hegel's epistemic turn-or spinoza's

8/2/2019 Hegel's Epistemic Turn-Or Spinoza's

1/8

HEGEL'S EPISTEMIC TURN-OR SPINOZA'S?Heidi M. Ravven

Abstract: This paper takes issue with Slavoj Zizek's constructed opposition between Spinoza and Hegel. Where Zizek views Hegel's non-dualistic relationalepistemology as a substantial improvement over Spinoza's purported dogmaticaccount of a reality which is external to the perceiver, I argue that Hegel inher-ited such an epistemology from Spinoza. Ultimately, it is Spinoza who providesHegel with the conceptual tools for knowledge of the "transphenomenal" withinthe context of human finitude.

In a recent essay, Slavoj Zizek portrays Hegel in contrast and even in opposition to Spinoza.!The focus ofZizek's opposition between the two is Hegel's epistemic turn beyond Kant. Heplaces Spinoza at the most primitive stage of a triad (Spinoza-Kant-Hegel) which he suggestsrecurs in history in different forms. It is, he says, a version of the more basic triad paganismJudaism-Christianity. In contrast with Pierre Macherey who in the second edition ofHegel ouSpinoza argued that "one cannot avoid the impression that Spinoza had already read Hegeland in advance answered his reproaches;'2 Zizek advances what he calls "a consciously oldfashioned Hegelian reading of Spinoza" that amounts to a "radical anti-Hegelianism."3 Thisposition would seem to go beyond even Hegel's own assessment ofSpinoza. For Hegel in theHistory ofPhilosophy proposed not an opposition between his own and Spinoza's philosophiesbut instead insisted that all true philosophy, all truly modem philosophy culminating in hisown, begins with Spinoza. Zizek proposes, however, that Spinoza represents in Hegelian termsthe most primitive philosophical position, the origin from which philosophy must depart tobe philosophy. "In a way," he writes, "the triad Spinoza-Kant-Hegel DOES encompass thewhole of philosophy" (emphasis in o r i g i n a l ) . ~ So what is this reading of Spinoza that placeshim not only prior to (and thus intellectually less advanced than) Christianity but even inferiorin worth and adequacy to the Judaism from which it sprang?

Zizek places Spinoza in the category of the pre-Kantians who could merely make "anaiVe attempt at 'absolute knowledge,' at a total description of the entire reality."5 Kant'sepistemic breakthrough, Zizek suggests, is exactly what is missing in Spinoza since forKant, "the transcendental is irreducibly rooted in the empirical/temporal/finite, it is thetransphenomenal AS IT APPEARS WITHIN THE FINITE HORIZON OF TEMPORALITY. And this dimension of the transcendental as opposed to noumenal is what is missingin Spinoza" (emphasis in original)6 Zizek elaborates upon this claim by explaining thatwhat Kant means is that "phenomenal reality is not simply the way things appear to me"but instead "designates the way things 'really' appear to me, the way they constitute phenomenal reality."7 Thus, pace Hegel himself, Zizek maintains that "it is only with Kant. . . that true philosophy begins." Even more: "Ultimately, philosophy as such is Kantian,"(i) 200..'1. Idealistic Studies. VolLlme ..'1..'1. "'LIes 2-3. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 195-202


2/8

196 IDEALISTIC STUDIESZizek insists.8 Hegel's contribution to the furthering of this Kantian revolution, according toZizek, consists in his departure even further from Spinoza toward a deeper and more radicalKantianism. It is not that Hegel returns to Spinoza and the spirit of Spinoza, as Deleuzeand others have suggested. So Hegel's "insight into how the path towards truth is alreadyTruth itself, into how the Absolute is precisely-to put it in Deleuzian terms-the virtualityof the eternal process of actualization,"9 Zizek says, amounts to a more complete purgingof philosophy of remnants of Spinoza than even Kant was capable of or envisioned. For"in transpos[ing] the incompleteness, openness, the surplus of the virtual over the actual. . . into the thing itself' Hegel moves beyond a Kant who, in Zizek's estimation, "remainsall too Spinozean: [for] the crack-less, seamless, positivity ofBeing is just transposed [inKant] into the inaccessible In-ltself."10 And this move, according to Zizek, is what Hegelmeans by his difference from Spinoza, encapsulated in his famous epigram that for himselfthe Absolute is not only Substance as it was for Spinoza but Subject as welL ll

