Hermes, Hermeneutics & the Humanities: Listening to the Sources in Esotericism Research
The following text was presented as a keynote lecture at the conference Science et ésotérisme: Représentations, Interactions, Usages, FRÉSO, Paris (France) on 12 May 2023. It will be published in French translation in a collective volume edited by Léo Bernard and Tom Fischer, whom I want to thank for their permission to make the original English version (with added footnotes) available online. This text has its origin in my personal experiences of deep puzzlement at discovering, a few years ago, how many younger colleagues seemed to consider it self-evident that "listening to the sources" is an impossibility. If this would be true, then why should historians even bother to study primary sources at all (or, for that matter, the secondary sources known as scholarly literature)? Since I spent so many years poring over the primary sources of Hermetic literature, trying as hard as I could to understand what they meant, I felt it was crucial to get to the bottom of what might be going on here. This article is meant as a conversation starter, so I will be very interested in any critical objections. NB: footnotes (numbered by section paragraphs) can be found at the bottom.
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| Hans-George Gadamer at his youngest and coolest |
When I received the kind invitation for a keynote lecture at the 2023 FRÉSO conference sciences et ésotérismes, the first thought that came to my mind was that I wouldn’t have much to say about that theme, because none of my current research projects had anything to do with the natural sciences. But just one moment later, I realized that I had fallen prey to a very common type of confusion that has to do with translation – a topic that actually was extremely central to my present concerns. In French, of course, you refer to the humanities as les sciences humaines, and the conference description mentioned the study of history as les sciences historiques. “Les sciences” can cover all types of academic research, from the study of history or literature to chemistry or quantum physics. Most other modern languages use one single term for all the academic disciplines as well, for instance Wissenschaft in German or wetenschap in Dutch. By contrast, the English word “science” suggests specifically the natural or social sciences but does not seem to fit the humanities, where we usually prefer to speak of “scholarship” or “scholarly research.” The term “human sciences” is rarely used in English, because it doesn’t feel entirely right. Aren’t the humanities much more concerned with understanding historical sources, in all their depth and complexity, than with explaining the world in terms of law-like structures, processes or mechanisms? As is well known, this contrast between “explanation” (German erklären) and “understanding” (German verstehen) plays a central place in theoretical discussions, at least since Wilhelm Dilthey, about the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities.
In this online version of my lecture, I want to discuss the study of esotericism specifically in relation to the humanities (les sciences humaines) and even more specifically in relation to the problematics of translation and its very close connections with two other topics that have moved to the very center of my research in recent years: the nature of communication and of understanding (in which the final term will be taken as strictly equivalent to interpretation and hermeneutics). So this is why I chose the title for my lecture and article. The term hermeneutics (the art of understanding) refers to Hermes, the tricky messenger of the gods who excels in communication because he is the master of translation (from Latin translatus, past participle of transferre, “to carry across”) – the ability to flit with lightning speed across barriers that mere humans cannot pass. On the pages that follow, I will keep returning to the basic triad translation | communication | understanding (and to raise some awareness about how often we use the five key terms without even being aware of it, in this article I'll adopt the convention of putting them into small capitals). Finally, of course, Hermes also stands for the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian master of ancient wisdom who is central to the Hermetic literature – one one my favorite topics, on which I will draw in this article for purposes of illustration.
The Hermetica
My interest in the Hermetica goes back to the period around 1990, when I was twenty-nine and for the first time encountered the Corpus Hermeticum, in a new Dutch edition that basically changed my life. I also began reading the famous publications by dame Frances Yates, beginning with her 1964 bestseller Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, the book that put “the Hermetic tradition” on the map of academic research. Just mentioning that name and that title, however, immediately leads me to the issue of translation. Frances Yates’ book was very widely read by scholars and the general public and had an enormous effect on Renaissance studies and history of science in the anglophone world. Eventually, it became a paradigmatic model for the study of esotericism as well. However, it did not get translated into French until 1988, and Yates’ ideas seem to have played virtually no role in the academic development of esotericism as a field of research first developed by Antoine Faivre at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris since the 1970s. By the way, Yates had even less of an impact in Germany. Her book on Bruno never got translated there; and as a result, German research on Hermetik developed into entirely different directions.
This case may serve to illustrate an important point that I believe has enormous implications for the humanities, including the modern study of esotericism: the fact that, in our field as in many others, academic debates and traditions still tend to be remarkably insular or provincial. In spite of all the rhetoric about globalization and internationalization, the fact is that English and American scholars mostly read English, the French mostly read French, the Germans mostly read German, the Italians mostly read Italian, and so on. Far too often, we are blissfully unaware of what is going on in other linguistic spaces than our own and make far too little effort to find out. From a perspective of global international relations determined by political and economic power, this fact has even wider implications. Whereas scholars in the First-World metropole can usually afford to stay largely in their own bubbles, scholars from countries in the so-called Second or Third World often do not have that luxury. They are largely dependent on English as the most dominant lingua franca for having their voices heard in global academia, and this fact has troubling implications in terms of important new projects such as the global history of religion and esotericism. Yet another related factor, which we tend to underestimate as well, is that the development of academic debates is often determined not by strictly scholarly arguments or evidence as such, but by publishers and their commercial/financial choices of what to publish or bring out in translation and what not.
