If we think of the general madness of the world at the present in terms of the familiar biological taxonomical hierarchy: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, while something like “Critical Whiteness Studies” might be a species within the Critical Race Theory genus, which is in turn classifiable in the neo-Marxian Family, Marxian Order, and Hegelian Class, the question arises: in what the Kingdom are all these interrelated insanities to be found? I assert that it is that ancient parasitic bugbear known as Gnosticism. In fact, the systematic Hegelian project and especially Marxism, which materialized it, would therefore define the Gnostic phylum of Scientific Gnosticism (though, by definition, “scientistic” would be better) that completes the taxonomy. Whatever might be said about other branches in Kingdom Gnosticism, Scientific Gnosticism is perhaps the most calamitous ideological phylum human beings have so far managed to contrive. Within that phylum, though taxonomically placed otherwise, we would find all of the failures of Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism, for example. We will also find our present plight, the so-called “public-private partnership,” which synthesizes Communism and Fascism into one new terror to be managed technocratically, in mockery of the science it will invoke to establish yet another unnecessary tyranny upon the world and its generally innocent people.
The essence of Gnosticism can be expressed in three beliefs. These are (1) that it is not you or your theories that are wrong, but the world itself; (2) that we have been flung into this miserable and intolerable condition against our wants; but (3) are able to attain a consciousness, a knowledge—a Gnosis—that will allow us to repair the world and ourselves. In this regard, Gnosticism is a perverted impulse toward progress, which describes the circumstance in which we have improved our ability to live in the world through a better understanding of it and ourselves in it. That is, progress means better according our lives with reality as it is and thus doing better in reality. Gnosticism turns progress upside-down—inverts it—by reframing it away from the effort to prosper in the world as it is and toward remaking it into a world that is not and, because this non-reality is essential to the Gnostic project, cannot be.
In that regard, Gnosticism is the perversion—the inversion—of epistemology, which is how we might go about knowing what we know and that we know it. Philosophically speaking (which is to say loving wisdom, not mistaking ourselves for the wise), knowledge is a tricky matter. While theologies are content to assert an absolute Truth in the Deity, they also, when mature, also insist that man’s fallibility and limitation prevents him from knowing that Truth as the Deity would. In other words, while there may be some absolute Truth, it is not man’s lot to know it within the circles of this world. To capital-K (or G) Know would position us as gods ourselves—and so whispers the Serpent of Genesis—which is out of accordance with the order of Creation. God’s mind is not our mind, and our minds are not equipped to fathom the ways of the Deity. Instead, we must be content to pursue or to love knowledge, or wisdom, and, if theological, God, and to pursue it as best we may in humility and in recognition of our proneness to error.
The theistic Gnostic, often theosophists, turns this upside-down. Absolute knowledge is available and hidden from us by those who have ordered the world. God is not the Creator who put order to the world and then called it good; He is a tyrant and the warden of a universal prison locked from within, keeps that which is truly Good for Himself, and by maintaining for us a state of ignorance keeps us enslaved. Knowledge of the higher truth, that the Garden is in fact a prison, sets us free of it, at which point we can reshape the world nearer to our hearts’ desires. Religion and Truth merely have to be exposed as the limiting lies that lead us to see the chaos of our lives as ordered, but in ways beyond our knowledge, and our misery as contentment and even joy. Accordingly, Knowledge of the Absolute Truth, Gnosis, is the way to true freedom. We just have to bite into the fruit, and capital-G Knowledge is ours.
So much for premodernity. Theistic Gnosticism is its own set of phyla in our taxonomical tree. In the modern era, epistemology has shifted into the scientific. Where many of the theologically savvy have recognized the scientific method as a tool to gain provisional and limited knowledge of God’s creation, they have come into harmony with those who see order in the brute fact of Nature herself. Science becomes the method by which we ask hard questions of the world, whether it be named Creation or not, and seek to ascertain what we can of its order. There is no shortcut to this process. Science is intrinsically agnostic—without Gnosis. Science, when it hasn’t ossified into some doctrine of scientism, proceeds entirely on the assumption that we do not know. Whereas The Science is settled; the science is never settled. Every hypothesis can be challenged. Every claim to knowledge can be overturned, especially any claim to Knowledge. Science is therefore by definition anti-Gnostic, just as are the healthy expressions of theistic faith. To allow the category error, Nature, whether product of God or not, has ordered the world as it has, for reasons that may forever remain inscrutable to us, and by our application of reason (gift of God or not), we might come to understand some portion of the order in which we live.
This agnostic fact of science bears a number of relevant consequences. One is that, since science is interested in ascertaining provisional truths about all that is, a Scientific Gnosticism must seek to call truths things which are not. This is why non-reality is essential to Scientific Gnosticism, and the form it takes is Theory. Theory sits atop reality and provides the right understanding, such that those who embrace Theory are the only ones who can truly understand reality. Socialism can only be properly understood by Socialist Man, who is a Scientific Gnostic. Another consequence readily follows. Scientific Gnosticism is scientistic, not scientific at all. It uses the prestige of science as a pretense to its own insight, but it is a counterfeit and an inversion in the same way that premodern Gnostic cults are counterfeit, inverted religions, which the faithful call “heresies.” One familiar is here reminded of the feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver, who called for a revolution against the “absolute authority of recalcitrant Nature” in a now-infamous 1989 paper in a paragraph in which she asserts that we can be freed from that prison by abandoning “true theories” and “false theories” for “strategic theories.”
