Hegel and Spinoza
Expected: January 2026
[Amazon]
Events: Coming Soon
0 Hegel and Spinoza: From Shapeless Abyss to Self-Developing Thought
§0.1 Hegel and Spinoza: Initial Images to Introduce the Chapters Below
Hegel sees the best aspects of Spinoza’s metaphysics as containing something like an energy needed to get systematic philosophy going, to begin with a rough image. But this energy, once it does get going, is supposed to ultimately send philosophy away from Spinoza, and in an entirely new kind of direction—Hegel’s own. This is somehow supposed to be a kind of self-negation of Spinozism, on the way to a philosophy newly somehow centered on negation or self-negation. But making sense of this last idea is difficult, something to build towards; the way to approach it is to begin rather by asking: What is the Spinozist metaphysics that Hegel takes so seriously or thinks so important in this respect?
Spinoza argues that there is only one substance, infinite and eternal, and that is all that there is.
Some might rather hold that reality is only a great disjointed heap of multiplicity, without organization or intelligibility. Spinoza argues for a very different view.
Some might hold that there is a transcendent God, responsible for freely creating a world. That requires at least two substances. Spinoza argues that there is only one. Spinoza sometimes calls his one substance “Nature,” sometimes “God,” and sometimes uses terms like: “the eternal and infinite being, whom we call God, or Nature” (E4Pref).
There being only one substance, itself infinite, is supposed to be compatible with you and me and our family members existing, even though we are many and finite. To again give an image, which will need to be replaced with argument below, picture an ocean, with waves rolling across its surface. Multiplicity would come back to a one: many waves in one ocean. For the waves are not independently substantial. The waves just are the ocean—the ocean insofar as it sways or oscillates. So you and I would exist, but in a surprising and radically limited sense: merely like waves in an ocean. Spinoza’s “substance monism”—the view that all there is is one substance—retains you and me as mere finite “modes” in, or “affections” of, the one substance.
The core of Hegel’s “abyss critique” of Spinoza (as I will call it) is to argue that Spinoza’s own reasons, insofar as they could be reasons for the elimination of anything but one ocean—as it were—would also force elimination of all the waves, or currents, or any determinate features of that ocean. That is to say, insofar as Spinoza has reasons for the elimination of any substances other than one infinite substance, these reasons would force the elimination of anything finite, of anything “in” substance, and of all determinate features of it. Spinoza’s substance would be, Hegel says, “a shapeless abyss.”
I will argue that interpreters have not found and explained something essential by Hegel’s own lights: how the argument provides reason against Spinoza’s system without begging the question. They again and again read Hegel in ways that leave him (whether they note this or not) merely presupposing something Spinoza argues against, or would naturally take himself to have argued against. I think we must solve this problem of a more substantial reason against Spinoza if we are to hope to understand how Hegel uses Spinoza as a pivot toward a supposedly new form of philosophy.
Granted, some are already familiar with terminology expressing a sense of Hegel’s critique and his alternative. Some might begin with: Spinoza is a philosopher of the “affirmative”; Hegel takes this to be insufficient, revealing the need for a philosophy of “self-negation,” or “absolute negation.” But terminology like “absolute negation” is already familiar to interpreters, and yet they have again not (I argue) found the philosophical strength of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza. Indeed we will see that a natural reading of the italicized interpretation would leave Hegel merely assuming some kind of negation antithetical to Spinoza, and so begging the question (§0.2; §2.2.2). For now, then, I seek to rest no weight on such terminology at the start, saving room to rethink and find the strength of the argument, earning my way back to terms like “absolute negation,” or the contrast between our figures on this topic, providing in this sense more philosophical substance (§3.4).
Similarly, some might want me to begin by taking a side in debates about this topic, perhaps with something like: Hegel’s philosophy is a version of Spinoza’s substance monism. But many specialists would deny this, and some would even want to hear something more like: Hegel pursues a kind of philosophy that does not take philosophically seriously the metaphysics of Spinoza’s time, seeing it as outdated, naïve, extrinsic to the proper pursuit of philosophy. But these “sides” exist, and yet the philosophical strength of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza has not (I argue) been found. I try to avoid assuming either side-taking claim. I will argue that Hegel’s philosophical reasoning only works by taking the metaphysics he sees in Spinoza as seriously as it can be taken; but in the most philosophically perspicacious sense, this will make his philosophy something other than just a version of Spinoza’s substance monism.
I can now state the two large organizing aims of this book. The first is the defense of Hegel’s “abyss critique.” This organizes my first two chapters and requires a tight fit between them: §1 is on Spinoza’s reasons for his monism, and §2 draws in part on this to show that those very reasons turn against Spinozism—in this way solving the problem that interpreters have not found Hegel’s non-question-begging argument against Spinoza.
But there is another aim, which organizes all three chapters together. I argue that, insofar as interpreters have not found the philosophical strength of Hegel’s Spinoza critique, this suggests that there is still much to learn about the problem of how reasons get themselves going in his new kind of systematic philosophy, in his Science of Logic, the core of his mature system. The problem of reasons in the Logic is harder: it is here that we get more general reasons against the general kinds of metaphysics of which Hegel sees Spinoza as just one example. So I conclude by drawing on results from the defense of the critique of Spinoza, and the general approach that sees Hegel as taking Spinoza’s metaphysics seriously but critically, to propose an approach to that problem of how reasons get going in the Logic, in a supposedly new way. I call the approach to Hegel’s philosophy: taking metaphysics seriously to take it dialectically.
An old working draft of what was then called From Shapeless Abyss to Self-Developing Thought: Hegel and Spinoza
An old working draft…