The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

by Joshua Ramey

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition.

Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Esoterica, Mysticism

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Joshua Alan Ramey is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College.

Reviews

[Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halfway through my sophomore year of college, I made a change. I was a physics major and hating life. I was waking up literally having nightmares about partial differentials and in a constant state of high-anxiety about my schoolwork and grades. I was already married with a daughter (I married young - and, yes, we are still happily married nearly 30 years later), poor as the day is long, and about to have a series of mental breakdowns if something didn't change. I was tutoring a young lady in math who told me about her major in Humanities. I asked a little bit about it and, after talking with her, my wife said to me "that sounds right up your alley". And she was right. So I changed and, eventually graduated with a BA in Humanities with a History emphasis and an Anthropology minor. One of the best moves I've made in my life.

The Humanities major was intentionally broad and covered a number of different topics, one of which was philosophy. The luxury of my degree's requirements was that much of it could be taken in any order - it was broad and deep, but not as sequentially-arranged as most majors. I waited until my senior year to take the required Philosophy 101 class. Of course, by that time, I had already been steeped in philosophy through my general humanities classes, which gave a gloss on many movements in philosophy as reflected in art, literature, theater, cinema, music, dance, architecture, etc. I also had a few key classes that dove deeper into philosophy - classics, medieval and renaissance history, for example - so I didn't come to that freshman class as a senior without a decent amount of philosophical study behind me.

Early on in my college studies, before that change in major, I was in an astronomy class that was boring me to tears. I love astronomy, but my professor was drop-dead dull. I expressed my boredom to a math professor who I respected a great deal. He told me "you pay for college, get what you paid for! If it's boring, make it entertaining. Make the craziest claim you can and see what unfolds. In your astronomy class you could say 'the whole Hubble space telescope project is a waste of money' or something like that. Other students will jump in with their opinions and, voila, non-boring discussion."

He was right. I tried it and got my money's worth out of that class. I had several students come up to me at the end of the semester saying "I'm so glad you threw out that comment about [whatever it was I actually said - I don't even remember now]. That opened the class up for me!"

Fast forward to my Philosophy 101 class, with me as the only senior in a freshman-level class. I was bored. I threw out a comment that I still think is true: "Socrates didn't even use the so-called Socratic Method. He used leading questions to pull the answers that he wanted from the crowd. They weren't discovering together, they were following his subtle lead." My, oh my, did that philosophy professor not like that. He was an old school (pun intended) academic and did not like me questioning Socrates. After a couple more comments like this, he pulled me into his office and basically told me that I needed to stop being so creative with my critique and just learn the material. I was a little cocky and a lot upset, so I said "basically, you want me to barf back what you feed me". And he answered that, yes, basically, that was it. I was applying to grad schools and wanted the best grades possible, so I did what he asked . . . on tests and papers . . . but not in the classroom. I still spoke my mind and disagreed heartily with the professor many times. He always gave me good grades on my tests and papers because I regurgitated the material, just as he had asked, and, to his credit, he never let our disagreements in the classroom spill over into his grading. I got an "A" in the class and a really sour taste in my mouth for the academic study of philosophy.

Then came grad school. That was a different milieu entirely. We were encouraged to argue our points vehemently, so long as we backed our bravado with solid rhetoric and documentary evidence (my MA is in African History). There was plenty of philosophical meat to our discussions. I learned about Foucault, Chomsky, Derridas, Sartre, and many others, and became more facile in my use of philosophy as a tool to dig for knowledge.

Deleuze was still on the cutting edge of philosophy. He died the year before I got into grad school, so his posthumous popularity hadn't quite blossomed yet. At least his ideas hadn't penetrated far enough into the historical domain to have much relevance to my work at that time. But I heard of him. And I kept hearing of him, in little snippets, bizarre congeries of references spoken in almost spiritual tones. Some people who are a lot smarter than I am really, really were digging this dead dude.

Life intervened and I lost track of Deleuze. Only recently, while listening to the Weird Studies podcast (the single best podcast on the interwebs, if you ask me) did I pick up the thread again. Deleuze (and his compatriot, Felix Guattari) kept getting mentioned again and again and again. Finally, I had to do something about it. But I wasn't going to jump straight in. I had learned enough to know that Deleuzian territory is dangerous, complicated, like the philosophical equivalent of Visitation Zones in Roadside Picnic. I thought about foolishly rushing headlong into Deleuze's work, then thought better of it. I couldn't just brazenly bluster my way out of his woods. I needed to explore. Slowly. Carefully.

