hegel or spinoza

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Preface to the Second Edition

to devote a study to the relationship of two major and historic philosophers such as Spinoza and Hegel is to be confronted indisputably, beyond the limits of a formal comparison (which is both academic in its undertaking and indifferent to its content), with certain stakes that are fundamental to the approach [demarche] to philosophy in general.

Spinoza and Hegel: these expressions indicate for us, first of all, two systems of thought that have value in and of themselves and are connected to the personal existence of their authors, which immediately name them, that is, at the same time designate them and sign them. Moreover, if you take the enterprise of philosophical thought seriously at all, you must grant it a relative autonomy with respect to such procedures of identification, which under the pretext of singularizing them actually disperses them, and tendentially make them disappear in an indistinct plurality of doctrines by privileging certain speculative “points,” which constitute concrete positions, incarnated in the empirical reality of systems of authors. But to strip them of the link of speculative engagement [ jeu] between individual discourses that traverse them is, at the same time, to risk deadening the enterprise of thought and submitting it to an abstract and atemporal evaluation, whose universality in the end risks an existence without content. This is why it is not possible to extract this enterprise entirely from its doctrinal origins; the work of philosophical reflection would then be transformed into a “putting in perspective,” which would assign the position of philosophers, to the extent that these create the conditions of their elaboration, their expression, and even their interpretation. The truth of philosophy is as much in Spinoza as it must also be in Hegel; that is, it is not entirely in one or the other but somewhere between the two, in the passage that is effected between one and the other. To say this somewhat differently, philosophy is something that moves, that passes, and that takes place [qui passe, et qui se passe], in a place where the connection between thoughts gestates, which, in the

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works themselves, escapes the specific historical conditions of their authors’ undertakings, and the understanding of this process diminishes the interest we might extend to their systematic intentions, because this process grasps them dynamically in the anonymous movement of a sort of collective project, appropriating a given philosophy to the ensemble of philosophy and not only to one or another among them.

When two systems of thought as well described as those of Spinoza and Hegel react to one another, that is, at the same time one against the other and one with the other, something must emerge, which coming from both belongs properly to neither but rather to the interval that separates them, constituted as their common truth.

And yet, in the exact case of these two philosophies, if their confrontation seems particularly fertile, it is because it is not an intellectually neutral encounter between two philosophies that confront each other while remaining external to one another; it is rather a reciprocal and ultimate test, which while it causes them to speak to each other opens up each system within itself and exposes each to an internal challenge, which gives rise to the recognition of its limits. Thus we cannot escape this double existence: to read Spinoza in Hegel and to read Hegel in Spinoza, in the manner of two mirrors that reflect, respectively, their images.

The expression “Hegel or Spinoza”—used here to express this confrontation—carries a semantic ambiguity that suits it, if not to explicate [lever] this ambiguity, at least to emphasize it, the better to characterize it. In the French language the use of the conjunction or merges two forms of evaluation that other languages distinguish from each other; it is thus that this or of the French offers an indistinct translation of vel and aut of Latin, which expresses things that are apparently contrary to one another. “Aut . . . aut” is the expression of opposition and exclusion: it is (either) one or the other but not the two at the same time. If “Hegel or Spinoza” were expressed in this way, “aut Hegel aut Spinoza,” that is, either Hegel on one hand or Spinoza on the other, this would lead us to present them as two irreducible forms of thought, constituting the terms of a choice that it would not be possible to leave suspended indefinitely. And yet, in privileging an order of names that reverses the chronological succession, in order to signal the incontrovertible character of an alternative, in making

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Spinoza come after Hegel and not before him, we seem to be engaged immediately in such a choice, because we have by this fact implicitly rejected the evolutionary logic that constitutes the heart of the Hegelian system, according to which that which comes after necessarily engulfs and includes that which, in coming before it, can only act in anticipation or as a preparation. Thus we have inverted the perspective that demands the Hegelian reading of Spinoza by subordinating it to that of a (necessarily hypothetical) Spinozist reading of Hegel, whose speculative power from that moment appears to transport it. Beyond a reciprocal consideration of systems, which makes them depend on this relationship, this game of “either–or” appears thus to lead, more or less dogmatically, to a resolution of the crisis initiated by their confrontation, and by choosing to place Spinoza as an alternative to Hegel, and not the inverse, it seems that we must look on the side of the former for the conditions of this resolution, through a decision whose necessity remains thus to be established and justified.

But we must not forget that “Hegel or Spinoza” can also be translated as “Hegel vel (sive) Spinoza,” which apparently signifies the opposite. The or here is an expression of identity and equivalence. It is the one we find in the well-known expression so often attributed to Spinoza, although he never wrote it in exactly this form, Deus sive natura, in which “God” and “nature” are presented as two different forms but also indifferent, for one and the same thing. Are not Hegel and Spinoza also equally two names for the same thing, which would be this thing they designate indistinctly? For this question, we would do well to conserve the interrogative character for as long as possible, without pretense that we might resolve it definitively. It is this question, from start to finish, that sustains the work we will read. Following the spirit of this interrogation, it is evident that if it is unavoidable to read Spinoza and Hegel in opposition to one another—this is the “aut . . . aut” side of the or—it is also no less necessary to think about them, one with the other, as if they would lend their elements or parts to a single unique discourse, in the interior of which their respective positions would be indistinguishable, because their meaning could be explained only in their interaction, and here it is the sive side of the or that we would bring to light.

The debate that arises between these two forms of thought has no

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necessity and is of no significance if these two forms do not partake of a single truth, whose process belongs neither to one nor to the other, because it is produced at the intersection of their respective journeys. This suspended truth, emerging from contestation and conflict, by this act no longer has the value of an arrested thought; it is rather that of a critique and a proof whose object is philosophy itself, as it expands across the ensemble of its own history, in the problematic element of difference and debate.

—Pierre Macherey

  June 1990