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1. The refusal of the metric measure, the opposition of the qualitative to the quantitative, the belief that nothing is stable and that every element of the universe acts over any other through reciprocal action. |
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2. The refusal of causalism, so that the reciprocal action of the various elements of the universe does not follow the linear sequence of cause to effect but rather a sort of spiral-like logic of mutually sympathetic elements. If the universe is a network of similitudes and cosmic sympathies, then there are no privileged causal chains. The Hermetic tradition extends the refusal of causality even to history and philology, so that its logic seems to accept the principle post hoc ergo ante hoc. A typical example of such an attitude is the way in which every Hermetic thinker is able to demonstrate that the Corpus Hermeticum is not a late product of Hellenistic civilizationas Isaac Casaubon provedbut comes before Plato, before Pythagoras, before Egyptian civilization. The argument runs as follows: "That the Corpus Hermeticum contains ideas that evidently circulated at the times of Plato means that it appeared before Plato." To Western ears, educated on a causal epistemology, such an argument sounds offensiveand it is indeed logically disturbingbut it is enough to read some of the texts of the tradition to realize that, in its proper milieu, this argument is taken very seriously. |
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3. The refusal of dualism, so that the very identity principle collapses, as well as the one of the excluded middle; as a consequence, tertium datur (the idea of the coincidence of the opposites depends on this basic assumption). |
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4. The refusal of agnosticism. One should think that agnosticism is a very modern attitude and that from this point of view the Hermetic tradition cannot be opposed to the Scholastic one. But the Schoolmen, even though they were credulous, had, however, a very sharp sense of discrimination between opposites. They certainly did not use experimental methods for ascertaining what was and what was not the case, but they were profoundly interested in determining what was the case. Either a given idea reflected Aristotelian opinion or it did not: there was not a middle way or, if there was a possible reconciliation, as it happened with the typical arguments of Aquinas, the final reconciliation was the final truth. On the contrary, Hermetic thought, being nonagnostic, is Gnostic; it respects the whole of the traditional wisdom because even where there is contradiction between assumptions, each assumption can bear a part of truth, truth being the whole of a field of contrasting ideas. |
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