The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (44 page)

6. Shades of Spinoza in Hegel?

It is hard not to be struck by deep affinities between Hegel and Spinoza, especially by their shared vision of reality as a single infinite substance of which we and all the episodes that constitute our lives are but an aspect. Hegel himself comments:

When one begins to philosophize one must be first a Spinozist. The soul must bathe itself in the aether of this single substance, in which everything one has held for true is submerged. (
Medieval and Modern Philosophy
, p. 165, translation adapted in Beiser (
1993
), p. 5)

Moreover, for both Spinoza and Hegel, our own involvement in the life of substance, including our making sense of substance, is a matter of our participating in its own sense-making. To revert to an analogy that I used in
Chapter 1
, §6: the relation between us and substance, as we come to make sense of it, is akin to the relation between a member of a linguistic community and the community as a whole. This in turn connects with something else that the two thinkers crucially share: a repudiation of morality in favour of ethics, or at any rate, in Hegel’s case, a commitment to the
Aufhebung
of the moral life by the ethical life (
Philosophy of Right
, §141). One Hegelian way of drawing the contrast between these would be to say that morality, grounded as it is in the fact that we are free individuals, is concerned with which unrealized possibilities we ought to realize, whereas ethics, grounded as it is in the fact that we together constitute a community, is more concerned with how we are to develop something that is already real.
⁵⁰

All of this is indeed striking. But there are differences between Spinoza and Hegel that are just as striking, and in my view deeper. We can broach these differences by reflecting on the theological dimension of the two systems.

Spinoza named his substance ‘God’. But then he treated of it in such a way as to make it far from clear that his position really merited the title of theism. In particular, his substance differed from the traditional Judæo-Christian God in two fundamental respects. It was not transcendent, and it was not personal. In
Chapter 2
, §2, I concluded that it is altogether less misleading to call Spinoza an atheist than to call him a theist.

Hegel too names his substance ‘God’ (
The Consummate Religion
, pp. 368–369; cf.
Encyclopedia
I, §1). He too treats of what he names ‘God’ in such a way as to resist straightforward classification as a theist. Indeed, my inclination is to draw much the same conclusion as I drew in the case of Spinoza, that it is on the whole less misleading to call him an atheist than to call him a theist (though we are of course under no compulsion to call him either, certainly not without the myriad qualifications that would be required in each case). Nevertheless, Hegel is closer to traditional Judæo-Christian theism than Spinoza is. For Hegel’s substance differs from the traditional Judæo-Christian God only in the first of the two specified respects: it is not transcendent. It is, however – unlike Spinoza’s substance – personal.
⁵¹
And this indeed marks the principal difference between the two thinkers – as
Hegel well knows, for it also marks the principal reproach that he levels against Spinoza. He says:

It is true that God … is the absolute thing: he is however no less the absolute person. That he is the absolute person however is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached: and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of religious consciousness in Christianity. (
Encyclopedia
I, §151
Z
, p. 214)
⁵²

The personhood of substance, for Hegel, is of a piece with the subjecthood of substance, whose importance I emphasized in §3. Hegel’s substance has a meaningful biography; it has purposes; it acts out its life in accord with concepts. None of this is true of Spinoza’s substance. Moreover, the way in which the life of substance is played out, namely through processes of negation whereby finite elements of that life are
aufgehoben
, is radically non-Spinozist. In ¶19 of the Preface to his
Phenomenology
, Hegel refers to ‘the labour of the negative’. He means by this these very processes, the processes that bring substance to ‘what it truly is’ (ibid., ¶20), in other words the processes through which substance exists for itself. Substance’s ‘power to move,’ Hegel writes, ‘… is being-for-self or pure negativity’ (ibid., ¶22, emphasis removed). This stands in stark contrast to what we find in Spinoza.
⁵³
Spinoza takes his substance to be ‘an absolutely infinite being’ and glosses this by saying, ‘If a thing is absolutely infinite, there belongs to its essence whatever expresses essence and does not involve negation’ (Spinoza (
2002c
), Pt I, Def. 6 and Expl., translation slightly adapted, emphasis added).

It is true that, for Hegel too, substance is absolutely infinite. Indeed, as we have seen, he actually calls it the infinite – just as he variously calls it the absolute, the true, or God.
⁵⁴
These are all, for Hegel, characterizations of the same ultimate reality. And to be sure, every one of them, as ordinarily construed, might be thought to exclude negation. But Hegel has his own distinctive way of construing them. Thus consider the characterization
of substance as the true. By ‘truth’ Hegel means truth of a philosophical sort: that which ultimately makes sense.
⁵⁵
And, in accord with this, he not only identifies substance with the true, or with truth; he also holds that there is no truth that does not exhaust it. That is, there is no truth – genuine, unadulterated truth – that falls short of the whole truth.
⁵⁶
(So truth is not like gold, say. There is certainly gold that does not exhaust all the gold there is – the gold in the crown jewels, for example.) This is because nothing less than the unified whole ultimately makes sense. What then of the false? Well, the false plays the finite to the true’s infinite. Recall that, for Hegel, the infinite is not opposed to the finite; it embraces it. (See §2.) So too the true is not opposed to the false; it embraces it. The false is a precondition of the true. This is not to say that the false is
part
of the true in the way in which hydrogen is part of water, nor that particular instances of the false are part of the true in the way in which individual bricks are part of Paddington Station. The point is rather this. The true ‘is not a minted coin that can be pocketed ready made’ (
Phenomenology
, Preface, ¶39). It must be
arrived at
through the very processes of
Aufhebung
referred to in the previous paragraph. These processes involve moments of falsehood and finitude, which are annulled and preserved in further moments of falsehood and finitude, and so on, until everything eventually makes indissoluble sense.
⁵⁷
And
that
is the labour of the negative. So although Hegel’s various characterizations of substance might appear to bespeak pure Spinozist positivity, his understanding of those characterizations in fact involves something very different.
⁵⁸

