Gregor Moder, Hegel and Spinoza. Substance and Negativity. Translated from Slovanian by the author. Northwestern Universiy Press, July 2017 - 200 pages
Zijn inleiding loopt uit op behandeling van Althusser, Deleuze en Derrida en verwijdert zich daarmee van Hegel, maar tot dan is het een knappe behandeling van hoe Hegel (via Jacobi en de met hem begonnen Spinozastrijd) in aanraking kwam met Spinoza, waarom Spinoza belangrijk was voor Hegel en over hoe hij hem las.
[Cf, ook het blog van 18 november 2017 over 't Symposium “Hegel and/or Spinoza” in Londen, waarin Gregor Moder's boek centraal stond.]
De oorspronkelijke paginanummers staan tussen [ ].
Introduction
Hegel and Spinoza: The Question of Reading
For Hegel,
Spinoza’s philosophy presented an irresistibly attractive and at the same time
relentlessly provocative system of thought. If we were to list Hegel’s main
incentives, that is to say, his necessary interlocutors, his favorite
adversaries, we would be forced to put Spinoza’s philosophy near the very top,
perhaps even directly below Hegel’s polemics with Kant and other famous German
Idealists. The reasons for this are, in part, purely extrinsic, or
“historical.” In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spinoza was essential
reading for German intellectuals. He was read by Goethe and Herder, who
recognized in his system the pantheism of a continuously developing universal
force of life. When romanticism sought to conjoin the question of subjectivity
to a vitalistic Whole in order to lay the grounds for its project of nature as
an expressive totality, as cosmic subjectivity, it drew its inspiration
precisely from Spinozism.1 Before Hegel, Spinoza was discussed by
other classic figures of German Idealism such as Kant, Schelling, and Fichte,
and perhaps there is not too much exaggeration in the statement that they could
not have developed their philosophical systems without the reflection in the mirror
of Spinozism.2 If it is true that Hegel’s position was, in his early
period, generally speaking a Spinozist one,3 then this was only
possible because at that time in intellectual Germany a generalized image of
Spinozism— for instance, in the form of a romantic pantheism, a living cosmos,
and organic unity— was simply an image that demanded immediate engagement,
either in its favor or against it.
But
why was the figure of Spinoza so dramatically important in the development of
German Idealism? How did this inflammatory thinker of nature without a
transcendent deity, passionately excommunicated by Jews, hated and ridiculed by
Christians, avoided by all, and submerged in relative obscurity suddenly rise
to become a topic of general discussion and to a certain extent even a model
philosopher, a philosopher as such? The answer, for the most part, lies in a
long- lasting controversy among prominent intellectuals which is known as the Pantheismusstreit
or Spinozismusstreit (pantheism- or Spinozism- controversy). The
spark that started the controversy was a scandal among the intellectual elite
of the [4] time, a scandal that involved strong personal convictions, breach of
trust, and a tragic death. It started in 1785 when Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,
at that time a peripheral but socially quite active figure, published his
letters to a renowned thinker of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, complete
with his commentary, under the title of Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, in
Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (translated as Concerning the
Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn). This publication
pushed Spinozism, as well as Jacobi, onto center stage.
The
exchange of letters between Jacobi and Mendelssohn started off with the
question of whether Lessing, one of the legendary personalities of the German
and indeed the European Enlightenment, was a Spinozist or not. Upon learning
that Mendelssohn was preparing a publication on Lessing, Jacobi wrote to him
and reported that during his visit to Lessing, the latter declared himself a
Spinozist. At the time this was an incendiary claim, since being a Spinozist
meant as much as being a radical atheist. But the discussion quickly
transcended this particular question and evolved to tackle some of the prominent
questions of the day, principally the relationship between understanding and
faith. Mendelssohn, who was quite upset by Jacobi’s publication of their
correspondence, feverishly worked day and night to produce a response. When it
was finished, he took the manuscript personally to the publisher on one cold
January night, got dramatically sick, and subsequently died; some of Jacobi’s
critics blamed him for Mendelssohn’s death.4
The
controversy sparked by this exchange came to involve the entire intellectual
elite, from Herder to Hamman, Reinhold, and Kant. In general terms, what was at
stake was the divide between the Enlightenment on the one hand and the Sturm
und Drang and romantic movements on the other hand; the relationship between
knowing and believing; and between understanding and feeling. One of the key
objections to the Enlightenment, raised by the Sturm and Drang movement and by
pietism, claimed that in its criticism of traditional authorities and
prejudices in the name of the universal understanding it was oblivious to the
fact that its own universal position was also possible only in its specific
cultural and historical context, and that understanding thus became the very
authority that suppresses freedom.5
But
Jacobi went even further. He claimed that the position of understanding alone,
if followed to its extreme consequences, leads to determinism and fatalism and
is therefore fundamentally immoral. For him, Spinozism was the most radical,
yet at the same time the most consequential form of a rational system. This is
why he claimed that a philosophy based on understanding is necessarily a form
of Spinozism. Hence the alternative: either one is a philosopher, and therefore
a Spinozist, or [5] one has to reject Spinozism, rejecting with it the principle
of discursive understanding and philosophy.6 The reach of the
knowledge that one could attain by means of understanding and philosophy was