Some in the modern era—notably G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx in his wake—believed that such an understanding of the emerging epistemology of that era, science, presents only a low-level understanding of the world as it is. Theirs is a world that becomes, not a world that is, and it does so through the intrinsically negative process of highlighting “contradictions.” Unless a claim to direct revelation is made, contradictions are a typical route to Gnosis for the Gnostic. As the Serpent whispered the first “contradiction” in Genesis—that ye be made in the image of God but are not as God—so raged Marx that the very point of understanding the world is to change it, by “ruthless criticism of everything that exists,” no less. And so Death entered the world as answer to the rebellion against the order of the world, which, in fact, will not change.
The term for “science” in German, Wissenschaft, carried less strict a meaning in the 19th century than its contemporary translation in English, and it was with that Wissenschaft that these German modern-era Scientific Gnostics worked. That Wissenschaft more accurately refers to “knowledge” than to the more specific term, “science,” and the systematic speculative idealist Hegel separated it into two levels: Verstand (“Understanding”) and Vernunft (“Reason”). A nearer articulation of the meaning of these terms, however, would be (agnostic) understanding (of provisional truths about the world) and (Gnostic) Theory, which is to say systematic contextualization—that is, ideology—of that understanding and everything else.
For Hegel, this meant that his own systematic philosophy was the better understanding, the Wissenschaftlicher, of Understanding (and therefore also not wrong). This is a great, and Gnostic, intellectual swindle. Hegel’s “philosophy,” for an actual philosophy it is not, becomes the doctrine through which all knowledge is put into its proper context. Hegel’s “Reason” is the Absolute, which those with Theoretical consciousness bring to completion. Thus, in Hegel, in Marx, and in their intellectual descendants throughout this taxonomical tree, who are in the current end “Woke,” we have the emergence of a “Scientific Gnosticism” that, in our own era, is often mockingly referred to as “The Science.” That a Scientific Gnosticism is, itself, an oxymoronic contradiction in terms is no impediment to The Science, because in-contradiction is its authentic state of being. That’s because it is an inversion of science done in the name of “progress” that seeks to remake the world rather than to understand it and to prosper in accordance with it.
Marx was quite explicit about The Science, which he referred to as Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus—usually given as “Scientific Socialism,” though the suffix –licher implies that it is more scientific (than science, one might presume). Scientific Socialism is an approach that went on to mischaracterize lowly Verstand science as “bourgeois science,” which in turn led to the unnecessary deaths of possibly more than a hundred million people in the Soviet Union and China. Recalcitrant nature, contra Kelly Oliver, retained its recalcitrance despite the strategery of the Theory.
Strategic theories, Gnostic Theories, turn out only to be good for obtaining power and abusing it, but they cannot deliver Utopia, no matter how many Theorists (Marxian, neo-Marxian, or Woke) spin them in new ways. They cannot remake the broken world into which we have been flung because it is not, in fact, broken in the first place. Vernunft (Theory, usually named Reason) isn’t very reasonable. Socialist Man doesn’t, as it turns out, know better, and he will never be able to reorder the world nearer to his heart’s desire.
Couldn’t we say, though, that that was then and this is now, and we’re no longer in the modern era but the postmodern, in which Scientific Gnosticism cannot be because there is neither Science nor Gnosis to be had? That was the postmodernists’ contention, anyway. All science, all knowledge, all truth is a proud claim to Gnosis, and that, they seem to assert, cannot be had anyway. So we might read Lyotard on the “postmodern condition” or understand Foucault’s dire warnings about biopower. “It’s not that everything is bad; it’s that everything is dangerous”: all progress is an illusion, and the world cannot be remade, nor us within it. Even the neo-Marxists of the late 1960s—undoubtely Scientific Gnostics of the first order—cleaved their Gnosticism in this direction, which is to say in the negative. Negative thinking becomes positive, admonished Marcuse, and the revolutionary potential of the movement is located within the absence of liberation while retaining consciousness of its historical possibility. It may not be possible to cast a positive image of the Utopia, claimed Adorno, but Utopia exists in the negative. Utopia is the possibility of what may be when all oppression is removed. Put otherwise, we might not know what Heaven will look like, but it’s not this and we’ll know it when we see it—now get in the car. This is still Gnosticism, and their mode, profoundly modernist even as it flirted with the postmodern, in the Scientific mold.
Regarding the challenge of postmodernism proper, at least three things must be said. First, the postmodernists, for all their insights and astute warnings about The Science, failed to understand the science it mimics. Second, though their dialectics turned almost completely negative, not even they gave up on Gnosticism. Instead, they retained it in different shape, so that the remaking of the world and Man within it was made totally internal and subjective. Their goal was to reject all meaning and truth, and this is but an avant garde, nihilistic, fashionably 1970s-French way of asserting that they in some way knew so much better, better enough to be able to sit aside from the whole world and shit on it at every turn. Third, their critique, even for what worth it retains in spite of these contradictions and confusions, doesn’t matter because in the years since postmodernism came to America, the Scientific Gnostics merely figured out ways to incorporate it into their Scientific Gnosticism—and they won the fight.