But is Zizek's reading of Spinoza correct? Indeed Hegel faults Spinoza for holding thatSubstance was not also Subject. Why then does Hegel maintain at the same time, and incontrast to Zizek, that (true, modern) philosophy begins not with Kant but with Spinoza?What is Hegel discerning in Spinoza that Zizek seems to have missed? I argue in this paper that Zizek's misjudgment is rooted in his (mistaken) claim that Spinoza's philosophyrepresents the paradigmatic standard pre-modern relation of ontology and epistemology.While Zizek's understanding of Spinoza's ethical theory as the complete rejection of anydeontological dimension and of his political psychology as rooted in primitive group emotionsis quite astute and goes beyond the standard versions, his reading ofSpinoza' s metaphysicsand epistemology is not only dated but even a caricature of a dated position. And unfortunately upon this caricature, rather than upon his more nuanced understanding of Spinoza'spsychology, Zizek's assessment of the relation between Spinoza and Hegel depends. ForZizek is simply wrong when he proposes that Spinoza is among those philosophers whoheld a "traditional opposition between epistemology and ontology" that amounted to aconception of "scientific investigation [as] engaged in the difficult path of getting to knowobjective reality, gradually approaching it . . . while reality just IS out there, fully constitutedand given."12 And thus Zizek mistakenly surmises that Hegel must be distancing himselffurther from Spinoza in attempting to be more Kantian than Kant when he holds that"our painful progress of knowledge, our confusions, our search for solutions-that is tosay: precisely that which seems to separate us from the way reality really is out there-isalready the innermost constituent of reality itself."I3

The burden of the rest of this paper will be to show that, pace ZiZek, when Hegel makesthe claim, in Zizek's words, that "our process of approaching constituted objective realityrepeats the virtual process of Becoming of this reality itself," he is building on Spinozarather than distancing himself further from him. Zizek is right that Hegel does not return toSpinoza in order to return to "rehabilitate the old Leibnizean metaphysics" to overcome theKantian gap between knowledge and B e i n g . l ~ But he is wrong that Hegel's inspiration stemsfrom Kant alone and arises as an urge to further distance himself from Spinoza. A carefulreading of Spinoza suggests, instead, that Hegel found resources in Spinoza's philosophyfor just the resolution of the Kantian gap that he proposed. For Spinoza's innovations arosein his own struggle to overcome and resolve the epistemological and ontological problems


3/8

HEGEL'S EPISTEMIC TURN-OR SPINOZA'S? 197ofCartesian dualism, problems not without Kantian parallels to those that confronted Hegel.So I propose here that Hegel can be seen as out-Spinozaing Spinoza as much as out-KantingKant. And Spinoza can rightly be understood as having helped Hegel out-Kant Kant.

I will argue in behalf of these two points: First, Spinoza's doctrine of divine immanencehas this implication for epistemology: Our thinking is not fundamentally about a reality outthere; it is not our mental approximation of that metaphysical Beyond, as Zizek assumes.Instead, our thinking is one of the infinite expressions of being itself, namely, modally inus. IS And it is ofone of the infinite expressiolls of being itself, namely, first and foremostabout our body. Thus our thinking is the modal unfolding of substantial thought in l iS, as ourbody is ofsubstantial extension. Since we are the psychophysical process of maintaining andenhancing our internal stability or equilibrium (the conatus), we are not a thing that thinksor contains thoughts about an external reality. We are the self-organizing energy distributedin this thinking and in (and of) this body that is a modal expression and particularizationand localization of the divine thought and extension. Thus scientific knowledge does notreach out to know an absolute beyond us but instead, approaches it first where it is mostavailable, namely, within us and as ourselves. How far then is it to go the next step as Hegeldid and propose that the developmental path of thought within us is a development withinsubstance itself, namely as subject, and not merely a modal version of it?

