Frederick Beiser over Hegels #Spinoza [9]

 

In dezelfde reeks, The Routledge Philosophers, waarin later het boek van Michael Della Rocca over Spinoza zou verschijnen, verscheen in 2005 van

● Frederick Beiser, Hegel. Routledge [The Routledge Philosophers], 2005 - 364 pagina's – books.google – PDF bij BookSC. De uitgever noemt het terecht “A masterpiece of clarity and scholarship.”

Beiser besteedt flink wat aandacht aan hoe Hegel met Spinoza bezig was. Ik citeer hier enge belangrijke passages [Ik vermeld wel de verwijsnummers naar de eindnoten, maar neem die niet mee]..

Uit hoofdstuk 3, Absolute Idealism

[59] According to Schelling, the absolute is ‘that which is in itself and through itself’, or ‘that whose existence is not determined through some other thing’.¹⁰ Hence Schelling sometimes calls the absolute ‘the in-itself’ (das An-sich). Schelling’s phrasing is reminiscent of Spinoza’s definition of substance in the Ethics: ‘That which is in itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception’ (Part I, def. 7). The affinity with Spinoza is no accident, since, during his Jena years, Schelling had become a virtual convert to Spinoza. The allusion to Spinoza’s definition of substance is all the more evident when Schelling calls his absolute ‘substance’ (die Substanz).¹¹

There can be little doubt that Hegel shared Schelling’s definition, and that he too saw the absolute in Spinozist terms. To be sure, Hegel sharply criticized Spinoza’s concept of the absolute (see pp. 91–5), and even in his Jena years these differences are already nascent. Still, Hegel saw Spinoza’s definition of substance as the basis or starting point for all philosophy. Hence, in the Differenzschrift he sometimes refers to the absolute as substance (II, 10, 49/80, 116), and in his History of Philosophy he said that one must first bathe in the aether of Spinoza’s substance before beginning to philosophize (XX 165; III, 257).

In making substance the fundamental object of metaphysics, Schelling and Hegel were, like Spinoza before them, going back to the Aristotelian tradition.¹² In his Metaphysics Aristotle had made substance the primary object of first philosophy. He defined his ‘science of first principles’ as the study of being as being, and more specifically as the study of those things that exist in a primary sense, those upon which all other things depend in order to be. Since substance alone is the basis of all other forms of being, first philosophy would have to be primarily a theory of substance.¹³

[…]

[64] True to Spinoza, their principle of subject–object identity essentially means that the subjective and the objective, the intellectual and the empirical, the ideal and the real – however one formulates the opposition – are not distinct substances but simply different aspects, properties or attributes of one and the same substance. The principle follows immediately from the Spinozist proposition that there is only one substance, of which everything else is either a mode or an attribute.¹⁹ If this is the case, then the subjective and objective cannot be two things but must be only modes or attributes of one and the same thing.

Though he never used the term, Spinoza himself had developed something like a principle of subject–object identity. In Part Two of the Ethics he argued that the mental and physical are simply different attributes of one and the same substance.²⁰ The order and connection of ideas is one and the same as the order and connection of things, Spinoza wrote, because both the mental and the physical are ultimately only different aspects of one and the same thing. That Hegel wanted to give his principle of subject–object identity this Spinozist meaning there cannot be any doubt. On two occasions in the Differenzschrift he refers approvingly to Spinoza’s propositions (II, 10, 106/80, 166).

But here again it seems that we are offering only an explanation obscurum per obscurius. For Spinoza’s doctrine is one of the most impenetrable in his philosophy. A large part of its difficulty comes from Spinoza’s notoriously equivocal definition of an attribute: ‘that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance’.²¹ The definition is a masterpiece of ambiguity. Are the attributes essentially subjective, simply different ways in which the intellect perceives, explains or understands substance? Or are they objective, different manifestations, appearances or forms of substance? Or are they somehow both?

[65] Fortunately, though, we need not dwell on the precise meaning of Spinoza’s doctrine. The only question for us now is how Hegel understood it or the meaning he gave to it. In his Differenzschrift Hegel explains the precise meaning he wants to give to Spinoza’s principle. He insists that the difference between the subjective and objective must be not only ideal but also real, i.e. it must be not only one in perspective but also one in the object itself. This means that the subjective and the objective are distinct appearances, embodiments or manifestations of the absolute. On several occasions he stresses that philosophy needs to explain the distinction between the subjective and the objective of ordinary experience. That the subject is distinct from the object – that the object is given and produces representations independent of our will and imagination – is a fact of ordinary experience. Philosophy should not dismiss this appearance as an illusion, Hegel insists, but it should explain it and show its necessity.²²

[…]

[67] Following Aristotle’s critique of Plato, Hegel thinks that universals do not exist as such but only en re, in particular things.²⁴ As forms inherent in things, as concrete universals, universals are, in Aristotle’s language, the formal–final causes of things. The formal cause consists in the essence or nature of a thing, what makes it the thing that it is; and the final cause is the purpose the object attempts to realize, the goal of its development. The two senses of causality are joined in Hegel, as in Aristotle, because the purpose of a thing is to realize its essence or to develop its inherent form. Like Kant, Hegel calls the formal-final cause the ‘concept’ (Begriff) of a thing.²⁵

If we keep in mind Hegel’s Aristotelian concept of the idea, then his idealism has a fundamentally teleological meaning. To state that everything is an appearance of the idea now means that it strives to realize the absolute idea, or that everything acts for an end, which is the absolute idea. Such was Hegel’s Aristotelian transformation of Spinoza’s monism: the single universal substance now becomes the single absolute idea, the formal–final cause of all things. Since he despised teleology, Spinoza would have turned over in his grave.