The result of the postmodern turn in Scientific Gnosticism wasn’t its end; it was its kaleidoscopic (literally, that’s their word for it) explosion. Now Gnostic consciousnesses proliferate at the level of identity politics, and these define the entire collection of genera in the “Woke” family or families in our taxonomical hierarchy. Queer Theory sees “queer” as an “identity without an essence,” and so every narcissistic adolescent obtains a specialized Gnosis of the world and its functioning located firmly in their own unstable sense of self that is contextualized by The Science of sex, gender, and sexuality. Race is socially constructed and imposed, says Critical Race Theory, so only by understanding yourself in terms of its structurally deterministic machinations can Gnostic awareness of Race Theory be rightly obtained. Understanding systems and their operation through the black magick of socialization awakens a Gnostic consciousness in every conceivable domain of identity, but Scientific Gnosticism it remains. Postmodernism didn’t kill Scientific Gnosticism; it merely pushed it deeply into the plural.
In this way, we can understand the madness of the current world. Gnosticism is again ascendant in a new postmodern and scientistic form, and Gnostic cults have captured countless people and far too many institutions. The trouble is: they think they Know, and they think that with their Knowledge, they can remake the world and those who are so unfortunate to inhabit it in its Fallen form. As a result, droves of otherwise sensible human beings yet again feel as though they have been flung into a broken world and, with the right Theory, the right Gnosis, they can properly contextualize all that they think they understand and so remake the world and themselves to match.
In practice, then, because these are metaphysically based cults, all stories, including stories about data, must serve Theory because Theory is the map to that Absolute knowledge—consciousness, be that class, feminist, critical, racial, or otherwise—that God and Nature otherwise would withhold from us, no matter how good our theology or our instruments. In this understanding, we can see that nothing has changed and that the “liberation” held out as Theory’s promise is false. Recalcitrant nature—human and otherwise—will remain recalcitrant. Second reality will not become reality. Theory put into practice will fail. They will not achieve “liberation” because liberation from reality is not possible, no matter how self-indulgently miserable and resentful anyone becomes by believing they capital-G Know what they can only pretend to know.
59 comments
I don’t see the author turning Gnosticism into a caricature. I think he is right is saying one seed is Gnosticism – I’m sure James is not saying it is the only one – and that seed of a bad idea carried on to other belief systems that harmed the world. That basic seed is, the physical world is evil so it must be destroyed so we can reach Heaven. Marxism converts this into, the physical world is evil and so we must destroy it so we can reach Heaven by remaking the destroyed physical world into Heaven. How do you know that you are right in this, I may ask? How can we trust you? Because we Marxists… er, wokes are the ones who reached the higher consciousness (Gnosis), so trust us, we’re the experts. Wait, you disagree with us? You’re gonna block the perfect world that we want! Guards, off with his head!
Basically, any idea which promotes that humans are God or can become God leads to the death of other people.
Machiavelli advice to the nobility was to utilize religion as a tool for social control, regardless of whether they personally believe in it. This is why he was despised, labeled as a cynic, and criticized for the philosophy that “the ends justify the means.”
But Machiavelli also said that Christianism (the communism of the middle ages) was imperfect for that purpose. That’s why the British crown wants to replace Christianism with Gnosticism.
As someone pointed here, true gnostic religions is far away from these revolutionary modern gnostics. Takes the classical pali buddhist Nibbana for example; that is much more of a “cessation of subjetive representation of reality” than cessation of reality itself. To achieve Nibbana is to stop interpreting reality by trully experiencing It. Unfortunatelly, the language used by the Buddha was very deceptive and the buddhists itself starded becoming more and more gnostics with time, believing that Enlightment is the cessation of objective reality itself.
Anyway, even the most later gnostic mahayanistic buddhism dos not fit with the revolutionary assumption that liberation will be achieved by destroying the material reality, as if such destruction would automatically bring a idealized second reality. This is, in fact, a perverted version of gnostic religions.
Hmm. I think you need to research ancient Gnosticism and what it is really about. What you have written here seems to be missing the point
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59331/page/n11/mode/2up
It gets a bit over complicated if you leave out actual gnostic experience and concentrate on the mental constructs around it.
Here, Arthur Koestler has an actual gnostic experience, and it points him away from communism, not towards it. Yes the communists have a vision of a wicked world that should be purified, but their solution is a materialist one, a new economic order rather than spiritual. I think a real gnostic will say you can rearrange economics all you want it won’t bring real gnosis – as most affluent people demonstrate every day. Eye of a needle and etc.!
http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/read/notables/koestler.shtml
Hegel in the phenomenology of Geist, Mind, Intelligence, Entity, Life, Soul, Mind was to negate the misapprehension through an active engagement in the real world, not the empty ideas and beginning with Kant’s transcendental phenomenology, that is understand, comprehend reality, not the pre-undigested mentally imagined prior knowing what is being apprehended to arrive at a clearer comprehension of what one is living in and with continuously every moment of conscious attention of one’s existence as an active agent in the real world. That is the basic dynamic of the dialectic. Hegel was against the medieval scholastic philosophy of the dead letter logic still prevalent in academia. Fichte and Schelling inclusively post Kant who opened the way. Post Vedic India of course. Hegel admitted apart from Heraclitus that other amazing Greek whom I have forgotten just now! Schiller in his momentary philosophical bent summed Kant up with simplicity and clarity.