Such concerns have moved very much to the foreground of international research in recent years. But they were hardly present yet when I began my own explorations of Frances Yates’ “Hermetic Tradition” during the 1990s. My first project of deep textual interpretation was focused on a fascinating figure who, as I discovered to my excitement, had been strategically ignored and marginalized by Frances Yates – for no other reason than because he did not fit the story that she wanted to tell her readers. This was the forgotten Italian poet and humanist Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500), the most important early translator of the Hermetic treatises next to Marsilio Ficino, and the author of what I have come to see as the single most impressive Christian treatise on Hermetic spirituality produced during the entire Renaissance [the picture comes from a manuscript of his work, where we see him in conversation with king Ferdinand of Aragon and Sicily, known as Ferrante, who gets offered a copy of Lazzarelli's work by Lazzareli's own muse]
My work on Lazzarelli during the later 1990s made perfectly clear to me how closely translation is interwoven with interpretation (that is, with hermeneutics) as a means of communication with an author who has long been dead and who lived in a society that is almost unimaginably different from our own. So there we have the basic triad that I mentioned above. I was translating Lazzarelli’s works; this meant trying to understand what he was saying; and in a weird manner, I felt that by means of such scholarly interpretation I had entered into a process of actually communicating with the dead…! This personal discovery of what hermeneutics means has been the most formative experience of my scholarly career. More recently I re-experienced it again, and even more strongly, while studying the original Hermetic writings from Roman Egypt. What inspired me in this work was the project of listening, as deeply as possible, to what the anonymous authors who wrote these texts had been trying to tell their readers.
Listening to the Sources
But is it possible for modern scholars to “communicate” with those Hermetic practitioners from past centuries? Can we actually “listen” and “understand” what they wanted to say or write down? Or is that out of the question, because the famous “death of the author” precludes us from ever grasping authorial intentions? In a short article from 2019, I wrote the following lines:
… I advocate an [approach] to the study of esotericism that proceeds empirically and historically, not top-down but bottom-up. This means that the starting point consists, quite simply, in carefully studying an enormous record of sources and materials that have remained unexplored because they used to be rejected as misguided, unimportant, dangerous, or irrelevant … Research of this kind is best done with a minimum of theoretical baggage, at least at the outset, because the prime objective consists in listening to what the sources have to tell us instead of imposing our own ideas on them.
This was not just a stand-alone statement. I had been making the same point more explicitly in a book chapter in 2011:
Fashionable references to the “death of the author” are premature to say the least, and perverse in principle, for even though the authors of our texts may no longer be alive, they appear to have found a way to keep speaking to us. If we refuse to listen because we do not expect to hear anything but the reflection of our own voices, then we should not be surprised if we cease learning anything new. My central motivation as a teacher is exactly opposite. The careful and critical reading of texts can play a crucial emancipatory role in intellectual development, for students as well as teachers, by undermining our ingrained assumptions about the way things are. The reason is that, for once, this type of study is not about what we as twenty-first century readers think we know and understand, but about what somebody from a very different time and place is trying to communicate across the abyss of cultural and historical estrangement.
I’ve capitalized the key terms for special emphasis. Finally, in an analysis of Kocku von Stuckrad’s discursive approach from 2013, I affirmed along strictly similar lines that “I want to begin with an attitude of listening to whatever my sources want to tell me, rather than an attitude of telling them what they can and cannot talk about.”
Over the past few years, I discovered to my surprise that many colleagues in our field, especially those from younger generations, are mystified by such statements. Julian Strube insisted on “the impossibility of simply ‘listening’ to what the sources have to tell.” Dimitry Okropiridze saw my remarks as evidence for “a crucial inconsistency” in my work. Justine Bakker and Aren Roukema seem to have been puzzled as well, noting that my statement “does suggest room for more extensive reflection on the ways in which social location and individual standpoint shape research.” While I agree with that point entirely, I confess that these responses have been deeply puzzling for me. Why would it be so hard to accept, or even just understand, the simple idea that we can “listen to our sources”? We listen to other people all the time, we listen to the news, we listen to music – why then shouldn’t we be able to “listen” (metaphorically, of course) to messages that happen to be written down instead of spoken or recorded? Why should we consider it “impossible” to understand what they are trying to communicate? Aren’t we all in the business of reading and interpreting texts – that is, of trying to understand what we are reading? Why should my attempts at understanding intended meanings be dubious or wrong? Since the study of primary (and secondary) textual sources is of obvious key importance to the study of esotericism, as to all other fields of the humanities, it seems particularly important to clarify what is at stake here.
The widespread dismissal of interpretation is based on specific theoretical arguments and intellectual traditions that have become deeply influential in academia since the 1960s. Central poststructuralist philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault famously promoted “the displacement of the sovereignty of the author in favour of the text as a zone of experimentation.” As formulated by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora (again, I highlight the key terms for special attention),
[S]tarting from the 1970s, Foucault’s criticism of the author will constitute an intellectual framework for gradually thinking of the subject as a text: as something that needs to be invented, experienced rather than interpreted. … What Foucault – and Barthes – argued was that if there was no author or unique meaning, then the entire enterprise of interpretation itself was compromised. The discussion became not about how we should interpret the text but about whether there was anything to interpret at all. From the moment we conceived the text as something without an author, Barthes wrote, “‘meaning’ was no longer an adequate concept,” and “the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes completely useless.”
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| Foucault with Simeon Wade during their LSD-fueled trip to the Valley of Death in 1975 |
It is obvious that such a radically anti-hermeneutic argument was bound to have enormous implications, notably for the study of written sources that is basic to all forms of historical research. The assault on interpretation or understanding is at the heart of a large set of new theories and philosophical ideas that became widely known in the United States since the 1960s and are often referred to there as French Theory. In critically evaluating this phenomenon on the following pages, I will insist on a strictly historical perspective – but please note that even this very attempt at historicization already results in a clash with the philosophies under discussion here. In spite of their frequent invocations of Fredric Jameson’s slogan “Always historicize!,” it is a well-known fact that the poststructuralist/deconstructionist milieus of Theory or Critique have always refused to historize themselves. Rather than accepting the obvious fact (which is actually central to Foucauldian discourse analysis) that, as formulated by Olav Hammer, “propositions regarding the human condition and the constitution of reality … are historically contingent and culturally constructed,” they typically present their own propositions, again in Hammer’s words, “as if they were natural, trans-historical facts and thus protected from scrutiny.” This claim of exclusive hegemony has been analyzed and formulated very clearly by Rita Felski:
Critique does not tolerate rivals. Declaring itself uniquely equipped to diagnose the perils and pitfalls of representation, critique often chafes at the presence of other forms of thought. Ruling out the possibility of peaceful co-existence or even mutual indifference, it insists that those who do not embrace its tenets must be denying or disavowing them. In this manner, whatever is different from critique is turned into the photographic negative of critique – evidence of an irrefutable lack or culpable absence. To refuse to be critical is to be uncritical; a judgment whose overtones of naiveté, apathy, complacency, submissiveness, and sheer stupidity seem impossible to shrug off. In short, critique thinks of itself as exceptional. It is not one path, but the only conceivable path.