Second, Spinoza explicitly argues, and at length, that knowledge is not of an externalobject out there but necessarily always of the relation between self and world, and moreof self than of world. That relation is that which constitutes both the content and theoccasion of knowledge rather than any mental mirroring of an external reality. Metaphysical knowledge is self-knowledge because the absolute is operative within us both inthought and in extension and not just outside us. But the only way we get to approach it isthrough our internal relation to it, an internal relation occasioned, however, only by andin encounters with what is external to us. And we are that relation because we are not athing that thinks but the thinking itself-and the process of maintaining material stability.Substance discloses itself to us only in the relation between the outer and the inner, thatis, in the encounters between the two. What we can come to know, and it is there alonethat the possibility of knowledge discloses itself, is the relation between self and objectas the latter impinges on self and changes it. We know the world only through the effectsit creates in liS. The beginning of knowledge arises from the impingement and is only ofthe impingement and what follows from it and what it follows from. Spinoza explicitlysays that this is both how we know and also how we can be sure that the world is knowable, that things are as we sense them, as he puts it. They are as we sense them becausehow we sense them is the relation that constitutes the reality we're trying to know-andthat we are. While perception initiates knowing, it does not complete it. Has not Spinozain this anticipated the rudiments of Hegel's conception of knowledge as located in therelation between subject and object, self and other, and thus himself gone beyond Kant? Ithink we have here in the Ethics an incipient Hegelian posture, one brought to enormousfruition in Hegel's works from the Phenomenology on. I find it surprising that this clearlystated position of Spinoza's in the Ethics-it is not a mere implication or inference tobe drawn-has not been widely recognized and also seen as a source of inspiration forlIegel" epistemic turn beyond Kant.


4/8

198 IDEALISTIC STUDIESNow to the details. Regarding the first point: For Spinoza, the mind fundamentally

and first of all, minds the body, its own body. That is what he means by his claim that themind is the idea of the body: "the object of the idea constituting the human mind is thebody.''l6 This claim is the basis of the corollary that Spinoza draws: from this "it followsthat man consists of mind and body, and the human body exists according as we sense it"(my emphasis)Y That is to say, if we keep in mind that the primary object of our mind isour own body and not an external object, its perception cannot but be true. How could it beotherwise? It represents to itself its own body-state. Thinking is the body made conscious;it is the consciousness of the body and hence in so far as it confines itself to perception(Spinoza's, "imagination") without drawing further conclusions therefrom, it cannot err,Spinoza contends. "The imaginations of the mind looked at in themselves, contain no error;i.e. the mind does not err from the fact that it imagines, but only in so far as it is consideredto lack the idea which excludes the existence of those things which it imagines to be presentto itself."18 Spinoza characterizes true ideas as those that agree with their ideatum (EIAx 6).The agreement in question is not the standard correspondence of our thought to an externalworld which it is both separate from and also, in some sense, mirrors. Instead it is an agreement of the idea with that of which it is the idea, namely, its mental representation of itsbody state, a state that appears to us, however, only in the impingement of external objectsupon us (see below). The agreement is then between the expression of the body state (thecorporeal images) and our idea of it, which is to say our understanding of it, which lattercan be either imaginative or rational-more about that distinction below.Hegel follows and develops this Spinozist conception of truth. For Hegel, just as forSpinoza, both sides of the agreement are within the subject. What has oft been consideredthe quintessential Hegelian insight,19 we discover was pioneered by Spinoza. It is thatit is the world as we experience it, as it acts upon us, that is captured by our thinking. Itis its internal effects upon us for both Spinoza and Hegel that we are always theorizing,and which our thinking must be adequate to. For both Hegel and Spinoza, solipsism isavoided because the world is neither our subjective construction nor a reality completelyoutside us and hence unavailable to us. It is instead a real impingement, or as Hegel putsit, it offers resistance. Hegel gives an account of truth in these terms in the Introductionto the Phellomenology ofSpirit (


