fully consistent with the
ambitions of the Hermetic tradition, a current of thought that derives its name
from the so-called Hermetica (or Corpus Hermeticum), a collection of Greek and
Latin treatises and dialogues written in the first or second centuries A.D. and
probably containing ideas that are far older. The legendary author of these
works is Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Greatest Hermes”).
“Hermeticism” denotes a broad tradition of thought that grew out of
the “writings of Hermes” and was expanded and developed through the
infusion of various other traditions. Thus, alchemy, Kabbalism, Lullism, and
the mysticism of Eckhart and Cusa — to name just a few examples —
became intertwined with the
Hermetic
doctrines. (Indeed, Hermeticism is used by some authors simply to mean
alchemy.) Hermeticism is also sometimes called theosophy, or esotericism; less
precisely, it is often characterized as mysticism, or occultism. It is the
thesis of this book that Hegel is a Hermetic thinker. I shall show that there
are striking correspondences between Hegelian philosophy and Hermetic
theosophy, and that these correspondences are not accidental. Hegel was
actively
interested
in Hermeticism, he was influenced by its exponents from boyhood on, and he
allied himself with Hermetic movements and thinkers throughout his life. I do
not argue merely that we can understand Hegel as a Hermetic thinker, just as we
can understand him as a German or a Swabian or an idealist thinker. Instead, I
argue that we must understand Hegel as a Hermetic thinker, if we are to truly
understand him at all. Hegel’s life and works offer ample evidence for
this thesis. There are references throughout Hegel’s published and
unpublished writings to many of the leading figures and movements of the
Hermetic tradition. These references are in large measure approving. This is
particularly the case with Hegel’s treatment of Eckhart, Bruno,
Paracelsus, and Boehme. Boehme is the most striking case. Hegel accords him
considerable space in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy — more
space, in fact, than he devotes to many significant mainstream thinkers in the
philosophic tradition. There are, furthermore, numerous Hermetic elements in
Hegel’s writings. These include, in broad strokes, a Masonic subtext of
“initiation mysticism” in the Phenomenology of Spirit; a Boehmean
subtext to the Phenomenology’s famous preface; a
Kabbalistic-Boehmean-Lullian influence on the Logic;
alchemical-Paracelsian
elements in the Philosophy of Nature; an influence of Kabbalistic and
Joachimite millennialism on Hegel’s doctrine of Objective Spirit and
theory of world history; alchemical and Rosicrucian images in the Philosophy of
Right; an influence of the Hermetic tradition of pansophia on the system as a
whole; an endorsement of the Hermetic belief in philosophia perennis; and the
use of perennial Hermetic symbolic forms (such as the triangle, the circle, and
the square) as structural, architectonic devices.
Hegel’s
library included Hermetic writings by Agrippa, Boehme, Bruno, and Paracelsus.
He read widely on Mesmerism, psychic phenomenal dowsing, precognition, and
sorcery. He publicly associated himself with known occultists, like Franz von
Baader. He structured his philosophy in a manner identical to the Hermetic use
of ‘Correspondences!’ He relied on histories of thought that
discussed Hermes Trismegistus, Pico della Mirandola, Robert Fludd, and Knorr
von
Rosenroth
alongside Plato, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. He stated in his lectures more
than once that the term “speculative” means the same thing as
“mystical.” He believed in an “Earth Spirit” and
corresponded with colleagues about the nature of magic. He aligned himself,
informally, with “Hermetic” societies such as the Freemasons and
the Rosicrucians. Even Hegel’s doodles were Hermetic, as we shall see in
chapter 3 when I discuss the mysterious “triangle diagram”.
There
are four major periods in Hegel’s life during which he seems to have been
strongly under the influence of Hermeticism, or to have actively pursued an
interest in it. First, there is his boyhood in
Most
Hegel scholars have not thought it necessary to consider the intellectual
milieu of his boyhood. Hegel is almost universally understood simply within the
context of the German philosophical tradition — as responding to Kant,
Fichte, and Schelling. Needless to say, the influence of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling
was important, but it was not the only influence on Hegel. Part of the reason
other sources of influence are missed or ignored is that few scholars are
familiar with the complexities of religious life in eighteenth-century
are
familiar are almost always from disciplines other than philosophy, and almost
always German. (The study of German Pietism is almost exclusively the province
of German-speaking scholars.) The religious and intellectual life of
Württemberg is, however, the obvious place to begin to understand
Hegel’s own intellectual origins, characteristic ideas, and aims. Hegel
has to be understood in terms of the theosophical Pietist tradition of
Württemberg — he cannot be seen simply as a critic of Kant. Indeed Hegel,
as I will argue, was always a critic of Kant and never a wholehearted admirer
precisely because he was “imprinted” early on by the tradition of
pansophia, which was very much alive in Württemberg, and by
Oetinger’s ideal of the truth
as the
Whole (see chapter 2). He could not accept Kant’s scepticism, nor could
Schelling, and for identical reasons. Yet they both recognized the power of
Kant’s thought and labored hard to move from his premises to their own
conclusions, to circumvent his scepticism at all costs, in the name of the
speculative ideal of their youth. From 1793 to 1801 Hegel worked as a private
tutor, first at Berne, then at
this
time, Hegel appears to have become conversant with the works of Boehme, as well
as Eckhart and Johannes Tauler. Also during this period Hegel became involved
in Masonic circles.
Diagram by H. R. A.