too short for Jacobi. According to him, they cannot grasp the core of
the truth and are limited to posing true statements. The core of the truth
remains in all cases something immediate and unanalyzable, something that can
only be grasped by intuition or faith. Any true knowledge must therefore be
grounded in faith; and understanding is grounded in intuition. We can use these
theses by Jacobi as a negative background upon which we may formulate the
fundamental challenges of German Idealism: how to secure and defend the ethical
place of freedom within the framework of philosophy as “Spinozism”; or in
another context: does knowledge require an external guarantee— such as faith or
intuition— or is it, to the contrary, guaranteed as knowledge intrinsically,
and perhaps capable of producing its own foundation? This is why we can say
that the German Idealists embraced Spinozism as an exemplary philosophical
system, while trying to reject and supersede it at the same time.7
But
it was not only for these general and accidental reasons that Hegel was
interested in rejecting and admiring Spinoza; there were also specific and for
his own philosophy quite essential reasons. On the one hand, Hegel claimed
Spinoza was the peak of modern philosophy, even the only possible beginning in
philosophy, and he even went so far as to claim that there is no philosophy
save as Spinozism.8 On the other hand, most of Hegel’s reproaches to
Spinoza can be summed up as the reproach that the very philosophy which enables
the possibility of philosophy as such is at the same time stuck in its
beginning: it never progressed from its starting point, it never developed its
own positions. Since this philosophy was incapable of thinking contradiction,
Hegel often viewed it as a Parmenidean or identity principle, according to
which only being is, while nonbeing is not; he regarded it as a living fossil
for supposedly reintroducing a non-Christian, “Oriental” philosophy of light
and the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing can come out of
nothing) in philosophy. Hegel himself emphatically affirmed Christian
metaphysics and its principle of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of
nothing).9
Hegel’s
reproach of immobility or rigidity in Spinoza can be analyzed in three
different yet closely related ways. Firstly, Hegel claims that the Spinozist
substance is incapable of transforming itself or organically growing— which is
in obvious contrast to interpretations circulating in German romanticism and
preromanticism. To put it in Hegel’s decisive formulation, it is a substance
that is not yet substance and subject. In this respect, Spinozism is a
variation of the “pantheism of the Eleatics,”10 and its
substance is immobile in exactly the same way that the being of the [6]
Eleatics is immobile: it is a pure abstract affirmation and immediacy, and it
involves no movement or contradiction. Secondly, Spinoza’s geometric principle
of demonstration, more geometrico, is the method of demonstration in
mathematics, which was dismissed by Hegel as well as by other German Idealists,
since such a method cannot grasp the self-developing nature and the organic
movement of the absolute. In this sense, the rigidity of the substance is
closely related to the rigidity of its method of explication. 11 Thirdly,
Spinozism nevertheless already formulated the most brilliant dialectical
concepts, such as, for instance, causa sui (cause of itself) and the
principle of omnis determinatio est negatio (all determination is
negation), but it failed to develop them to their utmost consequences. It stuck
at the beginning. According to Hegel, in the definition of causa sui Spinoza
already formulated the “indifference of being and nothingness”; in this concept
he already grasped the fundamental speculative idea of self-mediation— for the
cause of itself produces itself as its effect and therefore as something other
than itself— but apparently failed to apply these principles to the absolute
substance, for otherwise it would not have been immobile.12
What
kind of reading is Hegel’s reading of the philosophy of Spinoza? It would be
much too naive— if not completely wrong— to say that he picked out some Spinozist
concepts and productively implemented them in his own philosophy while
discarding others as deficient. In fact, Hegel never read any of the
philosophers in the history of philosophy in this fashion. Moreover, he never
read any phenomenon of the spirit— be it artistic, religious, philosophical, or
political— in this fashion. Hegel’s reading of a text is completely different
from what we usually understand as reliable historical reading; it is never a
reading that diligently collects and weighs its sources, references, summaries,
and reports, comparing one against the other, and carefully choosing the most
adequate explanation in the pursuit of compiling a transparent oversight of the
whole with the explicit ambition of producing an impartial view of the matter
at hand.
In
a way, Hegel’s reading is “nonhistorical” and “unreliable”; that is to say, it
is most certainly a reading that takes us away from the immediate letter of the
text and its historical context, often in an unashamed and quite apparent attempt
at developing Hegel’s own philosophical theses. And yet it does not do so by
picking out useful positions and concepts, and separating them from others. On
the contrary, the Hegelian reading always admits that the text it is reading is
a necessary expression of the spirit and that it is therefore in itself already
in truth— and not just a more or less fortunate collection of successful and
unsuccessful claims. It is a reading that does not measure its text to an
external guideline, but [7] insists on an immanent explanation. A text is
therefore always already in truth; but at the same time, its truth is
never a complete, absolute, or entire truth. As an affirmative
expression of the spirit, a text is always an expression of the absolute, and
yet as an affirmative and determinate expression it is also always already its
negation. It is as if the truth expressed in the text, through this very
expression, already became something other than it was, therefore demanding a
new expression.
