The hermetic tradition

1. Introduction

 

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of visiting a museum in Amsterdam dedicated to hermetic philosophy. It is called the Embassy of the Free Mind:

https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/

The history of the hermetic tradition is clearly an intellectually respectable activity. Indeed, the Universiteit van Amsterdam has a centre dedicated to it:

https://www.amsterdamhermetica.nl/

But what about the tradition itself? What should we make of claims made within hermetic philosophy ("hermetic claims" for short)?

We cannot see hermetic claims as on a par with modern knowledge of the sort that gets tested against evidence. The tradition has an important place in the history of the natural sciences, but its claims would be dismissed in any modern laboratory or scientific journal. The people who made hermetic claims of a scientific or quasi-scientific nature were not foolish, but it has turned out that they were mistaken.

In philosophy, the hermetic tradition again has an important place in history. And its influence reached out beyond the tradition to mainstream philosophy, giving the tradition an enduring role such as it has not had in the sciences. Connections can for example be seen between hermetic thought and the work of two mainstream philosophers whose work is of more than historical significance, Spinoza and Leibniz.

To start with Spinoza, while some distinguished interpreters have regarded him as a mystic, the case is far from proven. (Nadler, "Spinoza and Philo: The Alleged Mysticism in the Ethics", gives references to interpreters who see mysticism and argues that this is a mistake. For a different view see Stooshinoff, "Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart: On the Possible Mysticism in Spinoza's Ethical Theory".) Nonetheless some elements in Spinoza's thought, particularly his unification of God and nature and thoughts associated with that unification, are congenial to the hermetic mindset. It is no surprise to find his portrait displayed in the Embassy of the Free Mind.

Turning to Leibniz, it is pretty clear that he allowed his thought to be influenced by the Kabbalistic tradition (Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah). That tradition was at his time and place well entwined with the hermetic tradition.

Having said that, this is a perpetuation of influence and not a preservation of the content of the hermetic tradition. Analytic philosophers are likely to dismiss any supposedly factual content of hermetic claims either as obviously false if made precise enough to be assessed for truth, or as "not even wrong" if not made that precise. They are also likely to dismiss any suggestion that hermetic claims could be used to support conclusions reached outside the hermetic tradition, even if the hermetic claims inspired those conclusions.

We can however continue to see hermetic claims as providing current inspiration, in addition to any inspirational role they might have had in the past. There are two ways in which inspiration might be provided.

The first way is at a high level. Hermetic claims might make people feel more at ease in the Universe. Take for example the doctrine in the Emerald Tablet that is commonly summarised in the phrase "As above, so below". While it is open to many interpretations, it at least emphasises the tight integration of superior powers with the everyday world. And that could be found reassuring, for example by dispelling any feeling that the everyday world was a mere jumble of atoms acting without purpose or direction. (The text of the Emerald Tablet exists in several variants. For one early version see Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, pages 31-32.)

The work of making people feel more at ease in the universe could however be done by any of a wide range of claims, from a wide range of traditions. So there would be nothing special about the specific claims made.

The second way in which hermetic claims might provide current inspiration is at a lower level. Hermetic claims might be used as triggers of thought. Then the specific claims made might matter quite a lot, with other claims not able to lead one down the same paths of thought even though they could lead one down other and equally interesting paths.

One example of claims that might be important in this way is given by Robert Fludd's claims as to how the mind is structured and how we may reach the sensible, imaginable and intellectual worlds, claims that are set out in the diagram commonly known as "the spiritual brain". Such claims could inspire a good deal of thought about our mental faculties, how they related to one another, and what different types of knowledge we might obtain. (The diagram is in Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, volume 2, tractatus 1, section 1, book 10, page 217 in the original 1619 edition. It is conveniently available in many places, for example in Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds, page 70.)

It can be perfectly rational to allow hermetic philosophy the role of inspiring thought. But are there any roles that could rationally be given to hermetic claims which went beyond the provision of inspiration but which did not go so far as to treat the hermetic claims as factual claims that we would have to regard as mistaken? Could there be thoughts that incorporated some of the distinctive content of hermetic philosophy and that had a useful role in reaching or supporting non-hermetic conclusions about humanity or the world?

