By Giandomenico Casalino
The one who is about to read this piece must not be afraid of having to face a “burdensome” and ponderous essay, which would in any case suit the very high theoretical level and wisdom of Hegel’s Logic. As I implicitly believe that at least a basic knowledge of Hegel’s Science of Logic (and specifically the major one …) is more than necessary, I intend to highlight here, as succinctly as possible, what I believe to be its archaic esoteric nature[1] since, in the same way in which Plato in The Sophist (248e-249a) affirms the ontological determinations, The Science of Logic is highly symbolic of the living Reality of Being in its universality.
These reflections of mine are, essentially, the fruit of a profound intuition that has pervaded and invaded me, ever since I for almost twenty years ago started the systematic study of the Swabian philosopher; and, being accompanied by that initial vision, as a “key” to reading the Hegelian Logos, I have had the joy of contemplating, according to my personal equation, its immense spiritual vastness as well as its powerful mutating capacity as it opens the secluded and sometimes hidden nature of the soul…
In all of Hegel’s Logos there is a reality of disarming simplicity which “his” Logic expresses and manifests in an all-encompassing way: this is the phenomenological transposition into writing of what happens, precisely as an event, always and forever, in the World as Cosmos in its holistic dimension which is to say in its complex and multidimensional Truth. In fact, if one in terms of the multidimensionality of Being thinks of what manifestly is; living man as thinking microcosm, one is amazed by the total coincidence between its nature and what is exposed in The Science of Logic, which is the ancient question of the relationship between Mind and World[2]: This is not so surprising, given that Hegel in his work presents the very movement of Thinking. What, on the other hand, is extraordinary, in the sense that it goes beyond the very limit of “philosophical” discourse in the modern sense, is that the whole Logical Discourse, as “something” universal and archaic, as well as quotidian simple and natural, almost biological, constitutes the very Life breath of Being as Intelligence, Soul, Life and Movement, just as the Divine Plato teaches in the enigmatic passage in The Sophist mentioned above.
Man, like every living being, both animal and vegetable, is born, in fact emerges from and leaves a status of what initially is an indeterminate absence of being as individualization (absence of the principium individuationis) which is the animal maternal womb or the vegetable seed, which both, like the egg, are Symbols of the indistinct which Mythically is the Primordial Androgynous i.e. the “reality” Plato calls khôra which is contradictory in such a way that a “bastard kind of thinking” is necessary in order to define it. From this indeterminate status the Life breath comes out of itself and enters the World while alienating itself, inspires and expires and, as living, already is the Circle, which is the arcane Truth of Logic according to Hegel (which it from now on is good to establish is Cosmic Thinking, i.e., the Nous of Zeus).
And it is a Circle because if the inspiration is the Return to the Center of the Spiral, the expiration is the opposite movement which is the Exit towards the World and therefore its periphery. As established by Ananke as a necessary, eternal and evident movement, Hegel’s idea “is born” abstract and devoid of individualizing determinations, almost a “nothing”, which “later” externalize itself as Nature. The idea is alienated as it becomes other. In just the same way as in the biological event of motherhood the mother is alienated in the newborn child, the Idea is here alienated in Nature which is the World. The idea spreads, spatializes and temporalizes itself as plants, animals, birds, sea, sky, all these as Physis; until the idea finally reaches man, who is the “lowest” point of the Circle, the one who concludes the whole journey of the Idea as Nature, in which the Spirit is dormant as the Soul of the World; From this cosmic “moment” and “place”, which is the “place” of the principium individuationis and the rising of the I, the Spirit opens its eyes. Just like the eye of Ra, the spirit awakens and initiates the Ascension which is the conquest of the consciousness of being Self, the Knowledge of being I, of being the Light of Thinking which, as such, initiates (namely as initiation …!) the ascending path along the other half of the Circle which is the Return (the inspiration) towards the Center, the Beginning, the Mother, or the Place of Birth, now however as a Knowing Being.