A
text as an expression of the spirit already implies something that cannot be
grasped in its immediate form; it implies something unexpressed. If one was to
call on the Aristotelian distinction between actuality and potentiality, then
one could say that the text implies an unexpressed potentiality in its very
actuality; the texture of the text, so to speak, is never a smooth one. But we
can never simply separate the “actual” from the “potential,” as if they were
two independent threads; they can be discerned only in retrospect. Aristotle
used the distinction between actual and potential to explain movement or
change— and perhaps we can say that the text we are reading, for Hegel, is much
like a body in motion: it is certainly there, before us, as something true, but
at the same time it is not fully there yet; something still needs to happen to
it, it must still get somewhere. This is why the Hegelian reading does not
weigh its text, picking out its useful parts and discarding the rest. It rather
seeks to repeat the text in its truth; and by repeating its truth it
reveals its potentiality, its dynamism. One could say that the Hegelian reading
is a productive repetition of the truth of the text it is reading.13
So, what
kind of reading is Hegel’s reading of Spinoza? We can formulate the question
that interested Hegel in Spinoza as the question of whether it is possible to
think contradiction or movement on the level of the absolute substance, or, to
borrow from the title of one of Slavoj Žižek’s books on Christianity, whether
it is possible to think the absolute as a fragile absolute.14
More precisely: how can one read and explicate Spinozism in order to
successfully produce such a concept of the absolute? What Hegel found in
Spinoza was the idea that only what exists, exists, and that the substance is
one and universal, but at the same time also the idea that any particular
determination is already a negation of that primordial unity. What Hegel
thought was lacking in the work of Spinoza was not something that was
completely absent from that philosophy and had to be artificially added to it,
from its outside; rather, it was something that was certainly there, written in
the first line of the first part of Spinoza’s major work, the Ethics, in
the definition of the causa sui. Hegel’s speculative reading does not
take Spinozism as its adversary, but strictly speaking as an integral part of
its own position.15 To state again, what Hegel lacked in Spinoza was
not a certain positive content, but rather [8] a form of insistence and
consequentiality: had Spinoza comprehended the cause in itself as self-
determination of the universal substance, and according to the principle of omnis
determinatio est negatio as self- negation of the absolute, he would
already have had an explicit formulation of the negation of negation, a concept
of a productive contradiction, and therefore a concept of an absolute in
motion.
Hegel’s
question about Spinoza’s philosophy could therefore be understood as a question
of movement, specifically of movement or contradiction of the beginning, of the
primordial. In other words, it is a question of dynamism internal to being
itself, and at the same time a question of why it was necessary for Spinozism,
as far as the question of movement of the primordial is concerned, to get stuck
at the beginning, at the first sentence, and why it was unable to move from
this beginning. To use a recursive formula: why was it necessary for the
Spinozist absolute to appear as immobile to Spinozism itself, when it already
appeared for the Hegelian reading as an absolute with inner dynamism; that is,
as an absolute which on the one hand, for Spinozism itself, was immobile, an
identity absolute, whereas on the other hand, for the Hegelian reading, it was
already an absolute of contradiction, an absolute in movement?
Lost in Translation
Before
submerging deeper into Hegel’s reading of Spinoza, let me schematically point
out some of the principal objections to this reading and the concerns regarding
it that were traditionally raised. First of all, the understanding of Spinozism
as pantheism— be it Eleatic or romanticist— is not entirely justified. Gueroult
demonstrated, and his argument was taken up by many other commentators, that in
Spinozism the point was not so much that the whole (or the universe) is called
God, but that everything that exists exists “in” God.16 The more
proper designation would therefore be pan-en-theism.
Two, Hegel’s reproach to the mathematical method of demonstration, claiming that it was inept for demonstrating a philosophical truth— an argument that he constantly repeated throughout his body of work— was, in principle, also Spinoza’s reproach.17
Three,
the definition of the cause of itself, praised by Hegel as the moment of absolute
knowledge and explained as the fundamental, principal determination of
Spinoza’s system, does not really play, in Spinoza, the role of an absolute
beginning from which everything else stems and evolves. Moreover, being the
cause of itself is but a property of the sub-[9] stance, merely explicating the
substance; if we understand it as defining or determining the substance, we
have already submitted the essence of God to his power and therefore fallen
into the matrix of theological finalism.18
Four,
Spinozism is not organized either as a philosophy of the absolute beginning nor
as a philosophy of the beginning with the absolute— at least not in the Ethics.
