Hegel's Anti-Spinozism: The Transition to Subjective Logic and the End of Classical Metaphysics

• Author: George di Giovanni
• Position: Professor of Philosophy, McGill University
• Pages: 45-60

Page 45

The title of this paper is deliberately but also dangerously provocative.¹ Hegel is famously the philosopher who negates only for the sake of reaffirming at a more elevated level of comprehension whatever is being negated. Anyone who announces the anti-Spinozism of Hegel or, with reference to him, speaks of the end of classical metaphysics, must do so, therefore, at his own risk. This warning applies with special force when, as in the present paper, the transition from Objective to Subjective Logic is the issue. In the Introduction to Book III of the Greater Logic, Hegel goes out of his way to point out that, although he has called attention at the conclusion of Book II to some imperfections of Spinoza's system, the recognition of such imperfections is not the same as refuting the system itself. An effective refutation requires that the internal logic of the system and its necessity to the development of Spirit should first be recognized. The need to transcend it should then be demonstrated on the strength of precisely that internal logic. Spinoza's system is false only because it pretends to be the final system. To refute it only means, really, to transcend it.²

It might, therefore, be just as legitimate and instructive to say that, contrary to what the title of this paper announces, Hegel is in some sense both a Spinozist and a consummate classical metaphysician. Perhaps. (Incidentally, I mention Spinoza and classical metaphysics in one breath because, since Jacobi, everybody at the time assumed, Hegel included, that Spinozism had brought metaphysics to its logical conclusion. To speak of the one was to speak of the other.) In the presentPage 46 paper, however, I stand by my negative claims-for two reasons that are doxographical, as well as conceptual. The first is that Hegel does not say that Spinozism cannot be refuted. He says that it can be refuted only by being transcended internally.³ This transcendence, inasmuch as it constitutes a refutation, must entail a moment of negation. And we all know that for Hegel negation must be serious if the dialectic is to move at all. In what follows, I wish to document precisely the death of Spinozism, and of classical metaphysics, at the hand of Hegel. I shall sound a positive note only at the end, and even then it will be just a note.

The second reason is that when, in the 1816 Introduction to Book III of the Logic, Hegel complained about those who had argued that Spinozism cannot be refuted except by first assuming "as an established fact [which Spinoza himself denied] the freedom and the self-subsistence of the self-conscious subject,"⁴ Hegel was tacitly referring to Fichte. That was indeed how Fichte had made his stand against the naturalism of Spinoza in 1797, when he was still professing at Jena.⁵ However, starting just before 1810 and until his premature death in 1814, Fichte had again been lecturing on his Wissenschafstlehre in Berlin.⁶ And in his lectures, though by no means repudiating the standpoint that had governed his Science from the beginning, he now presented this Science as a revised form of Spinoza's system. Schelling was Fichte's intended target of criticism. Fichte's main objection against him was precisely that, though a self-professed Spinozist, Schelling misunderstood his mentor.⁷ In other words, around 1810 Fichte was trying to revise Spinoza's system from within, by transcending it according to its internal logic- exactly how Hegel says it should be done-in order to refute it. Now, it is very unlikely that Hegel knew of Fichte's lectures while he was working on his three Books of the Logic in Nurnberg, or Fichte of Hegel'sPage 47 logical efforts. To be sure, although only recently recovered and made available to us, notes of Fichte's lectures were widely circulated in Berlin, and Hegel must certainly have become acquainted with them when he moved there four years after Fichte's death. By that time, however, the last Book of his Logic had already been published. Be that as it may, quite apart from any question of who knew of whom and of what, it is remarkable that, as Riidiger Bubner has recently pointed out, Hegel's Logic of Essence was in fact a very subtle and sustained argument against Fichte's Wissenschafstlehre⁸ Moreover, in his treatment of the modal categories in the transition from Objective to Subjective Logic, Hegel was defining his position in relation to Spinoza in Niirnberg just as, at the same time, Fichte was doing it in Berlin. And, in thus defining his position, Hegel seemed to be deliberately countering Fichte's position. Hegel, not Fichte, is my topic here. But, in what follows, I shall also bring Fichte into the picture. He will be my foil for highlighting just how, in Niirnberg, Hegel finally transcended Spinoza and put an end to classical metaphysics. At the same time in Berlin-I shall want to say-Fichte was to fail in this same effort.