5/8

HEGEL'S EPISTEMIC TURN-OR SPINOZA'S? 199cal break between the divine and the human, the one and the many, or as Spinoza mostlikes to put it, between God and nature, we get the full force of his epistemology: It is theavailability within the human mind ofmetaphysical knowledge through its coming to knowits own body as itself an expressioll of the divine. "The essence of man is constituted bydefinite modifications of the attributes of God," namely, our body and mind.

For the being of substance does not pertain to the essence of man (preceding Pr.),which must therefore (Pr. 15, I) be something that is in God, and which can neither benor be conceived without God; i.e. all affection or mode which expresses the natureofGod in a definite and determinate way. (my emphasis)21

Knowledge therefore consists in tracing (causally) what we now know to be the expression ofGod in us to its foundations in the divine essence, i.e., in the attributes. And in fact that is exactlythe way that Spinoza characterizes the highest knowledge, scientia intuitiva, namely as knowl-edge of the essence of the individual in the divine attributesY This is possible because,

There is also in God the idea or knowledge of the human mind, and this follows in Godand is related to God in the same way as the idea or knowledge of the human body.23

Because "nothing can happen in [our] body without it being perceived by the m i n d " 2 ~ (by theidentity ofmind and body and by the definition ofmind as the idea, or consciousness, of thebody), knowledge ofau r own body in God is the source of, and guarantees the possibilityof, the knowledge of God or metaphysical knowledge. Spinoza's metaphysics suggests avery different epistemology from the one Zizek ascribes to him.Yet the reinterpretation of the Cartesian subjective turn just described is only part ofSpinoza's response to Cartesian solipsism. His further answer to solipsism is his claim thatwhile knowledge begins with the body, it is not restricted to it. For while the "imaginationindicates the present disposition of the human body more than the nature of an externalbody,"25 it nevertheless also grasps an external object.

The idea of any mode wherein the human body is affected by external bodies must in-volve the nature of the human body together with the nature of the external body26

"Hence it follows," Spinoza infers in the first corollary to the proposition just cited, "thatthe human mind perceives the nature of very many bodies along with the nature of its ownbody." And "secondly, the ideas we have of external bodies indicate the constitution of ourown body more than the nature ofexternal bodies."27 This is the second point I wish to argueagainst Slavoj Zizek, namely, that for Spinoza knowledge is of the relation between ourselvesand the external world; it is of their impingement. As such it is accessible and necessarilyaccessible. This is Spinoza's answer to Cartesian solipsism and it is a starting point forHegel's epistemic move beyond Kant. For Spinoza, as for Hegel, this knowledge ultimatelyis capable of yielding metaphysical truths because it is an expression of God within the hu-man and can be traced back to its divine origins. What differs in Spinoza and Hegel is theway in which Substance discloses and embodies its expressions empirically and as a resulthow they come to be known. For Spinoza modal expressions can be traced back via seriesof causes (both natural laws and series of individual efficient causes) to the attributes. Therelation of selfand impinging object can come to be understood as an expression of scientificlaws and not only within a web of personal and cultural imaginative associations.