This teleological dimension of Hegel’s absolute idealism appears very explicitly in the introduction to his lectures on world history. Here Hegel states that the fundamental thesis of philosophy is that reason governs the world, a thesis he identifies with the old teaching of Anaxagoras that the world is ruled by ‘nous’ (VG 28/27). To say that the world is governed by reason, he then explains, means that it has an ultimate purpose (VG 50/44). This means that whatever happens does so of necessity, but not merely in the sense that there are prior causes acting upon it in time but also in the sense that they must realize some end. What this end is we will determine later (pp. 266–7).

[…]

Uit hoofdstuk 4, The Organic Worldview

[90]

THE SPINOZA LEGACY

Hegel’s search for a rational foundation for his organic vision of the world took place in several domains: metaphysics, epistemology, and the natural sciences. In the realm of metaphysics he saw his organic vision as the only means of explaining the fundamental conundrum of monism: the relation between the one and many. In the field of epistemology he held that it is the only means to solve the outstanding dualisms of Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism. And in the field of natural sciences he saw it as the only means of overcoming the persistent problems of mechanism. We should now consider Hegel’s metaphysical arguments for organicism; in later sections we will examine his epistemological arguments (pp. 100–7).

In the realm of metaphysics Hegel’s search for a rational foundation for his organic vision finally forced him to come to terms with Spinozism. Hegel’s acquaintance with Spinoza goes back to his earliest years in the Tübinger Stift. It was probably then that he read Jacobi’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza.12 But it is striking how much Hegel seemed to have forgotten Spinoza during his Berne and Frankfurt years. He then saw Kant’s doctrine of practical faith as the proper form of a rational religion.¹³ Only in his Frankfurt years did he abandon this dour and rickety Kantian doctrine for the mystical pantheism of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. But even in this work  there is little trace of Spinozism. Hegel turned fully to Spinoza only in his early Jena years during his collaboration with Schelling, who had been especially inspired by Spinoza, and who, even during his Fichtean phase, declared himself to be a Spinozist. But Hegel’s turning toward Spinozism was not simply the result of Schelling’s influence. It fitted hand-in-glove with his own intention to find some rational foundation for his organic vision. After all, there were some deep affinities between Spinoza’s doctrines and Hegel’s [91] mystical pantheism; Hegel could only have admired Spinoza’s monism, his immanent religion, and his intellectual love of God. It was indeed Spinoza who had first attempted to find a rational foundation and technical vocabulary for such doctrines. It is no accident, then, that we find Hegel’s first metaphysical writings in the Jena years replete with Spinozist vocabulary and full of sympathetic references to Spinoza.

Yet, for all his sympathy and affinity with Spinoza, there were other respects in which Hegel was deeply at odds with him and had to settle scores with him. Hegel could never proclaim, as Schelling once did, ‘I have become a Spinozist!’ (Ich bin Spinozist geworden!). If Spinoza’s single universal substance was the starting point of philosophy, it could never be its goal or conclusion. For Hegel, there were profound problems with Spinozism. For one thing, there was its geometric method, its method of beginning with axioms and definitions and then rigorously reasoning from them. As a student of Kant’s Critique, Hegel saw the geometric method as a defunct remnant of the older rationalism, whose fallacies had been so ruthlessly exposed in the Transcendental Dialectic. ‘No philosophical beginning could look worse than to begin with a definition, as Spinoza does’, Hegel wrote in his Differenzschrift (II 37/105). This was already an implicit warning to Schelling, whose Presentation of My System had taken Spinoza’s geometric method as its model. For another thing, Spinoza was an arch-mechanist; his model of explanation, and his concept of matter, were taken directly from Descartes. Like Descartes, Spinoza held that the essence of matter is extension; and he saw the model of explanation as efficient causality, where the cause of an event is a prior event. In the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics Spinoza had explicitly rejected the older teleological model of explanation as anthropocentric. In the end, then, Spinoza’s single universal substance was in fact nothing more than a giant machine. Nothing could be further removed, then, from Hegel’s organic vision of the world.

Hence Spinoza’s philosophy was as much a challenge as it was a[92] support for Hegel’s organic metaphysics. The failure of Spinoza’s method, and his radical mechanism, made it necessary for Hegel to develop a new foundation for his organic vision. But Spinoza’s system presented not only a challenge but also an opportunity. For there was a fundamental weakness to Spinoza’s philosophy, a serious deficiency that Hegel exploited to the advantage of his own organic worldview. This was the ancient conundrum of the one and the many, or how the world of difference and multiplicity ever originates from primal unity. Spinoza did not solve this ancient problem but only reinstated it, making its solution all the more imperative. This becomes clear from a brief look at Spinoza’s Ethics.