When I saw the title The Hermetic Deleuze, I thought "Aha! I can approach Deleuze through my knowledge of hermeticism!" After all, I had done a paper on Pico della Mirandola in my junior year of college that was lauded by the renaissance history professor from whom I was taking the class at the time. My intent was to go "sideways" into Deleuze.

The question is: was it successful?

Yes and no. I was not a philosophy major. I had learned enough in my college years to be dangerous, but not savvy. I was never steeped in the language of philosophy like those friends of mine who were philosophy majors. I stumbled through the vocabulary, more fully learning what words like "heuristic" and "theandric" meant. It was a slow plod because my vocabulary had to be extended with every page for the first third of the book or so. I recalled enough from hermeticism to keep me afloat, just barely. But I had to intellectually float and dog paddle, to get used to the feeling of my philosophical body being in water, so to speak.

Then I started hitting the truly Deleuzian rapids. The latter two thirds of the book I scraped on rocks a few times, got caught in a whirlpool or two, got myself completely turned around and crawled onto the shore only partially aware of what I had just been through. But I made it through. Once. And I'm willing to do it again. Some sections were very clear, others are going to require more serious study and some more grounding in Deleuze's work, unfiltered. Rather than give a blow-by-blow account, I will leave you here with the notes I took throughout the book, with page numbers. I think this reflects the feeling I have looking back on the experience as a sort of stained-glass mosaic, with some panes being crystalline and other panes being so clouded as to be a blind spot.

And though I'm not confident that I understood more than a third of what was going on, I am absolutely sure that I learned many things and that my intellectual horizons have been expanded, and that is what philosophy can do. I will dive into Deleuze's waters once again with one of his own works, then revisit this one at a future date. I have so many questions and potential paths to explore (some listed in my notes below). Philosophy has done its job and Deleuze has got me thinking in ways that I have not thought before. Mission accomplished.

(4) Ready to sink my brain into this. The introduction has definitely whetted my appetite. And I've only had to look up two words: "heuristic" and "theandric"!
(10) A marvelous introductory essay. I'm hoping the book holds up to its promise.
(18) I understood about half the sentences I just read. Now to reread them again and again and again. My vocabulary is being extended with every page. This is slow going!
(24) Having a good background of knowledge in the Hermetic traditions is helping quite a bit. Deleuze is . . . I don't even know the word: oblique? Sidelong? Askew? It's going to take a lot of immersion in his work to really begin to understand his work at a meaningful level. I get hints and allegations, thin wisps of something just beyond my perception. Philosophical ghosts. I'm being willingly haunted,
(29) Just when you wrap your head around Theandry and begin to sense the whiff of Immanence on the air, Deleuze throws three more concepts your way. My brain is bending in new and interesting ways, some remarkably pleasant, some tortuous. I'm just glad I'm familiar with Pico della Mirandola and Ficino, or I would be utterly lost. That senior paper I wrote on Pico is saving me!
(32) This may be a brain-wringer as intense as Gödel, Escher, Bach was. Thankfully, it's about half as long, maybe less. Curious to see if it also has homework exercises!
(44) I was not expecting a deep dive into early Christian theological debates. Dazzling and utterly confusing.
(52) The contradictory notions of Bruno and Pico outlined on page 51 are worthy of exploration. I can feel a short story coming on . . .
(56) Ah, more Pico. This is something I can sink my brain into. I remember finding Pico's writings quite intuitive as an undergraduate. Hopefully, I can slip back into the magic Christian frame of mind easily enough again.
(58) Interesting that Pico considers true Magic not a work in itself - it doesn't cause miracles, it reveals miracles already inherent in, but hidden by nature. Goeteia, on the other hand, calls on the "operations and power of demons". Magic, in his estimation, is noble and complimentary with Christianity, while the dark arts are contradictory. I wonder where he drew the line between the two?
(73) Never use the word "obvious" in a philosophical text. Just don't. Still, I'm starting to see the tip of the iceberg regarding the relationship between Bruno's conception of nature and matter and Deleuze's immanence. It's like it's on the tip of my brain - I can sense a . . . presence about the intersection of the concepts, but can't articulate it.
(82) Bruno views art as potentially generative of magic if the image is less concerned with verisimilitude and more concerned with what may be. "The artist who wishes to move himself must be moved". Art, then, generates resonance with that which is beyond the art itself, so the art is representative, but more importantly, a sort of portal to access that which is beyond mere form.
(92) Biography helps. Deleuze was a member of a Salon during the French Resistance where he was exposed to Hermetic ideas, particularly Mathesis at a young age. He wrote the forward to Malfatti's Mathesis: or Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge in 1946, when he was 21. He later renounced this work.
(103) My hypothesis is that we should continue to see, on the horizon of Deleuze's work, the persistence of his adolescent vision of an ecstatic, erotic, and unfinished project of mathesis universalis as that "prephilosophical" or "nonphilosophical" apprehension of immanence alluded to on the final pages of What is Philosophy?
(108) Deleuze, here, seems to be most concerned with symbols as indicating the search for knowledge and wisdom, rather than the categorization of knowledge into discrete containers.