Deleuze pointed out the difference between the Short Treatise on God, Man
and His Wellbeing, which indeed begins with God, and the Ethics,
where the argument does not start with God and aims rather at being able
to rise to God as quickly as we can.19
Five,
there are many details that suggest that Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza was
either less than thorough or even a deliberate attempt at forcing Spinozism to
fit into a neatly arranged space that Hegel cleared for it in the grand scheme
of the development of the spirit throughout the history of philosophy. An
overwhelming example of this procedure, for Macherey, was Hegel’s reduction of
the infinity of attributes in Spinoza’s system to only two attributes of
extension and thought (and explaining those as basically Eleatic being and
thinking), a reduction that apparently serves no other purpose than to place
Spinoza immediately after Descartes in the logical-historical sequence of
philosophy.20
But,
six, none of the other aspects of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza was quite as far-reaching as the notorious principle of omnis determinatio est negatio.
This principle was not Hegel’s invention, and Hegel was not the first to try to
explain the entirety of Spinoza’s system from this principle. The idea that to
determine is to negate reached Hegel in relation to Spinoza through Jacobi.21
What is astonishing about this principle is, to put it quite simply, that
Spinoza never used it as a guiding principle of his philosophy. The sentence
was floating around in the air even before Jacobi, but it was this infamous
polemicist that gave it the form of an ontological principle according to which
all actually existing (that is, determinate) things are marked by an intrinsic
decadence or nonbeing (that is, by negation).22
But
if we follow Macherey’s thorough and elaborate analysis, Hegel’s specific take
on this principle is even more fascinating. The reason why Hegel was so
enthusiastic about this “Spinozist” principle is that he read it inversely: as
if all negation is determination, that is, as if a negation of an entity is in
fact a productive procedure of (positive) determination. 23 The
Hegelian gesture with regard to Spinozism can then be summed up as follows: had
Spinoza comprehended “his” principle as a speculative principle, that is, as a
principle of potentiality, then his system of absolutely infinite substance and
finite modes would never have been just a system of ontological degradation, of
simple negation, but rather a [10] system of the negation of negation, of
productive negation. This may all sound well, except for one simple flaw—the
principle of ontological degradation is not a Spinozist principle at all!
If
Hegel’s reading of Spinozism was fundamentally dependent on the principle which
differentiates between an undetermined, perfect absolute on the one hand and a
sequence of gradual determinations, differentiations, and ontological dilutions
or degradations on the other hand, then it is obvious that Hegel understood the
system of the substance, attributes, and the modes as a typical emanationist
system.24 But while Spinoza was indeed inspired by the vast Neoplatonic
tradition of the emanationist causality, Deleuze emphasized that he produced
within it an important immanentist twist. Both emanative cause and immanent
cause remain in themselves when producing their effect— but they differ in that
with immanentist causality, the effect also “remains in” its cause. This
distinction has enormous consequences for the entire system, because the
immanent cause knows no ontological hierarchy, and since the effect was never
“cast out” or “sent out” and never “fell out” of its cause, it also does not
need to teleologically “return” to its cause.25
The
perplexity of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza’s philosophy relies mainly on the fact
that he was attracted by concepts and principles— for instance, the definition
of causa sui as the beginning of philosophy with a contradiction between
the cause and the effect at work in the absolute substance, omnis
determinatio est negatio as the first step toward a concept of productive
negation— that were without any doubt tremendously important for Hegel, but
seem to have only a tangential relation to Spinoza. And as if this were not
enough, some of Hegel’s reproaches to Spinoza do not only seem unjustified, but
also unreasonable to the extent that they unnecessarily see an adversary where
there is in fact an ally. The most obvious example of this is the question of
the method. Spinoza’s famous example of working iron from the Treatise on
the Emendation of the Intellect is
an attack on Descartes’s method of clear and distinct perception: if one accepts
the premise that in order to work iron, one must first acquire a proper working
tool, a hammer, then one must necessarily also accept the following premise
that in order to produce that working tool, the hammer, one must first acquire
another hammer and other tools, and so on ad infinitum.26 Spinoza’s
definition of the adequate idea in the Ethics spells out quite clearly
that it is an idea “which, insofar as it is considered in itself without
relation to its object has all the properties, that is, intrinsic
characteristics, of a true idea.”27 Spinoza’s concept of “method”
therefore demands an intrinsic relation to truth, which is precisely what
Hegel’s “Introduction” to the Phenomenology of Spirit was so brilliantly
arguing for in its criticism of the Kantian demand that one [11] must first
discuss the limits of knowledge before even attempting to reach the truth.28
All of this seems to suggest that what Hegel was so enthusiastic about and at
the same time annoyed by in Spinozism was . . . Hegel himself. Or, as Macherey
put it, it seems that Spinoza served Hegel as some sort of mirror surface upon
which his own ideas were reflected. And perhaps Macherey’s remark can indeed go
for the image of Spinoza in German Idealism in general: they needed it precisely
as the image against which they were able to formulate their own philosophical positions.29
But perhaps something similar can be said about the image of Hegel in what we
could call the French materialism of the twentieth century. In Althusser, to
immediately take the example of a thinker that we will often come back to, we
can detect not only the generalizing tendency to reduce Hegel to a collection
of dry wisdom, but also the failure to perceive the proximity of some of his
own philosophical endeavors to those of Hegel. Additionally, it is important to
note that in opposing Hegel, Althusser leaned heavily on the philosophy of
Spinoza.
