The Alternative

On July 30, 1816, the Pro-rector of the University of Heidelberg wrote to Hegel, then principal of the Gymnasium of Nuremberg, to offer him a chair as tenured professor. He explained his offer in the following manner: “Heidelberg, for the first time since the founding of the university, will have a philosopher—Spinoza received a call from Heidelberg, but in vain as you undoubtedly know.” Actually, we are familiar with the letter of March 30, 1673, “to the very illustrious and very distinguished Dr. Louis Fabritius, professor of the Academy of Heidelberg and advisor of the Elector Palatine” in which Spinoza declined the invitation that would have enabled him to occupy the professorial chair because he feared that by dedicating himself to the education of youth, he would have to renounce his personal philosophical projects; above all, he feared that his freedom as a philosopher would be limited by the need to respect the established laws and precepts of religion. His clearly motivated refusal concluded in this manner: “what stops me is not at all the desire for a better fortune, but the love of my tranquility which I believe I must preserve in some way, by absenting myself from public lessons.” Hegel was aware of this incident, which he related as follows in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: “Spinoza (in his published letters) very wisely declined this offer, however, because ‘he did not know within what limits his philosophical liberty would have to be constrained in order that it would not appear to disturb officially established religion.’”1

On August 6, 1816, Hegel responded to the Pro-rector with zeal: “out of the love of academic studies” he accepted his proposition even though other opportunities were open to him from the University of Berlin. He asked only that their offer to him be augmented, that they provide him with free lodging, and that the costs of his moving be reimbursed. A little later, on August 20, when these material questions had been dealt with to his satisfaction, Hegel returned to his nomination to “express his gratitude, in part for the interest that [the

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Pro-rector] had taken in his cause, and in part for the sympathy he showed for the state of philosophy in Germany and other universities.” He added, “Equally pleasant to me is the kindness with which you view both my past works—and more—the benefaction of your hopes for my activities in the university. In no other science, in effect, is one as solitary as in philosophy, and I sincerely long for a livelier circle of activity. I can say that this is the greatest desire of my life. I likewise feel all too acutely how unfavorable the lack of living exchange has been for my works thus far.” Hegel remained in Heidelberg for one year, where he simultaneously composed and taught his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. In 1817 he finally accepted the post he had so desired at the University of Berlin.

Beyond what these circumstances suggest anecdotally, something significant is already apparent. In this history, Hegelians maintain above all that Hegel occupied the place that Spinoza had left vacant, through this “replacement” filling a task that the other was not able or did not want to complete. Nothing can escape its own time: the moment had not come for Spinoza, when the real philosophy would make itself publicly known. Others whom we might well call Spinozist, on the contrary, see a point of divergence here, an irreducible separation, if not between two systems at least between two conceptions, that is, two practices, of philosophy.

In the Hegelian system an argument is constructed and evolves while its author, with great good fortune, navigates the stages of a university career (from private instructor at the University of Berlin, passing through all intermediate steps). One is reflected in the other, reciprocally, and gives it its truth; is he not rightly destined, in this hierarchical organization, to be acclaimed within the body of an academic institution? Jacques Derrida expresses it very well: “Hegel does not conceive of the school as the consequence or image of a system, as its pars totalis: the system is, itself, an immense school, the thorough-going auto-encyclopedia of the Absolute Spirit in Absolute Knowledge. And a school which one does not leave, a mandatory instruction as well: that mandates itself, since its necessity can no longer come from outside.”2

In contrast, even though it would become well known for giving political concerns a proper place in philosophical speculation (see

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not only the Treatise but also Ethics, a key text), the Spinozist doctrine would have found such an official rendition profoundly repugnant. This doctrine reveals the point of view of a recluse, a reprobate, a rebel, transmitted by word of mouth. To be acclaimed, the doctrine risks entering into a contradiction with itself by accepting a place in this mechanism of intellectual and material oppression, which subordinates everything to the point of view of the imagination. Spinoza’s philosophy vanquishes fear and ignores obedience; it cannot therefore be taught publicly. The philosophy of Hegel is instructed from on high to pupils below; Spinoza’s philosophy is transmitted to disciples in an egalitarian manner. Here a difference emerges that we must take seriously.

Nevertheless, this is a common ground that connects Spinoza and Hegel, because an obvious familiarity exists between them. We cannot read Spinoza today without thinking about Hegel, perhaps because between Spinoza and us, there is Hegel, who intervenes or intercedes. Hegel himself never stopped thinking about Spinoza, or rather thinking him, in order to digest him, to absorb him, as an element dominated by his own system. But the fact that Hegel never ceased to return to the problem that was posed for him by Spinoza’s philosophy indicates that he found something there that was indigestible, a resistance he continually needed to confront anew. Everything transpired as if Spinoza occupied a limit-position in relation to Hegelian discourse, which he rejected even at the moment of its inclusion.

This is why the task of comparing the philosophies of Spinoza and Hegel is fundamentally deceptive. In effect, it is necessary to understand what such a comparison is about; the systems, that is, discourses organized formally according to an internal principle of coherence, between which we could attempt to establish a correspondence, would be interpreted as a relationship of lineage, or a difference, which excludes all possibility of understanding one through the other. Thus, in an annex to his monumental study of Spinoza analyzing Hegel’s interpretation of Spinozism, Guéroult concludes there is a radical “misrecognition” founded on a “confabulation”: those who adopt Hegel’s interpretation “do no more than project into Spinoza’s doctrine an entire world of concepts conceived elsewhere and with no relationship to it.”3 As we will show in a detailed study of the texts

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Hegel devotes to Spinoza, it is difficult not to credit Guéroult with this at least: the search for a supposed homogeneity, resemblance, or evolutionary relationship between the two philosophies, if not absolutely fated to fail, leads to uninteresting results. Quite simply, it tends to transform the two doctrines into a common model, which authentically represents neither one nor the other.

