Part of the Marxist idea of “Praxis” is the “material turn”, the phase where actual changes in real life are implements as part of the cycle of raising critical consciousness. It is part of the breaking apart and rebuilding of society, in other words, the “action” part of Praxis and part and parcel of the eschaton getting immanentized. It’s origin is esoteric in nature deriving from a history of mysticism that can be hard to explain without using its own specialized language and presumptions which beg the question. “Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost” has previously explained the basis of Marxism and Post-Marxism using plain speak, and does so again here to explain the esotericism of this “material turn”, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.
Let’s “plain speak” the material turn. The “material turn” in leftist theory means a change in the revolution toward the concrete, physical, and economic dimensions of social change. This means focusing on production, property, institutions, resources, and inequalities as a means to achieve emancipation and repair societal divisions. This turn is part of an oscillatory pattern rooted in esoteric traditions, where mind (ideal: insight, recognition, philosophy), body (material: tangible structures, nature, tools), and spirit (cultural: communal will, mores, rituals, shared identity) interpenetrate and cycle through history. This framework originates in Western Esotericist ideas that were transmitted through to Hegel (but almost certainly to Descartes and Rousseau), then adapted by Hess and Marx into leftist praxis. All of this structures leftist movements because, well, they slavishly follow their own models. So, it views reality as a unified fabric of correspondences, with history as a drama of withdrawal, rupture, elect-led collective repair, return to wholeness. Here, this is manifest by Descartes’s Cogito (Tzimtzum), Rousseau’s spiritual-cultural turn, and naming of property as the source of rupture/shattering, Hegel’s passive mapping of this pattern, then to the Hess-Feuerbach-Marx material turn, and the application of human agency, or tikkun, on a return to wholeness.
Let’s begin with the esoteric foundation. Hermeticism views reality as one internally linked whole, where the human acts as a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm, so knowledge and action here can touch what lies above. This is why as above, so below extends beyond stars and metals to encompass mind, body, and spirit working as one. Hegel takes this Hermetic vision of a circle connecting God and the world to heart, building his system around it. In Hermetic thought, God’s self-knowledge reaches completion through human recognition, a core idea Glenn Magee identifies as the main link between Hermeticism and Hegel. Human understanding of God becomes God’s understanding of himself, which explains why the world must be embraced rather than shunned.
Kabbalah, particularly the Lurianic stream carried into German thought by early modern Christians, adds the storyline that clarifies why this circle encounters fracture. It follows a sequence of contraction, shattering, and repair. In tzimtzum, the infinite pulls back to create room for finite life. In the breaking of the vessels, light scatters and sparks fall into husks. In tikkun, humans lift and reorder those sparks so the finite can once again reflect the infinite. The Tree of Life maps these connections across levels, with sefirot like Kether, the crown of ideal unity, flowing down through Tiferet, the balance of beauty, to Malkuth, the material kingdom, linked by paths that enable as above, so below transformations. Hegel was familiar with Kabbalah through scholarly works like Brucker’s history and Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata, and he references Lurianic themes such as Adam Kadmon and the sefirot in his lectures. The central Lurianic insight is interrelation, where lower and higher realms influence each other, and human effort in history plays a role in restoration.
With this framework in mind, the modern turns come into focus. Picture mind as the domain of insight and recognition, body as the material order of nature, tools, property, and institutions, and spirit as the realm of will, shared customs, cultus, and the collective vessel that shapes a people. Hermeticism permits lawful movement among these levels. Alchemy provides the mechanics: fixed and volatile elements held together by a mercurial mediator, and a triad of salt, sulphur, and mercury that Hegel interpreted as a genuine ontology (the philosophical study of existence itself). You see this withdrawal, rupture, elect-led collective repair structure right in the lineage of leftist thought.
Descartes sets the stage with a contraction of the field that mirrors a philosophical tzimtzum. The thinking subject pulls away from the extended world to find certainty, opening a cleared space where mind and body stand sharply apart. This is more an analogy than a direct historical tie, but it traces the pattern. A world once seen as a single fabric splits for the sake of method and control, leaving spirit without a clear civic home. We can’t prove Descartes plagiarized tzimtzum, but the resemblance is too much. It’s the same thing.
