De Engelse vertaling van Gregor Moder’s boek is verschenen: Hegel and Spinoza

In een blog van 26-02-2016, “De Hegel - Spinoza – strijd,” verwees ik naar de Duitse vertaling van het Sloveense boek van Gregor Moder en meldde ik in een aanvulling dat in juli 2017 de engelse vertaling zou uitkomen. En zo is geschied:

Gregor Moder, Hegel and Spinoza. Substance and Negatvity. [Vert. van Hegel und Spinoza. Negativität in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie]. Foreword by Mladen Dolar. Northwestern University Press, July 2017 - 176 pagina's

Contents
Acknowledgments vii Foreword: Hegel or Spinoza? Yes, Please! ix Mladen Dolar Note on Sources and Abbreviations xiii Introduction. Hegel and Spinoza: The Question of Reading 3 1 Hegel’s Logic of Pure Being and Spinoza 16 2 History Is Logic 37 3 Telos, Teleology, Teleiosis 59 4 Death and Finality 82 5 Ideology and the Originality of the Swerve 104 Conclusion. Substance and Negativity: The Primacy of Negativity 121 Notes 147 Bibliography 167 Index 173 ...

Ik geef hier het abstract in ’t Duits zoals Gregor Moder het op z’n pagina bij academia.edu geeft: “Zwei der einflussreichsten Philosophien der Neuzeit scheinen in einem radikalen Gegensatz zu stehen: Spinoza und Hegel, philosophisch gesprochen entweder die unendliche, unveränderliche Substanz oder die unendliche, produktive Negation der Negation. Was passiert, wenn Hegel Spinoza trifft? Hegel meinte dazu, man sei Spinozist oder gar kein Philosoph. Spinozisten wie Althusser oder Deleuze meinten, Hegel habe ein »Identitiätsdenken« durch die Hintertür eingeführt. Dieses Buch unternimmt den Versuch, beide Seiten zur Sprache kommen zu lassen und jede Seite aus der kritischen Perspektive der anderen zu sehen.”

GREGOR MODER is an assistant professor on the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana.

 Uit Mladen Dolar’s  Foreword: Hegel or Spinoza? Yes, Please!

At a famous spot in the lectures on the history of philosophy Hegel emphatically proclaimed: “Either Spinozism or no philosophy at all” (Entweder Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie). It is true that Hegel, in the picturesque dramaturgy of his lectures given to an enthralled audience, never missed a chance to praise or scold, often exaggerating in the heat of the moment, yet he nonetheless never said anything quite like this about anyone else. If one truly wants to be a philosopher then one has to be a Spinozist; one must embrace Spinoza’s courage and audacity of thinking; one has to espouse the speculative stance of the unity of thinking and being. More than that, one has to engage with thinking which is at the same time a production of being and not merely a reflection of something supposedly existing before and outside of thought. Not only engaging with the absolute, but also producing the absolute. Spinoza is thus presented as the touchstone of any modern thought, the decisive entry into philosophy and the prospect of its highest reach. And yet within the same dramaturgical move typical of the lectures, this high praise is transformed into a sharp criticism over the course of only a few sentences: the audacious journey got stuck already at the very first step; Spinoza’s substance, so courageously proposed in the beginning, is stuck in its rigidity, remaining within the boundaries of understanding (Verstand), unable to reach the realm of reason (Vernunft). It is bereft of all movement and change because it lacks the inner driving force of negativity: Understanding deals with determinations that do not contradict each other. Negation is simple determinateness. Negation of negation, however, is contradiction, it negates the negation; thus it is affirmation, but at the same time also negation as such. This contradiction is something that understanding cannot endure; it pertains to reason. This is the point that is lacking in Spinoza, this is his shortcoming. For Hegel, negativity is precisely the speculative lever that enables us to think the life of the absolute; it is the way by which every substantial determination necessarily passes over into its other and thereby loses itself; it loses its self-identity, it negates itself, it progresses through the persistent movement of self-referential negation, “negation of negation.” But through this process negativity nevertheless remains the inner principle of the life of the absolute; the absolute is not something free of negativity, but something produced by negativity. For Hegel, substantiality is that which preserves itself through negation; not something that would persist in its positivity and identity beyond the vagaries of change and beyond the process of what Hegel has called, in an excellent word, selfothering, Sichanderswerden. This is precisely why, for Hegel, “everything depends on grasping and expressing the True not merely as substance (i.e., as persistence of something positive and identical) but also equally as subject (i.e., as a process of incessant losing oneself and producing oneself only through this loss).” This is the standpoint of reason, while Spinoza, in Hegel’s view, got stuck in the impasses of understanding. As opposed to this, Spinoza famously maintained: “Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being,” and: “No thing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.” No entity is endowed with negativity in itself; it is driven by the pure persistence of conatus, negation can only come from outside. Thus it seems that Hegel’s reading of Spinoza presents us with two emphatic alternatives: either Spinozism or loss of any philosophical standpoint worthy of this name—it is only through Spinozism that the substance and the absolute can be taken seriously; but then this leads to another emphatic choice: either the Spinozist substance that cannot embrace negativity, a substance that is not and cannot become a subject, or the proposition that “substance is subject.” Either conatus or self-othering. This famous page from Hegel’s lectures condenses the gist of the problem, boiling it down to two crucial concepts, that of substance and that of negativity… Etc. [Cf. Muse.jhu]

 Moder gaf op zijn academia-edu pagina ook diverse reviews te lezen, o.a. van Vesa Oittinen (Helsinki) [cf.] en van Mirt Komel (University of Ljubljana) [cf.] dat ook apart als PDF gepubliceerd is en een duidelijke impressie geeft van wat het boek biedt.

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Ik wil hier tot slot mijn verbazing uiten over iets dat Vesa Oittinen in zijn review stelt:

"Dies trifft bspw. auf die Deutung der erkenntnistheoretischen These Falsitas consistit in cognitionis privatione (Eth. II. prop. 35) zu. Verf. meint, dass ein Fehler bzw. ein Irrtum »keine Folge innerer Mangelhaftigkeit des Vorstellungsvermögens« sei, denn das Vorstellen (d.h. die Imagination) sei ja durchaus ein »positives Vermögen des Menschen« (142). Das ist richtig und Spinoza hat auch nichts anderes behauptet: Die Bilder der Einbildungskraft (Mentis imaginationes) enthalten an sich betrachtet keinen Irrtum (Eth.  II prop. 17 schol.), dieser entstehe erst dadurch, dass wir falsche Urteile über die Sinnesdaten machten. Der Standpunkt Spinozas ist also klar formuliert. Deshalb verwundert es, wenn Verf. schreibt, dass die »inadäquaten Ideen nicht etwas Nichtiges sind, sie haben ihre immanente Notwendigkeit und Positivität« (143). Hier wird aus der Imagination als einem positiven Vermögen darauf geschlossen, dass es auch in den inadäquaten Ideen etwas »Positives« gäbe. Ebenso gut könnte man argumentieren: Weil das Vermögen des Rechnens etwas Positives ist, so enthält auch ein falsches Rechnungsergebnis – etwa 2 + 2 = 5 – etwas ›Positives‹."

Volgens mij is dat wat Spinoza bedoelt: dat er in inadequate ideeën nog een adequate kern schuilgaat. Daarom gebruikt hij, naast 'verward', ook de term: 'onvolledig.' Een onvolledig denkbeeld heeft iets werkelijks in zich - alleen weet de 'weter' niet welk deel dat is. Het voorbeeld dat Oittinen geeft is enigszins 'demagogisch', want raakt de kern niet.