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

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 present 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 fo...

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