But if we must go against the inclination of more obvious comparisons that proceed by analogy and reject the temptation to look for the similitude of a global common meaning between Spinoza and Hegel (through which the commonality or the convergence of the two systems of thought would manifest itself ), it would be no less absurd to decree that this is a case of two forms of philosophical reflection that are radically exterior to one another and restore them to their independence. In effect, it is incontestable that Hegel and Spinoza met one another, even if their encounter on Hegel’s part took the form of an extraordinary misunderstanding. If Spinoza and Hegel do not travel the same path, together or one behind the other, it remains a fact that their paths crossed, connecting at certain moments in order to separate in strongly opposing directions. From this point of view, rather than compare the systems—an attempt doomed to failure or to too easy success—it might be significant to look for singular points of intersection between these two philosophies. It is these that explain the strange feeling of familiarity all Hegelian readers of Spinoza experience, as do all Spinozist readers of Hegel.

In his Essays in Self-Criticism, Althusser talks of “the repetition of Hegel anticipated by Spinoza.”4 Let us list a few points justifying this assertion: the refusal of a relativist conception of knowledge and the idea that there is, within reason, something of the absolute that connects it [l’apparente] to the real; the discovery of the formal character of all finite representation, dedicated to abstraction; the critique of the “bad infinite”; and the idea that knowledge is a real process that carries within itself the conditions of its objectivity. On all these points, even if they reflect on them using very different conceptual elements, even if they derive opposing consequences from them, evidently Spinoza and Hegel have something in common that distinguishes them from everyone else. This rapprochement must be explained.

We will address this question by applying ourselves to the reading

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that Hegel himself derives from Spinoza. This reading is very instructive, not because it would manifest the truth of Spinozism, finally laid bare by Hegel, but on the contrary because it is based on a formidable misreading; everything transpires as if Hegel were given the means to construct an interpretation of Spinozism that permits him to ignore its essential lesson, insofar as this bears exactly on something related to his own system. This interpretation appears as a sort of obstinate defense, set against a reasoning that destabilizes Hegelian philosophy itself. This produces a paradoxical effect: Hegel is never so close to Spinoza as in the moments when he distances himself from him, because this refusal has the value of a symptom and indicates the obstinate presence of a common object, if not a common project, that links these two philosophers inseparably without conflating them.

To take into account this conflictual relationship is to depart from a formalist conception of the history of philosophy, which suppresses all historicity within itself, segmenting it into irreducible and arbitrary unities, whose dispersal becomes ever more the object of descriptive commentary; moreover, this is more exhaustive than if it immediately contained itself within the limits of the internal coherence of a system, eliminating all interrogation of a historical position. The significance of this dissipation is all the more [tout au plus] aesthetic, to the extent that it makes doctrines into works of art. Against this, we must come to think a certain form of unity, a link, between these diverse philosophies: the entire question is to know whether this is possible without falling back into the confusionism, which purely and simply identifies different philosophies within the fiction of a common truth.

To simplify, we could say that this problem is that of the dialectic. But it would be absurd to discover in Spinoza a rough draft or promise of a dialectic that is manifestly absent in his work. Nevertheless, this does not prevent us from beginning with Spinoza ourselves to be able to think of the dialectic anew, that is, to ask it these questions that Hegel rejected from his own system because they were unbearable for him. In the mirror of Spinozism, without a doubt Hegelian discourse brings into view its own limitations, or even its internal contradiction. Spinoza in Hegel: this does not imply that it is necessary to read Ethics as the failed beginning of Logic, as Hegel reads it himself, but that it is necessary to search for the conflictual unity between these two

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philosophies, which explains the astounding phenomenon of a simultaneous mistrust and recognition [méconnaissance and reconnaissance], which links them by opposing them to each other. Hegel or Spinoza: it is a unity that divides itself in two.

We say “Hegel or Spinoza,” and not the inverse, because it is Spinoza who constitutes the true alternative to Hegelian philosophy. Therefore, the discussion we will undertake has more than one objective. It will not only make the limits of the Hegelian system apparent, a system whose universality is necessarily historical; it will allow us at the same time to extricate ourselves from the evolutionary conception of the history of philosophy, which is also the heritage of Hegelianism. According to this conception, Hegel proposed himself as the only possible alternative to Spinozism, the forerunner that ceded its place to that which came afterwards, in this movement of ascension that comes ever closer to the spirit itself. But here we would like to subvert the potency of this unitary and progressive interpretation of the history of philosophy, which is only apparently dialectical.

According to Hegel, Spinoza’s thought is not yet dialectical enough. And what if it were too much—or at least, if it were so in a way that was unacceptable to Hegel? The denial of this dialectic—let us say, to move ahead quickly, of a dialectic without teleology—toward which Hegel proceeds via the intermediary of Spinoza is his way of addressing an insurmountable obstacle in the development of his own thought: that of a discourse that we must not say is not yet Hegelian but is so no longer. And it is here that the evolutionist presentation of the history of philosophy lies in ruins: because Spinoza himself also refutes Hegel, objectively.