Heguel claimed that opposites are the same, so asserting “Hegel did X” or “Hegel meant X” is essentially claiming the opposite, leading your entire argument into confusion and deception.
Possible issue with the argument from the language: In German, isn’t the “-er” ending on “Wissenschaftlicher” you refer to merely a gendered adjective ending to match the masculine-gender of “Sozialismus”?
Yes, yes it is.
The ‘Wissenschaftlicher’ in Wissenschaftler Sozialismus is an adjective, not a comparative. It meant to differentiate Marx’ form of socialism from the unscientific (Unwissenschaftlich) socialism of Fourier and company. So talking about the sea turning into lemonade would be Unwissenschaftler Sozialismus.
Insightful essay, as always.
the way in which conservatives recently are defining gnosticism for use as a rhetorical weapon against the woke left seems to caricature gnosticism as something easily refuted in my opinion. i’ve endeavored to learn about gnosticism on-and-off since 2009, and though my recollection of various gnostic teachings is not flawlessly precise, i seem to recall that the practices proceeding from gnostic religious teachings tends to be extremely ascetic and austere, a personal withdrawal from the apparent world in pursuit of a higher reality that envelopes or surpasses it all, like the hindu moksha, the buddhist nibbana or pleroma as it is called in gnosticism. though it may differ between gnostic or “heretical” christian sects retroactively labeled as such, i don’t recall anything in gnostic teachings or texts that would admonish a destructive revolt against the material world. if i’m not mistaken, on a gnostic view of epistemology, this would be an entirely pointless and misled endeavor, as physically destroying the corporeal world would do nothing to change its fundamental essence as a prison for souls or divine fragments. this sort of action would be totally arbitrary. if i’m not mistaken, the gnostic path to redemption or enlightenment is entirely inward, and would involve an ascetic withdrawal from the goings on of the apparent world – and, as such, would certainly not be conducive to any terrorist action like that carried out by marxist revolutionaries, brownshirts or antifa/blm “activists.”
Thanks for your input. Since my days in Catholic seminary, back in the 1070’s, I too have been interested in Gnosticism, especially as it threatened Christian doctrines in the first through third centuries. Of course, Gnosticism spread throughout the religious sects of those centuries, and it took on some the look of each rather adeptly. I have been aware of the evolution of postmodern thought into its melding with Critical Theories, at least to some degree, for awhile. Some time ago I developed four concepts through which I would strain postmodern thought, one of which was Gnosticism. I know it’s potentially simplistic, but it helps to look for the undefinable special knowledge of the theories in question. I have appreciated James’ discussion of Gnosticism since I first encountered it last fall—it was encouraging to know that someone else was seeing something similar. I actually believe that Gnosticism could easily take on some of the revolutionary ideas of deconstruction that come from Critical Theories. Thanks again for making me think.
Ha, ha! I should edit before I post. As you can see, I am rather old, but not THAT old. I meant to say that I was in the seminary in the 1970s.
The gnostic heresy, if I remember it rightly, was the denial of the reality of the material world, and thus a denial of the Creator whose world it is that the gnostics denied. Fair enough. Think what you want; we all do. However, the orthodox Christian position was and is that the material world is real, and the Christian is called to participate in it rather than withdraw from and deny it. I would assert that all utopias are the products of gnostic thinking, i.e., the denial of current reality and the assumption that humans alone can create de novo the perfect world–which does not and cannot exist. Christian theology continues to ascribe to God alone the power to create ex nihilo, and the extent that we as God’s children inherit the power to create in this reality, this comes from God alone and not from any inherent human capacities. Marx and his spiritual followers arrogate to themselves this power, and unfortunately, as we have seen in the oceans of blood they have so cavalierly spilled since 1844, they forget that the power to create also includes the power to destroy.
If not gnosis and gnosticism, what would you call their claim to this “special knowledge” that apparently only they – as enlightened beings on a higher level of consciousness – can perceive?
Occult knowledge? As in hidden knowledge?
And of course the woke aren’t exactly Gnostics of old with a capital letter G. Isn’t it more the point that they’re doing things the *same way* as Gnostics, claiming some sort of special insight into the mysteries that only they have access to … now that they have the correct faith/sees things Critically?
Much like when someone claims to have knowledge of God and just “gnows” that God intends for them to become, as you write, ascetics? They claim to have “other ways of knowing”, but given that it isn’t knowledge as normal people would understand it it becomes something more akin to gnosis, wordplay: “Gnowledge”.
That is, it’s not so much the *contents* – nor the actual implementation of knowing the “really Real” – of historical Gnosticism, which appears to be “ascetic and austere”, but the huge claim that they actually know what God wants. You know the people who always go “I know things”, but can’t really account for any of it, it’s just something they mysteriously have some insight into.
I dunno, if it’s more about the structure of thought that arises from this rather than content, I kinda think “Gnosticism” gets the point across to me at least.
