Content area
Full Text
LIKE MANY OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES, Hegel considered Spinoza a modern reviver of ancient Eleatic monism, in which "all determinate content is swallowed up as radically null and void."1 This characterization of Spinoza as denying the reality of the world of finite modes had a lasting influence on the perception of Spinoza since Hegel's time. In this article, I take these claims of Hegel to task and evaluate their validity. Although Hegel's official argument for the unreality of modes in Spinoza's system will turn out to be unsound, I do believe there is one crucial line in Spinoza's system-Spinoza's rather weak and functional conception of individuality-which provides some support for Hegel's reading of Spinoza. But in the final account, I will argue, even Spinoza's weak criterion for individuation does not justify the Hegelian charge of "acosmism." Hegel was clearly a sympathetic reader of Spinoza, yet it seems that on the issue of the reality of finite things, Hegel's reading of Spinoza was not sensitive to the nuances of the latter's position. Hegel used a broad-brush characterization of Spinoza against which he could better present his own view.
1. BENEDICT OF ELEA
Soon after Spinoza's death, several writers were already suggesting that Spinoza's philosophy was a revival of ancient Eleatic monism, which rejects the reality of change and diversification. Bayle makes this association quite explicitly in several passages in his dictionary,2 while Leibniz argues (against Malebranche) that to claim that "all things are only some evanescent or flowing modifications and phantasms, so to speak, of the one permanent divine substance" is to endorse "that doctrine of most evil repute, which a certain subtle and profane writer recently introduced into the world, or revived [pessimae notae doctrinam nuper scriptor quidem subtilis, at profanus, orbi invexit vel renovavit]-that the very nature or substance of all things is God."3 There is little doubt that the "subtle but indeed irreligious" writer in question is Spinoza, and it is quite plausible that the revived doctrines are those of the Eleatics.
Almost a century later, with the emergence of German Idealism, the identification of Spinoza with Eleatic monism became the standard view.4 Hegel, for example, announces:
Parmenides has to reckon with illusion and opinion, the opposites of being and truth; Spinoza likewise, with...