Plotinus (204/5-270), Anonymous, white marble, Ostiense Museum, Ostia Antica, Rome

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) From a painting by Meister des Marienlebens (Master of the Life of the Virgin), located in the hospital at Kues (Germany)

G.W.F.Hegel (1770-1831), Anonymous

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), Anonymous, Museum der Westlausitz, Kamenz

Edited transcript of my presentation at the Department of Philosophy ‘mini-conference’, the University of Sydney 12.09.14. Part three

I believe that Hegel could never even mention Cusanus for two reasons – the second following from the first:

• he was so indebted to him
• if that debt were ever exposed, he could never escape the charge, made correctly of him during his lifetime, that his philosophy is mystical.

This opens out into the far broader question regarding mysticism being treated as the pornography of academic philosophy (assiduously studied by many and its principles absorbed, but that influence claimed to be other, dissembled about or denied).

In denying through his utter silence the significance of Cusanus and the foresight of his genius, Hegel was emblematic not only of the German intellectuals of his time (with regard to Spinoza then Swedenborg and Oetinger and later, Nietzsche with regard to ‘Saint Max’ Stirner) but of Western culture as a whole – suppressing key elements of our history, of what has made us, so that we may perceive ourselves, as Hegel did, the bearers and masters of ‘Reason.’

We of the West believe it has been our ‘reason’ – primarily understood as linguistic, conceptual and particularly propositional – that has enabled us to achieve so much and attain global domination. Mysticism, the myth goes, was only a stage that was shed long ago.

What if ‘reason’ were understood to function not only linguistically, conceptually and propositionally (the reason of patriarchy) but in a manner that has been relegated to and powerfully utilised in the mystical, in ‘the feminine’?

As a materialist I state that mysticism has contributed and contributes profoundly to all aspects of our culture as William Franke’s two volume anthology On What Cannot be Said – Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (Classic Formulations and Modern and Contemporary Transformations) well exemplifies – it inspired Copernicus to the greatest scientific hypothesis, it inspired Kepler to his theory of elliptical orbits in a wonderful yet imperfect world, it informed the pivotal moment of modernist art (Cubism) through the philosophy of Bergson – and I believe its not being taught (distinct from advocated) academically is the most gross failure of intellectual and social responsibility.

Marx correctly took Hegel’s philosophy and stood it on its feet but failed, as did Hegel, to overcome the Neoplatonic teleology  – which for Hegel concluded in the Prussian state and for Marx, in ‘communism’. There will never be an end to the engine of contradiction, in nature or in that aspect of it called ‘society’.

I would like to merely touch on one point with regard to Hegel as I believe he was, a prose poet. Donald Phillip Verene wrote of our having lost track of the dimensions of philosophical language:

‘we have so little experience in taking metaphorical speech seriously as a carrier of philosophical meaning that we read right past it. …we have become so accustomed to the monotone hum of the abstract concept and the category, the fluorescent buzz of the argument, that we have lost track of the dimensions of philosophical language. We have forgotten its secrets and cannot recollect its manner of eating bread and drinking wine.’¹

I will finish with a quotation from Magee: ‘an appreciation of the role of mystical ideas in the thought of Hegel and other modern thinkers opens new vistas, new paradigms for the history of modern philosophy and for the philosophy of history.’²

Notes

1. Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in The Phenomenology of Spirit, State University of New York Press, Albany, New York, 1985, 34-35 ↩

2. Glenn Alexander Magee, ‘Hegel and Mysticism’, pp. 253-280 in Frederick C. Beiser, Ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, 280 ↩

Official insignia of the Rosicrucian Order

 Image sources: Plotinus/Cusanus/Hegel/Böhme/Rose-Cross

Plotinus (204/5-270), Anonymous, white marble, Ostiense Museum, Ostia Antica, Rome

G.W.F.Hegel (1770-1831), Anonymous

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) From a painting by Meister des Marienlebens (Master of the Life of the Virgin), located in the hospital at Kues (Germany)