The perfect movement, as the Greeks knew, can only be circular and is that of the Spiral of Stephanos, which I have already discussed elsewhere[3]. It is polyvalent and multifunctional, since the Circle is both a Symbol which is Reality and a Reality which is Symbol of the All’s Oneness (Èn to Pàn). Here the All means Everything visible, that is the visible dimension of the Invisible. The Invisible is the Real and True Nature (Essence) of the Cosmos, its Motor or uncaused Cause of movement (as in Aristotelian thinking which, essentially, does nothing but translate into an image, that always splendid passage of Plato already mentioned above). Hegel himself confirms all this in an extremely clear passage from his Science of Logic: “… The whole of science is in itself a Circle, in which the first becomes the last, and the last also becomes the first …”; therefore what is, is in the Optimal and Maximum sense (the reference to the titles of Jupiter Capitolinus [Optimus Maximus] is intentional!) and is, obviously, Invisible to the blind but not to the Spiritual eyes of the seer: this is the deep, archaic, hermetic reason for the mysterious (for modernity …!) Hegelian definition of The Science of Logic and i.e., of Cosmic Thinking: “…These are the thoughts of God before the creation of the World and all its finite beings …” which is to say that The Science of Logic, as the Science of Cosmic Thinking, is the Science of the Invisible and therefore the Science of the Lord of the Universe which is the Intellect immanent in it, in the sense that every living being, to whatever type it belongs, is “his” Intelligence, “his” Soul, therefore Spirit and Life which is Invisible.
With this concise definition, expressed in a deliberately simple religious and creationist lexicon, Hegel reveals to us the greatest of the hermetic Mysteries and reveals its Life, its Soul, its Intelligence, and its movement. He intends to make it clear that his work, his Path (just like that of Dante’s Poem …!) is not a systematic “treatise” concerning a sector or part of philosophical science but is absolute Science or better the “simple” presentation of Thinking to itself. Said in more accessible terms, it is the human dimension of Thinking, where thinkers present, narrate, express the eternal movement of the Self in the cosmic dimension (God): it is as if, absurdly, water could present its modalities of manifestation and therefore the ontological states of its being (liquid, gaseous and crystalline) by extending them to the reality of Water in the cosmic dimension. Thus, Logic in Hegel is the Science of Sciences, given the fact that the Truth is the Whole, which is Thinking. Therefore, Logic is Cosmology[4], Cosmos being the realization of endless projects and i.e., Ideas, in the infinitely small as well as in the infinitely large. And the All is manifestation, presentation, exit by the Self from the Self (as Idea or project), which is the alienation of the One in the Many. This corresponds to the Indo-European wisdom of the Vedas and Hinduism that refers to the concepts of pravrtimarga and nivrtimarga as the breath of Brama[5] (Exit and Return, Expiration and Inspiration) which is the proodòs and epistrofè of Plotinus as well as the ekpýrosis of the Stoics; and it is our daily life as we exhale, i.e. Exit to the World, and as we inhale as Return to the Center, to the Heart where it is the diastolic and systolic movement: the exit is Life, Nature, human history, Love, but without the Return (the systolic which is the Initiation as Return to the Center, to the Heart which is the Ascent of Contemplation or Action…) it is Death, as whoever exhales definitively and irreversibly, loses Life and Thought i.e. the Spirit. From this it is legitimate to deduce that the uninitiated, that is, the one who does not return to the Center of the Self, is already dead when alive…! The movement of Exit and Return is therefore a “moving image of the Eternal” (Plato) whose symbols are therefore the Spiral, the Shell, the Galaxy, the helical form of DNA as the cardiac system of dilation and contraction, which is the hermetic solve and coagula.
All this reverberates in the very life of Thinking, in the human dimension and sphere of this life, since every act, every decision, every project, every word, everything that comes out and radiates and expands from man, from his Spirit, from his Mind and his voice, becomes and is World, is objective Spirit, is Thinking as thought which becomes Civilization, that is, a spatialized and temporalized Idea, which later Returns in the Self, in the Substance which is Thinking that knows itself as such, and in the Ascension initiates itself to the superior Life of the Spirit which Hegel defines thusly: From forms such as representation (Vorstellung) both in aesthetic and religious objectification, Absolute Spirit “later” achieves the overcoming of any objectifying duality in the presentation (Darstellung) of the Self to itself which is the liberation from any religious and therefore dual relegere (relationship) of the I and the Divine, through the initiatory identification (Plotinus’ spoudàios) which is the Knowing of Being the Divine and i.e., the Absolute Idea which is the One, God. Regarding this, Meyrink affirmed that man, to acquire the Knowledge of Being the God, must overcome the spiritual phase of the adoration of the God which is inherent in the duality that exists between the I and the God itself.