In my firm opinion, such dogmatic claims of “self-evident” superiority and exclusive truth cannot be accepted in academic debate. I cannot help thinking that scholars of esotericism (who, after all, study ideas and traditions that have often been ostracized, suppressed, marginalized, or even persecuted from the perspective of dominant ideologies) should have good reason to be particularly sensitive to this authoritarian impulse of imposing one “single vision” to the exclusion of all others.
Historicizing French Theory means approaching it as just another set of historically contingent cultural constructs. If we take such a perspective, a first thing to note is that, around the time when Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, or Deleuze “& Co” were going out of fashion in France, they found a receptive new audience in American academia. Due to the global dominance of the English language and American scholarship after World War II, they became a potent force in the humanities up to the present. As regards this intellectual transfer from France to the United States and from there to global academia, the issue of translation is once again of crucial importance. While studying an important text by Jacques Derrida, “La pharmacie de Platon” (in his book La dissémination), in close connection with his famous De la grammatologie, I discovered (to my considerable amazement) that the standard American translations by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Barbara Johnson are largely incomprehensible, whereas Derrida’s French originals (while certainly very difficult) turned out to be perfectly lucid and clear. Therefore what is it that Derrida’s American readers actually think they are reading? How is it that all those readers who do not know French can manage to convince themselves that they understand Derrida, if what they are reading simply makes no sense and therefore cannot be properly understood? I do not mean to be overtly cynical here, but could it be that it’s of no great concern to these American fans of Derrida whether they understand him or not – because, after all, the author is dead and you can’t grasp his intended meanings anyway?
Ripping off the Mask
To continue my argument, I must pay some special attention to another great French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, and what happened to his work when it traveled to the United States and became famous in translation. In his important book about hermeneutics, De l’interprétation (first published in 1965), he developed a new concept that would become extremely influential. Ricoeur distinguished between what he called the hermeneutics of faith associated with famous Eranos figures such as Mircea Eliade or Gerardus van der Leeuw, and the hermeneutics of suspicion based on the classic approaches of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud – the three great “masters of suspicion.” If you apply the hermeneutics of faith, Ricoeur explained, you are trying to understand in the sense of unveiling the deep meanings of a text or topic. By contrast, if you apply the hermeneutics of suspicion, your intention is not to unveil but to unmask. You want to show that the surface meaning of a text or topic actually hides its true meaning, its “dirty secrets.” Ultimately, these always have to do with such issues as power, sex, and domination. Unveiling versus unmasking – it is hard to miss the relevance to “secrecy and concealment” and their well-known importance in the study of esotericism. In one sense, the difference may be subtle, because both procedures are concerned with uncovering what has been concealed or with bringing meanings to light that are not apparent at first sight. But the difference is important. There is something subtle, gentle, positive and respectful about the gesture of unveiling or bringing to light. By contrast, unmasking is an inherently aggressive act.
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| Paul Ricoeur |
Let me be clear: there can certainly be no question of rejecting the hermeneutics of suspicion, for such procedures of unmasking can be of enormous importance in the critical study of texts. To give just one example, I recently applied it to standard scholarly interpretations of a famous visionary narrative that appears at the beginning of the Corpus Hermeticum, the so-called “Poimandres.” We read there how the grand “Man of Light” who has been born from the androgynous God (or more precisely, from the divine Light of the Nous) bends downward through the cosmic spheres and beholds the beautiful shape of “Nature” down there below. Nature, for her part, looks upward and sees the splendid beauty of the Grand Human. She smiles back at him, he immediately comes down, and they start making love. This is a very important moment: humanity will later be born from their union, so everything starts from here.
Now if you read the standard academic interpretations of this famous passage, you discover that, without even a single significant exception, all major specialists throughout the twentieth century have seen it as a depiction of the Fall of Man. With the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the back of their minds, or rather at the forefront, they took it for granted that Man (Adam) had been pure and innocent until Woman (Eve) seduced him to eat the apple. They also assumed that this Fall of Man must be understood in terms of sexual seduction. Very much in line with fin-de-siècle decadent art, they were thinking of Nature as a sinister quasi-demonic femme fatale who had caused the pure spiritual Man of Light to get trapped in the darkness of Matter. As Richard Reitzenstein put it, kaum ist er niedergestiegen, so umschlingt ihn die phusis in brünstiger Liebe – having hardly descended, right away the phusis (matter) captures him in a deadly embrace of animal lust. Throughout the twentieth century, this interpretation of the Poimandres has reigned supreme, with enormous implications for how the Hermetica as a whole were understood – if it was all about the Fall of Man, then salvation by gnōsis must be all about liberation from the darkness of matter and sexual sin.
In fact, however, this entire pattern of interpretation is based entirely on a deeply misogynic fantasy in the minds of male scholars who were obsessed with the biblical model – or with fantasies of women as sexual temptresses. The Hermetic writings are entirely pagan and there is no evident connection with the biblical Genesis story at all. If we read the Poimandres without Christian prejudice – that is, if we begin by listening to what this source has to tell us – we find a beautiful and entirely positive story of mutual love. There is no sin and there is no Fall. The point of the story is that human beings are wonderful and admirable “double entities,” as they are born from the beautiful marriage of Nature and Spirit (or, more precisely, Nous).