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), Anonymous, Museum der Westlausitz, Kamenz

Edited transcript of my presentation at the Department of Philosophy ‘mini-conference’ at the University of Sydney 12.09.14 Part two

For the Hermeticist, we too require diremption: ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.’¹ Redding wrote ‘Each recognises himself not simply in the other but in the recognition/acknowledgement of the other – that is, in the other’s act.’²

Hegel’s philosophy functions on the armature of the Christian Trinity (he was obsessed with the triune and its dialectical potential) clothed in Neoplatonic Hermeticism. Hegel scoured Western philosophy for those currents which best suited his purpose – to capture in philosophy the contradictory dynamism and processes of the world as consciousness. Just as he wove into the dense tapestry of his philosophy the dialectical potential of the Trinity together with the Neoplatonic process of emanation and return, so he also wove in the Hermetic notion of ‘othering’ and its potential.

Cusanus is of greatest interest to me – not only because I believe that Hegel was indebted to him in so many ways but, and more particularly, because of what I think Hegel’s silence regarding him indicates about Western self-perceptions and how this silence – replicated over and again since (by others with regard to the impact of mysticism on their work and on Western culture generally) – and these cultural perceptions profoundly detract from the potential of philosophy.

Cusanus was more widely known about and read than is recognised. He was discussed in a 1652 Dutch study of skepticism, being referred to as a ‘modern skeptic.’³ Buhle cites three editions of his works, one from Basel in 1565 in three volumes.⁴ Jasper Hopkins wrote that Kepler, Descartes and Leibniz mention Cusanus.⁵ Magee wrote that Schelling, whose ‘use of “Absolute” is remarkably similar to Cusa’s’⁶ read him. (Inwood wrote that the concept ‘Absolute’ was first used as a noun by Cusanus).

Both Cusanus and Hegel sought to develop a new method for doing philosophy and theology – Cusanus in reaction against scholasticism, Hegel in reaction against the mere ‘understanding’ of the Enlightenment and religious belief that held that God cannot be cognised.

As Böhme gave Hegel the spiritual potential for knowledge through ‘othering’, Cusanus, of all that he gave Hegel, particularly gave him the means of ‘cognising‘ God non-predicatively – coincidentia oppositorum. It is through this concept that Hegel’s philosophy can be appreciated. Just as God is known through the process of contradiction (God is this process) so Hegel (as Magee wrote) ‘talked around’ his concepts – their meaning being found in that dialectical process of a unity of opposites. Cusanus wrote ‘when we look by way of a mirroring symbolism, as the Apostle says – we can have knowledge-of-God’.⁷ For Hegel, when we know the science of logic, we know God. Another way of putting this is that for Hegel, the science of logic is God. For Proclus, that which is divine (but not the First Principle) can be apprehended and known from the existents which participate it. (The Elements of Theology Prop. 123)

Buhle wrote of Cusanus:

‘In my opinion his idea of the human cognitive faculty can be best grasped from the following passage, which I quote here in his own words ‘It must be the case that speculations originate from our minds, even as the real world originates from Infinite Divine Reason. For when, as best it can, the human mind [which is a lofty likeness of God] partakes of the fruitfulness of the Creating Nature, it produces from itself, qua image of the Omnipotent Form, rational entities, which are made in the likeness of real entities. Consequently, the human mind is the form of a speculated rational world, just as the Divine Mind is the Form of the real world. …In order that you may recognise that the mind is the beginning of speculations, take note of the following: just as the First Beginning of all things, including our minds, is shown to be triune (so that of the multitude, the inequality, and the division of things there is one Beginning, from whose Absolute Oneness multitude flows forth, from whose Absolute Equality inequality flows forth, and from whose Absolute Union division flows forth), so our mind (which conceives only an intellectual nature to be creative) makes itself to be a triune beginning of its own rational products. (mw: thus, for Hegel, being, nothing, becoming) For only reason is the measure of multitude, of magnitude, and of composition. Thus, if reason is removed, none of these will remain. …Therefore, the mind’s oneness enfolds within itself all multitude, and its equality enfolds all magnitude, even as its union enfolds all composition. Therefore, mind, which is a triune beginning, first of all unfolds multitude from the power of its enfolding-oneness. …’⁸

