Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition

Rating:
Summary: Hegel the Initiate
Review: Glenn Magee's HEGEL AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION begins with the audacious assertion that "Hegel is not a philosopher"--and then proves it. Hegel is not a philosopher because he does not claim to pursue wisdom, he claims to actually be wise--and he claims that in becoming wise, he has brought God's own quest for self-knowledge and self-actualization to fruition. This, Magee argues, places Hegel in the "Hermetic" tradition that runs from the CORPUS HERMETICUM of Greco-Roman Egypt through alchemy and Kabbalism to modern Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and other occultist strands of thought. Magee offers three kinds of evidence for his claim. First, he shows that Hegel adopts the essential Hermetic teaching that God attains self-knowledge through the Hermetic initiate's knowledge of him. Second, he shows that Hegel read and was influenced by Hermetic thinkers, particularly Jakob Boehme, throughout his intellectual development and mature philosophical career. Third, he shows that Hegel was interested in such loosely Hermetic topics as alchemy and paranormal phenomena. The book begins with a survey of the Hermetic tradition, with special reference to the German tradition and Hegel's intellectual milieu. Then Magee devotes a chapter to Hegel's early writings, a chapter to his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT and one chapter each to Hegel's discussions of Logic, Nature, and Spirit. The evidence presented is overwhelming. The scholarship is magisterial. And the book is beautifully written. Indeed, it is the best-written book on Hegel I have ever read. Beyond that, Magee's thesis is revolutionary in its implications. If he is right--and I am convinced that he is--then all contemporary accounts of the nature and development of Hegel's thought are inadequate at best. This book is destined to take its place alongside its model, Frances Yates's GIORDANO BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION, as one of the classics of intellectual history. It will be read by philosophers, historians of ideas, and would-be Hermetic adepts, and by anyone who wants to expand his imagination by discovering how rich and strange Hegel's thought really is. To top it all off, Cornell is to be congratulated for the book's tasteful design and beautiful production.

Rating:
Summary: Hegel as Theosophist of the Rose in the Cross
Review: Professor Magee has added a crucial dimension to our understanding of Hegel by showing in abundant detail the deep and life-long influences of hermeticism, alchemy, the Kabbala, and various forms of theosophy (the ancient wisdom) on Hegel's metaphysics. He quickly dispatches the absurd idea that Hegel was primarily a hermeneute and that he was not 'really' interested in hard-core metaphysics, and he further distances Hegel from the postmodern displacement that would reduce him to a negative genealogist of finite self-consciousness (e.g., in Julia Kristeva's reading of "negativity" in Hegelian consciousness via the later Freud). Combining close historical studies with internal categorial analysis, Magee exhibits the power of Swabian mysticism and its correlary, local pietism on such Hegelian ideas as: 1) the self-return of the absolute from its own concentration and condensation in the realms of finite reciprocity, 2) the reconstructed Aristotelian idea that all selves contain potentia of the fullness of absolute Geist in a mirroring relationship, and 3) the doctrine of dynamic internal relations that permeate the manifest cosmos. The "Phenomenology of Spirit," so often seen as a detached "we" consciousness of the regathering of shapes of self-consciousness (gestalten des Selbstbewusstsein), is thought theosophically as an initiation ritual in which the individual self shatters its provincial illusions and prepares to become a true Adept on the edges of absolute knowing (das absolute Wissen).
Hegel scholars will especially appreciate Magee's detailed treatment of the way the concept of "aether" functions in Hegel's "Philosophy of Nature" as a primary background meta-material substance (hints of Paracelsus and Bohme here), which has dynamic and life-generating potencies in the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water understood in the classical Greek sense). Further, Magee's analysis of the "Earth Spirit" opens up a dramatic vista on the mythos underlying Hegel's understanding of messmerism, telepathy, and the earth-like unconscious (shades of Heidegger's earth/world struggle).
For those who came to Hegel through French phenomenology, Protestant theology (e.g., his conflict with Schleiermacher), analytic philosophy ("what was Hegel's epistemology and did he really beat Kant at his own game?"), or Heidegger's destructuring of the opening gambits of the "Phenomenology," Magee's hermetic approach will provide a far more historically accurate and balanced perspective on the mystical and robustly metaphysical heart of Hegelian dialectic. The rose in the cross is an image that Hegel uses in "The Philosophy of Right" to balance his reconstructured Lutheranism with his commitment to the pansophia found in the Rosicrucian Movement (toward which he had friendly relations). Magee gives us a Hegel that Hegel would have recognized on the spot, and we are much in his debt for his doing so.