A False Binary
Five years before Ricoeur’s seminal volume De l’interprétation appeared on the market, the great German philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer published his masterpiece Wahrheit und Methode (“Truth and Method”). The book did not immediately attract much attention, but became famous when the revised second edition appeared in 1965 – the exact year in which Ricoeur published his own book about hermeneutics in French. Therefore Ricoeur had not yet been able to profit from reading Gadamer, whose work would have an enormous impact on the subsequent development of his ideas. The significance of this fact will appear below.
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| Hans-Georg Gadamer (l.) and Martin Heidegger making themselves useful in this world of Being & Time |
Again, we see the importance here of publishers and translations. Ricoeur’s pre-Gadamerian volume about hermeneutics came out in English with Yale University Press in 1970, under the title Freud and Philosophy. The very term “hermeneneutics” had therefore vanished from the title (no doubt because the publisher feared it would be unknown to American readers), and the new subtitle was “An Essay on Interpretation.” This translation had an enormous success. Freud and Philosophy became one of those “indispensable” books that most American scholars in the humanities were reading during the 1970s and 1980s. Within just seven years after its first publication, it had already been reprinted eleven times. Ricoeur’s concept of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” became famous in American academic debate because it was so obviously congenial to the great academic prestige, during this same period, of his three great “masters of suspicion.” Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud were being hailed as key authorities for the critical revolutionary work of unmasking pious illusions; and of course, they were central references as well in the new wave of poststructuralism and deconstruction that became known as French Theory. Hermeneutics meant originally the art of interpretation, but as we have seen, central authors such as Barthes or Foucault had declared war on that very concept. The gap was filled now by the art of unmasking, as an alternative to the hermeneutic art of “unveiling.” This new style of hermeneutics was based on an attitude of radical suspicion towards the hidden mechanisms of power and domination that had to be lurking behind the surface of each and every text.
As Ricoeur’s American readers adopted the hermeneutics of suspicion as their core approach to textual interpretation, its obvious opponent was what Ricoeur referred to as the “hermeneutics of faith.” He had discussed it at the example of Eranos luminaries and phenomenologists of religion such as Gerardus van der Leeuw, Maurice Leenhardt and, most of all, Mircea Eliade. These scholars were now seen as exemplifying the very type of the “old-fashioned,” “uncritical” or “pre-critical,” somehow theologically oriented and culturally or politically conservative perspective from which the followers of “French Theory” wanted to break away. This idea of a sharp opposition between a “conservative” versus a “progressive” type of hermeneutics has been with us ever since. However, something important got lost in translation, as will be seen, resulting in a simplified and simplifying “faith versus suspicion” binary that has remained quite dominant as well.
Ricoeur’s book that Americans were reading had been written before the French philosopher discovered Gadamer’s German masterpiece. Ricoeur’s own view of hermeneutics evolved into new directions after his reading of Wahrheit und Methode; but the point is that his American readers did not follow him in that development. French Theory was experienced as sexy, edgy and exciting, whereas Gadamer’s hermeneutics was commonly associated with a heavy kind of old-fashioned German seriousness. In the words of Rita Felski, it never managed “to muster the high-wattage excitement that radiated from poststructuralism.” It is precisely at this point, and in this respect, that I believe American poststructuralist and deconstructionist French Theory took a wrong turn during the 1970s. It moved into a direction that was certainly innovative and fascinating in many respects, but also deeply cynical, one-sided, and essentially blind to the wider and deeper meaning of hermeneutics – the art of understanding that is basic also to the arts of translation and communication.
Against Understanding
In the wake of these developments in intellectual and academic history since the 1960s, countless modern scholars have come to believe that “listening to the sources” is indeed “impossible.” But that assumption is based on a profound misunderstanding. First of all: listening (as distinct from “hearing”) obviously does not mean just the passive reception of sounds. It means the active interpretation of sounds – a semi-automatic process in which sounds are turned by human listeners into something that carries meaning. This is true not just for listening to human language. For instance, if you find yourself listening to a blackbird singing in the dead of night, you are not just hearing sounds. Without any conscious intervention, your mind is already interpreting those sounds as “beautiful,” hence as valuable, and therefore as meaningful in some sense.
The same is true for human language. When I gave this particular lecture at the FRÉSO conference on 12 May 2023, the members of my audience were obviously not just hearing sounds – their minds were actively translating the sounds that were coming from my mouth into words that they could understand. I was literally not making any sense! The audience was making sense of my words, through an activity known as “listening.”
The claim that “listening to the sources is impossible” is therefore a non-starter. It is equivalent to the absurd proposition that none of us can ever understand what another person is saying; that we are incapable of translating the sounds that the other is making into anything meaningful (anything that could possibly corresponds with an intended meaning); and that any communication is therefore impossible. Presumably, we are all condemned to stay in our bubbles forever, isolated from one another, without even the slightest hope of ever reaching across the abyss by grasping another person’s meaning or being understood by that other person in turn. What the argument really says is that we do not actually talk with one another – that is, we never engage in any “dialogue” (that is, a communicative exchange between two voices). All we ever do is committing acts of violence towards others, by replacing their words with our own discourse as its “supplement.” This specific term is important in this context, as explained by Barbara Johnson:
In French, the word supplément has two meanings: it means both “an addition” and “a substitute.” Rousseau uses this word to describe both writing and masturbation. Thus, writing and masturbation may add to something that is already present, in which case they are superfluous, and/or they may replace something that is not present, in which case they are necessary. What Derrida’s reading of Rousseau sketches out is indeed nothing less than a revolution in the very logic of meaning. The logic of the supplement wrenches apart the neatness of the metaphysical binary oppositions. Instead of “A is opposed to B” we have “B is both added to A and replaces A.”
This argument turns any act of presumed communication into an act of aggression. Or in the very terms under discussion here, the very concept of understanding gets “replaced” by a concept of discursive violence as its supplément. The resulting claim, as formulated by Roland Barthes, is that “to speak, and even more so to discourse, is not to communicate … it is to subjugate.”