I will quote from two of Cusanus’ most important treatises to give a sense of what I think Hegel drew on:

1) De Deo abscondito (‘On the Hidden God’)

On the relation between being and not-being:

‘He (God) makes not-being pass into being and makes being pass into not-being.’

‘God is not the foundation of contradiction but is Simplicity, which is prior to every foundation.’

Christian: He is the Source and Origin of all the beginnings of being and of not-being.

Pagan: God is the Source of the beginnings of being and of not-being?

Christian: No.

Pagan: But you just said this.

Christian: When I said it, I spoke the truth; and I am speaking the truth now, when I deny it. For if there are any beginnings of being and of not-being, God precedes them. However, not-being does not have a beginning of its not being but has only a beginning of its being. For not-being needs a beginning in order to be. In this way, then, He is the Beginning of not-being, because without Him there would not be not-being.’⁹

2) De li non aliud (‘On [God As] Not-Other’)

‘ABBOT: You have led me, Father, unto a Spirit which I see to be the Creator of all – just as was seen by the prophet who said to the Creator: “Send forth Your Spirit, and they will be created.”  … And you have led me to see that the mental spirit is an image of this Spirit.  For, indeed, this mental spirit – which of its own power goes forth unto all things – examines all things and creates the concepts and likenesses of all things. I say “creates” inasmuch as this spirit makes the conceptual likenesses of things from no other thing – even as the Spirit which is God makes the quiddities of things not from another but from itself, i.e, from Not-other. And so, just as the Divine Spirit is not other than any creatable thing, so neither is the mind other than anything which is understandable by it. And in the case of a mind which is more free of a body, I clearly see a spirit shining forth more perfectly as creator and creating more precise concepts.’¹⁰

Part two/to be continued…

Notes

1. G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans., A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, 111 (#178). Hegel continued ‘The Notion of this its unity in its duplication embraces many and varied meanings.’ ↩

2. Paul Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1996, 112 ↩

3. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, 162. Also ‘Prior to the period I shall deal with, there are some indications of a sceptical motif, principally among the antirational theologians, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian. This theological movement, culminating in the West in the work of Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century, employed many of the sceptical arguments in order to undermine confidence in the rational approach to religious knowledge and truth.’ xix. ↩

4. In her 1935 essay on Montaigne and Melville, Camille La Bossière stated that Montaigne owned a copy of the 1576 edition of Cusanus’s single most important treatise De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance). Camille R. La Bossière, ‘The World Revolves Upon an I: Montaigne’s Unknown God and Melville’s Confidence-Man’ ↩

5. Jasper Hopkins, ‘Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464): First Modern Philosopher?’, Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 26 (2002), pp. 13-29, 28 (‘Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel never mention him, although Kepler, Descartes, and Leibniz do.’) ↩

6. Glenn Alexander Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, Continuum, London, 2010, 18 ↩

7. Nicholas of Cusa, De Beryllo (‘On [Intellectual] Eyeglasses’), Nicholas of Cusa: Metaphysical Speculations: Six Latin Texts Translated into English, Trans., Jasper Hopkins, The Arthur J. Banning Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1998, pp. 792-827, 798 ↩

8. Johann Gottlieb Buhle, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie seit der Epoche der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften, in 6 vols., Johann Georg Rosenbusch, Göttingen, 1800, vol. 2, 341-353 ↩

9. In Jasper Hopkins, A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa, The Arthur J. Banning Press, Minneapolis, 1994, 303-304 ↩