Rating:
Summary: Sphinx in a time machine
Review: This beguiling work opens with the statement, "Hegel is not a philosopher". As we go further we see this is to mean that Hegel is expressing the perspective of Absolute Knowledge, in the echoes of the Hermetic tradition. This book is a bit of a tour de force, although perhaps unsettling to those who inherit the Hegel reshaped in the nineteenth century by the Young Hegelians and others, indeed by the reticent stance of Hegel himself whose interest in Bohme and Eckhart, and early contacts with Rosicrucianism, the Masons, and study of a host of occult and theosophical subjects, tends to be factored out of his biographies. This component of Hegel's philosophic odyssey might never meet the approval of an age of science, yet the context is important to an understanding of Hegel's sources and development, and also on the grounds that much that is obscure clarifies at once if seen in this light. In fact this analysis hits the spot. Too much logical bandwidth is wasted on a sort of logical positivist recoil at the glyphic Hegel. Seen in this light, he is another man entirely and can be taken on his own terms, and with a proper caution that the seeker with a mystic triangle argument stands in ghostly shadows near the dialectician hoping to explicate a law of history (read Left Hegelian, Marxist). It is important to know what you were up to!
Very well documented text, with good historical snapshots of this side of Reformation history, made to disappear from most philosophic treatments of Hegelian subjects.

Rating:
Summary: Sphinx in a time machine
Review: This beguiling work opens with the statement, "Hegel is not a philosopher". As we go further we see this is to mean that Hegel is expressing the perspective of Absolute Knowledge, in the echoes of the Hermetic tradition. This book is a bit of a tour de force, although perhaps unsettling to those who inherit the Hegel reshaped in the nineteenth century by the Young Hegelians and others, indeed by the reticent stance of Hegel himself whose interest in Bohme and Eckhart, and early contacts with Rosicrucianism, the Masons, and study of a host of occult and theosophical subjects, tends to be factored out of his biographies. This component of Hegel's philosophic odyssey might never meet the approval of an age of science, yet the context is important to an understanding of Hegel's sources and development, and also on the grounds that much that is obscure clarifies at once if seen in this light. In fact this analysis hits the spot. Too much logical bandwidth is wasted on a sort of logical positivist recoil at the glyphic Hegel. Seen in this light, he is another man entirely and can be taken on his own terms, and with a proper caution that the seeker with a mystic triangle argument stands in ghostly shadows near the dialectician hoping to explicate a law of history (read Left Hegelian, Marxist). It is important to know what you were up to!
Very well documented text, with good historical snapshots of this side of Reformation history, made to disappear from most philosophic treatments of Hegelian subjects.

Rating:
Summary: Hegel the Occult Thinker
Review: This new study of Hegel by Glenn Alexander Magee is a brilliant piece of work on numerous levels. Those who have been daunted by the language of Hegel's philosophical system, or who find it otherwise obtuse and impenetrable, will do well to reapproach him from Mr. Magee's perspective. Unfortunately Hegel's name has furthermore been tainted from his later appropriation by the political "Young Hegelians," most famous among them Karl Marx. This has probably caused some to look askance at Hegel as a thinker whose ideas eventually lead to marxoid Gulags (one can see a similar negative type of effect in the world of music, when some folks cringe at the sounds of Richard Wagner, since Hitler was a Parsifal fan).
Mr. Magee's book forces a radical new reading of Hegel, and one that is very much at odds with the materialist or politically motivated interpretations that have been commonplace for over a century. Here the argument is offered that Hegel was, in fact, thoroughly immersed in the Hermetic Tradition, and his "speculative philosophy" is a discourse of mystical conceptions about man's relationship to the divine. The book is clearly written and Mr. Magee states his case with precision and a fascinating wealth of evidence, circumstantial as well as internal. This is not only an illuminating study of Hegel (and you will never look at him the same after having read it), but also an informed explication of the core ideas of Hermeticism, as well as a history of its proponents throughout the centuries, especially in the German speaking lands. Not just a book for philosophy scholars or students of German Intellectual History, it has much of value to offer anyone interested in Hermeticism and its ramifications in the larger world of Western thought.