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| Gadamer in his old age, during an obviously failed attempt to engage Derrida in dialogue |
This is not just some kind of rhetorical hyperbole. It is a core belief held by those who embraced the hermeneutics of suspicion, not just as one useful approach among others, but as the central and exclusive approach to interpretation that should “supplement” all others. For instance, it was at the heart of an iconic non/encounter between Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer at the Goethe Institute in Paris in 1981. Gadamer, who had been studying Derrida since the 1960s but had never met him in person, expected that they would engage in a constructive dialogue based on the “good will” of both discussion partners to try and understand one another. But Derrida made perfectly clear that he excluded the very concept of dialogue, because the profession of “good will” could never be anything else than a mask for the “will to power.” There could be no such thing as “listening,” understanding or communication – only attempts at gaining power and achieving domination. Look at the image: the body language says it all.
Close Hermeneutics of the Third Kind
If scholars are puzzled or mystified by my advocacy of “listening to the sources,” responding with the claim that no such thing is possible, this is not just a simple misunderstanding that could be cleared up rather easily. We are faced with a fundamental disagreement about the very nature of what scholarly work in the humanities is or should be all about. This conflict of opinions rests upon extremely basic beliefs or assumptions about hermeneutics – that is about what, exactly, is involved in the core academic business of understanding, interpretation, and translation. Many academics in the humanities today seem to take the hermeneutics of suspicion for granted as the only legitimate perspective. As a necessary result, scholarly analysis must rest by definition on some form of critical theory that aims at revealing the hidden operations of power behind the surface of all texts. Those who fall short in this regard must necessarily lapse into the only alternative – an old-fashioned “hermeneutics of faith” that remains blind to the operations of power and believes it is possible to just “listen to the sources” with an attitude of naïve trust in their good intentions. Unless you accept the hermeneutics of suspicion as the only valid approach to interpretation, therefore, you will find yourself under suspicion: before you know it, you may find yourself accused of relapsing into old-fashioned religionist approaches with politically conservative implications.
Popular as it may be, this entire argument is deeply flawed. It is based on a profound misperception of hermeneutics that is based essentially, as I will argue, on a neglect of Gadamer’s work. If Ricoeur had read the first edition of Wahrheit und Methode (1960), prior to writing his own book (1965, translated in 1970), he could not have ended up with the simplistic “faith vs. suspicion” binary that made such an impression on his American audiences. The American and international debate on hermeneutics would then have taken a different turn. Intermediary between the famous "Masters of Suspicion" specialised in unmasking, and the "Masters of Faith" specialised in unveiling, there is a neglected third possibility exemplified by Gadamer, the “Master of Interpretation” specialized in the art of understanding.
Nietzsche, Marx, Freud | Gadamer | Eranos (notably Eliade) |
Suspicion | Interpretation | Faith |
Unmasking | Understanding | Unveiling |
Gadamer’s core argument is that any act of interpretation (including any act of “listening what the sources have to tell”) always, and necessarily, begins with the already-existing ideas and opinions that are present in the interpreter’s mind. Gadamer uses German terms such as Vorurteil (literally “prior judgment”) and Vormeinung (literally “prior opinion”), but the common English term is prejudice. The negative connotations are rather unfortunate, for pre-judicio makes just a simple factual claim: that a certain number of judgments and personal biases are necessarily already present in the reader’s mind before she begins reading any text. It is impossible to read historical sources from a perspective of pure receptivity, passivity, neutrality, or objectivity – no such thing exists in hermeneutics.
What actually happens in the act of interpretation is described by Gadamer as Horizontverschmelzung, the merging (literally “melting together”) of horizons. Any linguistic statement (for instance the text you are presently reading) is obviously always conditioned and limited by the personal horizon of the person who has spoken or written it, that is, by what this person can and cannot see. Nobody can see beyond his or her horizon at any given moment; but we can always try to expand our horizons by moving away from where we are and learning new things, for instance by trying to imagine ourselves in another person’s position and ask what the world would look like for them. Our hermeneutic horizon in this analogy is determined by our historical situatedness as fallible, finite, mortal human beings who are subject to restrictions of time and space. For instance (to stick to my Hermetic examples), Lodovico Lazzarelli’s horizon was determined by the fact that he happened to live in Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, in a deeply Christian culture, prior to the Reformation, in which “pagan” sources like Plato or the Hermetica had just started to appear on the horizon of humanist thinkers like himself. Countless things that are self-evident to us today and determine our possible interpretations of the world were still completely beyond his horizon. He could not possibly see those things. The only real difference between Lazzarelli’s position and our own is based on the so-called “arrow of time.” Because the future leaves no traces in the present, and the present leaves no traces in the past, it is obvious that Lazzarelli would never be able to understand our world. By contrast, the past and the present do leave traces that reach into the future. Those traces are known as historical “sources.” They do allow us to transcend our own situated prejudices (our “prior judgments”), at least to some extent, by shifting or expanding our own limited horizons so as to bring parts of his world into our purview.
I consider it of crucial importance that when I study Lazzarelli’s work, my own horizon as a contemporary scholar is exactly as limited as his. We are fooling ourselves if we imagine that, as twenty-first century academics, we are capable of “seeing further” and “understanding more deeply” because supposedly we have “progressed” towards a superior modern perspective. To make that assumption is nothing but arrogance, an example of what the historian E.P. Thompson famously called “the enormous condescension of posterity.” On the contrary: our modern horizons have certainly expanded in countless ways, but simultaneously they have shrunk in many other ways – or perhaps it would be more correct to say that they have shifted. Because we have moved somewhere else, new things have come into our view, while many other things that our ancestors used to see have become invisible to us. The point is simple: we like to flatter ourselves about seeing more than our ancestors did, but in fact we are just looking at different things, or see them differently. A bit of humility is in order.
