On the surface, it appears that all Hegel has in mind by “magic,” and by the “magic” of magnetism, is simply psychological control. As we have seen, he speaks about magnetism being made possible by the strong-willed controlling the weak-willed. Hegel also speaks in the same context about various other kinds of “influence” that people can have on one another, none of which seems overtly “occult” or traditionally “magical.” Hegel states that the most”unmediated” kind of magic that there is consists in the control that our mind has over our body. Again, it seems that there is nothing particularly “paranormal” here. Those who might be embarrassed by Hegel’s interest in mesmerism will probably breathe a sigh of relief: At least he does not really believe in magic! They will be disappointed, however.
Hegel refers to the relationship of mother to child as a “magic tie” (Philosophy of Spirit § 405; Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3 vols., trans. M.J. Petry (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), 2:223). In discussing the effects a mother can have on the unborn child, Hegel distinguishes between organic (organische) and psychic (psychische) causes. His use of “psychic” seems to be identical to our use of the term to refer to a supernatural influence of the mind, as the following lines bear out: “One hears, for example, of children coming into the world with an injured arm, either because the mother had actually broken hers or at least had knocked it so severely that she feared she had done so, or indeed on account of her having been frightened by the sight of someone else’s broken arm” (PS § 405, Z; Petry 2:237). Hegel evinces no skepticism about such reports. He goes on to give examples of clairvoyance, dowsing, “remote viewing” (as it would be called today), and even ofa man who could read with his stomach! (PS § 406, Z; Petry 2:267). Hegel allows that frauds do exist, but he seems to regard his anecdotes as well-authenticated. In one amusing example, Hegel tells how the arch-rationalist Friedrich Nicolai, looking down his street one day, had a vision in which he seemed to see not the actual houses that were there, but structures which had stood there at some earlier time. Hegel dryly notes that “The predominantly physical basis of the poetic illusion of this otherwise entirely prosaic individual became apparent through its being dispelled by the application of leeches to his rectum” (PS § 406; Petry 2:269).
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In the introduction to the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel writes that “In recent times, especially in the case of animal magnetism. the substantial unity of the soul and the power of its ideality have even become apparent as a matter of experience. This has discredited all the rigid distinctions drawn by the Understanding, and it has become immediately obvious that if contradictions are to be resolved, a speculative consideration is necessary (PS § 379; Petry 1:15). Hegel’s “speculative consideration” consists in maintaining that in psychic states Spirit sinks down into identity with the “feeling subjectivity” of the Soul. In other words, in psychic states such as precognition or telepathy a regression to a subrational, “natural” state is involved (this would be most evident in the case of a trance state).
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The implication here is that in order to understand psychic states we must not regard the Soul as spatially distinct from the world. Further, in psychic states Soul and world overlap. This happens when we sink into a certain primitive mode of being, but it also happens when we achieve philosophical understanding, when the world really does cease to be “external either to itself or us once the ideality of the Soul has transformed it.” Psychic states are a fleeting, unreliable, fundamentally subconscious and subrational way in which the subject-object division is overcome and the world is made our own. In philosophy, we can achieve, consciously, a state in which we rise above space and time, and in which external relation or “otherness” is canceled. With philosophy, and in general with the human project of remaking the given, the world becomes no longer other but rather that which is understood and willed. Hegel writes that “It is true that the human Spirit is able to raise itself above knowledge concerned exclusively with the singularity of what is sensuously present, but it is only in the Conceptual cognition of the eternal that this elevation is absolute. … In the magnetic state, however, there can be no more than a conditioned rising above knowledge of what is immediately present” (PS § 406, Z; Petry 2:281—83). In short, philosophy is a higher type of magic. In Hegel’s own words, philosophy is “absolute magic,” “the magic of Spirit as such.”
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), pp. 219-21