Hegel’s Perspective — Circularity and Consummation of Knowledge as Archaic-Hermetic Thought
By Giandomenico Casalino
“Philosophy is the esoteric consideration of God.”
(G.F.W. Hegel, Encyclopedia)
“From our point of view spirit has for its presupposition Nature, of which it is the truth, and for that reason its absolute prius. In this its truth Nature vanishes, and spirit results as the Idea reaches its being for itself; whose object and subject are joined together in the concept.
This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect externalized objectivity, this self-externalization has now been overcome and made one and the same with itself.
The concept is such an identity only insofar as it has returned in itself from nature”.
(G.F.W. Hegel, Encyclopedia)
Preface
Some considerations about the reasons for the short study that follows are necessary.
When we a moment had the opportunity or, better, we were “led” to view Hegel’s thought with new eyes, his principal way of speaking the world, we felt the serene and enthusiastic (έν θεῶ [én theó]) certainty that this thought, this phenomenology of being, this unitary, total and at the same time multifarious thinking, always has been our own thought!
In a word: we read and meditated on our own innermost essence…
This discourse is not and must not be something “personal”.
Instead, it is an objective spiritual fact, precisely because it deals with essential philosophical speech, which goes beyond the simple (and “technical”) appeal to traditional philosophical categories, having, in fact, as its object the inescapable fundamental question (fundamental in the sense not only as relating to the “fundament” but as being itself the very fundament…) which has always been, in every moment and from the rise of spirit from consciousness, about the Whole and “what it is”, in other words its reason (αρχή [arché]).
In the circular logos of Hegelian speculative thought (speculative from speculum, that is, a thought that, reflecting itself in φύσις [physis], sees itself as an absolute foundation, sees multiplicity as the non-being of being and (re)cognizes itself as Idea) the Whole finds its reason, in the sense that the Whole is the reason of itself, and the discourse (logos…) is finite, in its consummate infinity…!
And, therefore, nothing else needs to be said!
This is the meaning we have tried to transfer to these pages, meaning in a, for us, extremely certain sense, as Hegel’s (filo)sofia, which we immediately saw was the same truth as the one found in the archaic-religious thought of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations; symbolic, esoteric thought, because it recognizes itself in and expresses itself through semantemes (the Lord of Delphi… semànei…), the symbolic essence of the world; which was the “object” of knowledge on the part of the ancient divine royalty of the Indo-European Tradition and their highly refined… speculative theologies.
Therefore, the ultimate reason for our writing is to provoke in the consciousness of the addressee, that is, those who are able to hear “our” speech, a rising awareness of the existence of something that has always existed: it is to provoke the radical impossibility of not hearing (and thematizing…) the “discourse”; in a word, the rise of speculative thought that recognizes itself to be the Whole, that is, the Absolute that knows itself, where “subject” is not first and “object” is not second, where neither “first” nor “second” ever existed, where from eternity and for eternity there is (only) Idea, in its objective concreteness (the concept).
Giandomenico Casalino
Philosophy is a thinking consideration of objects.
(G.F.W. Hegel, Encyclopedia)
1.
Knowledge can only be expressed through and in a system, where with system we mean an organically unitary, complex and scientifically prosaic discourse (logos). Unitary knowledge expresses itself, indeed it is the logical and therefore ontological articulation of its phases as reasons for its very existence in movement, as Subject in life.
2.
This knowledge is unitary since its foundation resides in the (Parmenidean-Platonic) identity of logic (thought) and ontology (being), therefore in the similarity of soul (in man) with soul (in things) and with soul (of and in the world), and this is archaic thought… which guarantees epistemological certainty and gnoseological truth; since its foundation is unity as the identity of the Same.
3.