In
particular, let us take a look at Althusser’s well-known interpretation of the
so-called materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectics. What is at stake for
Althusser is not simply to take binary oppositions like matter/-idea,
practice/theory, economy/ideology, and then overturn their order of primacy.
For Althusser, it does not suffice to invert the stream of causality, so to
speak, and claim that instead of the primacy of theory one should argue for the
primacy of practice; or that the system of economic production is not dependent
on the dominant state maxim (mercantilism, liberalism, etc.), but vice versa,
so that the dominant state ideology is dependent on the relations of economic
production. The inversion of Hegelianism that must take place, for Althusser,
is therefore not just an inversion of the direction in which determination
works within idealism, but a much more ambitious step: he demands no less than
an outright disownment of the hierarchical ontological- causal model of
determination. Such a model was characteristic of the metaphysical systems of Neoplatonism,
and Althusser strongly argued for the Spinozist principle of— to apply the
Deleuzean reading through Duns Scotus— the univocity of being.30
This
principle is the key to understanding Althusser’s theses, where theory is not
the opposite of practice but rather such and such theoretical practice; where
the ideology of the state is not the opposite of the system of economic
production but rather such and such ideological production. This already
determines the image of Hegel rejected by Althusser: it is the image of Hegel
as an inversion of Neoplatonism. Macherey— a student of Althusser’s and
coauthor of the famous Reading “Capital”— spells it out: “What Hegel
proposes is simply to reverse this [Neoplatonic] [12] order, by placing the
Whole at the end of the process and by arranging its determinations as moments
that progressively lead there.”31 What Althusserians saw in Hegel
was essentially the embodiment of both theology and teleology, coupled with the
inverse ontological model of systems of emanative causality, where instead of
the falling from the absolute and the subsequent return to it we have the
process of sublation as a persistent advance toward it. This is why the
infamous concept of absolute knowledge was explained as a mythical point of
convergence of knowledge and truth, exhibiting the fundamental fallacy of the
idealist theory of knowledge, its confusion of the object of knowledge and the
real object, which allows it to keep “silently pondering the religious
fantasies of epiphany and parousia.”32
One
must note that Althusser and his students were hardly the only French school
that saw teleology and theology working hand in hand throughout Hegel. Derrida
pointed out that Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty,
Lévinas, and many others went through a case of an “organized allergy . . .
towards the Hegelian dialectic,” each with their own specific theoretical
background and entry point.33 This all started with the legendary
lectures of Koyré and Kojeve, whose readings of Hegel massively influenced
generations of scholars and thinkers. Catherine Malabou points out that
Kojeve’s reading of absolute knowledge as the End of Time, which lay the
foundation for the idea of absolute knowledge as a convergence of all
oppositions, was itself heavily influenced by Heidegger’s explanation of absolute
knowledge as Parousia, and by his claim that primary time, for Hegel, was past
time.34 One could claim, then, that a large portion of the French
rejection of Hegel is based on Heidegger’s critique of Hegelianism as onto-theological metaphysics.
Of
course, within the construction of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel did
place the chapter on absolute knowledge immediately after the chapter on
revealed religion; in fact, as the logical conclusion of that chapter. The
spirit of revealed religion is for itself still separated from its
object, even though the two are clearly one in itself. Consciousness is
still not reconciled or united with essence. Hegel writes: “Its own
reconciliation therefore enters its consciousness as something distant,
as something in the distant future.”35 This is Hegel’s own
formulation of the necessity for the advent of absolute knowledge. The
reference to Parousia as the future reconciliation is quite apparent. And yet
the knowledge at stake in absolute knowledge is not knowledge of some mystical-
religious truth. In absolute knowledge, consciousness does not learn anything
new; no new content is reached. Absolute knowledge is not the mythical
elimination of the difference between subject and object, between truth and
knowledge; it is not the Holy Grail of cognition, it is not the prophesized
moment of [13] immediate and final truth where concrete words express concrete
being. Rather, absolute knowledge is an empty point. It is precisely the
concept of the fundamental irreconcilability in the heart of truth itself. To
use a recursive phrasing proposed by Mladen Dolar: the truth is nothing but the
hiatus between truth and knowledge.36 Absolute knowledge is the place
of this void, and this void is what produces the effect of Parousia.
