De Canadese filosoof Charles Taylor heeft
veel bijgedragen aan de politieke filosofie, en is bekend van een dikke turf “Bronnen
van het zelf.” Maar ook schreef hij eerder een omvangrijk werk over Hegel. Vele
jaren is deze studie die Charles Taylor over Hegel schreef en dat voor het
eerst in 1975 uitkwm, beschouwd als hét handboek over Hegel. Velen hebben er
tijdens hun sudie kennis van genomen. Het kreeg vele edities en is nog steeds
beschikbaar:
● Charles Taylor, Hegel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975, [nieuwe editie] 1977 [books.google]
Frederick
Beiser schrijft in de “Introduction: The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance” in:
Frederick C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. [Cambridge University
Press, 2009]:
The apex of the Anglophone Hegel revival was the
publication in 1975 of Charles Taylor’s Hegel. With grace, precision,and
remarkable erudition, Taylor surveyed the depth and breadth of Hegel’s entire
system and showed it to be an edifice of great intellectual subtlety and
sophistication. Unlike earlier scholars, Taylor did not limit himself to
Hegel’s social and political thought; he treated every aspect of Hegel’s system
and examined in depth its central core and foundation: its metaphysics. The
central theme of that metaphysics, Taylor argued, was the concept of
self-positing spirit. What held every part of the system together, what made it
into a unified whole, was the idea of an absolute spirit that posits itself in
and through history and nature. Because of its remarkable clarity, Taylor’s
book proved to be a great success, going through several editions and
translations. Yet, it is difficult to understand how Taylor’s book could lead
to a growth in interest in Hegel. The idea of self-positing spirit, which
Taylor made the very heart of Hegel’s philosophy, is so speculative, so
metaphysical, [] and so religious that it is hard to understand how it could
convince modern readers of Hegel’s intellectual merits. These readers had been raised
in a much more secular and skeptical age, in a philosophical culture suffused
with positivism, and so the idea of a self-positing spirit proved very
problematic. When Taylor’s book appeared, the academic establishment in Britain
and the United States was already dominated by analytic philosophy, which never
had much time for metaphysics. So, ironically, given the emphasis it placed on
Hegel’s metaphysics, and given the anti-metaphysical atmosphere in Anglophone
academia, Taylor’s book was more likely to bury than revive Hegel. Yet,
interest in Hegel only grew. Why?
For all its merits, this had little to do, I believe,
with Taylor’s book. Instead, it had much more to do with the fact that scholars
began to ignore or underplay that aspect of Hegel’s philosophy that Taylor had
placed center stage: metaphysics.
In dit blog neem ik een aantal
langere citaten uit Taylor's Hegel over Spinoza op.
In het eerste deel, THE CLAIMS OF
SPECULATIVE REASON,
But Herder and those of his generation and the succeeding
one were also greatly influenced by Spinoza. This may be surprising in that
Spinoza was the great philosopher of the anti-subject, the philosopher who more
than any other in the Western tradition seems to take us beyond and outside of
su jectivity. But the age in receiving him imposed a certain reading on
Spinoza. His philosophy was not seen as denying an understanding of human life
as self-unfolding; rather the Spinozan notion of a conatus in all things to preserve themselves was read in this
light. What Spinoza seemed to offer, why he drew Goethe, and tempted so many
others, was a vision of the way in which the finite subject fitted into a universal
current of life. In the process Spinoza was pushed towards a kind of pantheism
of a universal life force. In other words he was re-interpreted to incorporate
the category of self-unfolding, now seen as the act of a universal life which
was bigger than any subject, but qua self-unfolding life very subject-like. Why
such a strong need was felt for a relation to this universal current of life, I
shall return to below. […]
In deel III, Hoofdstuk “Essence”
But before both of these dialectics, we have in the WL a first phase concerning the absolute, which is in fact a
critique of Spinoza and a situating ofHegel's position vis-a-vis Spinozan
monism. l Although not essential to the dialectic, this raising of Spinoza is
not a departure from the central theme. Spinoza is an important philosopher for
Hegel, and this not simply in the sensethat all past philosophy was important
for one who was the first major thinker to express his position as essentially
an Aufhebung
of all previous thought. Within this general importance of
all the philosophical past, some philosophers stand out: Aristotle, of course ;
and Kant as the indispensable starting point, the definition of the dualities
which Hegel is trying to overcome. But Spinoza is important for the opposite
reason to Kant, viz . , that he believed in the unity of everything in the
absolute which was both God and also the whole. Everything is linked in a
totality which is dependence on the Absolute which is God. Spinoza thus comes
very close to the Hegelian position, and now when we have got to the stage of
seeing reality as totality expressive of essence is the time to take our
position vis-a-vis Spinoza.