This implies that Truth is the whole and that the whole is identity of identity and non-identity. Truth, which is the whole, that is, the Absolute and therefore Idea, is all the realities of the closed Athanor, as every one of them in that “moment” of wholeness but not as reality in any one “moment” since the Athanor (the whole) is the Truth. It is the Beginning which coincides and is realized (as Idea) in the Goal which is the end of all the Astrological, Numinous and Metallic realities that are [in] the Athanor, and conceived not as “this” or “that” in chronological time but conceived in a logical sense in the instant (εξάιφνης [exàiphnes]) [Parmenides, 155d-157b]: it is Truth which moves in the contradiction of itself, that is, in a dialectic that is outside of time.
4.
Radical extraneousness to any humanism and any subjectivism: the subject does not exist but the Subject which is Absolute and Whole. To say that the Absolute is Subject (and not Substance as in Spinoza) means recognizing the absence of staticity and thus the presence of the living movement in the Whole, which is the movement of the Whole, where the “thing” (Nature, Spirit and History) is the actual reality (as petrifaction) of the concept and thus it is Idea, therefore the Whole is Idea.
5.
There is a rational or analytical logic, as a way of seeing and thinking things, which is typical of the historical moment of modernity and its knowledge.
Such is the logic proclaiming that A equals A and that A is different from non-A; This is the so-called Aristotelian logic, which is absolutely not the logic but a logic, of an exoteric, popular and modern level (from the agora). There is another logic (the one of Hegel) which is superior, that is, it is situated on a higher, therefore archaic, and esoteric level.
This is not an abstract logic of identity separation and self-contradiction, but a concrete logic of unity and complexity where the principle of identity and the principle of non-identity together are the Same, that is, the Whole and therefore the True. It must be said, however, that this is not the intuition of the indistinct (the intellectual intuition rejected by Hegel), that is, of nebulosity, but a different, more complex, and superior rationality. In a word, the goal is not merely to change the state of being, as in the knowledge of Dionysus, but to reach Apollonian wisdom. This rationality distinguishes but does not separate, sees being and its contradiction as negation. It sees night and day, hunger and satiety, health and disease and says (with Heraclitus) that all this is God, as Hegel says it is the Whole, that is, the Truth.
6.
Unity, the reunification of the split is the (unsolved) problem of modernity. Hegel’s worldview, his thought (which can be considered almost a hermetic philosophy if re-proposed in modernity) is aware of the separation, of the fracture (state and society, individual and community, faith and knowledge, morality and law…). The archaic and premodern nature of this worldview, which therefore is anti-modern even though it is embedded in modernity (almost anticipating the intuitions of the German conservative revolution which developed in the first half of the twentieth century, thus not positioning itself in reactionary intellectual attitudes) manifests itself precisely in the search for what is but no longer is experienced: the complex and contradictory reality of the Whole, that is, of the One which is All.
Here the truth is not an abstract fracture but the real and concrete negation which is “sublated” in a complex and articulated nature (both cosmic and human). Indeed, Hegel shows the characteristic Indo-European (Greek, Roman, Germanic) forma mentis which both in the macro (the Universe, Nature) and in the micro (the Political Order) does nothing but PHENOMENOLOGICALLY (as Hegel sees and thinks…) let be what is: the articulation of Forces and Powers (heat and cold, dry and humid, night and day, the Senate–the few and the People–the many, the Sacredness of the Res Publica and the Sacred primacy of magistrates, the Auctoritas (of the Senate) and the Majestas (of the People) which are based on the Pax Deorum and therefore based on the Divine but which are distinct and autonomous (in the etymological meaning of the term) from it since they choose, decide and act freely as is typical of the Ascesis of Action in the race of the Indo-European spirit.
Neither in Indo-European culture nor in Hegel’s political philosophy can there be an abstract and unilateral Eastern theocracy where the will of the All or the enclosed presence of the Spirit, in a logic of singularity, understood as individuality, are conceived as situated completely in a Sovereign as Imago Dei on earth, where everything around him thus is abstractly negated because all the other contradictory realities (Assembly of Elders, People, intermediate Hierarchies) are crushed.
