Op vrijdag 24
november 2017 is er aan het Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought aan
Goldsmiths, Univesity of London een Symposium waarvan het thema op het affiche
wordt aangeduid als “Hegel or Spinoza”, maar in de titel van de webpagina waarin het wordt beschreven, wordt
aangeduid met: “Hegel and Spinoza” symposium, Nov 24.
Het illustreert
wellicht de twijfelende, dubbelhartige houding van de organisatoren. Het ging tot
aan Moder’s boek immers altijd over Hegel of Spinoza.
Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity
is a lively entry into current debates concerning Hegel, Spinoza, and their
relation. Hegel and Spinoza are two of the most influential philosophers of the
modern era, and the traditions of thought they inaugurated have been in
continuous dialogue and conflict ever since Hegel first criticized Spinoza.
Notably, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Idealists aimed to overcome
the determinism of Spinoza’s system by securing a place for the freedom of the
subject within it, and twentieth-century French materialists such as Althusser
and Deleuze rallied behind Spinoza as the ultimate champion of anti-Hegelian
materialism. This conflict, or mutual rejection, lives on today in recent
discussions about materialism. Contemporary thinkers either make a Hegelian
case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and
death, or in a way that is inspired by Spinoza they abolish the concepts of the
subject and negation and argue for pure affirmation and the vitalistic
production of differences. Hegel and Spinoza traces the historical roots of
these alternatives and shows how contemporary discussions between Heideggerians
and Althusserians, Lacanians and Deleuzians are a variation of the disagreement
between Hegel and Spinoza. Throughout, Moder persuasively demonstrates that the
best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast but
together: as Hegel and Spinoza.
Hegel says right from the start, "Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing ... but on the contrary, they are not the same", which quotes and defies Parmenides' "I forbid you from that other way along which men wander knowing nothing. Perplexity in their hearts leads their understanding astray, so that they consider being and not being as both the same and not the same". In my opinion, if you remove that contradiction and all the contradictions that follow from it, his philosophy wouldn't be very far from Spinozism, in which "absolutely infinite substance is indivisible" does not imply that "being is in fact nothing".
BeantwoordenVerwijderenSugar,
VerwijderenIk neem aan dat je Nederlands begrijpt dus je kan me wel volgen, toch?
Je stelt dat Hegel ‘being’ omschrijft als ‘is in fact nothing’, juist? In zijn Encyclopaedia Logic blz 136 (Hackett uitgave) bespreekt hij onder §86 Being en schrijft: “Pure being makes the beginning, because it is pure thought as well as the undertermined, simple immediate, [and because] the first beginning cannot be anything mediated and further deternined.”
Herlees het eens want in het directe vervolg verwijst Hegel reeds naar Spinoza (blz 137).
In §87 gaat Hegel over naar: “But this pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutly negative, which when taken immediately, is nothing.”
Hier komt het woord ‘nothing’ maar dit betekent niet ‘being is nothing’. Het is ‘this pure being’ als ‘abstraction taken immediatly’ is niets. “Only in this pure indeterminacy, and because of it, is being nothing – something that can not be said; what distinguishes it from nothing is something merely meant. All that really matters here is consiousness about these beginnings: that they are nothing but these empty abstractions, and that each of them is as empty as the other; the drive to find in being or in both [being and nothing] a stable meaning is this verry necessity, wich leads being, and nothing further along and endows them with a true, i.e., concrete meaning.”
§88: “And similarly, but conversely, nothing, as this immediate [term] that is equal to itself, is the same as being. Hence, the truth of being and nothing alike is the unity of both; this unity is becoming.”
“As there unity, becoming is the true expression of the result of being and nothing; it is not just the unity of being and nothing, but it is inward unrest – a unity which in its self-relation is not simply motionless, but which, in virtue of the diversity of being and nothing which it contains, is inwardly turned against itself. Being-there, on the contrary, is this unity or becoming in this form of unity.”
Vervolgens gaat Hegel in §89 over naar being-there.
Groeten.
Ed, I can't read Dutch, so I use a translator and try to reply only if I think I understand the translation.
