... and he considered himself a (great world-historical) philosopher, ergo "Spinozist". — 180 Proof

:up:

This is too pantheistic, even for Hegel (a christian pan-en-theist). As he (with Maimon) points out, Spinoza's metaphysics is acosmist. Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist"). — 180 Proof

I was probably going too far. Hegel is a mountain.

Could you elaborate on the bold part ?

Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist").
— 180 Proof

Could you elaborate on the bold part? — plaque flag

:yikes: Which part?

All of it? :scream:

(As much as I try to be, I ain't no @Fooloso4 or @apokrisis or @Banno) Unpacking that blurb would be a helluva dissertation ... In the meantime, I recommend Pierre Macherey's Hegel or Spinoza which, as I recall, is an excellence critique of Hegel's (deliberate) misreading – "updating" – of Spinoza's ontology, etc (@Tobias re: one of our first discussions). Maybe I wlll come back to this if I can more expansively explain what I mean in only a paragraph or three. :sweat:

:up:
Thanks for the recommendation, and I hope you do get around to writing more.

Lingering covid brain fog and chronic fatigue – I do what I can.

Lingering covid brain fog and chronic fatique – I do what I can. — 180 Proof

I hope you feel better soon. I was punched by a bad case in the early days, two weeks watching Twin Peaks.

I got the virus twice in 2021, before & after the jab. I've had two boosters since. These "long haul symptoms" I've been living with for two years ain't no joke. It's reduced me from a marathoner to a one-legged sprinter. "I can't go on. I'll go on." Thanks anyway. :mask:

Somewhere I came across Hegel described as Spinoza plus time.

From the preface to the Phenomenology:

#17:

In my view … everything hangs on grasping and expressing the true not just as substance but just as much as subject.

It is instructive to compare this to what Spinoza says about substance.

By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception. (Ethics , Part One, Definitions, III)

Hegel continues:

At the same time, it is to be noted that substantiality comprises within itself the universal, or, it comprises not only the immediacy of knowing but also the immediacy of being, or, immediacy for knowing.

The universal is unity of the immediacy, direct and unmediated, of knowing and being, of knowing and for knowing.

However much taking God to be the one substance shocked the age in which this was expressed, still that was in part because of an instinctive awareness that in such a view self-consciousness only perishes and is not preserved.

I take this is a direct reference to Spinoza’s God. Hegel thinks it shocked the age not because, as is commonly assumed, threatening the status of God as distinct and separate, but because it threatens the status of man as distinct in his self-consciousness.

Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist"). — plaque flag

Well, I am not 180 but I can take a stab at it. One of the critiques of Hegel is that he totalizes. For Hegel things move. He considers the 'movement of the concept' in the 'Logik', the coming to be of the modern state the the philosophy of right, the appearance of the spirit in the Phenomenology. During this movement described, the concept, spirit, the state acquire higher levels of self awareness and self articulation. Until with Hegel himself spirit manages something it did not manage before, namely its self awareness and therefore its identity as self thinking substance. Substance has managed to articulate itself as thinking being through taking into account its historicity in the sense of the many articulations it had to go through to reach that point.

If true that would be a real feat. His thought would in one go solve Descartes problem of duality between res extensa and res cogitans. Within the world thinking is at work. What we determine as duality is such because it is determined so by thought. The appearance of those dualisms is historical and also solved historically by pointing to their historical origins. They are unmasked, not as absolute dychotomies, but as dichotomies produced by our antinomical way of thinking. We think in dualisms, but also in their overcoming.

Not only would he have solved Descartes' problem, he would also solve the tensions between two of the greatest influences of his time, Kant and Spinoza. While for Kant the thing in itself (the world as it is) remains forever unreachable and separated from thought it is there. Relegated though to a position of mere intuition as matter. It is thought that forms it and makes a world out of it, but forever knowing that pure knowledge is out of reach. For Spinoza the world, is as 180 put it, one of the infinite modes. His great achievement in Hegel's eyes is the identification of substance and world. The realization that substance is absolute, there is nothing outside of it, there is no God that makes it work, it is all one thing. But Spinoza's world is blind, an infinite without rhyme or reason, in which we cannot be at home. Self consciousness has no place in Spinoza, as it also has no place in Deleuze or Spinoza's materialist followers. It follows that we are a stranger in a strange land.

Hegel solves it by stating, we cannot think substance other than as subject, as something with a history, a reason, a rationality attached to it necessarily that same as hours. The identity of thinking and being. The same as with Descartes. There is no res cogitans and res extensa, they are the same. Hegel's name for it is spirit.

One can see why this is totalizing. A movement culminating in the realization that there is nothing outside of the thinking historical subject whose history seems to have a rational unfolding. An unfolding even culminating in Hegel himself, so what bigger hybris might there be? Some point to Hegel to proclaim the end of history, how much more totalizing and teleological does it become?