So Rousseau identifies the rupture in social terms and rekindles the spiritual register. Inequality and property have twisted the natural good, so citizens need to be shaped through moral sentiment, civil religion, and a general will that unites the many as one. This restores spirit as a communal force rather than a mere theological addition. its an ideal turn from Descartes but the material is very much buried in here when in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he identifies property as a root cause of social inequality and injustice. This is how these turns work, the previous sets up motion for the next turn.
Ah yes, Rousseau, the course of so much evil and ruin.
Hegel isn’t a turn as much as he maps the whole structure ̷b̷y̷ ̷p̷l̷a̷g̷i̷a̷r̷i̷z̷i̷n̷g̷ ̷W̷e̷s̷t̷e̷r̷n̷ ̷E̷s̷o̷t̷e̷r̷i̷c̷i̷s̷t̷s̷.̷ He draws on Böhme’s Ungrund-myth and the Lurianic cycle, influenced by sources like Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae, which frames Kabbalah in a Lurianic light, and Swabian Pietists like Oetinger, who blended Lurianic ideas with Böhme. Hegel encountered Lurianic Kabbalah through Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, which he cited in his lectures, along with Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Porta Coelorum. In his philosophy, pure Being contracts like Ein Sof in tzimtzum, giving rise to Difference and Nothing; this self-limitation bursts into Nature, reflecting shevirat ha-kelim where Spirit’s light fractures into finite shards. History becomes the work of Weltgeist, a collective force gathering those shards through determinate negation, where contradictions are preserved, lifted, and woven into unity, a rational tikkun. The triad Logic-Nature-Spirit transforms theosophy into a secular form, with categories unfolding like sefirot in dialectical harmony, culminating in an ethical state where freedom comes to life. By turning Kabbalistic rupture and repair into a political engine grounded in the present, Hegel offers left thinkers a roadmap for the material turn.
The next step connects Hess (+Feuerbach) & Marx to the material turn: 19th c. edition. The story starts with Hess. Hess takes up this Lurianic-infused Hegelian structure, and weaves in Spinoza’s monism, which sees thought and extension as modes of a single substance, to envision a reconciled community – a restored whole by human agency. While Kant’s teleology provides a backdrop of purposeful history, Hess roots it back into human agency, secularizing motifs like tzimtzum and tikkun into a philosophy of the deed (1843). He insists that abstract theory must join with action to overcome fragmentation, challenging Hegel’s view of Geist unfolding on its own and arguing that human deeds must actively drive its realization, enacting a secular tikkun through collective effort. Hess’s guiding idea, which can be summed up by reworking Descartes’ cogito (I think, therefore I am) to what Hess says in his 1843 essay -we think therefore we are and do. Here, he stresses the union of thought and deed within organic social life. In works like Philosophie der Tat and his 1846 Communist Confession, he presents communal ownership as the Kingdom of God on earth, denouncing private property as a money-devil that estranges human essence and calling for ethical socialism to heal it. This catechism-style approach fed ideas into the Communist Manifesto, though Marx later critiqued its prophetic tone as True Socialism.
Marx learns from Hess in the 1840s, whom he initially admired and who turned Engels to communism, but Marx moves away from the esoteric language in the later 1840s, covering over the esotericism with a think materialist scaffolding. Hess’s critique of passive materialism, emphasizing self-education and praxis, shapes Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, especially the third thesis, which faults static views for ignoring agency and splitting society. Marx refines this into revolutionary practice as the merging of changing circumstances and human activity. Though Engels undermined Hess’s draft for the League’s Confession of Faith to prioritize class struggle over ethical humanism, Marx absorbed Hess’s visions of human led repair, alienation and redemptive history, reworking them in materialist terms. In the 1844 Manuscripts, communism mends the gaps between essence and existence, freedom and necessity. Despite dismissing True Socialism to claim originality, Hess’s motifs persist in Marx, recast as primitive accumulation, alienation, and proletarian praxis. This is the first material turn.