The way I read and hear James he seems to be saying the same when (in structure and not content) he claims that Intersectionality is Marxism. Take that literally and based on content and James would be wrong – Marx was about the economics and such, not identity or race. So they’re Marxists, not so much due to content, but because they think along the same lines as Marxists: belief in historicism, belief in dialectics, belief that things are perfect only trapped in a shell of oppression, etc.
I really enjoyed this piece. I think you have identified something very important. Thank you.
Cf. https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-America-Contemporary-according-Christianitys/dp/0692260498/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=gnostic+heresy&qid=1630028363&sr=8-3
Also, the entry for gnosticism in the Catholic Encyclopedia (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06592a.htm):
“The Gnostic Saviour, therefore, is entirely different from the Christian one. For the Gnostic Saviour does not save. Gnosticism lacks the idea of atonement. There is no sin to be atoned for, except ignorance be that sin. Nor does the Saviour in any sense benefit the human race by vicarious sufferings. Nor, finally, does he immediately and actively affect any individual human soul by the power of grace or draw it to God. He was a teacher, he once brought into the world the truth, which alone can save. As a flame sets naphtha on fire, so the Saviour’s light ignites predisposed souls moving down the stream of time. Of a real Saviour who with love human and Divine seeks out sinners to save them, Gnosticism knows nothing.”
Gnosticism in three easy steps
1) find a grassy field
2) pick psilocybin mushrooms
3) enjoy the dissolution of the self
Congratulations, you have taken an excellent step into gnosticism. It’s that simple. Hasn’t got much to do with either side of the culture wars.
Another experiment.
Meditate deeply until you feel you are one with the source of all things.
Have a conversation with someone you deeply disagree with.
Notice that your opinion, and the opposite one coming from your friends mouth, are both emanating from the same source.
Excellent, you are witnessing the unification of opposites!
If Hegel didn’t mean that then he wasn’t a proper hermeticist or anything similarly esoteric.
NB. you don’t have to talk to anyone, just watch a political debate on TV.
Fanks!
I’ve had trips like this many, many times, and I’ve found that yes, there is something going on, but there’s also something not so clear cut. One of the level 4 trips on the Shulgin scale was done with a bunch of friends.
And while I did experience things, I also noticed how, afterwards, everyone was oh-so-ready to push their pre-packaged labels on the phenomenon I experienced, and I honestly have to say that I didn’t believe them. I knew a lot of those people well, and in my estimation they projected a lot of their own stuff onto my experience.
There’s no doubt the experience is real, I was there after all, and I have no doubt that many a miracle or religious experience – if not organized religion – has been derived from such psychedelic trips (and at some point they stopped eating shrooms as the eucharist, and the religion then got more intellectual and less visceral.
I definitely noticed after the trip, next day, that I was much more wary of making sweeping claims about metaphysics and “cosmic consciousness” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) than my friends.
Lots of psychonauts happen to be Communists when they’re not tripping, and they think the drugs are basically validating their belief in Marxism. In the long run I found many of these friends to lack a whole lot of gnosis into the world … bloody enlightened if you asked them, but utterly dysfunctional beings who couldn’t hold a job for two weeks, nor create anything useful other people would pay for.
Lots of them were just living off the State – because their Marxism and psychedelics obviously wasn’t enough to make them function. . And I’m more like “fuck that” … if enlightenment means you get dysfunctional, maybe stay away from that kind of “enlightenment”, go look elsewhere.
That 4* trip caused me to lose a lot of my resentment. In a matter of days I noticed that I had become a markedly less angry driver. I suppose over the years it did start a slow process – at the time I fancied myself a Socialist, but once the resentment had been largely scrubbed from my system, it appears that I slowly lost my interest in Leftist politics. Leftism is driven emotionally by resentment. I dunno why it worked better for me than my friends, but maybe because I lived far away from them and never really got involved with any of the local political causes I couldn’t be sucked in as easily.
Anyway, have a nice day 🙂
Probably the best book about said ‘Eucharist’ is: “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name”, 2020, by Brian C. Muraresku. Great commentary on Dionysus, Hermeticism, etc. Although Muraresku does NOT advocate psycho-actives and plant medicine, he is bold in asking hard questions and employing logic regarding the history of the authentic Eucharist in Paleo-Christendom. I couldn’t put the book down!
It would be good to show the actual historical connections between Hegel and gnosticism.
In his philosophical idealism, Hegel was quite intentionally reviving earlier forms of mysticism (with roots in neo-Platonism).
This is a good source: The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy
https://www.amazon.com/Mystical-Sources-German-Romantic-Philosophy/dp/0915138506/ref=sr_1_10?dchild=1&keywords=hegel+german+mysticism&qid=1629741066&sr=8-10&asin=0915138506&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1
Yes I like the “Gnosticism” category. Seems suitable
OK I want to compare what is said here with what other sources say gnosticism is.
Three point schema given here…
” These are (1) that it is not you or your theories that are wrong, but the world itself; (2) that we have been flung into this miserable and intolerable condition against our wants; but (3) are able to attain a consciousness, a knowledge—a Gnosis—that will allow us to repair the world and ourselves. ”
Elsewhere on the net…
According to Valentinian myth, one’s fate depended on whether one had attained to gnosis or not. Those who did not have gnosis were believed to be subject to judgement and punishment by the Craftsman (demiurge) and his associates in the “Middle” (Gospel of Philip 66:7-20).
