Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition [Hardcover]

Glenn A. Magee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2001 | ISBN-10: 0801438721 | ISBN-13: 978-0801438721

Glenn Alexander Magee's pathbreaking book argues that Hegel was decisively influenced by the Hermetic tradition, a body of thought with roots in Greco-Roman Egypt. Magee traces the influence on Hegel of such Hermetic thinkers as Baader, Böhme, Bruno, and Paracelsus, and fascination with occult and paranormal phenomena. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition covers Hegel's philosophical corpus and shows that his engagement with Hermeticism lasted throughout his career and intensified during his final years in Berlin. Viewing Hegel as a Hermetic thinker has implications for a more complete understanding of the modern philosophical tradition, and German idealism in particular.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Magee's splendid book marshals all the available evidence for the Hermetic background and interests of Hegel. This is no small achievement. It involves mastering a side of intellectual history that is frequently referenced but rarely comprehended and an exhaustive account of its application to the formidable philosophical apparatus of Hegel. The result deserves to become the standard reference work for this dimension, not only of Hegel but also of the entire idealist context."--Review of Metaphysics

"The organization of the text is first class, the reading of Hegel's texts sensitive and perspicacious, and the writing poised, even elegant. This would be a fine book for a scholar at any stage of his or her career. For a first book it is absolutely exceptional."--Owl of Minerva

"This excellent book performs a significant service by its uninhibited exposure of Hegel's dark side."--International Philosophical Quarterly

"I hail this book as an important event in Hegelian studies, especially since it addresses issues that have been neglected or dealt with superficially. Now we have a cogent scholarly work that will serve as the point of reference for many years to come."--Antoine Faivre, Professor Emeritus, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sciences Religieuses, Sorbonne

"This first book-length study of Hegel and Hermeticism builds on both Continental and Anglo-American Hegel scholarship, contributes new perspectives on the gnostic and mystical aspects of Hegel's thought, and is eminently readable!"--Religious Studies Review --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Glenn Alexander Magee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (July 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801438721
• ISBN-13: 978-0801438721
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,914,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hegel the Initiate, July 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Hardcover)

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.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hegel as Theosophist of the Rose in the Cross, December 14, 2001

By 

Robert S. Corrington (Madison, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Hardcover)

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.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hegel the Occult Thinker, September 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Hardcover)

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.