After this material turn, the pattern swings back into spirit with cultural Marxism, particularly through the Frankfurt School, where thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse craft a cultural critique of ideology, hegemony, and commodification, weaving in Marx’s material analysis to explore how capitalism shapes consciousness and daily life through processes like reification, which echoes the Lurianic concept of kelipot as husks that encase and obscure divine sparks. Reification, as Lukacs builds on Marx’s commodity fetishism, transforms living human relations into rigid, thing-like entities under capitalism’s commodity form, imprinting consciousness so that personal qualities turn into quantifiable objects detached from identity, extending alienation from economic spheres to intricate mental and social domains, much like kelipot thrive on misplaced belief to sustain disorder and illusion. Adorno and Horkheimer dissect mass media as a culture industry that molds perception and desire, Marcuse portrays a one-dimensional world that stifles dissent, and Habermas raises concerns about the colonization of the lifeworld; this spiritual-cultural phase sustains the earlier materialism by blending body’s economic foundation with spirit’s cultural superstructure. Figures like Gramsci highlight cultural hegemony as the arena where ideals are channeled through institutions, originating in the factory where material structures shape superstructures, necessitating a war of position in civil society to secure consent through modest concessions without challenging the ruling core, while Lukács advocates reclaiming totality to break reified illusions through proletarian awareness of society’s constructed nature. Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School looms large here, laying the groundwork for Western Marxism’s spiritual turn by analyzing culture as a site of domination and resistance, a legacy that deeply influences the later woke movement by fostering a critical consciousness, which sets us up for the next turn: Woke.
At “Woke,” all the familiar terms are here, Critical consciousness, critical pedagogy, woke ideology, and Critical Race Theory. Here, in this turn, Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientizacao serves as a pivotal mechanism, building on the Frankfurt School and Gramsci’s insights by transforming education into a dynamic process of critical consciousness. Freire, in works like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, advocates for problem-posing dialogue that bridges reflection and action, empowering students to analyze and challenge oppressive structures (law, policing, housing, finance, health care, and media) by recognizing how these systems perpetuate inequality and limit access, rather than passively accepting them as natural. This critical consciousness awakens individuals to the hidden power dynamics embedded in everyday life, encouraging them to act collectively to dismantle reified realities. Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related frameworks extend this by centering standpoint epistemology and the identification of patterned biases, treating these not as personal sentiments but as diagnostic tools to unveil the “second nature” of institutional racism and systemic oppression, all of which are concepts that align with Lukacs’ reification and the Lurianic kelipot as husks obscuring divine sparks. CRT scholars like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw argue that racism is not just individual prejudice but a structural feature encoded in policies, legal systems, and cultural norms, requiring a reexamination of history and power to restore agency. Because hegemony (Gramsci) rests on a material foundation, these recognitional gains naturally extend beyond mind and spirit to body, implying that once the frameworks of bias are clear, solutions manifest as tangible reforms, like budgets, ownership and land use, labor regimes, infrastructure, and public goods. In this sense, the ideal-cultural turn of woke ideology, CRT, and critical pedagogy, fueled by Freire’s conscientizacao, primes the next material turn, now scaled to address global disparities and planetary constraints.
So – Esotericism supplies the triad at the level of first principles, establishing a foundational structure that underpins the mind-body-spirit dynamic. In Hermetic and alchemical traditions, the cosmos is envisioned as a single fabric of correspondences, with the human microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, a principle explicitly articulated in texts like the Emerald Tablet.
Alchemy provides a working model through the tria prima (salt, sulphur, and mercury) each carrying symbolic and practical significance that maps onto the mind-body-spirit triad while also resonating with elemental and cosmological frameworks like heaven and earth or fire and water. Salt represents the fixed, stable, and corporeal element, aligning with body as the domain of matter, tools, property, and institutions, grounding the physical structures of existence. This fixed quality ties salt to earth in traditional alchemy, where earth symbolizes the solid, tangible foundation of the material world (similar to the lower sefirah Malkuth in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life). Sulphur represents the fiery, cognitive aspect, the principle of form, intention, and transformation, which fits mind as the realm of insight, critique, and intellectual discernment. Its fiery nature connects sulphur to heaven or fire in esoteric thought, representing the active, illuminating force of thought and spirit ascending toward divine understanding, similar to the upper sefirah Kether, though its dynamic quality also bridges toward transformative action. Mercury, the mediating, volatile, and animating principle, joins these opposites, corresponding to spirit as the will, mores, cultus, and the shared vessel that unites a people, facilitating movement and reconciliation across levels. Mercury’s fluidity and adaptability links it to water or the heavenly mediator in alchemical cosmology, reflecting the balancing sefirah Tiferet that harmonizes the upper and lower realms, enabling the lawful traffic of “as above, so below.”