I Fichte and Hegel as Post-Kantians

First, let me be clear in what sense Fichte and Hegel were both post-Kantians and were both promoting the programme of Idealism. Spinoza will soon come on the scene to set them apart. The main point is that for both, thought is a priori. This means, in effect, that the universe of meaning is conceptually constituted and that, as so constituted, it stands on its own as a self-contained, intentional organism, independent of any antecedent it might have had in natural existence. It is as if a leap had occurred creating an irreducible hiatus between this universe of meaning and its antecedent. Phenomena refer, first and foremost, only to themselves. This does not mean that the supposed antecedent is not in some sense real, or that the relation that intentional phenomena still bear to it is not problematic. The point is rather that, whatever this reality might be in itself-assuming that it has an "in itself-it has standing within the universe of meaning only to the extent that it has already been informed as an element internal to the structure of the latter. Its relation to it has become itself a problem internal to it. The main tenet of Idealism is that the relating of phe-Page 48nomenal world and external being has to be done phenomenally from within the context of meaningful intentions. It is the task, precisely, of both the Wissenschafstlehre and Hegel's Logic.⁹

The problem that the task poses is also the same in both. We can see it already clearly delineated in principle in both Fichte's and Hegel's analysis of the concept of appearance, and then explicitly stated in their subsequent treatment of the modal categories. Appearance has being only inasmuch as appearance internally refers to being as lying outside whichever determination appearance might exhibit at the moment, with the result that any such determination assumes the character of a mere seeming of being. And this "pointing to being beyond itself," and the consequent dissolution of appearance into mere seeming, is an event that repeats itself indefinitely.¹⁰ I should note that I am using appearance in the present context in a very broad sense, as a common point of reference for both Fichte and Hegel, and eventually for Spinoza as well. So far as Hegel himself is concerned, to be exact, one must say that seeming (Schein) is the starting point of Hegel's logic of reflection;¹¹ appearance, in Hegel's specific sense of the term, is on the contrary already a much more developed objective configuration. If I am allowed a certain latitude of expression, the point now is that appearance-thus broadly understood-is for both Fichte and Hegel a totally unstable objective configuration that, taken by itself, preempts the constitution of stablePage 49 objects. To bring firm limits to it, and thereby to allow for the constitution of a well-articulated universe of meaning, is precisely the problem that must be resolved by both Fichte's Wissenschafstlehre and Hegel's Logic.

The strategy that Fichte and Hegel adopt in meeting this challenge differs, not just in details (a circumstance that we shall have to ignore in the present context), but, as we shall see in a moment, also in fundamental assumptions. Right now, however, I am concentrating on what makes these two post-Kantian Idealists. If appearance were the only objective configuration of being, it would be impossible to draw meaningful distinctions between what is, and what is not, the case. That is, meaningful discourse would not be possible. But there is such a discourse. The move that both Fichte and Hegel therefore repeatedly make, starting from appearance, is to introduce a priori, by way of reflection, objective configurations that reflectively contain within themselves the distinction between being and its appearance-the same distinction which, if not thus reflectively contained, would dissolve the presence of being in appearance into an illusionary presence (i.e., ein Schein). Such more complex configurations provide new contexts for this otherwise evanescent appearance of being that bring limits to it, and therefore allow determinate discourse about it. Contrasted with these contexts, which are assumed in each case as presupposed, the original appearance of being is revealed for what it is-namely, a product of mere abstraction.

Hegel proceeds in the Logic to introduce these ever more complex and new objective configurations with meticulous precision; in each case assuming as presupposed just enough of a new conceptual complexity to resolve whichever problem (i.e. whichever renewed threat of a slide into mere seeming) a given configuration presents at the moment. From the first configuration as defined by the distinction between the essential and the non-essential, Hegel proceeds (passim) to the distinction of ground and grounded, of thing and its appearance, of substance and...