VerwijderenI don't claim to understand Hegel, but his identification of "indeterminate being" with nothing in the Science of Logic seems to me to confuse the simplicity of indivisible substance with nothingness. He says pure being contains no content, whereas Spinoza says rightly that indivisible substance contains all possible content. It may be that I'm interpreting Hegel simplistically. I see a similar confusion of indivisible substance with nothingness, 'emptiness', or 'the void' in many Buddhist and other mystic authors and in many 19th-20th century authors.
Indeed, "indeterminate being" is nothing because it is still indeterminate. Its the start of the proposition (satz, thesis) as abstraction that needs in the antithese (Gegensatz) concreteness. Being AND nothing. The dialectical movement has still to start.
Verwijderen§87 says: “But this pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutely negative, which when taken immediately, is nothing.”
“Only in this pure indeterminacy, and because of it, is being nothing – something that cannot be said.”
§89 says: “In becoming, being, as with nothing, and nothing as one with being, are only vanishing terms … in this way its result is being-there.”
§90: “Being-there is being with a determinacy, that is [given] as immediate determinacy or as a determinacy that simply is: quality.”
Quality starts with being-there and being-for itself.
So, I don’t think Hegel says that being (substance) = nothing. But, you have his ‘Logic’ so enjoy his text.
§151: “Substance, therefore, is the totality of the accidents; it reveals itself in them as their absolute egativity, i.e., as the absolute might and at the same time as the richness of all content. The content, however, is nothing but this manifestation itself, since the determinacy that is inwardly reflected into content is itself only a moment of the form, which oasses over into the might of the substance.”
Enjoy reading Hegel.
Deze reactie is verwijderd door de auteur.
VerwijderenI deleted my reply because I decided I don't want to criticize Hegel. On the other hand, the indivisibility and absolute simplicity and concreteness of Being in itself is important to me. In my opinion, our immediate intuition of simple Being, prior to any distinction of attributes and modes, is Beatitude, or absolute bliss and enjoyment of eternity. But to be clear, our understanding and enjoyment of bliss is only possible insofar as we understand clearly and distinctly that what is cannot be what is not.
VerwijderenSugar,
VerwijderenIs it possible to do what you do? Calling Substance (prior to any distinction) X. But, by doing so, you make with ‘Beatitude’ a distinction ‘prior to any distinction’. Even calling Substance simplicity – even absolute simplicity! – is, I think, to much a saying. Substance is indivisibility, yes. It’s an axiom. Maybe ‘concreteness’ is not a good word to use with Substance. All we can say is that Substance ‘is’.
What do you think?
Ed, about concreteness, I think substance is absolutely concrete, but its modes (such as 'Gary Sugar') are abstractions. That is, the modes of substance are not really distinct from substance or from each other, but are only modally distinct, or divided by nothing, insofar as we conceive them inadequately.
VerwijderenAbout the larger point, Spinoza uses many names for substance. God, Nature, Reality, Perfection, Being, Eternity, and so on. Sometimes to make his meaning a little more clear, he adds "itself" or "in itself", for example, God is 'existence itself' or 'Being in itself'. I sometimes say God is perfection itself, necessity itself, etc.
It's a very old question, going back at least to Plato, but found frequently among mystic authors, whether the many names of God constitute a one and the many problem. But any distinctions between the meanings of these names are just in our imaginations. God, Nature, and Eternity are the same thing, but these words are associated in our imaginations with other words, and with all kinds of inadequate ideas and images of things, due to the ways we're accustomed to hearing them used. When Spinoza was asked how a thing can have multiple names, he replied,
"By 'Israel' I mean the third patriarch: by 'Jacob' I mean that same person, the latter name being given to him because he seized his brother's heel. Secondly, by a 'plane surface' I mean one that reflects all rays of light without any change. I mean the same by 'white surface', except that it is called white in respect of a man looking at it".
Notice that in both examples, the two names denote the same thing but each one emphasizes a different way that we understand it inadequately in our imaginations.
So Spinoza more than any other philosopher frequently tells us that two things we are used to imagining as different are really the same thing. It's not only the many names of God that all really mean the same thing. For another example, reason, understanding, virtue, and happiness are all the same thing.