I think this reading is too unnuanced though, at least in regard to the Hegel that wrote the Pheno and the Logik. Inside his thought is also the principle that blows up this picture, an ironic image. The phenomenology of spirit is completed in the realization that being is historical, aka 'being is time' as put by later thinkers and that is a momentous insight, but it is not over yet. Thinking progresses for Hegel by the negation, so also by the negation, or at least the seeming negation of his own thought. The chapter on absolute knowledge in the Pheno is short, short and anti climatic. What is absolute knowledge other than the knowledge that thought moves and produces deeper more refined articulations in which the older axioms are rejected? Absolute knowledge is the knowledge that one should not asbolutize because the moment that happens the thesis becomes subverted, what moves becomes dogma, dogma for its rigidity is antithetical to thought.

So yes, one can read him teleologically @plaque flag, but I think his thought is much more enriching and fruitful for the thinkers we are in our time when we do not. Than we learn something about the features of thought, an insight we may take with us, a ladder to climb and to throw away after we climbed it.

I take this is a direct reference to Spinoza’s God. Hegel thinks it shocked the age not because, as is commonly assumed, threatening the status of God as distinct and separate, but because it threatens the status of man as distinct in his self-consciousness. — Fooloso4

From my post above I think it follows that I hold that it is not about man as much as that Spinoza threatens self consciousness in general. There is no knowledge, also no slef knowledge possible in an infinite word permeated by God. It is all a thousand plateaus and nothing up or down. A rhizome without rhyme or reason to read Spinoza anachronistically.

I blame 180 proof, Hegel and red wine for this post...

:clap: :sweat:
I'll reply later after my own glass or three, old friend.

I think that is a notoriously difficult point in Spinoza's philosophy, whether it amounts to a flat out declaration that Nature is God tout courte. — Wayfarer

Yes, firstly Spinoza did not say the world is God, but that nature is, and it's not clear that he meant both manifest nature and the nature that manifests, or both. The nature that manifests (natura naturans) would seem to be the more likely.See the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata.

Hi, Tobias. We seem to pretty much agree on Hegel, so it looks like you misread me. For instanceL

There is no higher court than Us as our norms evolve without foundation or instruction from some authority that would have to be tyrannical and alienated given the enlightenment imperative made explicit by Kant. — plaque flag

What is absolute knowledge other than the knowledge that thought moves and produces deeper more refined articulations in which the older axioms are rejected? Absolute knowledge is the knowledge that one should not asbolutize because the moment that happens the thesis becomes subverted, what moves becomes dogma, dogma for its rigidity is antithetical to thought. — Tobias

Elsewhere I've used the phrase liquid logic. I also interpret Heidegger as an optimized Hegel, where time is [ spirit is, we are ] the endless confrontation of [ among other things ] current semantic norms with themselves.

There is no res cogitans and res extensa, they are the same. Hegel's name for it is spirit. — Tobias

I've been arguing elsewhere for a particular kind of direct realism in terms of the encompassing always-already-historically-articulated lifeworld. The world is all that is the case.

Than we learn something about the features of thought, an insight we may take with us, a ladder to climb and to throw away after we climbed it. — Tobias

Ah but we don't throw it away. We are timebinders. We are out past in the mode of no longer being it. We are our past as that which leaps ahead in every forehaving.

Absolute knowledge is the knowledge that one should not asbolutize because the moment that happens the thesis becomes subverted, what moves becomes dogma, dogma for its rigidity is antithetical to thought. — Tobias

I agree, but this (I hope you agree ) sinks into bland edification --- a mere fallibilist platitude -- without the clarification of what it means to be historical. One has to suffer its having been thrown, 'hear' its having been given over to the junkyard of what everyone and no one knows (of gossip or idle talk.) What a generation takes 'obvious' is contingency mistaken for necessity. Proximally and for the most part we are bots.

Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer.
— Heidegger

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequencegoes on merely along the surface.
--Hegel

He considers the 'movement of the concept' in the 'Logik — Tobias

I'll just end by agreeing that this movement is central. Semantic norms, which are also inferential norms, are absolutely central, and I think Hegel grasps their timebinding liquidity.

This is Brandom on what I call Hegel's liquid logic. Braver writes of impersonal conceptual schemes, which I take as unstable historical articulations of a lifeworld (something like the discursive spine of such a form of life, personified by the way one [ das Man ] operates almost automatically within a 'transparent' network of equipment and (shifting now in to gossip /idletalk) knows everything and nothing already in the form of platitudes and what's 'obvious.' Philosophy is something one's [the Anyone's] uncanny self-confrontation, with the philosopher trying to slide out of a having been thrown like a snake getting free from a dead skin.
***
Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.
...
All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.