10. In Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not-Other: A Translation and an Appraisal of De Li Non Aliud, The Arthur J. Banning Press, Minneapolis, 1999, 1160-1161 ↩

Image sources: Plotinus/Cusanus/Hegel/Böhme

Plotinus (204/5-270), Anonymous, white marble, Ostiense Museum, Ostia Antica, Rome

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) From a painting by Meister des Marienlebens (Master of the Life of the Virgin), located in the hospital at Kues (Germany)

G.W.F.Hegel (1770-1831), Anonymous

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), Anonymous, Museum der Westlausitz, Kamenz

Edited transcript of my presentation at the Department of Philosophy ‘mini-conference’, the University of Sydney 12.09.14

My thesis explores the relationship between Hegel’s philosophy and Neoplatonism. In it, I will argue that Hegel’s philosophy is not only mystical – Christian Neoplatonic – but Hermetic.¹

A common understanding of ‘mysticism’ is that it is a belief that one can attain union with or absorption into a deity or an absolute, or spiritually apprehend knowledge – through the ‘abandonment’ of self or through contemplation.

Clearly, Hegel did not claim this of his philosophy – rather, the opposite – that God can be cognised through ‘reason’, that knowledge comes not from the abandonment of self but the application of ‘reason’ to the intricacies of speculative thought.

How am I to go from the common understanding of ‘mysticism’ to the argument that Hegel’s philosophy is mystical? My answer is that consistent with the dynamism of its beliefs, mysticism (and here my focus is particularly on the dominant form of Western mysticism, Neoplatonism) has undergone continual development. With regard to Hegel, Cusanus and Böhme are key figures.

Hegel acknowledged Böhme. In volume III of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he discussed him – ‘the first German philosopher’ the reading of whose works was ‘wondrous,’ – over eleven pages, giving five pages in the same volume to Bruno, yet he never even mentioned Cusanus – a figure in the German mystical tradition between Eckhart (whom Hegel also referred to and quoted in the first volume of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion from one of his sermons – ‘The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him.’)² and Böhme.

In the same volume of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel wrote simply of Bruno ‘The fullest information about him is to be found in Buhle’s history of philosophy.’ In that extremely interesting work (and reinforcing Magee’s reading of Hegel – Buhle discusses the impact of Neoplatonism, Kabbalism and Hermeticism in general on German philosophy) Buhle wrote on Cusanus.

No direct connection has ever been established between Nicholas of Cusa and Hegel. It has been accepted that Hegel did not know of him.³ In fact, Buhle’s History is clear evidence that Hegel did know of Cusanus, and in detail. Not only did Bruno twice specifically refer to him, and with the highest praise,⁴ Buhle wrote on Cusanus at length, citing fourteen of his works, including his most important – three of which he discusses.⁵

Why did Hegel never even name Cusanus, in any of his writing – a man who was far more philosophical, and in the ‘Hegelian manner,’ than either Eckhart and particularly Böhme, of whom Hegel also wrote that his articulation was ‘unmistakably barbarous’ and that he ‘grasps the antitheses in the harshest, crudest fashion’?

My contention in my thesis will be that Hegel never named Cusanus, not only because he was so indebted to one who was known to be a Christian mystic/Neoplatonist (I have identified more than thirty points in the philosophy of Cusanus which occur in that of Hegel), but because to do so would immediately open to question the nature of Hegel’s vaunted concepts (several of which, I will contend, came directly from Cusanus), the apparent intellectual rigour of his philosophy, and particularly, the meaning of his ‘reason’ – his claims to and for it.

Magee wrote excellently on Böhme’s influence on Hegel – he concludes that we cannot understand Hegel unless we recognise his philosophy as not only mystical, but Hermeticist. He wrote ‘Hermeticists typically reject the mysticism that stops short at “mystery,” and, like Böhme and Hegel, hold that actual, discursive knowledge of the nature of God is possible’. Böhme believed that for God to develop, for God to be fully God, He had to dirempt himself from himself through the act of creation so that another was opposed to him. Through the opposition and conflict of that relationship, God could progress towards self-consciousness as man. In attaining the nature of God, man attains that of reality as a system of thought.

