Hegel in vijf boeken – o.a. vergeleken met #Spinoza

De website Five Books bracht gisteren een uitgebreid interview met de filosoof van Warwick University Stephen Houlgate, waarin hij aan de hand van vijf boeken van en over Hegel veel over deze filosoof verduidelijkt. Doordat hij wel acht maal naar Spinoza verwijst, wordt ook iets meer van het verschil tussen beide filosofen duidelijk. Het is een lange tekst: wel 35 A4-tjes op 1-regelafstand. Maar kennisneming ervan is m.i. zeker de moeite waard. Ik geef als voorbeeld een citaat ergens halverwege:

“Since the [Science of] Logic aims to discover the basic forms of being, as well as the basic categories of thought, it is a metaphysics as well as a logic. So you can say that Hegel is not only redoing Kant’s derivation of the categories, but also doing anew what Spinoza did, namely understand what there is. Spinoza, of course, begins with substance and then considers the relation between substance, attributes and modes. Hegel, however, thinks that this is to assume too much at the start of metaphysics and that all we are entitled to begin with is pure, indeterminate being.”

Of kom, nog een citaat dat aan het vorige voorafgaat – eentje waarin Spinoza niet voorkomt, maar waarin je hem zelf kunt indenken:

Absolute knowledge is thus not some grand knowledge of everything, nor is it knowledge of some ‘thing’ called the ‘Absolute’. It is simply consciousness or thought that no longer regards the distinction between itself and being as absolute, and so now knows that it can understand being through thought alone.

The distinction between self and object is at its sharpest in the shape of ‘sense-certainty’, but as we move through different shapes of consciousness, shapes begin to emerge that understand the active role that their own consciousness plays in disclosing, or in some cases transforming, their object. Understanding, for example, recognises that, in order to comprehend not just of the play of forces we see around us but also the deep structural laws that govern it, we’ve got to move from ‘passive’ empirical perception to ‘active’ understanding. Understanding as a way of thinking has got to disclose those laws through its own activity. That’s already beginning to undermine the sharp distinction between the knowing subject and its object. Of course, all practical consciousness does that, too, by transforming the object that it knows. So there is no sharp distinction between subject and object there either. Later on the object I engage with becomes another self-consciousness or, indeed, my own self-consciousness, as in the ‘unhappy consciousness’. So, once again, there is no sharp distinction between the self and what is other than it. Then with absolute knowledge consciousness recognises that the form of its own thought and the form of being itself are one and the same, and that thought can thus understand being through its own autonomous activity.