This truth further confirms (if it were still needed!) the essential Platonism of the Hegelian Idea, which is movement, Life, Soul, Intelligence and therefore koinonia[6], which is the shared presence of opposites and also the noetic movement of Thinking in Thinking itself, which Plato discloses, somewhat esoterically, in Parmenides (155d-157b)[7] where he speaks about a “movement” in which the One “…changes instantaneously, and when it changes it can be in no time, and at that instant it will be neither in motion nor at rest…”; Plato defines change like this, which is the same concept as in The Sophist, referred to in the passage mentioned earlier which it is now necessary to cite in full: “…By Zeus, shall we let ourselves easily be persuaded that motion and Life and Soul and Intelligence are really not present to Being in its totality, that it neither lives nor thinks, but venerable and holy, devoid of Intelligence, is fixed and immovable?…”; in fact, this opinion appears, in the eyes of Plato himself, so absurd as to be almost blasphemous, a sort of stupid hýbris which it is good to dispel and drive out of the mind in order to free the eye of the Spirit so that it can see “… Being in its totality … “ which is, in other words, Life, Soul, movement and Intelligence. And is not this nature, precisely in the Greek meaning of phýsis, the same as Hegel’s Science of Logic, as Science of the Cosmic Logos as Thinking which is “… Being in its totality… “?
And the movement, the change in this Being manifests itself in the passages, in the modulations of thinking and their determinations, whose dimensions correspond to natural reality (The Doctrine of Being, Essence and Concept, from which it is clear that one knows what one is and one is what one knows), since “… Thinking and the determinations of thinking are not something extraneous to objects, but rather their essence, that is, things and the thinking of things coincide in and for itself. Thinking, in its immanent determinations and in the true nature of things, are one and the same content …” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic).
This “movement” is therefore not to be understood as, according to the vulgar spirit, the apparent becoming perceived by the senses, which are deceptive, but it is precisely the movement “… of Being in its totality …” which is, as Plato states, movement, Life, Soul and Intelligence, in the same way in which Hegel presents it in The Science of Logic which, being the Science of the universal Logos, is the Science of the Intellect that: “… O Tat, is of God’s very essence, if there is an essence proper to God … the Intellect, however, is not separated off from the essentiality of God, but unfolds from him like the Light of the Sun … where there is Soul, there is also Intellect, just as where there is Life there is also Soul… ”(Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum, XII).
Is it necessary, perhaps, to present other probative arguments on the intrinsic hermetic nature of Hegel’s Knowledge? We believe that the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition, as expression of the Truth of the Indo-European Spirit, whose foundation is the Knowledge of Apollo Phoebus is, Joyfully and Radiantly and therefore with magical power, manifested in the same Circle of Circles which is the Logic of Hegel as Metaphysics. This Logic is an unfolding “forward” which is also a rewinding “backward”, where there is no longer neither “future” nor “past”. What remembers Being, in that which, we in ignorance would call the “end” of the Way, has always been the same since what we, still in ignorance, would call “beginning” as there is neither Beginning nor End nor least of all a Way. Even if these moments pedagogically are exposed historically, they are not real: there is “only” the One who has always and forever been the All. Beyond time and space, this is the Eternal in the Platonic Instant, which in the same manner is indicated in Hegel’s Via Secca [Dry Path] which is The Science of Logic as initiatory ascension to Knowledge that is Being.
Translated from https://www.ereticamente.net/2018/06/la-scienza-della-logica-di-hegel-summa-ermetica-giandomenico-casalino.html
[1] G.A. MAGEE, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University 2001, G. CASALINO, Hegel, Evola e la conoscenza del Divino. Studi sulla Teosofia platonico-ermetica, Genova 2018, pp. 49 ff.
[2] J. MACDOWELL, Mente e mondo, Torino 1999.
[3] G. CASALINO, La conoscenza suprema. Essere la concretezza luminosa dell’Idea, Genova 2012, pp. 66 ff..
[4] G. CASALINO, La conoscenza suprema, cit., pp. 22 ff..
[5] G. CASALINO, Il nome segreto di Roma. Metafisica della Romanità, Roma 2013, pp. 187 ff.
[6] F. PIZZUTI, Cosa è un’Idea? L’intelligibile nell’ultimo Platone, Roma 2015, pp. 84 ff..
[7] G. CASALINO, Sul fondamento. Pensare l’Assoluto come Risultato, Genova 2014, pp. 66 ff.