2. Distinctive content

 

Distinctive content shall mean content of hermetic claims that is not also supported in ways the epistemic respectability of which could not reasonably be contested. (Such ways would include most of the methods accepted in the natural sciences.)

There is for example no support in such other ways for the claim that there is a fundamental agent of creation and change appropriately referred to as "the good", an understanding of which can make sense of a great deal. This claim is, in various and sometimes less explicit forms, conspicuous in the Corpus Hermeticum (Copenhaver, Hermetica; see for example Corpus Hermeticum part VI, pages 21-23).

Logical positivists would dismiss claims like that as having no content, as not being claims at all, whenever there were no empirical means either to verify or to falsify them. But we shall take them to be genuine claims, and see where we can go.

3. Roles in reaching and supporting non-hermetic conclusions

 

Hermetic claims may have various roles in reaching, and perhaps in supporting, non-hermetic conclusions.

3.1 Psychological inspiration

 

Claims may be psychologically important, in that they may be the most effective prompts to reach conclusions. So long as claims played that role only at stages before we arrived at conclusions that were supposed to set out the actual state of the world, there would be no need to regard the claims as correct, and therefore no danger that support for our conclusions would be undermined by the thought that the claims were or might be mistaken.

Even the virtue epistemologist or the reliabilist could allow this much, so long as there was a point before reaching conclusions at which any influence of hermetic thought was washed out so that support for the conclusions had no dependence on the acceptability of hermetic claims.

Having said that, the condition that influence be washed out would be quite a demanding one if we were to base our measure of support for conclusions on factors of the sort to which reliabilists or virtue epistemologists would accord importance. Even the most staunchly externalist reliabilist would not be happy to allow that making use of doubtful claims could be a reliable route to truth. And both virtue reliabilists and virtue responsibilists would deplore the knowing use of doubtful claims, albeit for reasons which would be related but would need to be characterised differently. The psychological role of hermetic claims would need to be circumscribed in order to avoid such objections.

3.2 Implication from hermetic claims to non-hermetic conclusions

 

It would theoretically be possible for hermetic claims to imply non-hermetic conclusions, at least when combined with some other non-hermetic claims. The implication might be as strong as logical entailment, or it might be some weaker relationship under which the correctness of the claims would make it more likely that the conclusions were correct.

This would be a very direct form of support. And if any reliance were placed on it in accepting a conclusion, it would be important that the hermetic claims were at the very least acceptable.

Having said that, no examples of implication that would be robust enough to be of interest come to mind. This is not surprising. The language of hermetic claims is not well adapted to the derivation of specific empirical conclusions.

3.3 Implication from non-hermetic conclusions to hermetic claims

 

A non-hermetic conclusion might imply certain hermetic claims. If the claims were independently appealing, that could give support to the conclusion in two ways. It would show that the conclusion cohered with the claims. And if the implication could be set out by reference to some mechanism in the world which showed how the correctness of the conclusion would give rise to the correctness of the claims, it would enhance the status of the conclusion by increasing the range of things that it explained. All of this would would be so whether or not the implication was as strong as logical entailment, although stronger forms of implication would be at least as good as weaker forms and probably better.

One example of an implied hermetic claim would be the dissolution and re-assembly parts of the claim that composite beings do not die, but are only dissolved into components which are re-assembled into new beings (Copenhaver, Hermetica, Corpus Hermeticum part XII, section 16, pages 46-47). To modern ears this claim, excluding the denial of death, sounds like an obvious implication of well-established atomic theory. What gives it distinctively hermetic content is its place within a wider discourse about the mind and its relationship to God, much of which is far from having any scientific worth.