Such was the involutionary process which led post-medieval Europe from feudal hierarchical structures to the monarchical absolutism typical of modernity which is the father of bourgeois ideology. Unity can, indeed, be Eckhartian-Vedantian (where the law “All is One” which is also found in Spinozian acosmism, is the spirituality of the East, whose aim is liberation from the World, by reaching the Zero-Nothingness which in Zen is the Void which is at the opposite extreme of Plotinus’ One and its concretizing logic), where the World is God in the sense that the All melts into a Divinity from which there is nothing outside; or the law is “The One is All”, where there is no liberation from the world but freedom (libertas) to ACT in the world, and there is no Void but Fullness, and this unity is Indo-European, classical, Greco-Roman and, therefore, Hegelian.
Here the unity, the True, the Whole, is not the Divinity that absorbs and negates the World, but it is the World, the Universe, which phenomenologically is Spirit, Nature and Idea, that is, Divinity. Concretely, the Divine is in the vicissitudes of men, in their society, in their Law, in the Ethos which is the virile Order (State), as dialectical “moments” of life itself which is sacred history and therefore philosophical history of the world of men; as the Res Publica of the Romans is the irruption of the Sacred into History, the Res Publica therefore also sacralizes history. This is the beginning of the dialectical and circular movement of Romanity itself, where the Beginning coincidingly Is the Goal which is the end (as we have affirmed in our book The Secret Name of Rome. Metaphysics of Romanity [Il nome segreto di Roma. Metafisica della romanità, Roma, 2003]).
7.
Hegel’s philosophy is the phenomenology (Kojève) of the result, of the outcome of the process which is the Thing (and is in the Thing …).
It is to see Being as it is, as result, when in the “moment” of affirmation-negation of other “moments” which “were” other results, for an instant opens a breach to eternity as the thinking of all results (of the Result of the results — of the Circle of circles… [the Absolute].
8.
Thinking the process, without thinking the outcome, is to think time, which means thinking movement, that is, the process which is the concept of time, and this is the Eternal, since the change in the moment where it is “object” of thinking no longer is; Everything is immutable and fixed in the concept (Eternity) of the movement. Now the Eternal is (the concept of) time which measures (is) the changes of the Living, of the Subject. The concept is the Result, which has made all the “moments” of the process its own so that they never existed.
If thought, therefore, thinks Being only as result, it (the result) is the outcome of the same changes, as thought extracted from nature and enclosed in the concept (which is why Hegel explicitly states that Nature is not divine, but the Idea of Nature is).
Therefore, when the dialectic is thought for what it is, in its concept, it is no longer there, it is situated outside of time and in that “place” where contradictory “moments” in the process disappears; however, when the spirit thinks the “moments” as such, that is, empirically, it falls back into time and therefore into change.
The Platonic language expresses the same truth as this discourse: becoming is only if, paradoxically, thought does not think it, but if and in the moment (exàiphnes) in which thought thinks it and, therefore, knows Being, this becoming (time is the moving image of eternity [Timaeus, 37d]) does not exist (anymore), there is only the Idea of the Living One, the Result of results, the Hegelian Absolute…
9.
The traditional concept evoked several times in our writings, of Immanent Transcendence is the theme, the foundation of the Hegelian identification of Logic and Metaphysics, indeed, as one says in technical terms, of the absorption of the latter into the first.
What does all this mean? The only meaning is that of which Heidegger speaks when he makes the physical nature of Aristotelian “metaphysics” explicit; that is, it is the same as saying that physics is theology, the fundamental principle of Hermetic Philosophy. Here the “other” is not alien to the world, to being, to the Idea, but it is within all this and therefore in the Logic which, having ontology as its object, is the science of Being and therefore of God. Logic is consequently theology; but it is also philosophical “history” of the world (of the Spirit).
The fundamental idea is that “transcendence” while being “other” is not the “supernatural” in the miraculous and we would say blasphemous sense which desecrates nature by thus abandoning and reducing it to a “playground” of the sensational and the alien, but it is a different sense of transcendence which, in hermetic and therefore classical (Greek-Roman) terms, is nature which fascinates nature, nature which illuminates nature, that is to say natura naturans and natura naturata which are not two separate “realities” but dialectically opposed and necessary “moments” of the circle that closes in on itself like the hermetic serpent Uroboros which at the same time, in Hegel, is the life of the Whole.