…blah blah…
At the end of the world, the spirits then enter the Fullness (pleroma) along with Sophia, their mother. Sophia is joined to her bridegroom, the Savior. Likewise, the spirits are joined to their angelic counterparts (Irenaeus Against Heresies 1:7:1, Excerpts of Theodotus 64:1, Valentinian Exposition 39:28-33, Gospel of Philip 81:34-82:25). They all “attain to the vision of the Father and become intellectual Aeons, entering into the intelligible and eternal union in marriage” (Excerpts of Theodotus 64:1). The entire Fullness is the “bridal chamber” for their union (Irenaeus Against Heresies 1:7:1, Excerpts of Theodotus 64:1).
Then the “fire which is hidden in the world will blaze up and ignite and destroy all matter and consume itself at the same time and pass into nothingness” (Irenaeus Against Heresies 1:7:1). The physical world will cease to exist. The deficiency will then have been eliminated and the process of restoration will be complete. ”
contrasting point three – “are able to attain a consciousness, a knowledge—a Gnosis—that will allow us to repair the world and ourselves. ”
…with …
“Then the “fire which is hidden in the world will blaze up and ignite and destroy all matter and consume itself at the same time and pass into nothingness” (Irenaeus Against Heresies 1:7:1). The physical world will cease to exist. The deficiency will then have been eliminated and the process of restoration will be complete. “”
I don’t think any communists expect the world to pass into nothingness. And there’s no real gnosis in Marx. If so please do drop a quote here tnx
See, here is where Marxism (and a whole lot else) falls on it’s arse, because it doesn’t have room for gnostic and peak experiences, whereas even some of the wackiest cults and religions do.
How much good is your philosophy going to do if it has no room for humanities finest experiences ?
Being a Marxist is one continuous gnostic experience or, rather, state of mind. ‘Peak experience’ for a Marxist is their realization of how ‘right’ Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, other another classical Marxist writer is; or, for example, their experience of ‘class consciousness’, or a dialectical ‘Aufhebung’.
Well, I think there’s a big difference between gnosis and mere devotion. But you raise a good question as to similarities between political and religious conversion experience. Does a convert to any political ideology experience ecstasy and emotional rebirth ? Is there a yoga of communism or a rebirth into the spirit of liberalism ? Is there an Erowid vault for the psychedelic experiences provoked by religious and economic philosophies ?
“Gnosticism turns progress upside-down—inverts it—by reframing it away from the effort to prosper in the world as it is and toward remaking it into a world that is not and, because this non-reality is essential to the Gnostic project, cannot be”.
This reminds me of Lord Buddha’s advice to a complainer to put shoes on his feet rather than attempt to cover the earth with leather.
“Recalcitrant nature—human and otherwise—will remain recalcitrant. ”
One cannot rewrite reality to suit one’s whims. Evil is weak, because its primary adversary is reality.
Lenin had a great word: “Facts are stubborn”.
Why concede so much? Seems like “scientistic dogmatism” would more accurately describe what you’re getting at, without conferring the superficial legitimacy that “Scientific Gnosticism” seems to.
It’s not scientific dogmatism. It is scientific gnosticism. Dogmatists are stuck with a wrong idea they can’t give up. Gnosticists have a state of mind which enables them to believe in one wrong idea after another.
“Science is intrinsically agnostic—without Gnosis”
<- But science activism seems to be intrinsically gnostic! In the sense they always have the answer before looking at the facts. As if, once one has learnt a certain amount about the world, one no longer needs facts to figure stuff out – we can just model it!. Some good examples of actual scientific gnosticism are:
– Psychoanalysis
– Lysenkoism
– Linear No-Threshold – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCRiw6Lg0i8
– Man-made climate chanage = entirely based on models!
– COVID vaccine mania. Many aspects of COVID were just 'made up'. As if they knew already. For example: we were told:
— lockdowns would save us. The 'evidence' for this was based on Chinese propaganda
— COVID is almost certainly natural in origin, and promoting or discussing a man-made origin for COVID was 'racist'
— mass vaccination would give population-wide immunity
— crude face masks will prevent infection
— gene-based vaccines are perfectly safe
Time after time, with COVID, without having much data or experimental results, the gnostics decided in advance what would happen and how things would pan out. They were wrong time and again. Were I were wrong even once, that would severely knock my confidence. Yet the Science Gnostics have no issue being wrong because, for them, the problem is in the world, not in their ideas.
You are entirely right about anthropogenic climate change and corona virus. It’s the difference between The Science and science.
Well said!
Lockdowns DID save the Chinese from mass spreading. No one says vaccines of any kind are “perfectly” safe, but they work. I’m old enough to remember seeing young people wearing metal braces due to polio, in the late 1940s and 1950s. No one gets polio any more, thanks to mass vaccinations. No one says that crude face masks will PREVENT infection, but there’s no question that commercially available masks will reduce the spread of infection. “As if they were just ‘made up,’ ” whatever that may mean. It is gnostic to demand that science know perfectly all the answers in advance, these criticisms are far most gnostic than the behaviors practiced,, which are distortedly described here.
You seem to [G]know a lot!