I said before that substance is absolutely concrete but its modes are abstractions, or inadequate ideas of substance. Any of these names of God, or the ideas they denote, can be conceived in abstraction to denote properties of God. For example, I can say 'God necessarily exists', 'God is absolutely perfect', 'God is the essence of all things'. Similarly, I can say the same thing in different ways with different names of God. For example, 'God necessarily exists' and 'what is must be what is' mean the same thing, but they seem a little different in our imaginations because of they ways we're used to hearing these words. So Spinoza uses the different synonyms to his advantage to emphasize this or that when he is explaining the properties of God. This helps us, because as he says, through understanding distinct properties of God through the second kind of knowledge, we can better recognize, and as it were increase, our immediate intuition of them "all at once", which is our Beatitude.
Sugar,
VerwijderenOkay, I can follow you.
The only thing I see different is that “immediate intuition”. I think that every intuition is ‘mediated’, otherwise it can’t exist. (Intuition don’t fall out of heaven.) But that’s the only difference, because for me the third kind of intuitive knowledge goes by the ‘common in between’. That what connects ‘the same as part and as whole’. Understanding the ‘common’ is understanding the mediated.
Ed, I think the ideas that are common to all things and equally in the parts and whole are reason, the second kind of knowledge [or third kind in TIE and KV]. We conceive many ideas of reason, such as 'nothing comes from nothing' or 'a thing must be identical with itself', but we can distinguish them from each other only insofar as we conceive substance as divisible.
VerwijderenIn my opinion, Spinoza's explanation of intuition in Ethics part 5 omits the most important point, that intuition is adequate conception of God or an attribute insofar as it is conceived adequately as indivisible and simple, i.e. without distinguishable parts. Since God is Eternity, and an attribute is eternal, and all things are in them and undivided in them, insofar as I conceive God or an attribute adequately, I conceive myself in them but not in any way distinguished from them or from anything else. That is conception of myself "in the form of eternity".
This is the most fundamental conception I have. It is prior to distinguishing the ideas of reason, and prior to distinguishing opinions and images. It is the adequate conception of God that refers to in E2p47: The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God". I have this adequate conception of substance in my mind because substance is the only thing that really exists, so it is therefore absolutely infinite and present in all things, including my mind, and so there can be no conception prior to it.
So Spinoza says (KV/22),
"That this fourth kind of knowledge, which is the knowledge of God, is not
the consequence of something else, but immediate, is evident from what we have
proved before, [namely,] that he is the cause of all knowledge that is acquired
through itself alone, and through no other thing; moreover, also from this, that
we are so united with him by nature that without him we can neither be, nor be
known. And for this reason, since there is such a close union between God and
us, it is evident that we cannot know him except directly".
This is our immediate intuition of existence. As Descartes showed, and as Spinoza clarifies in his Cartesian Principles, there is no conception in my mind prior to "I am". This is not 'I am Gary Sugar'. It is prior to that - just simple and immediate intuition of Existence, or Being, itself. Many authors have explained this. The oldest I've read is the Chandogya Upanishad: "That which is absolute being, this whole world has That as its soul. That is Reality. That is Self. That is you".
Sugar,
VerwijderenSpinoza gave, at the end of E2,40, the example of mathematics in intuitive thinking. So, someone who didn’t learn mathematics, who don’t know what figures are, what plus or minus is, is not able to see intuitive the counting. Intuition is seeing the connection or the common, not a gift from heaven.
Nietzsche says that intuition is forgotten knowledge. But Sugar, we can differ in this.
We'll have many more opportunities to discuss intuition. I've gone on and on too much already. But I do agree that intuition is the power of inference in the example of mathematics.
VerwijderenGary en Ed,
VerwijderenIk zag geen reden om mij in deze uitwisseling te mengen. Wel werden enge opmerkingen van Gary Sugar, waarover ik mij zorgen maakte, aanleiding voor mij voor het volgende blog:
https://bdespinoza.blogspot.nl/2017/11/over-spinozas-gebruik-van-abstracte-of.html#more
Indeed, Gary Sugar, "being is'nt in fact nothing." Being is id cujus essentia involvit existentiam sive id cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens.
BeantwoordenVerwijderen