This is why Hegel is moved to proclaim, in opposition to ‘rational theology’ – by which he means the attempt to make sense of God using the resources of ordinary human understanding
⁵⁹
– that

it resulted in a notion of God which was what we may call the abstract of positivity or reality, to the exclusion of all negation. God was accordingly defined to be the most real of all beings. Anyone can see however that this most real of all beings, in which negation forms no part, is the very opposite of what it ought to be and of what understanding supposes it to be. Instead of being rich and full above all measure, it is so narrowly conceived that it is, on the contrary, extremely poor and altogether empty…. Without definite feature, that is, without negation, contained in the notion, there can only be an abstraction. (
Encyclopedia
I, §36
Z
, pp. 57–58)

It is also why he is moved to proclaim, in opposition to Spinoza:

As intuitively accepted by Spinoza without a previous mediation by dialectic, substance … is as it were a dark shapeless abyss which engulfs all definite content as radically null, and produces from itself nothing that has a positive substance of its own. (
Encyclopedia
I, §151
Z
, p. 215)
⁶⁰

There is a profound difference, then, between Spinoza’s conception of substance, as that self-subsistent whole in which all particulars are bound together, and Hegel’s conception of substance, as an organic unity of opposed elements of finitude, whose oppositions are resolved in processes of
Aufhebung
.
⁶¹
This difference in turn occasions many others. Where Spinoza believed that each part of nature positively expresses the essence of substance, Hegel believes that nature is substance’s ‘other’, the forum in which these processes of
Aufhebung
are played out so that substance can exist for itself, a forum which, in this very otherness, must itself be
aufgehoben
so that substance can exist in and for itself.
⁶²
(In one remarkable passage in
Encyclopedia
I Hegel says, ‘God, who is the truth, is known by us in His truth, that is, as absolute spirit, only in so far as we at the same time recognize that the world which He created, nature and the finite spirit, are, in their difference from God, untrue’ (§83Z).) Again, where Spinoza found a paradigm of sense-making in the adequate knowledge of particular essences, Hegel holds that there is no sense ultimately to be made save in the integrated whole. Or, to put it another way, where Spinoza found a paradigm of sense-making in our ideas of what particular things can do, ideas that positively express their own reasons for being true, Hegel finds only moments of falsehood that need to be
aufgehoben
in order for the truth to be fully and properly realized. Or, to put it yet a third way, where Spinoza found, in the various differences and oppositions that we confront, an invitation to extend our knowledge by making sense of them, Hegel holds that the various differences and oppositions that we confront need to be overcome for true knowledge, that is substance’s knowledge of itself, to be possible at all. Where Spinoza had no truck with the negative, Hegel talks of our ‘looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it … [and converting] it into being’ (
Phenomenology
, Preface, ¶32). These two thinkers, in countless ways, are
worlds apart.
⁶³

7. Contradiction, Reason, and Understanding

I remarked in §1 on the liberties that Hegel takes with language. We have since seen some of his terms of art. ‘Absolute idea’ is one. Consider also the triad ‘in itself’, ‘for itself’, and ‘in and for itself’. Not that there is anything especially remarkable about a philosopher’s devising new words or phrases to meet particular needs that he or she has. New ideas can obviously require the exercise of new concepts, which can in turn require the use of new terms to express them.

Altogether more striking, if not altogether more shocking, is Hegel’s apparent violation of certain basic linguistic rules, both syntactic and semantic. In his argument that the concept of nothing passes over into the concept of being, for instance, he all but insists that if there is nothing, then there is something, namely nothing. This seems to be almost Carrollesque in its combination of solecism and logical punning.
⁶⁴
Worse, he proceeds to tell us, first, that ‘pure being and pure nothing are … the same,’ and then that, ‘on the contrary, they are not the same, … they are absolutely distinct’ (
Science of Logic
, I.i.i.1C, pp. 82–83), a contradiction that is scarcely made any the more palatable when glossed as ‘the identity of identity and non-identity’ (ibid., I.i, ‘With What Must the Science Begin?’, p. 74).

Nor is his toleration of contradiction confined to these abstract concepts. We saw in
Chapter 5
, §6, how Kant, confronted with arguments for the finitude of the physical universe and arguments for its infinitude, reacted by denying that there is any such thing – any such unconditioned whole – as the physical universe. This enabled him to attribute the apparent contradiction to a natural mistake of (human) reason, namely the mistake of assuming that there
must
be such a thing. Hegel, despite being less impressed than Kant by these arguments, likewise acknowledges that there are grounds both for regarding the physical universe as finite and for regarding it as infinite (i.e. spuriously infinite). But he cannot avail himself of the same solution. This is for two reasons. First, the Kantian solution requires a Kantian distinction, of the very sort that Hegel repudiates, between appearance and reality. Second, since Hegel takes the operations of reason to be the operations of reality itself, whatever problem there is with the physical universe’s being both finite and infinite must on his view be no less a problem with our being
led to believe, by operations of reason, both that it is finite and that it is infinite. Hegel’s own solution is to deny that there is a problem with
either
of these.
He accepts the contradiction
. The truly infinite, for Hegel, embraces a co-existence of opposed aspects, and the relevant arguments concerning the extent of the physical universe simply highlight some of these. Like all such opposed aspects, they are to be
aufgehoben
in the infinite’s progress towards self-knowledge. (See
Science of Logic
, I.i.ii.2C(
b
), Remark 2, pp. 234–238, and
Encyclopedia
I, §§28 and 48.)