Festugiere on Hermes Trismegistus: The Most Puzzling Book I've Yet Attemtpted to Read

 La révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste: Edition Definitive, by AJ Festugière.

I've read Gravity's Rainbow, Finnegans Wake, everything by Gaddis, Eco in Italian+, Adorno in German, Cervantes in Spanish, Ovid and many others in Latin, and none of them gave me any particular problem.

But I can't even tell you yet what Festugiere's book is, what kind of book it is. Oh, I can tell you one thing for sure, one thing some will no doubt find helpful: it is not not the Corpus Hermeticum, the primary Greek and Latin texts of which were edited by Nock and published with facing-page translations into French by Festugiere. In addition to the volumes by Nock and Festugiere, the Coptic and Armenian parts of the corpus were published by JP Mahe, also with French facing-page translations. I Ramelli also published one very convenient, although large, volume of all of the above except for the Armenian text, with facing-page translation in Italian. Also, all of the above volumes contain thorough introductions and commentaries, in French or Italian as the case is.

Those Greek, Latin, Coptic and Armenian texts are the Corpus Hermeticum, the primary texts of the Hermetic religion or philosophy, however you wish to describe it.

Festugiere's Revelation -- is not that. It's often described as a collection of the primary Hermetic texts, but it isn't. Like Festugiere's and Nock's collection of the primary texts, it was first published in 4 volumes beginning in the 1940's -- but 4 different volumes. It contains many, many excerpts of texts written both before and after the Corpus Hermeticum, texts which, whether in agreement or opposition, inspired Hermeticism and in turn were inspired by it, mostly, but not all, translated into French, and with thorough introductions and commentaries. What is it exactly? Festugiere's description of Hermetic religion? That would be my best guess.

I have not spent much time studying theology, in fact I have spent a good portion of my life avoiding theology. That no doubt accounts for much of my difficulty here.

So why am I not avoiding theology as assiduously as I used to, like a good atheist? Because I have loved so many people to whom these things have been so important, that I cannot ignore them any more. My apologies to Johann Wolfgang von ("-- und leider auch Theologie --") Goethe, who I think would understand.

One of the very last parts of this enormous book, one of the very last appendices, contains a translated text by Proclus under a title saying that finding God is difficult and explaining God is impossible. Maybe I should have a long, good laugh at that, and not try to explain what this book is, besides brilliant.

Another good, long laugh for me personally: Hegel puzzles me profoundly, and recently I've come across the assertion the he was an Hermeticist. 

Buy books by A J Festugiere at Amazon:  https://amzn.to/42b5WNs

Hegel??

"After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough."

That's the first paragraph of an essay I posted here on December 11, 2023. 4 months later, it seems more and more likely that what I understood was a YouTube which purported to be about Hegel. Does that video actually have anything to do with Hegel? I don't know. I don't have any Earthly. I can't even. 

 

What we have here, now as before, is failure to communicate. We're back to where we were before last December. I am not getting the message from Hegel's texts. 

Unless I am. Unless Schopenhauer was right about Hegel's philosophy: that it was pseudo-intellectual gibberish successfully passing itself off as philosophy. But I can't be sure about that anymore. 

It's not that I am afraid to assail the reputation of a celebrated thinker and purported genius. Every word Susan Sontag published or said on a broadcast was pseudo-intellectual garbage, delivered with that smug grin William Gaddis warned us about. Spengler is, im Grunde genommen, pretty silly, and hugely overrated. But at least much more entertaining than Sontag.

It's not that I can't follow philosophers in general. With those up to and including Hegel's most celebrated immediate forerunner Kant, and also with those following him, although I must often read very slowly and repeat certain passages, I don't get this feeling I get with Hegel. Not with Kant himself, not with Heidegger, not with Adorno. Not with the world's most famous Hegelian, Marx. 

Well, as Kierkegaard said -- Kierkegaard, who has often delighted me, often made me shake my head chidingly, but never puzzled me: enten -- eller. Either Hegel has fooled a great number of very smart people, who regard him as a great genius, but not me, or Schopenhauer, or Kierkegaard -- or all of those people have significantly smarter than all three of us, at least in this regard.