For close as Spinoza is to Hegel, there are important
differences. The point is that because Spinoza is close, the expression of
these differences is one of the best ways Hegel knows of making clear his own
position. Hence he does so frequently.
The difference can be summed up in categories which only
will come clear at the end of this section, that for Spinoza the absolute is
only substance and not subject. The absolute is what lies behind, and cannot be
equated with any particular thing in the world. All determination is negation,
the principle of Spinoza which Hegel makes his own, but from this Spinoza holds
that the absolute is beyond determination, is beyond negation. But this
Absolute is one in which particular things sink without trace, it is simple
self-identity. And for this reason, it remains a pure hidden inner reality; and
hence it is a reality without inner movement, which is not conceived as such
that the external determinate things can be deduced from it, or flow out of it
in virtue of its own nature.
The Hegelian absolute, on the other hand, contains
negation, it is determined to go beyond itself, to go into its other,
determinate being. Hence for Hegel but not for Spinoza, the external reality of
the world is not just there, not simply something found, but an order which
manifests an inner necessity. Spinoza's God being pure and beyond determination
is a pure inner, and hence the reality of the world is a pure outer in the
Hegelian sense. Hegel likens this notion of the emanation of particulars from
the absolute to that we find in some eastern religions, in which the Absolute
is light which streams forth, gradually losing its nature as it issues in lower
and lower beings. Hegel seems to think that some such idea underlies the
religion of the ancient Persians, but something of the same notion is found in
Neo-Platonism. Hegel rather sweepingly calls this an oriental cast of thought,
and connects Spinoza's adoption of it with his Jewish origin, for it is ' in
general the oriental way of seeing things, according to which the nature of the
finite world seems frail and transient, that has found its intellectual expression
in his system ' (EL, § 1 5 1 Addition). 1
Reciprocally, the particular is thought of as
disappearing, but not as inwardly related to the absolute as it is with Hegel,
where the nature of the absolute can be read out of the contradictions in the particular.
What we lack in Sinoza is thus the idea of contradiction, of the unity of
opposites, which is the source of movement, and which affects the absolute, God
himself.Spinoza's philosophy lacks the contradiction of an absolute which is
the source and fount of all particular, and yet which has particularity in it;
which is over and against the particular and which nevertheless contains it.
Hence the world which we see as emanation from this absolute lacks necessity.
There are all sorts of particulars. The absolute has an undetermined number of
attributes. Although Spinoza only names two, extension and thought, he does not
see that these are the only two and that they are related by the necessity of
being the two contradictory sides of the absolute, whose contradiction is the
source of movement. They are united, but without their opposition being seen,
hence they are immobile, and without necessary connection. Because Spinoza's
absolute is immobile in itself, we have to think of its modes as arising from its
contact with an understanding, which does not really have a place in the
system. Spinoza's is still a system where a pure inner is balanced by an outer.
But the distinction between inner and outer refers to an observer which is
still unintegrated in the system. It is relative to him that modes exist. In
contrast, Hegel's is a system in which the observer is integrated, and in which
ultimately, as we shall see, the duality between observer and reality is
overcome.
The defects of Spinoza's system are matched by defects of
his method, which proceeds more geometrico. For
this involves taking certain definitions as starting point; but as starting
point their inner necessity is not seen. The Hegelian system by contrast,
claims to be thoroughgoing, seamless necessity.
At the end of the Remark where he discusses Spinoza in WL, Hegel takes up Leibniz, who is guilty of an opposite
error. Leibniz has in the monad the notion of a subjectivity which is such that
it manifests itself in its properties. It issues necessarily in its properties
and is conscious of them. But this is compensated for by Leibniz' idea of a
multiplicity of such monads which see the world from different points of view.
This multiplicity is not derived, so that it cannot be seen as the manifestation
of necessity. Rather Leibniz has recourse weakly to God who is thought to have
made a system of pre-established harmony out of them. But they are not
harmonized out of themselves. It is not immanent in them that they are in
harmony. This harmony is something purely external, and hence is also something
internal, hidden in the designs of God.
Spinoza's notion of the absolute as without contradiction,
and hence movement, is what makes his absolute just substance and not subject.
For the subject is what moves itself, and what is conscious of itself, hence is
necessarily other than itself, in Hegel's view.
So much for Spinoza. Hegel thus rejects the notion of an
undetermined Absolute. But this of course was already rejected with the
distinction between outer and inner, for an undetermined absolute is a pure
inner. We come back thus to Reality as manifestation, and we take up the
dialectic of contingency and necessity. [pp. 280-282]
In deel V – Absolute geest
Spinoza
goes further. He takes off from Descartes, from the latter's opposition between
thought and extension, and tries to unite these. This is an altogether more
contentful and difficult enterprise than asserting the simple identity of
abstract thought and being. In extension we have a less abstract, more
developed determination of being and hence the problem of unity is greater and
the notion of unity much higher, more developed.