It is rotative thought, in which a group of images turn ever more quickly around a mysterious point, as oppossed to the linear allegorical chain.

I might be starting to "get" Deleuze. Starting . . .
(111) . . . Deleuze continues to be haunted by the connection of philosophy to symbolic iterations - artistic, scientific, and esoteric - that would be adequate for the expression of immanence and indispensable for philosophy as an act of creation.
(125) So, in sum, as I understand it, Deleuze is more concerned with "becoming" as an action than with the platonic "idea," which is a static state of being? I guess? It seems that Deleuze delights in multiplicities, rather than The One. I would love someone to confirm or repudiate my understanding, please!
(126) Aha! The notion of "intensity" in Deleuze provides me a nice window to peer into his philosophy. Now, I just need a glass house made of those windows.
(138) Deleuze's concept of "difference" escapes me at the moment. It is not as simple as one might think. Honestly, I don't even think I have a mental direction to face in order to begin to understand it. Guess I'll just intellectually wallow until I find some piece of driftwood to hang on to.
(148) About two years and three rereads, that's what I'm going to need to crack the code on that last chapter. Phew!
(154) . . . the flesh is pulled or pushed out from the outside by the planes that frame it (in musical terms melody and rhythm push sound towards its pulsing vitality . . . harmony represents the planes that intersect and frame sound in a cosmos, a universe of vectors and dimensions.

This cryptic passage is actually helping me to understand Deleuze's approach/view on art more clearly.
(171) For Deleuze, all genuine artistic experimentation must be understood as a local activation of otherwise imperceptible cosmic forces that move through natures, cultures, and psyches. When it is successful, the work of art suggest new modes of sensible and affective engagement within the world . . .
(173) . . . when a person dies, the event is the result of physical causes, but the meanings of a death are multiple and thus both precede and exceed the physics of the event itself. Teh mental or ideal time in which the meanings of a death are played and replayed is not linear and sequential, but aberrant and discontinuou . . .

Cue: differentiation between Aion and Chronos.
(200) Understanding less and less as I approach the finish! And this after listening to several podcasts about Deleuze.
(208) I will definitely need to give this a reread after having listened to a series of podcasts which are basically "Deleuze for Dummies". I'm definitely able to follow the threads here in a much more informed manner.

[Jeremy Garber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joshua Ramey provides a stunningly insightful read on the intertwining strands of Western esotericism and the thought of countercultural French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Ramey makes the argument – thoroughly researched and supported – that Deleuze sees thinking itself as a kind of spiritual ordeal that can literally change reality, linked to a tradition going all the way back to Pseudo-Dionysius. Ramey’s reading certainly squares with my life-changing experience of reading Deleuze, an act of tortured comprehension I have frequently compared to having my brain scooped out of my head, thrown against a wall, and then dumped back into my skull. Deleuze’s frequent references to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty are also not accidental. The fruit of such painful endeavors, however, is a renewed capacity to see the world in a way that allows for the real possibilities of change. Ramey traces this tendency in Deleuze’s writing to a belief in the immanence of God in the world (via Spinoza) and such radical theologians as Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno. Most radically, Ramey unearths Deleuze’s early essay on Mathesis Universalis to uncover the strands of Deleuze’s thought that actually suggest that language and symbol-making can actually change the world. Ramey summarizes beautifully: “For Deleuze, ethics is intimately tied to the possibility of transforming sense in a way that expands the parameters of what is normally understood as a personal identity....The ethical imperative is amor fati, the cultivation of a joyful, loving, and humorous relation to the events that wound us and make us.” For myself as both a constructive theologian and a lover of Deleuze’s work, Ramey helps me think of the possibilities of an immanent theology that can incorporate this tradition into a new way of thinking and being in the world.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very compelling read that aligns Deleuze's postmodern mode of thought with an hermeticist tradition that stretches from late antiquity to the present day. With a few, tenuous exceptions, Hermeticism as an intellectual and spiritual tradition has always known an existence in the shadow of religious and dominant orthodoxy. And that is understandable given that hermetic thinkers have entertained quite radical and subversive political programs. The key idea that animates hermeticism is the unity of the whole cosmos as one living body. Our phenomenal, microcosm is an integral part of that and governed by the same principles as the macrocosm.