Alas, it is unlikely that implications to hermetic claims could reliably lend support to non-hermetic conclusions. Hermetic claims are, in respect of their distinctively hermetic content, only likely to be independently appealing if one is already immersed in hermetic thought. There is nothing to draw in the uninterested, who can ignore hermetic thought without any intellectual discomfort or even an unrecognised failure of rationality. For the uninterested, implications to hermetic claims will be of no use as a source of support for non-hermetic conclusions because they will be implications to claims which are not independently appealing.

We should perhaps be glad of this. Suppose that a non-hermetic conclusion did imply some hermetic claim. If that claim were unacceptable, the conclusion would have to be discarded if the implication were a logical one. The conclusion would also be placed at risk if the implication were of some weaker form. But if it is legitimate simply to disregard hermetic thought, taking the view that whatever a hermetic claim may appear to say, it does not really say anything hermetic about the world, such risks would not arise. This move could be made because if hermetic thought were disregarded, the hermetic content of claims would evaporate. Only any non-hermetic content would be left, and that could be handled like any other implication of a non-hermetic conclusion.

3.4 Psychological satisfaction

 

If some hermetic claims were at least appealing, and they fitted together with some non-hermetic conclusion, one might favour both the hermetic claims and the non-hermetic conclusion on the ground of goodness of fit. We have in mind not a defined measure of coherence, but a general feeling of fit.

(For examples of defined measures of coherence see BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, section 5.3; Douven and Meijs, "Measuring Coherence".)

Such fitting together would not provide support in the sense that thinking some propositions to be true may give reason to regard other propositions as true. Rather, connections between hermetic claims and non-hermetic conclusions would go through a human feeling of things making sense which, by virtue of being at a psychological level and the conditions for its arising being dependent on the psychological nature of human beings, would not be probative at the level of the world, truths about which (aside from psychological truths) should have no dependence on human psychology.

To take an example that illustrates the limits of what might be achieved, there are hermetic claims which have been linked to broad-brush versions of conclusions in quantum mechanics. (See for example Powell, "Entangled Minds: How Quantum Theory Echoes Hermetic Thought", an example which also makes connections with chaos theory).

The conclusions of quantum mechanics do not derive any support from hermetic claims, nor do they need any such support. And the hermetic claims do not derive any support from apparently supporting quantum mechanics, since they do not in fact do so in any form of support that would have scientific respectability. Nor are the hermetic claims shown by quantum mechanics to be correct. They are at most shown to be ones that should be accepted, and even that is only achieved if one also accepts that the hermetic way of thinking about the world is appropriate.

While support would not normally be on offer, psychological satisfaction in accepting hermetic claims could be derived from finding a fit between claims and some non-hermetic conclusions. That would suffice to support a positive attitude to the hermetic claims, a willingness to make them parts of one's mental furniture.

To complete the picture, we need to fill out the idea of claims being parts of one's mental furniture. We must not limit it to the acceptance of the claims as factual, because there are many hermetic claims that could not be so regarded, or not with sufficient confidence. But if it were merely the idle entertainment of claims that were never put to work, the claims would have only a trivial role.

Fortunately, there is a third possibility. People can have claims in mind and can use them freely as ways of looking at the world or as analogies. Such things do not explain scientific facts, but they can help to make scientific facts intelligible. It is common for those who explain complicated things to non-experts to say "Try looking at it like this", or to use analogies. Everybody knows that such moves are imperfect, and that if they were taken too far they would lead to the attribution to reality of properties which it did not actually have. But the method is harmless so long as its limits are understood. And it is distinct from the method known as lies to children, in which it is asserted that reality actually does have some simplified form, although that too can be harmless so long as clear warning is given to the students.

4. Humanistic discovery

 

4.1 The nature of the discovery

 

There is something in between psychological satisfaction and learning about the world. This is learning about the human condition in a humanistic rather than a scientific way. What we may say in this area would make sense to other human beings, but there would be no expectation that it would make sense to, for example, a Martian scientist who knew all about our neurons but who had never experienced human life from the inside. What we said would be perspectival. It would not amount to objective facts. And when someone said something on these lines and got the response "Yes, that is how we are", the response would include an element of "That resonates with me" as well as an element of "We agree on the facts".