Part one/to be continued…

Notes

1. Hermeticism is ‘a grab bag of loosely-related subjects, including alchemy, extrasensory perception, dowsing, Kabbalism, Masonry, Mesmerism, Rosicrucianism, Paracelcism, prisca theologia, philosophia perennis, “correspondences,” “cosmic sympathies,” and vitalism.’ Glenn Alexander Magee, ‘Hegel and Mysticism’ in Frederick C. Beiser, Ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, 253-280, 278 ↩

2. The editor wrote that Hegel was familiar with the writing of Eckhart from 1794. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion vol. I, Ed. Peter C. Hodgson, Trans., R.F.Brown, P.C.Hodgson, J.M.Stewart, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007, 347 ↩

3. ‘…Nicholas of Cusa (whom Hegel surprisingly never mentions)…’ Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, 140. Magee, citing Beck, wrote ‘we know that Schelling was influenced by reading Nicholas (Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, 71)…However, Hegel never mentions Cusa anywhere in his published writings or in his lectures.’ In the footnote to this Magee (who otherwise writes excellently on the relationship between Hegel, mysticism and Hermeticism, arguing that Hegel was an Hermetic mystic) expressed a standard view ‘David Walsh notes that although there is no evidence that Hegel ever read Cusa, he was indirectly influenced by him through J.G.Hamann and Giordano Bruno.’ Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2001, 28. Redding wrote ‘In Hegel’s case, Spinozistic and Cusan elements (were) reflected through the speculative thought of Schelling,’ Paul Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1996, 31, also ‘Jacobi had not only introduced the German reading public to Spinoza but also to Giordano Bruno, and thereby, indirectly to Nicholas of Cusa.’ Paul Redding, Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche, Routledge, London, 2009, 126. Hodgson wrote ‘Hegel was familiar with Bruno through Schelling’s work as well as that of J.G.Buhle and F.H.Jacobi,’ Peter C. Hodgson, Ed., G.W.F. Hegel, Theologian of the Spirit, Fortress, Minneapolis, 2007, 274. Jasper Hopkins wrote ‘Nicholas does not anticipate, prefigure, foreshadow, etc., Kant, so also he does not anticipate Copernicus or Spinoza or Leibniz or Berkeley or Hegel. …In retrospect, Nicholas must be regarded as a transitional figure some of whose ideas (1) were suggestive of new ways of thinking but (2) were not such as to conduct him far enough away from the medieval outlook for him truly to be called a Modern thinker. Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel never mention him, although Kepler, Descartes, and Leibniz do. …Nicholas’s intellectual influence on his own generation and on subsequent generations remained meager.’ Jasper Hopkins, ‘Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464): First Modern Philosopher?’, Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 26 (2002), pp. 13-29, 28-29. ↩

4. The ‘divine’ Cusanus, ‘the inventor of geometry’s most beautiful secrets,’ is Bruno’s guide in Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he referred to key aspects of Cusanus’ philosophy. Bruno again named and referred to Cusanus as ‘divine’ in The Ash Wednesday Supper, citing his single most important treatise, De docta ignorantia. ↩

5. Johann Gottlieb Buhle, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie seit der Epoche der Widerherstellung der Wissenschaften (History of Modern Philosophy Since the Time of the Restoration of Sciences), vol. 2, Johann Georg Rosenbusch, Göttingen, 1800, p. 81 and p. 342ff. Buhle discusses De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance, 1440), De coniecturis (On Surmises, 1441-2) and (Idiota) de sapientia (The Layman of Wisdom, 1450). ↩

Image sources: Plotinus/Cusanus/Hegel/Böhme