[More specifically, following Antoine Faivre, we can say that esoteric thought, writ large, "relies on three basic concepts: similitude, or the search for structural affinities; the participation of “entity-forces” in one another; and a view of nature as a composition of “concrete pluralities,” rather than as self-identical individuals.]

As human beings we are called to enact this harmony in a conscious, redemptive process of learning that is simultaneously an embodying of the archetypal structure of cosmic reality. It is the exploration of transhuman, microcosmic, and macrocosmic principles as the fundamental determinants of human subjectivity. This experimental process is, in line with esotericist protocol, punctuated by spiritual ordeals. There is an important conceptual and practical resonance between an hermeticist view on the cosmos and the Deleuzian nexus of thought and immanence.

["We have seen Deleuze argue, for instance, that from an immanent perspective, nature and culture are crossed by a deeper “Unknown Nature” that connects the human to the animal, the social to the geophysical, the architectural to the cosmic, in a potentially unlimited multiplicity of ways. Deleuze and Guattari insist that from the perspective of a plane of immanence, boundaries between the animate and inanimate, human and animal, the living and the dead become imperceptible. In this view, there is thus a kind of “ecology of the virtual” deeper than the divide between the living and the nonliving, an ecology as much of the artificial as of the natural. And through experimental exploits in art, science, and philosophy, this deep ecology can be activated."]

'Thinking' in its most general manifestation as an experimental practice, is for Deleuze always a journey, a process of production, a "force of the cosmos". Ramey writes: "In his late work, Deleuze emphasizes repeatedly that the renewal of belief in this world is the very definition of thought: “It may be that believing in this world, in life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered or our plane of immanence today” (WIP, 75). Deleuze and Guattari even argue that thought itself requires a kind of conversion. This convertio (turning) is not away from the world, but toward it. It is an “empiricist conversion,” a kind of restored vision that rediscovers the world with its “possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks”. It is this inchoate aspect of reality that is a reflection of the ontological immanence at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy: the world has taken on the attributes of God, transcendence has been totally absorbed into immanence.

[By the way, the passage quoted above uncannily resonates with what Martin Savransky, who orients himself on William James, writes in his book 'Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse': “... trusting the possibility of another world underway and yet-to-be-made is vital, perhaps even the most vital function that our lives in this world might have to perform. But it also makes present that doing so authorizes nothing. It provides no definition of how the good common world ought to be, and it warns us against giving in to the temptation of dreaming of a world that, once made, would bring the facts of struggle to an end. The pluriverse must be made, even when it won’t get made. Indeed, it is almost as if the vital task of composing other worlds in the wake of what has happened to us would only succeed, as sheer activity, by espousing as a political vocation the indefinite failure that simultaneously upends and subtends its project. As if taking the risk of setting out to fail might one day, by apposition rather than opposition, turn failure into its opposite, linking the imperative of struggling for another possible world with the very insistence on staying alive to an ongoing experimentation with worlds in the making. Such is the insistence of the pluriverse in the still of the night, gaping open the world on the edges of every world-vision, drawing it into the hold of perhaps.”]

Contemplating these reflections the connection between 'thought' and spiritual ordeal becomes plausible. Ramey: " ... religious faith is no longer the paradigm of belief. The model, rather, becomes the ordeal—at once epistemic and ethical—of living in a world whose ultimate structure remains inaccessible to thought, and yet forces thought to conceive it ..." 'Thinking' is delving into this inchoate ground and this is always 'a wager', is never risk-free. It is a 'pragmatics of the intense' that we see practiced by certain philosophers (Spinoza, Nietzsche) and artists. It constitutes a renewal of life itself which aligns with the hermetic practice of transformation, known as 'magia naturalis'.

This terrain is mapped out in the Introduction and the first chapter. Here is an outline of the unfolding argument:

Chapter 2 discusses very revealingly how key figures in the hermetic tradition - from Plato and Neoplatonists to Nicholas of Cusa to the principal representatives of Renaissance hermeticism - mesh with Deleuze's thinking.

Chapter 3 zooms in on the role of esoteric signs and symbols and mathesis universalis. Interestingly, one of Deleuze's earliest publications - he was twenty-one when he wrote it - already bristles with esoteric motives. To the young Deleuze symbolic knowledge seems to facilitate a kind of magical thinking, or, as Ramey puts it, "a kind of cognition that can, through a sort of intuitive leap, develop an image capable of effectively altering reality in conformity with itself."