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| Lazzarelli and his muse engaged in an undoubtedly Herme(neu)tic dialogue |
Or rather, quite a lot of it. A staggering wealth of tacit or explicit knowledge would still be perfectly self-evident to a person like Lazzarelli but has become very hard, or simply impossible, for us to access or even begin to understand. As a result, it is extremely easy for us to misunderstand and misinterpret the work of him and his contemporaries, by tacitly overwriting it with our own concerns and preoccupations. Whenever we are studying sources in the field of esotericism, our first task as I see it consists in making an effort to actually understand what these people whose texts we are reading were trying to say; and this does require an attitude of humility on our own part. They probably knew things that we don’t know. They may be able to show us things that we no longer see. We may think that we “get” what they are saying, but perhaps we do not get them at all, because we are missing so much of the relevant context. In short: instead of talking to our sources in our boundless arrogance, because we find our own contemporary “theories” so self-evidently superior to anything they might possibly have to offer, I do believe we must begin with an attitude of listening first.
I see this as a basic principle in the humanities generally, but it may be even more crucial in the specific field of esotericism. The reason is that in this case, we are dealing with ideas and traditions that are not just distant from us in time or space, but have an additional feature – the fact that so much of it used to be thoroughly “rejected” by the mainstream of modern thinking. As a result, we do not normally get to learn about it in modern educational institutions, so that most people in our societies or academic environments find all of it strange and unfamiliar. This means that precisely those traditions that are categorized as “esoteric” have a particularly strong potential for teaching us how to see beyond the contemporary horizons of mainstream academia. This obviously does not mean that we are supposed to become esotericists ourselves; but it does mean that these texts and traditions give us a precious chance to engage in an honest dialogue or conversation with forgotten ways of thinking that seem weirdly unfamiliar or strange to our contemporaries.
To engage in hermeneutic dialogue with textual sources from the past means, quite literally, to enter into conversation with the dead. Although these authors are no longer alive, yet they can still talk to us, by means of the written sources they have left behind. It is our business as historians to not shut them up, or drown their voices in our own academic discourse (because unfortunately, it is in our power to do so), but to approach them with respect and insist on their agency – by allowing them to speak to us and making a serious effort of listening closely to what they have to say. I hope to have made clear that such “listening to the sources” is a hermeneutic activity. The speaker or writer does not make sense – it is always up to the listener or reader to make sense of spoken or written texts. Nevertheless, paradoxical as it may seem at first sight, even written sources do have agency. They have the power to challenge our prejudices, by coming up with content that we might never have expected or that forces us to reconsider assumptions that we had always taken for granted. If we are willing to listen and allow ourselves to be affected by what we read, our own horizon will start to shift and expand, so that our patterns of “prejudice” (prior judgment) will inevitably start changing as well, thereby allowing us to see dimensions of the text that initially we couldn’t see. This basic process of understanding is famously described by Gadamer as the “hermeneutical circle,” although perhaps it would be better to think of a never-ending hermeneutical spiral (moving downwards, into deeper layers of meaning). The conversation with our sources never stops – unless we decide that we have made up our minds, that we’ve figured it all out and no longer care to listen.
Content and Meaning
I had my first strong hermeneutic experience of “talking with the dead” while studying Lazzarelli during the late 1990s. This happened by pure chance, because Antoine Faivre was so generous as to lend me his precious copy of a sixteenth-century French translation of Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis: Gabriel du Preau’s Le baßin d’Hermès.
Somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that most contemporary specialists in ancient sources such as the Hermetica seem ultimately less interested in meaning and content than in tracing the historical genealogy of separate textual elements or looking for parallels from a comparative perspective. In other words: the first question they usually ask themselves is “where does this come from?” and “where else do we find it in the literature of the period?” This approach has led to voluminous commentaries full of precious information about parallels and origins, but it carries very serious risks as well – for unless we understand correctly what is actually meant, how can we know what we should compare it with, or from where it might have come historically? I believe that our task is not just to determine what was written down, but what was meant and how it must be understood. And that requires hermeneutics.
My best example is the key Hermetic vocabulary for knowledge, which can be summarized as follows:
· Gnōsis: the supreme salvational knowledge to which Hermetic practitioners aspired.
· Nous as the human faculty that makes gnōsis possible.
· Noēsis: the activity of knowing by means of the nous.
· Nous as the ultimate divine object of knowledge
The word nous therefore has a double meaning: it refers not just to our human faculty for gnōsis, but also to the object of such gnōsis. This Nous is described as the universal divine Light; and we might think of the human nous as the inner light that allows us to see that Light. But here it comes! If you look these words up in standard modern translations of the Hermetica, you will find that almost without exception, nous gets translated as “intellect” or “mind,” and noēsis as “thinking.” As a result, the unavoidable impression is that these are philosophical treatises concerned with thinking and intellectual arguments.
However, that is a typical example of what Gadamer would call the hermeneutic Vorurteil (“prior judgment”) of modern translators – a prejudice that is perfectly necessary, in sofar as it makes the very act of interpretation possible, but which must also allow itself to be changed and revised by its dialogue partner (that is, by the text that is being read). Modern translators are perfectly correct insofar as “intellect” or “mind” is indeed the standard lexical meaning of nous in standard philosophical discussions, and it is certainly normal and acceptable there to translate noēsis as “thinking.” But in the case of the Hermetica, these translations are utterly misleading and completely wrong, because what we understand by “mind,” “intellect” or “thinking” today is not at all what the Hermetic authors meant by nous and noēsis. You do not discover this by just using your dictionary – on the contrary, by just using your dictionary, you are sure to not discover it! You will only discovered it by engaging in deep hermeneutic dialogue with the Hermetic texts. Only by listening carefully to what the anonymous authors were trying to say (having allowed our own hermeneutic horizon to merge with theirs, as much as possible) will we discover what these key words gnōsis, nous and noēsis meant for them, in their language and in their world. As it turns out, those meanings are entirely different from what “mind,” “intellect,” or “thinking” mean in our language and our world.