I can easily admit it when a single person is clearly more intelligent than I  -- okay, not easily, but I can admit it. When an entire group is outdoing me, it's disturbing. 

It sort of reminds me of the historical Jesus question. I've studied it pretty thoroughly. Most of the people who have studied it pretty thoroughly say that it's pretty obvious that a person named Jesus preached in Galilee and Jerusalem in the 20's, 30's or 40's AD, that he said many of the things in the text we today call the Sermon on the Mount, and that he was crucified on Pilate's orders. 

Well, it's still not obvious at all to me. That light bulb above my head, which is supposed to go on when I see how the evidence all adds up to Jesus having really lived and preached and been crucified by Pilate -- that light bulb is not on, it has not begun to flicker. The Biblical scholars go over the evidence, and to me, they're making the case that it's possible Jesus existed, the case that it's conceivable -- and then they say, so you see, it's really certain that he existed! And I shout wearily: No! I don't see!

I also don't see how I'm not keeping up with what those Biblical scholars are saying. Let's take the example of another famous controversy: were the writers of the New Testament wrong when they said that a virgin birth was prophesied by Isaiah? Yes. They were wrong. Bart Ehrman explained this to me in less than half a minute. To make a short story even shorter: read the entire chapter of Isaiah 7, and as Ehrman said: shame on all of us supposedly brilliant people for not already having read the entire chapter. It's not long. The Hebrew word can mean "virgin," or simply "young women," somewhat like the English term "maiden." Reading Isaiah 7, the entire short chapter, makes it clear that the Greek New Testament authors were mistaking in translating the word as "virgin" instead of simply "young woman."

I had zero trouble keeping up with that. But understanding what is so great about Hegel...

HEGEL!!

After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough.

I'm not bragging. On the contrary: I'm saying that I'm starting to grasp certain ideas which have occupied a great number of people over the past 200 years. Probably millions of people. And almost all of them began to grasp these same ideas decades quicker than I did. Well, better very, very late than never, and who knows what you might achieve if you simply don't give up, etc. 

I am not now going to explain Hegel to you. Of course not. Many others can do that far better, and there's always the drastic step of actually reading a philosopher's work, itself. It's still only been about 2 days since I moved from Schopenhauer's position on Hegel: that he was a simpleton, a charlatan, a pseudo-philosopher passing off the most awful nonsense as genius. I'm not now convinced that Hegel is a genius. I'm being cautious here. For a while I thought Sloterdijk was a genius. What has changed is that I think that now I've gotten a glimpse of why so many others think Hegel is a genius. I'm a take it from there.

If almost everyone thinks that you and Schopenhauer are wrong -- you and Schopenhauer may be wrong. Don't worry, Schopenhauer was still right about many things. 

It's so wonderful to suddenly see that you were wrong about something, and that it actually is as good as all those people have been saying, whether it's someone's music or someone' paintings or someone's philosophy. Suddenly, there's this wonderful thing. Well, it was there all along, right under your nose. But suddenly, you understand that it really is wonderful. 

Perhaps a great deal of the difficulty, for me and and also for Schopenhauer, was very simply that we are solitary natures, and Hegel's emphasis is on interaction, from the interaction of the smallest insect with its environment, to the interaction of entire civilizations, and the interaction of individual humans with each other in between. You and I interact, and we change each other. Previously, philosophers had investigated the way that people and things are. Hegel asks what people and things are becoming, and how this happens. That is the beginning, or one of the beginning premises of Hegel's philosophy, or one of its significant points of departure from Kant's. You and I change each other, and it goes on endlessly from there, and the mind races at the immensity of the possibilities.

I repeat, I'm not the one to explain any of this to you, as it's been just a couple of days since anything Hegel said began to make the slightest bit of sense to me. But don't worry, as one of the handful of most popular philosophers of all time, he's had plenty of people write entire books just about him. And, I repeat, you could, actually. Read. One. Of. His. Books.

Some Writers I Haven't Understood, and Some I Have

It goes without saying that when I think I've understood a writer, I could be completely mistaken.