Spinoza is in fact an important philosopher; one of the
most important for Hegel's thought, along perhaps with Aristotle and Kant.
Spinoza attempts to see the whole as system with God as its ontological base, a
God who unites thought and being. Thus Hegel is always ready to rush to Spinoza’s
defense against the charge of atheism. Rather, as Hegel says, since God alone
is the substance into which all determinations sink, we might more justly
accuse Spinoza of the opposite fault, acosmism. And this, indeed, is the
burthen of Hegel's critique of Spinoza, who of course was a seminal philosopher
for Schelling and for the whole Romantic generation. 2 Spinoza is thus one of
Hegel's crucial landmarks, against which he defines his own position.
The trouble with Spinoza is that he has grasped the
absolute as a single substance, but not yet as subject. He sees all the
determinations of the world, including the ' attributes ' of thought and
extension as going back to a single substantial ground, to a basic unity. But
this God of Spinoza lacks the movement in the other direction: he does not
produce in turn all the articulation of the world by his own inner necessity,
as Hegel has shown to be the case of the Idea. The God of Spinoza is thus not
yet a living spirit, who must
generate his own embodiment and return to himself out of
it. In him, all determinations are cancelled, annulled, but they are not
generated by an inner necessity. In this sense, God lacks the crucial
characteristic of the Hegelian subject. God is just substance, indeed he is
merely an empty ' abyss ' (Abgrund) in which all differences disappear, rather
than the germinal centre from which they can all be seen to unfold by inner
necessity. The actual determinations of the world are thus still not derived by
necessity, but just ' come upon ' (vorgefunden) .
In this way, Spinoza, a Jew, remains with the Jewish
absolute which is unreconciled with the articulated empirical world, and with
finite subjectivity, who only exists still in the movement of negation of this
finitude, without returning to be reconciled to it. But Spinoza's is of course a highly
philosophically-transformed version of this vision. In this respect it can also
be compared
to the
to
on of the Eleatics, which also lacked
the principle of inner development.
Hegel makes central use of the famous Spinozist principle
: omnis
determinatio est negatio. This is another way of expressing
his debt to Spinoza. But here again we can see his basic critique. For Spinoza,
this means that all the determinate realities of the world are carved out, as
it were, from the whole. They are arrived at by selecting from the whole and
negating the rest. The fully positive is thus that which is quite free of
negation. But for Hegel the positive can only be
the negation of the negation. It
cannot exist without the negation of it which is its embodiment in the
particular, with all the alienation, loss of self, and hence negation of its
infinity which this entails. The positive, God, the infinite, the very basis of
things, only can be by returning to itself out of these negations. Thus if it
is true that determinate being is a negation of the absolute or infinite, it is
also true that this infinite must issue in this negation. It must negate
itself; and is only finally at one with itself by returning out of this negation.
We can also see the same difference from another angle in
looking at Spinoza's theory of attributes and modes. These distinctions in the
absolute substance are seen as introduced in it through subjective thought; the
absolute refracts in that way into finite thought. The differences are not seen
as integral to it.
This lack in the content of his philosophy is matched,
says Hegel, by a lack in its form. Spinoza proceeds more geometico.
We have already seen that for Hegel the
mathematical is the poorest mode of thought and the farthest removed from the
speculative. This naturally goes together with the failure to grasp the principle
of inner development of the Idea. Hence we proceed from definitions and
deductions from definition; we do not see how these notions so defined
themselves issue necessarily out of the Concept, e.g. , thought, extension, understanding,
will, etc. We are still operating with presuppositions. However, like
Aristotle, the results are often much higher than the theory. Some of Spinoza's
definitions are full of deep speculative content. Hegel mentions, e.g., the
notion of God as causa sui, Spinoza's notion of the true infinity of God who is
unbounded totality. The latter is close to the Hegelian. But the distinction
between thought and extension made by Descartes does not just disappear. The
fixity of the distinction is defended against the Spinozistic ' abyss '
(Abgrund) by another school, the empiricists. The modern world has as inner
principle the unity of thought and being, but this means also that it really
takes seriously external, empirical reality. These two concerns cannot be fully
effectively united until the synthesis in true speculative philosophy. Until
then they animate different philosophies with different priority weightings,
and these philosophies are thus opposed. Hence while Spinoza gives primacy to
the unity, Locke, and we shall see in a moment in another way Leibniz, give
priority to the real independence of the external, empirical reality. [pp. 522-
524]
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