Charles Taylor over Hegels #Spinoza [8]

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]