There’s a lot to like in the rather expansive BUR Classici edition of the Corpus Hermeticum I recently picked up, from the acid-trip epiphany with which the collection begins to its weird agricultural/masturbatory cosmogony (the demiurge started the universe by casting seeds down into the world of material, and he hasn’t stopped since – that’s why we can do noesis) to its Neoplatonic exegesis of cult statues (which turns out to share a metaphysics with Christian attacks on those same statues). What sticks with me the most, though, is the Latin Asclepius appended to the end of the collection. This dialogue (most of the corpus consists of dialogues in a Ciceronian style, more like lectures) is the one that gives a much-quoted prophecy about the destruction of Egypt and the abandonment of its gods. Leaving aside the question of which eventu the prophecy is ex, it makes a striking contribution to a genre I’ve been thinking about for a while now and which may be especially salient at this moment in our history.
Marxists and Whigs alike tend to interpret the history of philosophy as a history of progress, the sum of individual contributions to a collective project that always gains and never loses. To say the least, that model falls well short of the demands of historical materialism. In general but especially with respect to political thought, the production of a moment can only be assimilated to a timeless, accumulative history at the cost of ripping it out of the circumstances in which it has been produced and annihilating its polemic value within those circumstances. A thoughtful historian like Ellen Meiksins Wood will recognize this fact and try to account for it, producing a richer narrative in which appropriations are also transformative. Even Wood, however, tells a story of philosophy always moving forward – much as history itself, in a doctrinaire Marxist account, is always supposed to be progressive.
Look closer, though, and you see the cul-de-sacs, the dead ends and backwards steps. If we have learned to see the Dark Ages as not so dark, the Decline and Fall as a Late Antique transition, still we can’t smoothe out all of history this way. Those cul-de-sacs, it seems to me, are especially productive moments for political thought: the owl of Athena flies at midnight, but that doesn’t mean that dawn is coming.
Some of the works that fall under this rubric have been written off, over the course of the twentieth century, as “minor” texts that fall outside the productive tradition of Western philosophy. Cicero’s De officiis, written after the assassination of Caesar but when its author had already begun to lose hope that a restoration of the Republic would follow from that, is one example. The entire oeuvre of Xenophon, written as a rear-guard action against mass politics and mercantile power, is another. All these texts were long misunderstood by a popular tradition of classical education which has largely died out; the academic history of philosophy that survives simply doesn’t know what to do with them.
A more striking case is that of Machiavelli, writing in the wake of a failed republican experiment in Florence. The Prince and the Discourses have never lacked for interpreters who see them as representing an important historical watershed, the secularization of politics and its liberation from various theological straightjackets. I suppose that would be a case of moral luck: once enlightenment thinkers (who by and large rejected him or read him as a satirist) had completed the work for which Machiavelli is usually credited, he could be seen in retrospect as a historical antecedent. Nevertheless, Machiavelli should be understood not as tranforming the substance of political thought but as writing about a recently vanished past.
All these thinkers are analyzing possibilities for action that have recently been foreclosed. They write within what, for them, are radically impoverished historical horizons where forms of excellence that they cherish no longer seem possible. The images they offer of that excellence are fully retrospective but exercise a fascinating power on later readers. That may be the function of such texts: to beautify an obsolete form of political organization in order to raise the possibility of its restoration at some point in the future.
The Asclepius undertakes a similar task with respect, not to actual Egyptian religion, but to a Neoplatonic culture of theurgy that was under intellectual and legal assault in late antiquity. It predicts that men who practice the old rites will be arrested and executed: this is precisely what happened to a pair of senators under Theoderic, who was enforcing legislation put into place by Theodosius a century earlier. The Christian emperors had undertaken to exterminate Neoplatonism as a ritual practice. In the West, they succeeded.
Against this background, the Asclepius directly broaches a question that the other texts I’ve mentioned only address obliquely: once the knowledge associated with the culture it memorializes has been lost, how will a restoration be possible? It can answer this question in a concrete way because it shares with the rest of the Corpus Hermeticum a theory of knowledge (noesis) that depends on direct divine inspiration. Things will be put right again after an interval of chaos because the god (ho theos) will send knowledge to a new generation of men.
The evidently mythical character of this solution highlights a problem that every text in this genre has to face. The text itself may survive and inspire a new generation of imitators; what can be done to ensure that they read it correctly? Hermeticism itself offers an example of how this can go wrong: Renaissance audiences eagerly devoured the Corpus Hermeticum in Ficino’s translation, but they historicized it as one form of wisdom among many in a kind of philosophia perpetua that bore only traces of Late Antique Neoplatonism. Finally, Isaac Casaubon demonstrated at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the Corpus had been composed at a much later date than it pretended, and this was enough to destroy its authority. Had its readers seriously imbibed its theory of noesis, this philological refutation should have done nothing to discredit the contents of the Corpus, which could just as easily have been divinely revealed in the first few centuries CE as in the second millennium BCE. However, the Renaissance was characterized by new scholarly and antiquarian attitudes toward the “authenticity” of texts which the authors of the Corpus could not have anticipated. The total control over its own reception which the text envisions was impossible to achieve in practice.
I’m writing this at a moment when it seems seriously possible that a certain political culture, one in which disagreements about collective aims and practices get resolved through rhetorical agonism rather than violence or asymmetrical repression, may vanish in my lifetime. With the support of autocrats elsewhere in the world as well as his own electoral base, Trump may formalize his own authoritarian aspirations and suppress forms of free speech essential to democracy, if not the voting process itself. Should that happen, democracy would lose the international prestige that led to its establishment (in name at least) around the world over the twentieth century. It would retreat everywhere in favor of nationalist-socialist regimes like those recently established in Russia, Poland and Hungary. This is an unlikely future, but not outside the realm of possibility.
If that were to come to pass, what would the philosophical legacy of this moment look like to future readers? This is a difficult thought experiment, because it requires us to envision an advocate for the democratic process less brain-dead than David Brooks or Thomas Friedman, but bear with me and suppose that someone did turn up who fit the bill. Would s/he be a footnote to history, like Xenophon? A B-movie villain, like Machiavelli? A mystic, like the author of the Corpus Hermeticum? That we can hardly say which of these outcomes is most likely marks, I think, the extent to which our future is beginning to look like a black box.