Nothing is foreign to logic since it is based on the identification of Thought and Being, in the sense that Thought is Being and Being is Thought itself; the object of logic being nothing else but thinking what is beyond thought itself!
Aristotle says that Logic is based on an unhypothesized first Principle and therefore on Metaphysics (as we post-Aristotelians call it). This is the antecedency of the noetic to the dianoetic.
To say this truth is the same as to speak of the doctrine of a “double logic”. In fact, what we have defined as “modern” logic and which is based not on the axiomatic (unhypothesized) Principle of the One which is above being and non-being, but on identity and non-contradiction, that is, Aristotle’s Logic, is nothing else but what Hegel defines as logic of the “intellect”; while the first, the one that founds the Platonic-Plotinian discourse, is the same Logic as Hegel’s which he defines as a Logic of Reason, that is, of the Whole. The second is the (modern) Logic of ontology, that is, of distinct and separate beings, in contradiction with each other, which negate each other and exclude each other, and therefore it is abstract and untrue (Heidegger develops this discourse critically confronting the ontotheology that has forgotten Being…), while the first, as we have said, is the archaic one, which coincides with true metaphysics and is the logic of Being, understood in the Porphyrian sense as non-being [non-entical] and therefore as the One who is above beings [entities] (επέκεινα της ουσίας [epékeina tes ousías]); the One is neither being nor non-being but, as immanently transcendent and transcendentally immanent, It is the Whole, the Absolute. The One is that which is and is not, It is day and night, It is hunger and satiety, It is health and disease, It is the “thing” and its other, where the thing is the world and its other is divinity; the One is here and it is the world. Therefore the “absorption” of metaphysics into Logic is equivalent to, it is the discourse of the philosophy of the One, of the Truth which is the Whole.
10.
If the Platonic dialectic is similar to the Hegelian dialectic and if the discursive-ontological or ontotheological moment in Plato is the first, the beginning, the immediate, and the second “moment” is the mediated, the end, that is, the intuition, the exáiphnes; in Hegel the “first” moment is called discursive-intellectual (with distinct and contradicting beings, therefore defined as ontological…) while the second is speculative Reason which, based on the discourse of the Intellect and its overcoming, knows and recognizes itself in the Whole, that is, in the One.
The task of philosophy for Hegel (and there is no doubt about this) is to think what is beyond thought, if we with thought here mean the ontotheological and dualistic Aristotelian and therefore “modern” metaphysics which can only conceive what it does not know intellectually as “beyond”. As already Plato knew: Thinking and Being are the same, that is, the Soul of things, beings, and world, is the same in everything; also in man, and that knowing a being means knowing it as soul, in itself and for itself (καθ’αυτήν). To see oneself in the soul of things and thereby knowing the world means knowing oneself (This concept, in the context of Phaedo, is beautifully expressed by Giorgio Colli in Nature loves to hide… [La natura ama nascondersi]).
11.
Hegel’s thought is situated in the line of the Platonic-Plotinian tradition of rational mysticism, of the speculative knowledge which expresses the essence of Indo-European spirituality; in which the religion of thought is a contradictory reality and therefore true, given the fact that Hegel’s perspective is that of a Proclus or a Plotinus. Indeed, in this discourse “the other” cannot fail to be thought because if it is, if it coincides with being (in the sense that even if it is the non-being of a being, it always is something…) then it coincides with thought.
Western-Hegelian spirituality avoids the longing impetus, the inspiration towards the Transcendent which derives from sacerdotal (feminine-Motherly) as well as Christian Dionysian (equally feminine-loving…) attitudes by anchoring it to a lucid and firm (Apollonian) rationality.