So what did they mean? What were they trying to say? The truth is that no words for their vocabulary are available in modern languages such as English or French. Our only option is to add gnōsis, nous and noēsis to our present vocabulary, as new words, and learn their meaning by listening to the sources. The only way to do that is, exactly the way Gadamer describes it, by engaging in a genuine dialogue – a hermeneutic conversation with the dead, in which we do not just arrogantly impose our meaning on their words, but show respect for the agency of these authors and their attempts to engage in communication with their readers across the barriers of language, culture, and history. The authors may be dead, but we can still talk with them. If we care to listen, in this case, we may discover that the human nous was a unique capacity for direct, unmediated perception (through a spiritual activity known as noēsis) of the universal “noetic” Light that was referred to as the divine Nous and that was considered to be the only reality that truly exists. Nothing actually is, according to the Hermetica, except this noetic Light. Everything else that seems to exist as different or apart from it has no true reality but is ultimately just shadow or illusion. Therefore noēsis means using one’s nous to pierce through the veil of delusion and see reality as it really is. Obviously that is not what we understand today by such words as “mind,” “intellect,” or “thinking.” Again, your standard dictionaries will lead you astray. The only way to find out what these words really mean is by listening to the sources, that is to say, by engaging them in a deep process of hermeneutical dialogue.
Concluding Remarks
The humanities generally, and the study of esotericism more specifically, should obviously have room for the greatest possible variety of approaches, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives, both old and new. Certainly, I do not mean to suggest that textual hermeneutics should be the only valid perspective. But I do believe that we need to restore this essential tool to our toolbox, because in the current academic climate, it tends to be neglected and very often gets misunderstood. It just so happens that Hans-Georg Gadamer remains, by far, the most profound theoretician who has analyzed the nature of hermeneutics; but while there are some hopeful signs that his work might begin to enjoy a revival, for the moment he seems to have largely vanished from the standard menu in countless humanities programs.
The regrettable decline of Gadamerian hermeneutics since the 1990s is a reflection of larger transformations in the universities and in society as a whole, related to two different but related developments: (1) a steady decline of general historical knowledge, consciousness, and awareness, and (2) an increasing tendency to put all our cards exclusively on the study of discourse (or, even more strongly, of contemporary discourse), at the expense of intellectual history or history of ideas. These vital dimensions have been atrophying over the most recent decades, but should be preserved and revived if we want to maintain a healthy climate in the humanities. If we neglect and forget the ideas of the past, because we no longer find them worth listening to, we will find ourselves at the mercy of our own contemporary prejudices – that is, we will end up imprisoning ourselves voluntarily within the narrow hermeneutic horizons of just our most immediate present. If we fail to understand what they were saying and why they were saying it, what they meant and what they might still be able to tell us, we will end up seeing nothing but whatever society or academia cares to put right in front of our eyes. This will make us myopic, close-minded, and narrow-minded – we will lose the wider horizon and the longue durée, the historical context of interpretation that we actually need if we wish to understand ourselves and find reliable ways of moving forward in the world.
This is why I believe historical awareness is so important in general. More in particular, what makes esotericism important from a historical point of view is precisely the fact that it is different – the fact that, from such perspectives as mainstream culture or standard scientific paradigms, its ideas are unfamiliar, puzzling, unusual, strange, weird, and often hard to understand. The liberating potential of studying esotericism lies precisely there. Whether we agree with anything these traditions have to say is entirely beside the point. Quite simply, the point is that by showing us something different from what we already know, they force us to question and reconsider our own taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of knowledge or about what reality is all about. But such a widening of horizons will only happen if we care to take them seriously, if we take the trouble to listen. Unless we respect their agency and know how to engage them in dialogue, we will never discover what we could otherwise have learned from them.
Notes
1 Understanding versus Explanation: e.g. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. 2 Translation – Communication – Understanding – Interpretation – Hermeneutics: These five terms are so common that we are often not consciously aware of using them. To raise awareness of their ubiquity, in this article I adopt to convention of putting them in small capitals.
The Hermetica
1 Basically changed my life: Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, ix-x. The reference is to the original volume by van den Broek & Quispel, Corpus Hermeticum (later integrated in an improved and expanded edition by van den Broek & Quispel, Hermetische geschriften). Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition & French translation Yates, Giordano Bruno et la tradition hermétique (transl. Marc Rolland). Marginality of Yates to Faivre’s pioneering work: Hanegraaff, with Brach & Pasi, “Antoine Faivre (1934-2021),” here 189-190. The German tradition of research on Hermetik seems to have taken its cue rather from the historian of literature Hans-Georg Kemper (whose oeuvre, in turn, is virtually unknown outside the Germany-speaking domain). See e.g. Alt, Imaginäres Geheimwissen, 13-14; cf. Hanegraaff, “Alt & Neumann on Hermetismus.” 2 For several points made in this paragraph, see the programmatic article by Hanegraaff & Mukhopadhyay, “Translating Esotericism: Scepticism, Optimism, Agency.” The recent development of high-quality translation tools may certainly improve the current situation of linguistic insularity and English dominance; but when it comes to deep translation and deep understanding, as opposed to “global lexicon” approaches, it is important to be aware that the inherent limitations of AI software such as ChatGPT are not just technical, but hermeneutic as well (ibid., 8-19 with note 20 and pp. 16-18). 3 Lazzarelli: see Hanegraaff & Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents. For the personal story of how I discovered Lazzarelli, see Hanegraaff, “The Real Hermetic Tradition.” My re-experience of what Hermeneutics means: Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality.
