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In the aforementioned book, Magee enumerates the following parallels between Hegel and Hermeticism:
1. Hegel holds that God's being involves "creation," the subject matter of his Philosophy of Nature. Nature is a moment of God’s being.
2. Hegel holds that God is in some sense "completed" or actualized through the intellectual activity of mankind: "Philosophy" is the final stage in the actualization of Absolute Spirit. Hegel holds the "circular" conception of God and of the cosmos I referred to earlier, involving God "returning to Himself" and truly becoming God through man.
3. Hegel's philosophy is encyclopedic: he aims to end philosophy, for all intents and purposes, by capturing the whole of reality in a complete, circular speech.
4. Hegel believes that we rise above nature and become masters of our own destiny through the profound gnosis provided by his system.
5. Hegel's Logic is an attempt to know the aspects or "moments" of God as a system of ideas. In a famous passage of the Science of Logic, Hegel states that the Logic "is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as He is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite Spirit" (Miller, 50; WL 1, 33-34).
6. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit represents, in the Hegelian system, an initial stage of purification in which the would-be philosopher is purged of false intellectual standpoints so that he might receive the true doctrine of Absolute Knowing (Logic-Nature-Spirit).
7. Hegel's account of nature rejects the philosophy of mechanism. He upholds what the followers of Bradley would later call a doctrine of "internal relations" as against the typical, modern mechanistic understanding of things in terms of "external relations."
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, August 16, 2006 at 02:19 PM
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