According to Spinoza, all individual things exist in God (Ethica, Pt I, Prop. 15), and are only modifications of his attributes (Pt I, Prop. 25). But everything that follows from some attribute of God must be infinite and eternal (Pt I, Prop. 21). This raises the question: how is there anything finite and in time? This problem becomes all the more apparent when Spinoza attempts to explain the actions of finite things. He maintains that their cause is an attribute not of God but of some other finite things in so far as they are a modification of some attribute. If the cause were the attribute itself, which is eternal and infinite, then the effect would be eternal and infinite too. Hence the cause cannot be the attribute itself but only some other finite thing that is a modification of the attribute (Pt I, Prop. 28). But this still leaves the question: How do these modifications of attributes arise? If everything exists in God, and if God is infinite and eternal, then everything should be infinite and eternal. But then why does the finite world exist? In the end Spinoza could do nothing more than relegate the whole temporal world to the realm of the imagination.¹⁴

The problem of the relationship between the infinite and the finite in Spinoza can be put more neatly and simply in the form of a dilemma: the infinite and finite must be, and yet cannot be, united. On the one hand, the infinite and finite cannot be united because they have opposing characteristics. The infinite is eternal, indivisible and [93] unlimited; the finite is temporal, divisible and limited. Hence if we were to join them in a single substance, that substance would be self-contradictory; it would be per impossibile both eternal and temporal, indivisible and divisible, unlimited and limited. On the other hand, however, the infinite and finite must be united because if the infinite excludes the finite, it cannot be all reality; it loses its infinite status because it becomes limited by something outside itself, namely the finite. It is the very nature of the infinite to be that of which nothing greater can be conceived; but this means that the infinite must somehow include the finite within itself, because if it is left outside itself it becomes limited by it or conceivable only in contrast against it.

This dilemma was one of the fundamental problems faced by Schelling during his Jena years, the years of his collaboration with Hegel. It is clear that his own reflections on this problem were greatly encouraged by Hegel,¹⁵ though there was never any final agreement between them. It was indeed Schelling’s failure to solve this problem that eventually led to Hegel’s break with Schelling after his departure from Jena. At first, in his 1801 Presentation of My System Schelling argued that the absolute is pure identity, complete undifferentiated unity, and that it excludes any difference or opposition within itself or between things (§§16, 23). He insisted that it was fallacy to assume that the absolute ‘goes outside itself’, as if it could somehow posit the finite and temporal world opposed to its infinite and eternal nature (§§14, 30). Partly due to Hegel’s prodding, however, Schelling soon flinched from such an uncompromising position, and reformulated his views in his 1802 Further Presentation and Bruno. Here he argued that the absolute should include finite things within itself; yet this modification of his position was more nominal than real since he insisted that finite things could be within the absolute only in so far as they are identical with one another, or only in so far as they are stripped of their distinguishing properties (Sämtliche Werke IV, 393, 408). In his 1804 Philosophie und Religion Schelling virtually abandoned the attempt to [94] explain the origin of finitude (Sämtliche Werke IV, 42). The infinite contains only the possibility of the finite; and the reality of the finite comes only from a fall or leap from the infinite. The absolute is not the ground of this fall, which lies in original sin and therefore in the arbitrary action of the finite itself. The fall cannot be explained; it is just an arbitrary and spontaneous action that defies all conceptual reconstruction.

For Hegel, Schelling’s theory of the fall was simply an admission of failure, a recognition of the breakdown of the philosophy of identity.¹⁶ Hegel’s solution to this dilemma was nothing less than his organic vision of the world. If the absolute were to be conceived as life, then it must include finitude and difference within itself for the simple reason that organic development consists in selfdifferentiation. Life is a process by which an inchoate unity becomes more determinate, complex and organized; it is the movement from unity to difference, and from difference to unity within difference. As Hegel puts the point in his Differenzschrift:

To cancel established oppositions is the sole interest of reason. But this interest does not mean that it is opposed to opposition and limitation in general; for necessary opposition is one factor of life, which forms itself by eternally opposing itself, and in the highest liveliness totality is possible only through restoration from the deepest fission. (II 21–2/91)

If Spinoza’s single universal substance were now conceived as an organism, it would have to be understood not as something eternally static but as something eternally moving and in development. Spinoza’s substance could still be retained as one moment of the truth, yet only as one moment. It would be the single universal organism in so far as it is something inchoate, formless and undeveloped. Of course, Spinoza would only have dismissed such a suggestion, for this transformation of his single substance meant nothing less than returning to the standpoint of teleology, against [95] which he had fought with such passion and energy. Yet, for Hegel, there was no choice but to transform Spinoza’s substance into a living organism, since by this means alone is it possible to escape the snares of the ancient problem of the origin of finitude.