Perhaps
we could say that absolute knowledge works like a punctuation mark at
the end of a sentence. The punctuation itself has no content; it is simply a
formal decision that the process is at an end. This way it refers the reader
back to the sentence itself, producing the effect of the meaning that
was in the sentence all along.
Punctuation
marks— full stops, commas, semicolons, and so on— clearly belong to the field
of writing. Since there is no sound for them, it may seem, at first glance,
that they are imposed on natural, organic spoken language. However, it is
common linguistic knowledge that such “artificial” imposition is in fact
characteristic of “natural” language itself. We know from everyday experience
that certain silences produce meaning just as well as words; we are all aware
and constantly use the dramatic pause; we know that silence is golden, and so
on; that is to say, we know that punctuation marks belong to language as such,
whether it is written or spoken. Moreover, as was pointed out by Saussure a
long time ago, what signs are signifying is not defined by their positive or
affirmative content, “but negatively by their relations with the other terms of
the system,” and therefore “their most precise characteristic is in being what the
others are not.”37
Derrida
pushed this argument even further and claimed that writing is not a secondary
representation of immediate, natural, or organic speech, that it is not a later
deformation of the authentic voice, but that it even has a specific advantage
over the spoken word. The negativity of writing, precisely its necessary delay
and deformation, is in fact inscribed in the essence of language itself.
Derrida writes: “If ‘writing’ signifies inscription and especially the durable
institution of a sign . . . , writing in general covers the entire field of
linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may
then appear, ‘graphic’ in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, ordered
by a certain relationship with other instituted— hence ‘written,’ even if they
are ‘phonic’— signifiers. The very idea of institution . . . of the sign is
unthinkable before the possibilityof writing and outside of its horizon.”38
The
negativity of language, pointed out by Saussure and Derrida, implies that the
punctuation mark is, in fact, the primordial phenomenon of language. That
artificial and purely formal cut of the punctuation mark, imposed on the
affirmative texture of organic language, is in fact [14] its innermost
possibility, its proper character. Now, how is this connected to the problem of
absolute knowledge? The point is that absolute knowledge operates precisely in
such a double function. On the one hand, it works as the full stop at the end
of a sentence, as the point of the promised End Judgment; but on the other
hand, this End Judgment turns out to be purely void and dimensionless, nothing
more than a formal point revealing to us that any positive, affirmative content
of an End Judgment is always an effect or a product of its
process. This formal gesture of a punctuation mark is radically foreign to
Spinoza and contemporary incarnations of Spinozism. It is precisely this simple
gesture that Hegel found, in nuce, lacking in Spinoza: what Spinoza said
was already everything that needed to be said; all that was still missing was
the punctuation mark at the end of the sentence.
Residual Questions
To sum up
the problematic of reception, one could make the general observation that the
relationship between Hegelianism and Spinozism is often a relationship of
mutual fascination with one self, a kind of mutual intellectual masturbation.
It seems that Hegel, and to some extent this goes for German Idealism in
general, recognized in Spinoza a powerful image, one that helped him formulate
his own project better, but also one that had discouragingly little to do with
Spinoza’s philosophy itself. At the same time, one could claim that the French
Spinozists— with Althusser and Deleuze carrying the banner— recognized in Hegel
a caricature of a theologian and a finalist which they gleefully hated and
denounced, but failed to see the common ground that bound their projects to
that of Hegel.
However,
this mutually failed relationship which determines much of the contemporary
debate within materialism nevertheless pivots around some basic themes.39
While on the one hand Hegel read Spinozism as a system of emanative causality
and ontological degradation, Althusserians, on the other hand, read Hegelian
dialectics as an inversion of the emanationist system. Hegel claimed that
Spinozism is fundamentally an example of what he called Oriental determinism,
an example of abstract negativism where everything determined is simply
negative, where all singularity is dissolved in the absolute substance— and
where there cannot be any concept of the freedom of the subject. But similarly,
Hegel was reproached for presenting a mechanical finalism where the movement of
thought is reduced to a straightforward transition through [15] rigidly
outlined stages of development and where there is never a place for true
surprise, since everything leads to a predictable conclusion, to the mythic
point of Parousia. And after all, even the Althusserian theory of ideological
interpellation was criticized by Lacanians as basically a functionalist theory,
since it can only “explain its proper success, but not how and why it does not
work,”40 since it fails to account for the traumatic residue of its
process, a kind of a leftover that “far from hindering the full submission
of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it.”41
These
objections— determinism, mechanical teleology, functionalism— overlook the fact
that neither Hegelians nor Spinozists subscribe to a hierarchical concept of
causality, and that they do not understand transformation or movement within
the order of the actual in Cartesian terms of a spontaneous thinking substance–
– which influences mechanical operations of the extended substance by
intervening from outside of it. Both Hegelians and Spinozists, in their own
specific terms and concepts, argue for a substance capable of organizing its
own transformation. How exactly is such a self- determination demonstrated, on
what grounds is it argued for, and what specific concepts and strategies are
employed— this remains an open question and lies at the core of the problematic
that we will address as the problematic of Hegel and Spinoza. In its own way, the
problematic of reception once again points to the question of movement within
the absolute, to the question of the contradictory status of beginning and to
the question of an irreducible dynamism, hidden in the positive landscape of a
text. The residual questions that will guide our inquiry as our basic thematic
points are as follow. Firstly, the question of teleology, especially in its
relationship to causality. Secondly, the question of the relationship between
the absolute and the determined, where Hegel and Spinoza formulated solutions
that sometimes seem to their adversaries as only minor adjustments of the
classical metaphysical causal model of Neoplatonists, but in fact completely
remove that model. And thirdly, the question of the limit that precedes what
lays beyond.