It is like anchoring oneself to the top of a rock with a very strong rope, and then launching one’s whole nature, one’s entire being towards the High (which is the Other…) while holding on to the rock. In conflict and strife this link is never severed, indeed this is absolutely not possible and has never happened even when someone has thought of cutting the rope or ignored its existence. That is, nothing can ever happen, and nothing has ever happened which no one knows that could ever happen, since this image, the circle, is the whole reality of the Spirit, forever.
This is the reason why Logic in Hegel is thinking everything that is beyond and outside of thought; thus, negating the existence of different realities outside of thought, realities existing instead according to the naive empiricist vision which cannot at all imagine the Hegelian logic, that nothing is outside of thought if thought and being are the same.
12.
In the closed Athanòr which is the Whole, that is, the Truth, the time of the beings and their dialectical succession happens, becomes, but the dialectic i.e., the contradictions and negations amongst these beings (worlds, eras, metals, states of consciousness and civilizations…) are outside of time in the sense that the movement is the Whole, that is, the closed Athanòr, in a word the κόσμος [kosmos] of the Greeks which is Eternal.
In Hegel’s thought, which has always coincided with our view of the world, the logos of the whole can be expressed in the concept of the seed from which all the “moments” that negate each other realize the tree. Everything is in the seed: from fruits to branches, from the scent of flowers to the colors of leaves, from what is born to what falls according to the rhythms of time, in the time of the tree as well as in the time of the universe. Here the end (which is the Goal) coincides with, is everything in the beginning, and therefore it is in the subject, the Whole, it is Idea, indeed it is the pure Idea which is the Divine Thought “before” any time and before the “creation” of the world.
Now the Eternal, that is, the True, which is the Truth, lives and is realized concretely in time and thus in its entire dialectical development but its cyclicality is the instant (exáiphnes) outside of time.
Appendix
Knowability of the One and Apophatic Theology
A.
If what we have defined as Hegel’s “perspective” is situated in the line of the Platonic tradition and if a central element of this latter tradition is the doctrine of the unhypothesized First Principle, therefore of the One and its “affirmation” by negation, the One is, as effect, unknowable, since It is above science and the intellect. But if the One is unknowable, how can this be reconciled with the very essence of the Hegelian vision which is based on the unity of knowledge and the phenomenological non-existence of the “other”, that is, of what is OUTSIDE of thought?
And if this (Platonic-Neoplatonic) discourse extends from the strictly gnoseological to the theological sphere and reaches the semantic field of apophatic (negative) theology, the “problem” then appears even more insurmountable, indeed it shows precisely the characteristics of an aporia. In fact, the apophatic logos is based on negations, the Divinity is not “this” or “that”, i.e., nothing can be predicated about It, therefore if It “is not”, then it is unknowable, since knowing means (indeed is) (re)cognizing that the nature of Thought and Being is the Same. If, therefore, the (re)cognizability of the Same (Thought–Being) is not realized in apophatic theology, then it raises before the “discourse”, indeed in the discourse of the Platonic Tradition a further aporia relating to the logical impossibility of preserving in the same logos both the very foundation of the latter, that is, the natural identity of Thought (νοῦς [nous]) and Being, and the context in which this foundation is situated: the same apophatic theology which, at present, appears to exclude it…
B.
This aporia, since it is one and the same, exists only if, as a spiritual attitude, one has lost the Hellenic serenity, the confident Greek awareness of man’s intellectual capacity to unite himself with φύσις [physis], of the joyful comradeship of Gods and men, who while being distant and different, can, as far as possible become more and more similar (ομόιωσις θεῶ [omóiosis theó]); thus, if one has lost the original absence of dualistic feeling in the world.
If and in so far as one instead remains in the authentic Platonic tradition, where Hegel himself is located, the apparent aporia is immediately dissolved, indeed we note that in this tradition it never existed…
Indeed, if what was said above was true, that there are aporias in the Hegelian discourse opposed to the Platonic discourse, also the latter venerable discourse would contain aporias with no way out. So evidently it is not and cannot be true, for the simple reason that Plato himself (He remains the main road…) begins and establishes the discourse of knowledge while defining the Good-One: επέκεινα τῆς ουσίας [epékeina tes ousías] = above being, while at the same time describing it as: μέγιστον μάθημα [mégiston máthema] = maximum knowledge.