In this area both classical and Renaissance hermetic thought are likely to fall short of doing much for the modern reader. They are more concerned with the supposed origin and nature of the world at large than with the human condition. One might get round this obstacle by reading what they said about the cosmos as really being about the inner workings of the human psyche, but that would be an ambitious interpretive step.

We can however see a good deal of the sort of thing we have in mind in poetry from several traditions. One leading example is the metaphysical poets of seventeenth century England. And it makes sense to discuss poetic claims alongside hermetic claims. Like hermetic claims, poetic claims can be inspirational both at the level of general attitude and at the level of specific ideas. They can give psychological satisfaction. And they can convey thoughts which we cannot regard as scientific knowledge but which are significant enough to join the furniture of our minds.

(We use "poetic claims" in the same way as we have used "hermetic claims", with a focus on the distinctively poetic content, content that would evaporate if the messages were put into dull prose. And as indicated, we are willing to take poetry from any tradition. There is a twentieth century Italian tradition known as hermetic poetry, but the ways in which it draws on the hermetic tradition do not give us reason to focus on it in particular.)

4.2 Knowledge

 

Might acceptance of some poetic claim about the human condition amount to knowledge? We would need to establish both that there was some well-defined content, and that the subject had or could have had good grounds for believing in the correctness of the content.

4.2.1 Content

 

When we supply information to another human being, we leave out a great deal. If someone asks us the way to the railway station, we may point out the initial direction and ask him or her to take the first turning on the left then the second turning on the right. We do not explain how to recognise a side road, the difference between left and right, or how to decide whether a building in view is the railway station. All that is background understanding which is taken for granted. Likewise, when a chemist describes some novel reaction in a scientific paper, background knowledge of how atoms behave is omitted unless the behaviour is unusual in some relevant way. The author can rely on the expertise of the likely readers of the paper.

How far could something similar be extended to the sort of understanding of the human condition that might be gained by contemplating some poetic claim? The argument would be that our experience of human life filled in enough for the claim to set out something contentful.

The evidence that something contentful was conveyed would be that when someone put forward a poetic claim, the response could easily go beyond "Yes, that is how we are". It could include some development of what had been said, or some qualification of it, or the making of explicit connections with other poetic or non-poetic claims. And the person who first offered the claim could likewise respond to what the second person said. In that way, what the claim conveyed could have a place in a coherent dialogue rather than standing in isolation.

If poetic claims could be placed in dialogues, that would indicate that they had content. We may compare the Frege-Geach problem, in which the ability to use ethical claims in arguments is seen as reason to regard them as having content. The actual content would then be disclosed by a combination of the ordinary meanings of the words used, the things that were said in the claims, and how the claims related to one another and to additional poetic and non-poetic claims.

There would often be some uncertainty about the precise content. What for example should we regard as the content of John Donne's line "No man is an island" (in the poem of that name), or of Goethe's "Im Anfang war die Tat!" (Faust, part 1, line 1237)? Such uncertainty could however be reduced, if never eliminated, partly by continuing a dialogue that remained centred on the poetic claim and partly by going round and round a hermeneutic circle between on the one hand the totality of the poetic tradition and its historical context, and on the other hand what was claimed on a particular occasion.

4.2.2 Grounds for belief

 

The existence of extensive dialogues in which claims fitted together could establish content, but it is very doubtful whether it would give sufficient grounds to believe in the correctness of any of the claims. As opponents of coherentist approaches to truth or knowledge like to point out, it is perfectly possible for all or some of a large and coherent set of propositions to be mistaken together. The prospect of this happening decreases as the amount of contact between members of the set and empirical observation increases, but it does not go away.