To begin with, writers I know I haven't understood:

-- In the past few days I gave up on my most recent, and only, serious attempt to understand Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. There was one moment when I was prematurely optimistic: I opened Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte at random and saw that he had a chapter dedicated to the Crusades. Some further skimming revealed statements about the Crusades which actually seemed fact-based, down to Earth and accurate. But when I settled down to read the entire chapter, I discovered that there were only a few lines' worth of this sort of narrative in the entire chapter, embedded in a murky sea of the objective teaching of Christianity and the immense idea of coupling the finite to the infinite and so forth, and I really just can't.

-- Speaking of Kant --

yeah, I don't understand him either. I apologize for having occasionally pretended that I did.

-- Heidegger: whoosh! he goes over my head.

-- Any theologians whatsoever. I still seem to share the New Atheists' problem with theology: theologian says, "God[...]," I respond, "[...]," theologian says, "That's not what I mean when I say 'God," and I've already lost interest. I don't even have the energy to angrily ask, "Well why don't you try saying what you mean when you say 'God'?!" because I despair of getting an answer which isn't even worse.

Writers whom I think I've understood:

-- William Gaddis. The only writer of realistic dialogue known to me. Because apart from literature, most people don't speak in complete sentences which resemble those written in books. And each one of Gaddis' characters is speech-impaired in his or her specific way, which again is realistic, and allows the reader to tell them apart even in a book like JR which is about 98% unattributed dialogue. Even the few characters who are able to speak quite elegantly while sober lose their verbal form, in a quite realistic way, as they get drunk.

Jean-Paul Sartre: I believe I understand: the world, the universe, is devoid of inherent meaning, and so therefore each of our lives is as meaningful as we are able to make it. Communism, with its goal of everyone working for the common good, is more noble than capitalism with its goal of he who dies with the most toys wins.

William H Gass: His prose is pure music, prose poetry. I never found it difficult.

Gertrude Stein: Hers either. Her joy in her experience with language is as pure and beautiful as the joy of a toddler, except that where a toddler toddles around a backyard and is astounded by a pebble, Stein traveled quite a bit, and took joy in her own wide knowledge, experience and vocabulary. Emulating her, writing as well as she did? Excruciatingly difficult, maybe impossible. Reading her? Never anything but joy as pure as a toddler's smile.

More Reading About Hegel

When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's easy to forget that you came there to drain the swamp. Reading various philosophers' opinions about various other philosophers is fun -- for me, it can be a huge amount of fun -- but a couple of days ago, I began to re-approach Hegel, through the filter of the opinions of others, because Hegel set out to change the world, and many people say he did. Marx, the most prominent follower of Hegel, was even more explicit about wanting to change the world, and the most famous follower of Marx, Lenin, who was most certainly a philosopher, reading the entire course of Western philosophy in many languages and writing a huge amount himself of what can only be called philosophy, also led the Russian Revolution.

But how many other philosophers have been political leaders on Lenin's scale? I can't think of any. And whatever you think of Lenin, he was succeeded by Stalin, who is highly thought-of by very few.

Did Lenin really name Stalin to be his successor, or did Stalin falsify the record to make it seem so? (Did Caesar really name Octavian/Augustus as his successor, or did Octavian/Augustus cheat his way into that?)

On pp 382-83 of Subjekt -- Objekt, his book about Hegel, Ernst Bloch says that Lenin wrote, in 1914, that whoever had not thoroughly studied and completely grasped the entire logical system of Hegel, could not thoroughly understand Marx' Kapital and especially the first chapter of Kapital. "Folglich hat nach einem halben Jahrhundert keiner von den Marxisten Marx begriffen." ("It follows that, after half a century, none of the Marxists has understood Marx.")

Yes, I have a copy of Das Kapital, untranslated, right here. Band 23, Volume 23, of the Werke von Marx und Engels, the collected works, published in (East) Berlin in 1977. Das 1. Kapitel, the first chapter, covers pages 49 through 98 in this edition. No, I didn't think I had already thoroughly understood this long first chapter before reading that Ernst Bloch quoted Lenin to the effect that I most assuredly had not as yet.

