Marx and Hermeticism

[Zanthorus]

I'm just wondering what people think of the link that Cyril Smith draws in "Karl Marx and Human Self-Creation" between Hermeticism (The idea that in creating the world God creates himself) and Marx's ideas about humans creating themselves by creating their material conditions through the process of production and the social relations production occurs under.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, there is very little of this in Marx, but what little there was came from Hegel:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/magee.htm

But the idea of self-creation is not an exclusively Hermetic idea. It appears in Plato and Aristotle long before Hermeticism was thought of.

And, of course, it's also apparent to anyone who looks at collective human labour, and what it accomplishes -- hence, this was apparent long before the Ancient Greeks.

[Meridian]

That was a definition of hermeticism that I had yet to come across. It's not completely off the mark as that idea is probably widespread in hermetic circles. But "hermeticism" comes from the name "Hermes Trismegistus" (Hermes Thrice-Great), which was basically another name of the ancient egyptian god Thoth. Thoth was, among other things, the god of 'magic'. The maxim you may have heard, "as above so below" is perhaps the most known idea in hermetic schools.

It is too vague for me to make much sense of, but I think it probably alludes to something along the lines of the idea in the original post (that in creating the world God creates himself).

I have noticed that certain extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists have tried to link Marx to hermetic ideas so as to essentially pose communism as a dangerous, mystical sect of some sort. Apparently, for example, Marx was a member of some sort of semi-secret organisation not too dissimilar to the Freemasons (a doubtful claim by the way). However, I have loosely 'studied' hermeticism and some of Marx's works and I can't say I have found any connection either way between these two. As Rosa said, if there is any it must be from Hegelian philosophical influences.

[BAM]

I knew Cyril and I am always pleased to see his work being talked about. I wrote to him regularly after reading his book Marx at the Millennium when I was an undergraduate. He wasn't able to finish his work on Marx and religion before he died, but I think he was on the right lines.

By the way, for those who haven't read it, he is not saying that Marx was influenced by Hermeticism:


Those old mystics had probed the contradictory structure of self-creation, but only in its heretical-religious form. How could they do anything more under the conditions of their time? Hegel took this much further, attempting to systematise that knowledge. Marx, living in the last stage of alienation, is able, in his critiques of religion, the state, philosophy and political economy, to pose the problem in the form in which its practical solution can be discerned: the communist revolution. Instead of the mystical loop, ‘God making humanity making God’, Marx must express an even more sharply contradictory movement, that of ‘human activity or self-change': humans make their own conditions of life, which in turn make humanity what it is. In its estranged shape, labour produces capital, which in turn enslaves labour.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/alteration/ch06.htm#4

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Engels most certainly was -- he was brought up in the Pietist tradition (as was Hegel), which was heavily influenced by Heremticism (via Jakob Bohme). This was compounded by his infatuation with Hegel, from whose grip he never escaped.

See the link I posted above and these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behmenism

[BAM]

I have a copy of Glenn Magee's book, actually. It's quite good, if a bit one-sided, but then re-interpretive projects like that often are.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

In fact, I have re-posted Chapter One at my site, and I use the book extensively in my work:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/glenn_magee.htm

[Zanthorus]

As BAM said Smith doesn't posit that Marx was a hermeticist but that the idea of God creating himself in the process of creating the world was a distorted reflection of the real world where humans create themselves in creating their material conditions. He posits that this is the "active side developed by Idealism" that Marx reprimanded Feuerbach and other contemplative materialists for neglecting.