Notes
1. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 16, 40– 41.
2. Pierre Macherey, Hegel or
Spinoza, trans. Susan B. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011), 195.
3. Klaus Düsing, “Von der Substanz zum
Subjekt: Hegels spekulative Spinoza- Deutung,” in Spinoza und der Deutsche
Idealismus, ed. Manfred Walther (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992),
164.
4. Daniel Dahlstrom, “Moses
Mendelssohn,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2011
Edition, ed. E. N. Zalta, http:// plato .stanford .edu /archives /spr2011
/entries /mendelssohn/.
5. Hans- Georg Gadamer, in Truth
and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. J. Marshall (London: Continuum,
2004), 273, reformulated this thesis slightly, writing that the Enlightenment
was prejudiced against prejudices. Hegel himself insisted that while it is, of
course, better to be led by your own judgment than to blindly follow an outside
authority, this does not rid you of prejudices. In Phenomenology of Spirit he
wrote: “The only difference between abiding by the authority of others or
abiding by one’s own convictions in a system of opinions and prejudices lies
solely in the vanity inherent in the latter” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology
of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977],
75).
6. Jacobi reports his conversations
with Lessing in great detail. After reading what could be roughly understood as
a Spinozist poem by Goethe that Jacobi showed to him, Lessing exclaimed that he
subscribes to hen kai pan (One and All) and that he would not object to
be called a Spinozist. Jacobi was startled, he “blushed” and had “gone pale,” for he
expected a different result. The next day, Jacobi writes, they agreed on the
paradigmatic example of Spinoza in philosophy. We find, phrased as a quote from
Lessing, the basic formulation of what became a trademark Hegelian dictum.
“[I:] In the main I had come to get help from you against Spinoza. Lessing: Oh,
so you do know him? I: I think I know him as only very few can ever have known
him. Lessing: Then there is no help for you. Become his friend all the way
instead. There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza. I: That
might be true. For the determinist, if he wants to be consistent, must become a
fatalist: the rest then follows by itself” (Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The
Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” trans. George di
Giovanni [Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1994], 187).
7. See also Jean- Marie Vaysse,
“Spinoza dans la problématique de l’idéalisme allemande,” in Spinoza au XIXe
siècle, ed. A. Tosel et al. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007), 65;
Pierre- Henry Tavoillot, “Spinoza dans la querelle du panthéisme,” in Spinoza
au XIXe siècle, ed. A. Tosel et al. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne,
2007), 40.
8. Hegel, TWA 20:165. Hegel’s
alternative “entweder Spinozizmus oder keine Philosophie” is in essence very
close to the alternative proposed by Jacobi (see also Adrian Johnston, Adventures
in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers [Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014], 34).
9. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The
Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 60– 61.
10. Ibid., 60.
11. Hegel, TWA 20:161.
12. Hegel, TWA 20:168: “Hätte
Spinoza näher entwickelt, was in der causa sui liegt, so wäre seine
Substanz nicht das Starre.”
13. This specific way of reading
philosophical texts, not taking them in as a collection of fixed statements but
revealing their intrinsic dynamism, their implied, unexpressed potentiality,
was an especially powerful influence on Heidegger’s philosophy. The
hermeneutical structure of the question of being is an especially
important reference here, since it quite clearly states that the question itself
is an integral part of being as such— which is what Heidegger underscored in
the introduction to his Being and Time (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,
trans. J. Stambaugh [New York: State University of New York Press, 1996], 3–
7). Moreover, Hegelian reading sets in motion all necessary aspects of
Gadamerian hermeneutics, where reading is understood as religious reading, that
is, as a re- reading (re- legere) which aims to resurrect “the dead
trace of meaning” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 156). And last but not
least, we may cautiously suggest that there is a peculiar connection between
such a notion of reading and the Althusserian concept of symptomal reading.
14. The full title of Žižek’s book is The
Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New
York: Verso, 2001).
15. See also Düsing, “Von der Substanz
zum Subjekt,” 163.
16. See Marcial Gueroult, Spinoza
I: Dieu (Ethique, I) (Paris: Aubier- Montaigne, 1968), 223; Genevieve
Lloyd, Spinoza and the “Ethics” (London: Routledge, 1996), 40. Negri
claimed that Spinoza proposed a “strategy of constitu tion” against the
“pantheistic utopia” (Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of
Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 28– 35).