I can't read everything. And I never really did consider myself a Marxist anyway, even before my first contact with postmodernism made me pretty sure that I'd been a postmodernist for a while, and therefore not a Marxist, since you can't be a postmodernist and a Marxist at the same time, despite Jordan Peterson's dire warnings about supposed throngs of postmodern Marxists swarming over our college campuses in order to destroy out lives and enslave us. Have you ever read the first chapter of Das Kapital, translated or not? It's really quite something. I'm not sure I really want to try to read it again, let alone carefully study all of Hegel just so that I can read that one chapter again with greater comprehension.

I haven't read any Lenin. I hear he's quite good. Haven't read any Trotsky either. My reading comprehension in Russian is not good, but of course, both Lenin and Trotsky are available in translations.

Where was I? Maybe that's the title I should've given to this blog post. Where was I? Who am I? Where did all of these figurative alligators come from? What the Hell am I trying to prove? If I'm trying to prove that I'm even half the reader either Marx or Lenin was, it would be best to just stop right now. They've got me beat, and I don't say that about many people, living or dead.

I'm still enjoying Bloch's book in which he praises Hegel to the skies, and, paradoxically, I still don't want to read Hegel. I still can't take Spengler seriously, although I still enjoy going through the index of his Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) to see what he has to say about this or that person. I've been doing that in the past couple of days because there are numerous references to Spengler in Bloch's indexes.

Where am I going? I don't know, but I'm enjoying this journey, and maybe it will eventually actually prove to be of some worth.

Procrastinating Instead of Reading Hegel

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I'm feeling more and more of a need -- a duty? A Stoic obligation? -- to re-examine Hegel, whom for a long time I had summarily dismissed, following Schopenhauer's example. I feel like I'm going to have to read some Hegel, and I don't want to. I open up a volume of Hegel to a random page, read a random sentence, and much more often than not, I am appalled, I think Ach Du meine Fresse, Schopenhauer was right, how can people take this guy seriously, let alone place him so centrally in the intellectual history of modernity?! But they do.

Fortunately, I have the option of procrastinating, of putting off the actual reading of Hegel by spending a lot of time reading about Hegel. In my previous post I mentioned Ernst Bloch's book about Hegel, Subjekt/Objekt. i did not mention that Subjekt/Objekt, in the suhrkamp taschenbuch edition I have (st 12, 16.25 Tausend 1972) is 525 pages long.

Then I have a Reclam edition of Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte from 1961, which I must have gotten around 1992, of whose 612 pages pages 3 through 34 are covered by an introduction by the formidable Theodor Litt, and 35 through 37 by a note on the text by an F Brunstaed, who, I'm sorry, Sir or Madam, is unknown to me. The note on the text is in very small type.

And then I have a copy of Phaenomenologie des Geistes, 2nd, expanded and newly arranged printing of an Ullstein paperback which runs to 911 pages, of which less than half, pages 13 to 447, are actually by Hegel. The rest is pieces about Phaenomenologie des Geistes by Lukacs, Goehler, Haym, Findlay, Wahl, Hyppolite, Marx, Marcuse and Bloch, although the 38 pages by Bloch are from Subjekt/Objekt, so I can't really count them twice. I got this copy of Phaenomenologie des Geistes back in the 1980's, as an undergraduate, when Hegel was still nothing more than a name which rang a very faint bell. Hegel was mentioned on the cover of Bronowski's book The Western Intellectual Tradition, and I suppose I didn't know more about him than was said on the cover of that book. I read some chapters of Bronowski's book for classes, and a few more on my own, but not the chapter on Hegel.

I realize that it's cheating to read Bloch's book, and the pieces by Lukacs, Goehler, Haym, Findlay, Wahl, Hyppolite, Marx, Marcuse, before reading Hegel. The latter are placed after Hegel's text in the Ullstein paperback to underscore this point. The many references to Hegel in Adorno's Negative Dialektik, a copy of which I obtained in Berlin in 2004, are likewise intended for readers who have already read Hegel. I'm procrastinating before even cheating by reading these secondary texts first, by going into such detail about the physical volumes I have, by writing this blog post and complaining, but you already noticed that.