Thus, according to Plato, the nature of the Good, that is, its being above being (indeed, as we will see, precisely its being such…), does not make it incompatible with the knowledge of It, which however takes place and becomes, outside of time, in the exáiphnes (Seventh Letter) of individuating identification (Jacob Boëhme) which for Plotinus is the μόνος πρός μόνον [mónos prós mónon], the Alone with the Alone of which Porphyry gives testimony…
Here the law is Apollonian: I am You! And this is not the annihilating immersion (of the intellect) in the abyss (Eckhardt’s Abgrund) of the Divinity, which is not a Greek but an Orphic-Dionysian-Oriental way. It is the realization of the true I, of its eternal “Idea” because the Divinity (Deitas), the One, is above the Gods (of cataphatic theology), who are not obstacles, but entities descended to the level of human knowledge (which is not equivalent to higher knowledge since it is founded on faith–πίστις [pistis]).
The identification which is authentic knowledge, where there no longer is distance between I and You (subject and object), is the philosophical sublimation (and confirmation) of the identity principle of Thought and Being that first appeared negated by precisely that apparent aporia; and it is realized only and insofar as the apex mentis (Proclus) speculates and thus reflects the Divinity that sees itself, which is to say: the apex mentis sees itself!
Identification-knowledge cannot occur by uniting beings [entities] (the historical-social I and the supreme god) at their own level because they as Many situate themselves in an ontotheological logic (Heidegger). What goes beyond the Many, Hegel specifies, beyond “nature”, while coming from it, is the Spirit. In Platonic-Neoplatonic terms (at least up to Plotinus…) the Spirit is the νόησις [noesis] which is the unity of the νοῦς [nous], the similar joined with the similar, it is the One which (re)cognizes itself as One: he is beyond form but not under form, he is beyond (human) being but not under beings [entities], he is at the opposite extreme of the scale of beings. The Spirit is the unlimited power of Light which reaches even below to its extreme opposite; the abyss of the limited power of darkness…
The aporia has been negated, in Hegelian terms “sublated”, and the Platonic tradition itself and with it and in it Hegel offers the GREEK, Apollonian confirmation that, in spiritual terms and as a method of realizing the true I, apophatic theology does not mean descending below the human while remaining in the human, nor does it mean individualism, father of nihilism, which is a consequence of the atheist monotheism of cataphatic theologies; but it means going beyond the human, into the Spirit. It means that the One founds the multitude of his theophanies which are the Gods, which is to say: Being founds and allows the life of beings [entities] (see Plato’s Parmenides); it means that the One is knowable only on the condition of being what one is because one knows it; It is knowable only on the condition of (re)cognizing the true and authentic nature of the Many in their unification, since the task, the teaching, the goal, i.e., the (phenomenological) Reality, the μέγιστον μάθημα [megiston mathima] is to make and unify One(self). But one can never know the One while remaining in the ontotheological and, in Christianity, creationist dimension as an individual entity (this is what Heidegger’s teaching means…).
Porphyry intuited, in fact, that even in the context of the apophatic logos, even at its maximum power–δύναμις [dýnamis] (Plotinus) the Good-One is always Being, because “επέκεινα [epékeina]…” means “above beings” [entities] and not above Being.
“Absolute knowledge has not in any way as its object something external or given, but only itself…” (G.W. F. Hegel. The Philosophical Propaedeutic).
Hegel, therefore, saves the reality of knowledge and its unity. He is, perhaps, more Greek and more Platonic than many distinguished exponents of the Platonic tradition, especially those from the postplotinian phase.
This is a translation of La prospettiva di Hegel. Circolarità e compiutezza del sapere come pensiero arcaico-ermetico, Libri di Icaro Editore, Lecce 2005.