Every example you gave assumes it’s own conclusion or is constructed in a way to eliminate the possibility of disproving it. The latter was described by Pauli as “not even wrong”.
How exactly do you know these things?
Of course there has been widespread public fear, consternation and frustration (whether called “mania” or otherwise) in response to outbreak of such an infectious and severe disease previously unknown. Three-quarters of a million Americans have died of it. Hospitals have been so overworked that other needs such as urgent surgery have had to be be rationed.
Lockdowns in China undoubtedly saved many lives that would have been lost by severe covid infection. Yes, almost all official statements from China have the character of propaganda, but some truths cannot be hid. Lockdowns are frustrating and some people in lockdown even died of that, but many more lives were saved from infection. Perfection results rarely if ever attainable in this world.
Aerial photos of Wuhan during the early phase before lockdowns became effective showed refrigerated trucks crammed with corpses waiting outside morgues where incinerators were constantly spewing smoke from burnt corpses. That was relieved when lockdown became effective.
Mass vaccination stopped polio and has stopped other diseases, so why should that goal not be held for covid? Goals do not need to be fully achieved in order to be worthy as goals to focus the mind and motivate people in a public health crisis.
“Crude face masks will prevent infection.” Straw man; only fools believed anything like that. Fools are always with us, and mischaracterizing a useful mechanism like that is simply polemic.
Vaccines of any kind are certain not to be perfectly safe. The covid vaccines have been shown to have a very high level of safety.
The people working on covid were playing catch up on an urgent problem. Any scientific investigation proceeds from hypothesis, collects relevant evidence and tests that, then revises the hypothesis as needed. Very few, if any of the torrent of pharmaceuticals we consume by considered prescription from qualified physicians have been tested for more than 3 to 5 years before release. Such medicines are often prescribed as tests of the drug; the patient is actually a guinea pig surrogate, but the risk is reasonably calculated to be so slight that, all things considered, it’s worth taking, at the patient’s discretion. This has nothing whatsoever to do with gnosticism.
“They were wrong time and again,” is it? Well, they got the main things right, and in USA we have access to three proved effective and highly safe vaccinations.
James-
Many thanks for you work. This is a productive topic, and the rabbit hole is surpisingly deep.
The Gnostic Vision can most easily be seen in a modern reincarnation – the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, or Repairing the World. But this is not original. It fully follows the Gnostic pattern: 1) we were in the heavens; 2) we were put in clay jars and cast down; 3) our thousands of sparks or points of light spread on the earth; 4) when we achieve a sufficiently righteous socity we can be returned to our rightful place in the heavens with God.
This can be seen in the materials of those that follow this theology, like for example: https://www.tikkun.org/how-the-ari-created-a-myth-and-transformed-judaism/
This depicts a form of salvation and return to heaven, presupposing an eternal soul and proposing that should we not get enough of humanity to accept this, then the plan cannot succeed. So all must participate. It is the pattern of the socialist Utopia, forcing all humanity to accept they must seek to become the “new man”. And thus implying that anyone who resists is a dangerous obstruction to this transformation.
This goes back to the the tower at Babel incident, to the Babylon Mysteries, and to God’s warnings to Isreal about them. It is about a plan for being returned to the heavens, from which they were cast, but not for humanity.
Lots of depth here that is not suitable for a reply to your informative article.
“[S]hould we not get enough of humanity to accept this, then the plan cannot succeed. So all must participate.”
In other words, a cult.
Strip away the exoteric happy-speak, and all cults boil down to two esoteric doctrines: recruit and fundraise, so that the parasitic leaders may live off the efforts of their minions.
Interesting but very abstruse article. Few people know who the Gnostics were. I think that countering the woke/critical studies phenomenon is going to require tighter, less technical articles that convey, if through shear repetition, the main flaws with the broader philosophy. Most people can understand ,”woke is wrong because it’s self-contradictory nonsense that uses the ideas it denies while hoping you don’t notice” followed by a short explanation. Most people can also follow a short summary along the lines of “A refugee German Marxist named Marcuse believed that freedom allowed fascism to form and therefore that freedom had to be restricted to prevent this – and to enable the Marxist dictatorship that he preferred.” Most people will have trouble sticking with the intricacies of specific philosophies – and don’t need to know that level of detail to be able to understand the problem. Mr. Lindsay can and has written such pieces. More of them are needed.
I believe he accepts guest writers sometimes, maybe you can write the articles you seek to see available.
Sounds like you have part of one started here. 👍🏼
We all need to play our part, and you sound qualified to write such pieces!
Fascism is marxism, and the post war propaganda tried to unstick socialism from it, so what people like Marcuse invented a narrative claiming fascism was unrelated to Marxism to absolve themselves of guilt.
Fascism has never been “far right”, but far left. It was invented by Lenin, and applied in the Soviet Union under the name of “new economic policy”. Decades later, Hitler and Mussolini copied it, because it was state of the art marxism.
Cue the jackals and carrion crows. The internet is poison. Adios.
“more scientific socialism” would be “wissenschaftlicherer Sozialismus”.
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wissenschaftlich#Declension
” though the suffix –licher implies that it is more scientific (than science, one might presume).”
No, the -er suffix in Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus is just the ending for the male grammatical gender, it’s not a comparative in this case.
