As Above, So Garage

Hermetic tinkering in unstable times

The phrase as above, so below, is something of a bumper sticker line for a lot of semi-mystical New Age philosophizing drawing loose inspiration from hermetic philosophy. The philosophical content of hermeticism is not particularly interesting or novel as far as I can tell. It’s the usual sort of mish-mash of mysticism, spirituality, metaphysics, and magic you find in a lot of pre-modern, post-antiquity thought all over the world. Certain modern strains of rather sloppy philosophizing in complex systems theory, associated with ideas like fractals and autopoiesis, also have a hermetic flavor to them.

But one rather notable element of hermeticism is that it induces a rather subtle sensibility of engineering and building, broadly construed. Historically, Hermeticism was associated with pre-scientific ancestors of modern technological activities, such as alchemy, medieval medicine, and divination. The idea of a demiurge, a sort of personification of creative emergence forces, is associated with hermeticism.

Viewed as a rigorous sort of philosophy contemplative philosophers might make up by sitting around meditating or deeply pondering the nature of Being, hermeticism is… not impressive. But if you view it as the sort of philosophy pre-modern engineers and experimentalists might make up, suddenly the ideas both make sense, and get a lot more interesting and impressive. I can imagine a particular sort of fifteenth century sage, busy in a workshop, and with little time for carefully worked out philosophies, helping build up the tradition we now identify as hermeticism, almost as a side effect of other activities, such as trying to turn lead into gold. The lack of a modern scientific sensibility and empiricist posture governing behavior would almost be a blessing for such a sage. The hermetic attitude strikes me as better-suited to intuitive leaps and daring experiments than a more “modern” realist attitude.

As far as I can tell, hermeticism is not as arbitrary as escapist as a lot of occult thought appears to be. Hermeticism feels adjacent to the zone where one finds things like tarot, druidic religion, and magick, but not quite part of it. It has a vibe of pragmatism and realism; an engagement with the world on terms that are not purely magical thinking. This is not to say that it was an empiricist or skeptical tradition. Quite the reverse. Though it seems to have been strongly associated with empirically constrained activities like alchemy, it seems to have drawn its first principles from an inner tendency towards mysticism, sacredness, and symbolism. I suspect you could view hermeticism as a philosophy whose praxis involved seeking an illegible internal sense of the divine in the external and material. A kind of metaphysical projection tendency, with any empiricism being subordinated to a strong will to see internally felt spiritual realities in the external world.

I could be wildly wrong, so if you know more about hermeticism than me, please correct me, and perhaps suggest an interesting book or essay. But for now, this is the potted view of hermeticism, drawn from Wikipedia and ChatGPT, that I’m going to take as my starting point.

This brings me to the wild theory I want to riff on: Hermeticism was the tech philosophy of its time, and modern tech philosophy has hermetic aspects to it. Its ideas make the most sense not when compared to (say) Aristotle or Heidegger, but to the kinds of thinking you see in the ephemeral writings of the idealized tech entrepreneur in a garage — to be found not in weighty tomes, but in email listserv rants, github commit messages, and StackOverflow arguments, the modern descendants of the historical lab notebook and letters between tinkerers.

Hermetic philosophy is perhaps comparable to modern engineering lore. The textual ephemera on the margins of what Davis Baird calls material epistemology, in Thing Knowledge. A mode of knowing where authority derives not from theories and concepts but from the embodied workings of technical objects. I’ll have more to say on Baird and the book in a future post, but for now I just want to suggest the connection to hermeticism. I suspect the book is going to end up near the top of the reading list for the Contraptions newsletter once I start putting that together. It’s rather expensive, so if you want to read it, you may want to look for it in the library first. I’ll do a review/notes post soon.

Compared to the hermetic attitude, the modern technological attitude, as I have said, is perhaps too realist. It does not encourage intuitive leaps and daring experiments. Instead it encourages caution, evidence-based decisions, and theory-based risk mitigation. All highly regulated by responsible social considerations. If those seem like unalloyed good things to you, then you don’t get technology or technological motivations. The technologist lives for the vague hunch proving out, the inspired guess turning out to be right, the hastily assembled experimental rig actually working. To wring from the universe proof of your deep connection to it. Proof that the universe is on your side.

When that element of serendipity-seeking is missing, engineering work feels soulless and technocratic. It lacks the punk element. This is one reason pop-hermetic books like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist seem to be favorites of engineers, especially ones who have a garage ethos.

Here’s one way to make sense of it: If sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, those who live it today must be mired in some sort of magical thinking. But it is not the same as magical thinking; merely indistinguishable from it. Davis Baird has a powerful example in his book — James Watt’s careful accounts of how his engine worked relied on confused notions based on phlogiston theory. Yet he arrived at basically correct conceptualizations of what we would today treat in terms of mathematically rigorous abstractions like work, energy, and entropy.

James Watt was in some ways the OG garage hacker, straddling the scientific and pre-scientific eras. Prefiguring the theories of thermodynamics with magical thinking that was sound enough to enormously improve the steam engine. Connecting hermeticism with what I call neo-hermeticism.

The archetypal garage hacker today, like the notional fifteenth century hermetic sage I’m imagining, is neither a pure scientific experimenter, nor idle dabbler, but a tinkerer with a purpose. A figure driven by a telos that’s more transcendent than that of the pitch-deck entrepreneur who is more interested in exit valuations than in what’s happening on the workbench. Someone spending more time seeking signs of sacred geometry in how solder beads up on a circuit board than on the Kremlinology of the VC mind.

If you think about it, this explains why, whenever Silicon Valley experiences any kind of spiritual anxiety, it turns to reverence of the idealized garage hacker to cleanse its soul. The excesses and corruptions of SV, on both sides of the startup venture financing table, are typically blamed on the influx of soulless MBAs from the East Coast. The real ethos of entrepreneurship is to be found, so the theology goes, neither in the over-financialized business thinking of MBAs, nor in the over-mathematized textbook engineering knowledge taught in universities (mathematization is the engineering equivalent of financialization). It is to be found in the garage. In the thing knowledge littered around as tangles of cabling and piles of lab equipment.