17. Deleuze argued that Spinoza was
fully aware that the method of mathematics is inappropriate when dealing with
philosophical knowledge (Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy:
Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin [New York: Zone Books, 1990], 20). Furthermore,
in Deleuze’s reading, the essences of the modes are not logical or mathematical
structures but physical realities, res physicae (ibid., 192). And
finally, Deleuze pointed out that the notiones communes (common notions)
which in his judgment constituted the essential epistemological breakthrough of
Spinoza’s Ethics are to be understood as “biological, rather than
physical or mathematical, ideas” (ibid., 278; see also Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2003],
54– 58). The question of Spinoza’s method, more geometrico (or ordine
geometrico), was explained by Macherey as a strictly anti- Cartesian
concept of truth, a concept of truth that was in fact very close to Hegel’s
own. For both, even though they differ in what they attribute to thinking,
“truth is an internal determination of thought, which excludes all relation to
an exterior object” (Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 73). Lloyd warned that
the sterile construction of the mathematical demonstration in Spinoza can be
misleading, since the book is soaked with ironies and witty, even emotional remarks
(Lloyd, Spinoza and the “Ethics,” 19– 20).
18. Gueroult, Spinoza I, 41.
See also Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 16.
19. Deleuze, Expressionism in
Philosophy, 76.
20. Pierre Macherey, “Le Spinoza
idéaliste de Hegel,” in Spinoza und der Deutsche Idealismus, ed. Manfred
Walther (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992), 149.
21. Jacobi uses the phrase in the
correspondence with Mendelssohn, explaining his understanding of Spinoza: “This
God therefore does not belong to any species of things; it is not a separate,
individual, different, thing. Nor can any of the determinations that
distinguish individual things pertain to it” ( Jacobi, Main Philosophical
Writings, 219). Further down, Jacobi quotes Spinoza’s letter to Jelles from
June 2, 1674, where Spinoza does in fact use the phrase “determination is
negation” (Spinoza, EPS 50, 892). Jacobi comments: “Individual things therefore,
so far as they only exist in a certain determinate mode, are non- entia;
the indeterminate infinite being is the one single true ens reale” (
Jacobi, Main
Philosophical
Writings, 220).
22. Hegel wrote: “Spinoza hat den
großen Satz: Alle Bestimmung ist eine Negation. Das Bestimmte ist das Endliche”
(Hegel, TWA 20:164). See also Düsing, “Von der Substanz zum Subjekt,”
183.
23. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza,
115.
24. See also Düsing, “Von der Substanz
zum Subjekt,” 169– 71.
25. Deleuze, Expressionism in
Philosophy, 171– 74.
26. Spinoza, TIE, 9.
27. Spinoza, TIE, 244.
28. Hegel writes: “Meanwhile, if the
fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence
of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something,
it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust.
Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the
error itself?” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 47).
29. Tavoillot provided a much more
measured formulation, writing that what was at stake for German Idealism in
discussing Spinoza was not a faithful reconstruction of his system, but rather
its philosophical value for their own time: “Savoir ce que Spinoza a vraiment
dit importe alors moins que de savoir si ce qu’il a dit est vrai” (Tavoillot,
“Spinoza dans la querelle du panthéisme,” 36– 37).
30. Throughout his oeuvre, Deleuze
constantly refers to Duns Scotus and his concept of univocity of being; what is
especially important in the context of Spinoza is that Deleuze argues that
Scotus was the essential philosophical forerunner of Spinoza. See especially
Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 58– 67.
31. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza,
75.
32. Louis Althusser, “From Capital to
Marx’s Philosophy,” in Reading “Capital,” by Louis Althusser and Étienne
Balibar, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970), 16.
33. Jacques Derrida, “A Time for
Farewells: Heidegger (Read by) Hegel (Read by) Malabou,” in The Future of
Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, by Catherine Malabou, trans.
L. During (London: Routledge, 2005), xxvi.
34. Malabou, Future of Hegel,
3.
35. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit,
478.
36. Mladen Dolar, Samozavedanje:
Heglova Fenomenologija duha II (Ljubljana: Društvo za teoretsko
psihoanalizo, 1992), 9– 10.
37. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course
in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1959),
117.
38. Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 44.
39. Adrian Johnston understands the
category of the subject as one of the central antagonistic points in
contemporary materialism: “I would go so far as to maintain that one of the
primary antagonisms splitting materialism today from within is that between
neo- Spinozist and neo- Hegelian tendencies, the former (incarnated by, for
instance, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and their various progeny) seeking
to dissolve the figure of the subject and the latter (represented most notably
by Žižek and Slovene Lacanianism) to preserve it” ( Johnston, Transcendental
Materialism, 20).
40. Mladen Dolar, “Beyond
Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6, no. 2 (1993):78.
41. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime
Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 2008), 43.
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