I don't even know how big Hegel's oeuvre is. Are the two volumes I have a third of the whole thing, a fifth, a tenth, even less than that? It seems that editions of his collected tend to run to about 20 volumes. If the volumes are about the same length, then I have about a tenth of it here before me. I feel like a kid who hates peas, who has a huge pile of peas in front of him, which he is expected to eat, supposedly for his own good. And so, I'm going to cheat, and read some of the stuff you're supposed to read after reading Hegel, before reading Hegel.

It would be swell if reading Hegel suddenly opened up my mind in huge unexpected ways and helped me make sense of the whole of humanity and life itself. That would truly be awesome. But I'm not holding my breath. It would be a pleasant surprise if I came away from this thinking that Hegel was not a huge horse's ass and one of the most overrated authors in the history of writing, along with Susan Sontag.

Will I Re-Consider Hegel?

If everyone or almost everyone disagrees with you, you may be a genius, far ahead of your time, or you may be wrong. Best to at least investigate the latter possibility.

I know of only one person who shares my opinion of Hegel: Schopenhauer, who called Hegel the worst, most ignorant, incoherent, empty, pretentious charlatan ever to successfully pass himself off as a philosopher. (See any remark about Hegel in any of Schopenhauer's works in which Hegel is mentioned.)

On the other side, those who considered Hegel to be somewhere between very clever and a world-beating genius include almost everyone whose opinion remotely matters, from Marx to Adorno to some of today's sneakiest anonymous post-postmodern YouTubers... Kierkegaard rejects some aspects of Hegel's system very energetically, but he doesn't call Hegel a fool or a fake the way Schopenhauer does. Kierkegaard clearly sees Hegel as a worthy adversary, who will not be defeated by mere insults.

Even Nietzsche, who has some passing insults for Hegel, seems to regard him as at least interesting. Speaking of having almost everyone disagree with you: When Nietzsche composed his list of "meine Unmoeglichen" ("my impossible ones," that is: "those whom I simply cannot stand") at the beginning of the chapter "Streifzuege eines Unzeitgemaessen" in Goetzendaemmerung, he doesn't list Hegel, but he does list Kant (along with Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, the brothers Goncourt and Zola), whom almost everyone else whose opinion matters -- including Schopenhauer -- considers to be a stone genius. Time for me to admit: I don't understand Kant nearly well enough to have any opinion about him, and time for me to admit that maybe my hero Nietzsche, who was dead wrong about women and war, didn't understand Kant either. (I'm still just fine with the rest of the list.)

For Schopenhauer (and almost everyone else), Kant was the most brilliant by far of all the philosophers of the preceding century.

Hegel built upon Kant, and so did Schopenhauer.

And Marx built upon Hegel, which means that most Leftists since Marx have built directly or indirectly on Hegel.

What finally made me decide that I had to give Hegel another chance, although the camel's back had been close to breaking already for a while, was Ernst Bloch. He's one of my favorite writers, and he wrote an entire book so extravagantly praising Hegel that I had to throw in the towel and agree to read and re-read some Hegel, this time trying to hold my mind open to the possibility that he's not as bad as Schopenhauer thought.

Or at the very least, I need to re-read that particular book of Bloch's, -- Subjeckt-Objekt. Erlaeuterungen zu Hegel -- slowly and carefully, and try to decide whether I want to approach Hegel again. At this point, I don't really want to. But I'm willing to let Bloch try to change my mind. I probably will read Hegel again. It's not just Bloch, it's everybody except Schopenhauer.

Oh, and I also need to research this fellow Solger. He's mentioned by both Kierkegaard and Bloch, it seems he and Hegel were friends. I've never heard anyone else mention him, but Kierkegaard and Bloch are more than enough.

I recently heard an English philosopher say that, yes, Hegel's prose is terrible, but that his books were actually lecture notes, not intended to be published as books. And this guy was saying that Hegel was brilliant even though his prose was awful. In Subjekt-Objekt, Bloch is having none of this talk about Hegel's prose being awful. Hegel's prose is sometimes difficult, Bloch says, but it's brilliant, full of deep music and blood and guts and Luther. And the thing is: German is Bloch's native language, he's very very good at it. If Bloch says someone writes brilliantly in German, I have to listen, even if that someone is Hegel, whom I'm used to thinking of, agreeing with Schopenhauer, as writing sheer shameless nonsense.