Listening to the Sources
1 First block quotation: Hanegraaff, “Rejected Knowledge…,” 151. In the original article, this is described as a positive “Enlightenment 2” approach, opposed to standard “Enlightenment 1” polemics based on the assumption that “‘rejected knowledge’ … should not be given any further attention but should rather be dumped as trash in the wastebasket of academic research, to be ignored and hopefully forgotten forever” (ibid., 149). I return to this distinction (while reversing the numbering) in the final chapter of Hanegraaff, Esotericism in Western Culture. Second block quotation: Hanegraaff, “Teaching Experiential Dimensions,” 167. From analysis of Kocku von Stuckrad: Hanegraaff, “Power of Ideas,” 255 (with footnote 6-7). 2 Julian Strube’s critique: Strube, “Towards the Study,” 45; idem, “Theosophy, Race,” 1186. Okropiridze’s critique: Okropiridze, “Interpretation Reconsidered.” While Okropiridze’s argument is sharp and interesting, unfortunately it is based on the mistaken assumption that I expect my sources to “tell me what esotericism is” – an essentialist notion that in fact runs counter to all my work (see discussion in Hanegraaff, Esotericism in Western Culture, Chapter One, forthcoming). Justine Bakker’s and Aren Roukema’s expressions of puzzlement: Bakker & Roukema, “10 Years of Correspondences,” 240 note 13. 3 On Foucault: Dean & Zamora, The Last Man takes LSD, 79, and block quotation from ibid., 80, 84. French Theory: Hanegraaff, “Provincializing American Theory.” “Always Historicize!”: Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Preface); cf. McCutcheon, Critics not Caretakers, 7. Discussion in Hanegraaff, “Generous Hermeneutics,” 70 note 62. Resistance to the historicization of poststructuralism/deconstructionism: Herman, “The Resistance to Historizing Theory.” “… protected from scrutiny”: Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, 29; Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 361. Block quotation: Felski, “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion” (unpaginated); and see her longer discussion in Felski, Limits of Critique, 147-150. Against “single vision”: On the importance of rejecting “one-dimensionality” (cf. “single vision” or la pensée unique), cf. Hanegraaff, “Generous Hermeneutics,” 64-65 with note 31 (cf. Otto, “Hans Thomas Hakl,” 27-28; Baroni, “Philosophical Gold,” 40, 58). 4 Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, or Deleuze & Co: Cusset, French Theory. It is consistent with my argument that precisely such key “humanities” (sciences humaines) perspectives as intellectual history or history of ideas had been among Foucault’s chief targets since Les mots et les choses. Incomprehensibility of Spivak’s and Johnson’s Derrida translations: see Derrida, Of Grammatology; idem, Dissemination. By “incomprehensible” I mean that one gets stuck within a few pages, due to a steady accumulation of non sequiturs and ambiguous sentences that make it impossible to follow the argument. For mistranslations in these standard works, see anecdotal evidence in Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 315-316 notes 26 and 28.
Ripping off the Mask
1 Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, 29-44. For an analogous discussion of Ricoeur and his influence, see also Hanegraaff, “Generous Hermeneutics.” Unveiling versus Unmasking: I rely here on the excellent analysis in Felski, Limits of Critique, 32. 2 … they start making love: CH I 14. 3 Reitzenstein’s kaum ist er niedergestiegen... The German original has nuances that are difficult to capture in translation: umschlingen (rather than umarmen) suggests capturing and binding, while brünstig has strong connotations of animal lust. Misinterpretation of Poimandres as describing “the Fall of Man”: Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 170-176. 3 --- 4 Final paragraph sentence: I further explain this concept in Hanegraaff, “Generous Hermeneutics.”
A False Binary
1 Gadamer, Hermeneutik I. 2 English translation Gadamer, Hermeneutik I. 3 Ricoeur on the Hermeneutics of Faith: Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, 36-40; idem, Freud and Philosophy, 28-32. On the importance of treating these scholars (van der Leeuw, Leenhardt, Eliade) not as isolated figures but seeing them as part of the Eranos tradition, see Hanegraaff, “Generous Hermeneutics,” 61, 70, with reference to Hakl, Eranos. 4 Gadamer’s impact on Ricoeur: e.g. Simms, Paul Ricoeur, 31-43. Gadamer’s hermeneutics never managed to “muster the high-wattage excitement …”: Felski, Limits of Critique, 32.
Against Understanding
1 --- 2 Block quotation: Johnson, “Translator’s Introduction,” xiii. “… to subjugate”: Barthes, Leçon, 12. 3 Gadamer on “good will”: “Text und Interpretation,” 343. Derrida’s response: “Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer” (originally titled “Bonnes volontés de puissance,” i.e. “Good Will to Power”). Gadamer’s “Reply to Jacques Derrida” was originally titled “Und Dennoch: Macht des Guten Willens” (“And Yet: The Power of Good Will”). On the 1981 meeting of Gadamer and Derrida, see the excellent collection of critical essays edited by Michelfelder & Palmer, Dialogue and Deconstruction. See also my discussion in Hermetic Spirituality, 342-351, esp. 345-347.
Close Hermeneutics of the Third Kind
1 --- 2 E.g. Gadamer, Hermeneutik I, 400-401; discussion in Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 132-135. 3 Situatedness of the hermeneutic horizon: Here I am thinking of a famous article by Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”; but the basic point is entirely central to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. On the central importance to hermeneutics of temporality, mortality and finitude, see Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 345. 4 “The enormous condescension of posterity”: Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 12. 5 --- 6 I may be worth emphasizing that (contrary to common misunderstandings of my argument in Esotericism and the Academy), I have never defined esotericism as “rejected knowledge.” As I point out in a recent publication, that cats are animals does not mean that animals should be defined as cats! (Hanegraaff, “Unnecessity of Definition”). On the category of “weirdness,” see Davis, High Weirdness; Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 139, 345; idem, Esotericism in Western Culture, Chapter Nine.
Content and Meaning
1 French translation of Lazzarelli: [du Preau], Mercure Trismegiste … For the personal story, see Hanegraaff, “The Real Hermetic Tradition.” Hanegraaff & Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli is out of print and almost impossible to acquire today; but I plan to include its essential contents in a new and more broadly-conceived monograph about the Renaissance revival of the Hermetica. Listening to the Hermetic sources: Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality. 2 Little interest in meaning and content among modern scholars of the Hermetica: Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality, 6-8. “what was meant and how it must be understood”: Steiner, After Babel, 141. 3-5 For the complete argument, including the radical metaphysical nonduality that it implies, see Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality.
Concluding Remarks
1 Gadamerian revival? See notably the monumental recent collection edited by George & van der Heijden, The Gadamerian Mind.
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