Guilt by association

"Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition" is something of a disappointment. The author, Glenn Alexander Magee, argues that the well-known German philosopher Hegel was an occultist and a Gnostic, or rather a Hermeticist (the author defines Hermeticism as different from Gnosticism). If true, this would indeed be quite interesting. Hegel influenced Marx, whose ideology became the official one in the Soviet Union (creatively developed by Lenin, of course). Was the Soviet Union really based on a Gnostic or "Hermetic" philosophy?

Hmmm....

Unfortunately, I don't think Magee really proves his point. Most of the book is simply guilt by association. The book never really delivers. For instance, Magee promises to prove that Hegel was influenced by Hermeticism in his youth, but he is forced to admit that Hegel's teenage diaries contain no entries about Hermetic subjects. Magee brushes this aside with the rather strange argument that "what you talk about every day, you don't write about in your diary". No? Since when? Here, the very lack of evidence for Hermetic influence is dialectically transformed into evidence *for* such influence. Sorry, but that's simply not convincing! Further, the author states that there is no direct evidence for Hegel ever being a Freemason. But since Schelling, Goethe and Fichte were Freemasons, and since Hegel mingled or corresponded with them, therefore... Magee also points out that Hegel and Schelling were friends, and that *Schelling* was influenced by Hermeticism. But Hegel and Schelling parted ways later, since Hegel disliked his friend's philosophy! Further, the author states that Hegel was a friend of Franz von Baader, which is true, but the two gentlemen often criticized each other. Besides, Baader wasn't an unthinking, orthodox Hermeticist.

In plain English, the entire book is nothing but "guilt by association", although positive "guilt", since Magee seems to like the idea that George Wilhelm Friedrich was a Magus. Personally, I don't care either way. I just don't think the case is compelling enough.

I don't doubt that there are similarities between Hegel and Hermeticism (or Gnosticism, if you like). That Hegel studied Jacob Böhme is, of course, uncontestable. He also studied Master Eckhart. Hegel's idea that God needs to create the world in order to realize himself, and that he realizes himself through man, sounds "pretty old hat" to all students of mysticism. So far so good. But is that the end of story?

Hegel's innovation was to claim that God (the World-Spirit) realizes itself through history, and necessarily embodies itself in human cultures and institutions. This historical perspective seems to be lacking from Schelling, for whom Nature was God's embodiment, and it doesn't seem to exist within the Hermetical tradition either, where the individual magus rises himself above everything else, including history. Magee has managed to find only two examples of Hermeticists with some kind of historical perspective, Isaac Luria and Joachim of Fiore, but it's difficult to see any real similarity between their apocalypticism (obviously derived from the Bible) and Hegel's evolutionary perspective.

Why was Marx able to "turn Hegel on his feet"? How could Hegelianism ever be given a secular, left-wing interpretation? Were the left-Hegelians raving mad? I don't think so. When Hegel claimed that the Weltgeist necessarily embodied itself in human institutions with a history, the question automatically arised, what on earth this "World Spirit" could possibly *be*? Isn't it simply a more superstitious, Romantic, pantheistic word for the historical process itself? A historical process propelled forward by *human* spirit? It was Hegel's "grounding" of the Weltgeist that made it possible for the left-Hegelians and Marxists to hi-jack his philosophy. Had Hegel simply said the same thing as Böhme, Schelling or Baader, this would have been impossible!

In other words, Hegel wasn't simply a student of Böhme, and absolutely not an "initiate". He was an innovator, who (dialectically?) pointed forward, to a very different philosophy.