Don’t try to mask it by pointing to a term 3 people in the world have studied.
Atheism is the parent of the abomination we today call woke.
The monotheists knows (gnos) this and are not angry at you for this. They know what is up and will join.
The cosmos was rigged from the start.
We are all in this. Unification is the answer.
“Marx was quite explicit about The Science, which he referred to as Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus—usually given as “Scientific Socialism,” though the suffix –licher implies that it is more scientific (than science, one might presume”
Please, please, Mr. Lindsay, before you go making claims about the syntax and semantics of actual phrases (or inventing your own pseudo-German phrases, like ‘Aufheben der Dr. Seuss’), consult someone who actually knows German. Don’t just go making things up and assuming that none of your readers know any better than you do. The word ‘wissenschaflicher’ (which is not capitalized, by the way, unless it occurs at the beginning of a sentence) in ‘wissenschaflicher Sozialismus’ is not a comparative adjective and does not mean ‘more scientfific’. The German word for ‘scientific’ (or ‘scholarly’) is ‘wissenschaftlich’ , and when it modifies a noun of masculine gender in the nominative case without any preceding determiner, it takes the ending ‘-er’. German syntax is complicated, so I would not expect someone who is ignorant of the language to know this. But that is all the more reason why you should not go talking out of your depth like this. Either run your claims about German by someone who knows the language before you publicize them or just don’t make them in the first place.
“Aufheben des Dr. Seuss” would have been correct.
Good essay. But, Hegel wasn’t Gnostic, he was a panentheistic Hermetic. Read “Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition” by Glenn Alexander Magee.
“The death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of socialism — it constitutes the goal of socialism.” Igor Shafarevich ‘The Socialist Phenomenon’ 1980
Every Gnostic, from ancient to current, thinks of him- or herself as a Hermes Trismegistus: ‘A Chosen One’ who possesses both the special ‘knowledge’ needed to create a Utopia and the ‘supreme right’ to destroy the existing world and anyone in it who resists the Gnostic’s vision.
“In much wisdom there is much grief, and he who increases knowledge, increases sorrow.” Tarkovsky (from the film) ‘Andrei Rublev’ 1966
Tarkovsky’s quote is a tool to use to separate who is truly wise (humanity based) from who has Gnostic false wisdom (ego/elitist based): To the truly wise, knowledge always brings sadness because the human truth that life is a vale of tears for all mankind is the origin of humility which is the first step on the ladder out of the vale for any human. To the false ‘Chosen One’, knowledge always brings self-power because Gnostic ‘truth’ is the opposite of humility, Ego, which digs a pit that no man can climb out of.
This is a very good article, indeed this idea I believe is a breakthrough one. This idea of the role of Gnosticism in past and current destructive societal patterns can be a generative critical Ah-ha moment if parsed out over time by many thinkers and may become the antidote not merely to the current woke iteration of an ancient human poison but to all Gnostic iterations once and for all.
I’m not even ‘truly wise’. I’ll settle for ‘skeptic who embraces empirical progress’. Recently, I was even labelled a ‘Cornucopian’. Now if you knew anything at all about me, it’d be clear to you I’m a natural stoic; so as far from ‘Cornucopian’ as it gets. I simply try to embrace Cornucopian ideas as a medicine to remediate my chronic stoicism. I don’t ‘believe in’ Cornucopia. I do ‘believe in’ skeptical enquiry based on empirical truths. For example, in science, the Laws of science are merely formulations of empirically observed reality; they are true. In contrast scientific theories are suppositions or speculations. Some theories may not be ‘true’.
We all be very wary of a desire to be ‘truly wise’. Far better to just avoid the crass stupidity of gnostic ideas.
Top article.
“When scientists discuss theories, they are designed as comprehensive explanations for things we observe in nature. They’re founded on strong evidence and provide ways to make real-world predictions that can be tested.” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uzsuCFUQ68
“[H]e who increases knowledge, increases sorrow.”
Thus, the leftist obsession with dumbing down K-PhD curricula.
Author needs to go on some meditation retreats and acquaint himself with actual gnostic experience. That’ll sort him out. Not very expensive either!
No excuses, retreats are easy to find.
For more on the value of retreats, the reader is referred to Cults in Our Midst by Margaret Thaler Sanger.
For even MORE on the value of retreats, the reader is referred to thousands of years of spiritual literature about gnostic experiences.
Anyway, cults are the basic social unit of humanity – our tribal heritage.
“Cult, which shares an origin with culture and cultivate, comes from the Latin cultus, a noun with meanings ranging from “tilling, cultivation” to “training or education” to “adoration.” In English, cult has evolved a number of meanings following a fairly logical path. The earliest known uses of the word, recorded in the 17th century, broadly denoted “worship.” From here cult came to refer to a specific branch of a religion or the rites and practices of that branch, as in “the cult of Dionysus.” By the early 18th century, cult could refer to a non-religious admiration or devotion, such as to a person, idea, or fad (“the cult of success”). Finally, by the 19th century, the word came to be used of “a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious.”
Cult is basic social unit….tribal cults etc….not always pejorative.
“We didn’t murder anyone because you can’t kill ‘kill’.” Charles Manson
Sort yourselves out! Free Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz! Say his name!