Contact between poetic claims and the empirically observed world might be wide in scope, in that the claims could be read as being about all sorts of things, but it would not be at all forceful. In the natural sciences, observations rule. They have the power to demolish theories, because the theories have specific empirical implications. Observations and their interpretation may be to some degree theory-laden, but this does not stop them having very blunt encounters with theories. By contrast, poetic (and hermetic) claims are not nearly so exposed to the risk of falsification by observation. They do not have precise and unambiguous empirical implications. So while the breadth of their scope of contact with empirical observation might help a bit, the lack of force in the contacts would mean that little would be done to reduce the risk of poetic claims forming a coherent but mistaken set. (The same would be true of hermetic claims, and for the same reason.) Coherence would therefore not be worth much as a ground for belief. We would need to look for some other way to justify poetic (or hermetic) claims.

If a claim merely resonated with us, that would not provide sufficient justification to support an attribution of knowledge. Human mindsets are too flexible to provide testing grounds for claims. Indeed, a claim that happens to be in some way appealing may encourage someone to change his or her mindset so that the claim can resonate without conflict.

If however a claim were found to be useful in living, causing us to notice things that we would otherwise not have noticed and to make wise choices when foolish choices had been available, that could help. It could do so because our own lives and our interactions with other people and with the world are only likely to be successful if we get some things right.

Having said that, support given in this way would only suffice to sustain attributions of knowledge if the claims were read in a non-realist way, as claims that it was appropriate to make. If claims were read in a realist way, as saying that the human condition or the world actually was as described in the claims, with nouns in the claims having actual referents which were indeed of the nature indicated by the claims, better support than one could expect to obtain from claims being useful would be needed in order to sustain attributions of knowledge.

The reason is that the usefulness of claims requires only success in understanding oneself at a level which may give rise to effectiveness or contentment, or success in interactions with people and with the world in the narrow field of practical life. That may be good enough to reach a view that it is useful to make the claims, although even then, reliance on usefulness to justify the attribution of knowledge would require a fairly weak reading of "useful", and a correspondingly weak sense of non-realist correctness. It would not have been established that the claims would be useful in the full range of potential interactions with people and with the world, including interactions with which human beings would not normally bother. And it would certainly not suffice to sustain attributions of knowledge on realist readings of the claims. Such attributions would require the actual conduct of all sorts of test which went well beyond the practical concerns of human beings in understanding themselves and in interacting with other people and with the world.

There is another possibility, in which one would not find oneself left with support for a claim to knowledge that was limited to a non-realist reading of the claims known. This additional possibility would arise when claims provided a perspective on humanity or on the world, a Weltanschauung, rather than providing a set of purported facts. If the claims were supported by the usefulness of the perspective in making sense of oneself and in interacting with other people and with the world, that would be ample support for the claims, at least so long as one accepted that it was not established that the perspective would be useful across a wider area than practical concerns with how to live. (There would for example be no support from usefulness in life for the idea that the perspective would be useful in doing physics.) However, neither the claims nor the perspective would be a source of specific propositions that could be regarded as known.

5. References

 

BonJour, Laurence. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1985.

Copenhaver, Brian P. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Coudert, Allison P. Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1995.

Donne, John. No man is an Island. Poem, widely reproduced.

Douven, Igor, and Wouter Meijs. "Measuring Coherence". Synthese, volume 156, number 3, 2007, pages 405-425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9131-z

Fludd, Robert. Utriusque Cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, volume 2. Oppenheim, Johann Theodor de Bry, 1619.

Godwin, Joscelyn. Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds. London, Thames and Hudson, 1979.

Goethe, Johann Wilhelm von. Faust. Verse play, many editions.

Nadler, Steven. "Spinoza and Philo: The Alleged Mysticism in the Ethics". Chapter 9 of Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (eds.), Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Powell, Jordon. "Entangled Minds: How Quantum Theory Echoes Hermetic Thought". Blog post, 25 January 2024. https://hermeticchaos.com/entangled-minds-how-quantum-theory-echoes-hermetic-thought

Principe, Lawrence M. The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Stooshinoff, Alexander J. "Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart: On the Possible Mysticism in Spinoza's Ethical Theory". Episteme, volume 29, article 1, 2018, pages 7-20.https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/episteme/vol29/iss1/1/