Descartes’ Hermeticism

Some paragraphs from an illuminating paper by Michael Allen Gillespie concerning Descartes’ links with Rosicrucians:

“The Rosicrucians were essentially a Hermetic society that sought to understand the hidden order of nature in order to gain power over and through it. Agrippa, for example, wrote in 1655 that for ‘a magician is defined . . . as one to whom by the grace of God the spirits have given knowledge of the secrets of nature.’ Hermetic thinkers in this sense divided the world into thinking substance and extension and sought to prepare themselves for the revelation of the hidden truth that lies ‘in ‘incorporeal substance by banishing the deceptions of the world from his mind. They believed themselves to be aided in the pursuit of these truths by Olympian spirits who clear away the shadows of the world that surround all things. Nature, however, will not in their view deliver up its secrets without a struggle, but must be tortured and even torn to pieces to discover the truth. The goal of such knowledge is not personal gain but the fundamental improvement of humanity by the prolongation of human life and the elimination of want and disease.

“Beeckman, who shared an interest with Descartes in Hermeticism, had encouraged him to spend his life searching for the truth. In Germany, Descartes discovered a secret fraternity leading just such a life. This experience seemed to intensify his desire to continue work on the new science he had described earlier to Beeckman. Waylaid by an early winter in a small German village near Ulm with no friends or acquaintances, Descartes was convinced that the time was ripe to try to establish a foundation for the science he wanted to develop. This was the task he set himself in his small, stove warmed room (po?le). Descartes describes this beginning in two places, in the Olympica section of his Little Notebook, and, more fully, in part 2 of the Discourse on Method. As we shall see, these two sources suggest that on November 10, 1619 Descartes spent the day in a series of reflections that began not with abstract metaphysical thoughts but with the criteria for distinguishing good technicians, lawgivers, and scientists set against the backdrop of a world that had failed to find a principle of order that could restrain the religious passions and establish political peace. The path that Descartes follows in his speculations is a path that leads away from the political and into the self, but it is not a path of retreat and withdrawal, not merely an effort to save himself or maintain his own independence on the model of Petrarch or Montaigne. The retreat into the self is part and parcel of his effort to discover the ground for a radical transformation of European society based on a certain method for determining the truth. His ‘retreat’ in this respect follows a Rosicrucian path. Indeed, in Hermetic fashion, he tries to separate his mind from his body in order to free himself from the illusions of the world and in so doing to open himself up to a visionary revelation. His goal, however, is not personal but public and political.”