Chapter 4 retraces lineaments of the hermetic in Deleuze's project of 'overturning Platonism', an overturning to be sure that conserves many features of Plato's thinking. An important theme here is the partially revelatory, hence ironic, presence of the Ideas with which Deleuze sympathises and which he naturalised into 'becomings', "pure dynamics of nature from which all forms emerge and into which they perpetually devolve." Also Plato's absolutist thinking in/about difference, in contrast with the comparative logic of Aristotle, is forcefully echoed in Deleuze's work. Artistic practice and vision is a precarious enactment of this 'transcendental empiricism' and embodies a new paradigm for philosophy.

Chapter 5 expands on this theme of the artist as 'cosmic artisan'. The artist engaged in the deeply ethical project of 'worlding' (not a term used by Ramey), of creating new worlds. This is mirrored in "the hermetic, philosophical impulse—present in Cusa, Bruno, Spinoza, and others—to cultivate vision, even to establish, through philosophical syntax, the ritualistic, pragmatic contexts under which psychic and somatic transformation is made actual." There is also a political dimension that provides a traît d'union between the Deleuzian project to connect the potentials of aesthetic experimentation to a utopian horizon and hermeticism's penchant to signal new possibilities for ethical and political intervention.

Chapter 6 then continues this ethical and political strand. Deleuze's ethics gravitates around the reflex to grasp ourselves as events in a cosmic field of interplay of forces. There are echoes here of Nietzschen experimental life and amor fati, and in a way we are circling back to the framing of the philosophy of immanence as a thought and practice of spiritual ordeal. A key question here is "What are the limits of any experiment, and of life as experimentation? Is it possible to render viable the potentials immanent to creative life and thought, or does a people that can endure a full arrival of immanence always remain, in some sense, a transcendental idea, impossible to realize in practice?" One would expect Deleuze to hover around the latter position, and he probably does in a necessarily equivocal way.

Chapter 7 takes up the question "How can such experiments be continued, and under what auspices, in our times?" Here Ramey turns the tables on contemporary critical commentators and philosophers, Adorno, Badiou and Zizek amongst others: "From the perspective of a hermetic Deleuze, hermetic thought within capitalism does not propose to fulfill impossible desires, but to unleash a cosmic dimension in desire that capitalism calls up only to restrict, survey, and control. Far from being the ultimate evidence of the triumph of that bourgeoisie positivism that identifies spirit with technological progress, it may be that hermeticism in our times (though always in danger of confusing “the emanations and the isotopes of uranium”) can pose potentials for desire that will persist beyond the apocalypse of the planned society and the imminent demise of technological reason as we pass through the current ecological and economic holocaust."

It took me a while to work through this book and I ended up with 40 densely printed pages of highlights. I complemented the Kindle version with a printed copy to be able to navigate more easily through the argument. Altogether "The Hermetic Deleuze" is an immensely rich introduction to Deleuze's sober, delirious universe and at the same time serves as a scholarly revaluation of hermetic thought. By bringing these two intellectual spheres into resonance something really extraordinarily pregnant emerges.

[H.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crikey, for me it's certainly a “spiritual ordeal” to get my head round Deleuze. Understanding perhaps 0.1% of Joshua Ramey's interpretation, I should perhaps have eased my way into the terminology (which often reads like a highbrow wine-tasting review with which I have difficulty relating to the reality of actually drinking) via Deleuze for Dummies, or Finnegan's Wake. I was, however, more at home with the author's scattered references to the art of “learning how to swim”, which was, quite possibly, metaphorically one of the main reasons for writing and having interested parties read this and related works.

As Jeremy Garber so aptly writes in review (above): “Ramey’s reading certainly squares with my life-changing experience of reading Deleuze, an act of tortured comprehension I have frequently compared to having my brain scooped out of my head, thrown against a wall, and then dumped back into my skull. Deleuze’s frequent references to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty are also not accidental. The fruit of such painful endeavors, however, is a renewed capacity to see the world in a way that allows for the real possibilities of change.”

In the end, I'm reminded that “[t]o ‘learn ignorance’ is to learn one’s limitations”, and “to be conscious of ignorance is wisdom”, to which I can but distantly aspire.

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work was both an excellent overview of the influence of Hermeticism on Deleuze, but also a wonderful and clear primer on many concepts in Deleuze's writings. In fact, I gained so much confidence by reading this that I started Difference and Repetition which has been on my shelf taunting me for years. It certainly helped me better understand the Body Without Organs as well as a whole host of other Deleuzian concepts. A worthwhile read and fully recommended!

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful

First rate thinking that puts real teeth into Deleuze’s work through the hermetic lens of a spiritual ordeal. Highly recommended.