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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Hegel

Seeing as you're conversant with what to me seems like insufferable turgid nonsense, what do you make out of the claims that Hegel is being misunderstood and misclassified ?

Thus far, however, the most influential English-language account of Hegel’s Hermeticism is Eric Voegelin’s. In his essay, “Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a New but Ancient God’” Voegelin admits that “For a long time I studiously avoided any serious criticism of Hegel in my published work, because I simply could not understand him.” The turning point came with Voegelin’s study of gnosticism, and the discovery that, “by his contemporaries Hegel was considered a gnostic thinker:” Voegelin goes on to claim that Hegel’s thought “belongs to the continuous history of modern Hermeticism since the fifteenth century."’ Voegelin’s principal statement on Hegel’s Hermeticism is a savagely polemical essay, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” referring to the Phenomenology of Spirit as a “grimoire” which “must be recognized as a work of magic — indeed, it is one of the great magic performances.”

Voegelin’s claims are unique in that he does not simply claim that Hegel was influenced by the Hermetic tradition. He claims that Hegel was part of the Hermetic tradition and cannot be adequately understood apart from it. Unfortunately, however, Voegelin never adequately developed his thesis. He never spelled out, in detail, how Hegel is a Hermetic thinker. Voegelin has, however, encouraged other scholars to develop his thesis more systematically (and more soberly). David Walsh, for instance, has written an important doctoral dissertation entitled The Esoteric Origins of Modern Ideological Thought: Boehme and Hegel (1978), in which he makes strong claims about Hegel’s indebtedness to Boehme. Gerald Hanratty has also published an extensive two-part essay, entitled “Hegel and the Gnostic Tradition” (1984-87).

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