As long as I'm here I may as well defend Schopenhauer and Nietzsche against the usual accusation from my colleagues on the Left, that they were reactionary. Certainly neither of them was progressive, but reactionary? What, exactly, do you think they were reacting against? They were both classless, and both clueless when it came to politics. I see no evidence that either of them was the slightest bit familiar with any socialist philosophy.

Hoffnung

Soeben bestellt, aus naheliegenden Gruenden:

Was meint Ihr, wird das helfen? Ich bin nicht ganz sicher. Ich habe ein wenig hierin

geblaettert. Erlaeuterungen zu Hegel also. Ich habe den Eindruck, dass Bloch Hegel eigentlich gut findet. Wertvolles Lektuere. Bisher habe ich gemeint, dass Schopenhauers Urteil zu Hegel, zB

"Hegel, ein platter, geistloser, ekelhaft-widerlicher, unwissender Scharlatan, der, mit beispielloser Frechheit, Aberwitz und Unsinn zusammenschmierte, welche von seinen feilen Anhängern als unsterbliche Weisheit ausposaunt und von Dummköpfen richtig dafür genommen wurden[...]hat den Verderb einer ganzen gelehrten Generation zur Folge[...]die größte Frechheit im Auftischen baren Unsinns, im Zusammenschmieren sinnleerer, rasender Wortgeflechte, wie man sie bis dahin nur in Tollhäusern vernommen hatte, trat endlich im Hegel auf und wurde das Werkzeug der plumpesten allgemeinen Mystifikation, die je gewesen, mit einem Erfolg, welcher der Nachwelt fabelhaft erscheint und ein Denkmal Deutscher Niaserie bleiben wird[...]Es ist unmöglich, daß eine Zeitgenossenschaft, welche, zwanzig Jahre hindurch, einen Hegel, diesen geistigen Kaliban, als den größten der Philosophen ausgeschrieben hat, so laut, daß es in ganz Europa widerhallte, Den, der Das angesehen, nach ihrem Beifall lüstern machen könnte."

es ziemlich genau getroffen hatte, mit der Ausnahme, dass Hegel leider viel laenger als nur eine Generation lang gewirkt hat.

Bloch, dagegen, scheint -- ich wiederhole, ich habe bisher nur ein wenig rumgeblaettert -- Hegel fuer einen grossen Denker, der gut schreibt, zu halten.

Ich weiss nicht also. Ich will stets Optimist sein. Wenn es nichts sonst tut, macht es mehr Spass, und ich bin ueberzeugt, dass es tatsaechlich mehr als das tut. Den Hegel aber fuer jemanden, der nicht ein geistloser, widerlicher Scharlatan, fuer jemanden, der mehr als Unsinn zusammengeschmiert hat zu dem rasenden Beifall von Unmengen von Dummkoepfen -- das klingt als ob es vielleicht sogar mir gar zu hoffnungsvoll ist.

Wir werden sehen.

PS: EIN TAG SPAETER: KEINE HOFFNUNG MEHR "Order cancelled." Kein Grund gegeben. Kein email von Amazon. *seufz* Hoffentlich kommt es doch, und "Order cancelled" steht da irrtuemlicherweise.

Ich weiss, dass ich oft blogge von Buechern, welche ich noch nicht gelesen habe. Und ich weiss, dass dies ungewoehnlich ist. (Oder ist es nur ungewoehnlich ehrlich, dass ich es zugebe?)

PPS: 6. Februar 2017. Heute, endlich, nach fast drei Monaten, und nach vielen weiteren Witzen a la "Hoffnung aufgeben" und "die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt," beim vierten Versuch bei Amazon -- warum sollte es vier Versuchen brauchen? Genau! Es sollte nicht, hat aber! -- habe ich alle drei Baender. Ich warne zum zweiten Mal dagegen, Geschaeft mit The Book Depository zu machen. Und jetzt endet das Klagen und beginnt das Lesen. ... "Der Affekt des Hoffens geht aus sich heraus, macht die Menschen weit, statt sie zu verengen, kann gar nicht genug von dem wissen, was sie inwendig gezielt macht, was ihnen auswendet verbuendet sein mag," gar nicht schlecht...