This alignment with heaven and earth or fire and water isn’t a perfect one-to-one match but reflects a layered symbolism. In classical alchemy, the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) interact within the tria prima, where salt embodies earth’s stability, sulphur carries fire’s transformative energy, and mercury incorporates water’s fluidity and air’s volatility. Heaven and earth often symbolize the macrocosmic and microcosmic poles, with salt grounding the earthly body and sulphur aspiring toward the heavenly mind, while mercury mediates as the spiritual bridge, akin to water flowing between realms or air animating them. Paracelsus, a key alchemical figure, emphasized this triadic balance over the four-element system, seeing salt, sulphur, and mercury as principles of body, soul, and spirit, connects to Hegel’s Logic-Nature-Spirit triad. The Kabbalistic sefirot reinforce this, with Malkuth (earth/body), Kether (heaven/mind), and Tiferet (mediating spirit) mirroring the alchemical flow.
It is important to note that the correspondence isn’t rigid. Fire and water as elemental pairs might suggest a dualistic tension (sulphur’s fire versus mercury’s water), but alchemy integrates them into a triadic unity, with mercury harmonizing the opposites rather than opposing fire directly. Heaven and earth align more broadly with the macrocosm-microcosm axis, where salt’s earthiness anchors the body, sulphur’s fire elevates the mind toward heavenly insight, and mercury’s water-like mediation embodies spirit’s cultural unity. This nuanced layering explains why esotericism supplies the mind-body-spirit dynamic: it offers a flexible yet structured model where elemental and cosmological symbols (heaven-earth, fire-water) underpin the triadic interplay, transmitted through Hermetic alchemy and Kabbalistic drama into Hegel’s dialectical system and leftist praxis. Hegel’s triad, for instance, secularizes this by framing Logic (mind/heavenly insight), Nature (body/earthly matter), and Spirit (cultural reconciliation/mercurial mediation), while Hess & Marx adapt it to prioritize body’s material repair without losing the spiritual telos, reflecting the esoteric roots plainly in their oscillatory pattern.
This triadic interplay, rooted in alchemical practice and Hermetic philosophy, provides the initial blueprint for the dynamic we see in later thought.
Kabbalah, particularly the Lurianic stream, add texture this triad with a historical drama that gives it narrative depth and purpose. Withdrawal/contraction (tzimtzum) opens space for finitude, shattering.rupture (shevirat ha-kelim) scatters divine light into worldly false husks, and repair (tikkun) becomes the human task of raising and reordering those sparks to restore the finite’s reflection of the infinite. The Tree of Life maps this across levels linked by paths of interrelation, emphasizing that knowing (mind), willing (spirit), and making (body) form a single circuit. Unlike earlier esoteric traditions that might favor escape, this Lurianic view, transmitted into German thought via Christian Kabbalists like Knorr von Rosenroth (as cited by Hegel), focuses on recomposing the shattered material world rather than fleeing it, requiring mind for discernment of the rupture, spirit for solidarity and intentional repair, and body for the vessels that hold this restored harmony. This shift from transcendence to world-affirmation, is the key contribution of Kabbalah to the triad’s evolution.
This package of esoteric principles moves into modern thought, with Hegel receiving it most explicitly through Boehme and Christian Kabbalistic sources, recoding it into Logic (mind as the unfolding of ideal categories), Nature (body as the material realm of alienation), and Spirit (cultural synthesis as the reconciling force), where negativity and reconciliation replace Hermetic separation and conjunction. Hess starts the turn to the material and adapts this grammar into a philosophy of the deed, insisting that restoration hinges on organized action to mend societal fractures, which is tikkun’s human agency. Marx then pivots all the way into the material, emphasizing production, property, and the state as the sites where vessels are built and reified husks broken and remade, without abandoning the inherited horizon of freedom, aligning with the material turn’s focus on concrete transformation. So, esotericism supplies the mind-body-spirit dynamic through Hermeticism’s triadic ontology and Kabbalah’s historical drama, transmitted via Hegel’s synthesis and adapted by Hess & Marx into a leftist framework of oscillatory repair.
The spiritual and the mundane thus become one, ready to be reassembled once sundered, into some utopia, upon the immanentization of the eschaton.