6/8

200 IDEALISTIC STUDIESFor Hegel, the Phenomenology suggests instead that substance unfolds as ego, as the integra

tion into memory of the experiences of a subject, a universal subject projecting itself into andembodying itself within the world and then introjecting and reconciling to its original intentionsits developed and not entirely predictable self-expressions. Hegel describes it thus:

The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, which is the same, is intruth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediationof its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure simple negativity .. . . Only this . . . reflection of otherness within itself . . . is the True. It is the processof its own becoming.... Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well bespoken of as a disporting of Love within itself.28

Yet in both cases and because of related metaphysical and cosmological claims (arising inpart in answer to versions of subjectivity), knowledge is ofself n its relations, relations thatcome to be constitutive ofselfand of self in God. I have argued elsewhere that for Spinozafrom his earliest writings to the latest the individual is never atomic but always extendsbeyond its narrow boundaries into its relations.29 It is this individual self in its relations asthey expand beyond the local personal and historical context to infinity through science thatis the object of knowledge for Spinoza. Thus the claim that knowledge is of one's own bodyand mind and the second claim that knowledge is of the self in its encounters and relationsare not conflicting but amount to the same claim when we come to understand Spinoza'sconception of the individual. For the individual, Spinoza tells us, is not a thing but a homeodynamic state, a stable arrangement of parts, a self-organizing, self-integrating processwhich allows for growth and change while maintaining identity (coherence) and stability.30It is thus expansive to its relations and by its encounters. And just below his explication ofwhat he means by individual, in the second Scholium to Proposition 13 of Part II, Spinozafamously describes the composite individual that is made up of an organization of simplerindividuals until one arrives at "the whole of Nature as one individual whose parts . . . varyin infinite ways without change in the individual as a whole." From this very discussion ofthe composite nature of body, Spinoza turns to draw epistemological conclusions.

First of all, "the human mind," he tells us, "is capable of perceiving a great many things,and its capacity will vary in proportion to the variety of states which its body can assume."We know our body only through its responses to the world and insofar as it is capable of themost nuanced response to the world. For "the human mind has no knowledge of the body,nor does it know it to exist, except through ideas of the affections by which the body is affected."3l Moreover, "the mind does not know itself except in so far as it perceives ideas ofthe affections of the body."32 We recall in this context that 1. N. Findlay aptly remarks thatfor Hegel, if we "remove the way truth affects us . . . nothing at all remains"33-a remarkwe find as fitting for Spinoza. What Spinoza refers to as the ways that the body is affected,Hegel regards more generally as experience, and proposes a science of experience, or aPhenomenology. Our idea of our body (which is our mind), Spinoza insists, "is not simplebut composed of very many i d e a s . " l ~ And these ideas are never of the unaffected, internalstate of the body proper but of the relation between our body and that which is external toit that affects it. For "the idea of any mode wherein the human body is affected by externalbodies must involve the nature of the human body together with the nature of the externalbody."35 Hence "the idea of these modes will necessarily involve the nature of both bodies


7/8

HEGEL'S EPISTEMIC TURN-OR SPINOZA'S? 201(AxA, I). So the idea of any mode wherein the human body is affected by an external bodyinvolves the nature of the human body and the external body."36 Yet neither knowledge ofits own body nor of the external body is adequate but rather confused.37 Spinoza in the twoCorollaries to Part 2 Proposition 16 draws this conclusion for epistemology: "Hence it fol-lows that the human mind perceives the very nature of many bodies along with the natureof its own body" but in doing so "the ideas that we have of external bodies indicate theconstitution of our own body more than the nature of external bodies."

In the following propositions, Spinoza goes on to describe how the relational natureof cognition operates on the imaginal level through association and memory.38 Later hewill delineate how reason grasps knowledge (and intuition completes that process) as arelation of self to its genetic causes (ultimately in the attributes) which are more consti-tutive of (the essence of) our individual self than the (current state of the) self per se.39In both cases knowledge is of the relation between se lf proper and its relations; and thisrelational thinking is the self and not a self that thinks. But in the first case, that of theimagination, the relations do not explicate the true constitution of the self but merely itslocal context, what Spinoza calls "the common order of nature." "Hence It follows [fromthe inadequacy ofthe ideas (and ideas of the ideas) ofthe affections of the body to provideus with knowledge of our body or mind] that whenever the human mind perceives thingsafter the common order of nature, it does not have an adequate knowledge of itself, norof its body, nor of external bodies, but only a confused and fragmentary knowledge."40Yet adequate knowledge is also relational, but it is of a different object, namely, of thefull causal system of which my mind and body as they are affected at any given point arethe effects. It is that relational system of which my mind/body are a locus of awareness, alocation in the full web of causal relations and layers, which I can come to know-therebyunderstanding myself in God. That full knowledge (being) is intuition; its mediate stage isreason (wherein the proximate cause is known); but imagination gives only local awareness(being) not any insight into the causal system. Hegel suggests otherwise and here he partscompany with Spinoza. For memory and history, and not just the view from eternity ofcausal science, as for Spinoza, are constitutive of the Absolute itself, Hegel claims, andnot just of our local experience of duration. For Hegel even our intellectual developmentfrom the most na"ive and narrow standpoint to the most nuanced and encompassing, andnot only the final achievement, is the stuff of spirit. Nevertheless, for Spinoza, and not justfor Kant and Hegel, knowledge begins with "the transphenomenal as it appears within thefinite horizon of the temporality." And for Spinoza, and not just for Hegel, thought seeksa truth within itself that yet leads outward to the world.

Hamilton CollegeNotes

1. "Hegel Against Kant," forthcoming in a volume of papers first delivered at the conferenceat the UCLA Jewish Studies Center in February, 2003. "After Spinoza: Judaism, Modernity, andthe Future of the Multitude."

2. Zizek, 1. The page numbers refer to the manuscript version of the paper.3. Zizek, 1.4. Zizek,2.


8/8

202 IDEALISTIC STUDIES5. Zizek, 11.6. Zizek, lO. Zizek comments that this description of the Kantian position depends on Foucault's

understanding of it via his notion of the "empirico-transcental doublet."7. Zizek, II.8. Zizek. II .9. Zizek, 13.lO. Zizek, 13.11. See, e.g . "Preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit," 'II 17.12. Zizek, 12.13. Zizek, 12.14. Zizek, 14.15. E2plOcor.16. E2p13.17. E2pl3cor.18. E2p 17schol.19. Edward Hundert, for example, makes the claim that "Hegel . . . realized as no one before

him that both these 'moments,' both things and thoughts, fall within the institution we are investigating" (Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience: Three Approaches to the Mind [Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1989], p. 48).

20. Hegel's "Phenomen%gy ofSpirit," trans. A. V. Miller. with Analysis of the Text and Foreword by 1. N. Findlay (Oxford University Press, 1977), ~ l ' I I 84-85. my emendation of the Millertranslation, pp. 54-55.

21. E2plOcor and dem,22. E2p40Scho12.23. E2p20.24. E2pI2.25. E4pIschol.26. E2p16.27. E2p16cor2.28. Preface to the Phenomenology. A. Y. Miller translation, p. lO.29. See my "Spinoza's Individualism Reconsidered: Some Lessons from the Short Treatise on

God. Man. and His Well-Being," in lyyun: Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 47 (July 1998), pp.265-292 (republished in Spinoza, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel and Gideon Segal, eds. [Ashgate: Aldershot,2000], and also in volume 1, Context, Sources, and Early Writings, Routledge Critical Assessmentsof Leading Philosophers: Spinoza, ed. Genevieve Lloyd, 2001).

30. E2p13 Lemma 5.3!. E2pI9.32. E2p23.33. Miller, p. 505, note to ~ l 7 3 . 34. E2p15.35. E2pI6.36. E2pI6dem.37. E2p24 and p27.38. On the identity of imagination and memory in Spinoza. see my "Spinoza's Rupture with

Tradition: On Ethics Vp39s," lyyulI: Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 50 (July 2001). pp.295-326 (and republished in Jewish Themes ill Spinoza's Philosophy: A Collectioll of Essay, ed.Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman [Albany: SUNY Press. 2002]).

39. See "Spinoza's Individualism Reconsidered."40. E2p29cor.

hegel's epistemic turn-or spinoza's

Documents