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.THE SPINOZA LEGACYHegel s search for a rational foundation for his organic vision of theworld took place in several domains: metaphysics, epistemology,and the natural sciences.In the realm of metaphysics he saw hisorganic vision as the only means of explaining the fundamentalconundrum of monism: the relation between the one and many.In the field of epistemology he held that it is the only means tosolve the outstanding dualisms of Kant s and Fichte s idealism.Andin the field of natural sciences he saw it as the only means ofovercoming the persistent problems of mechanism.We shouldnow consider Hegel s metaphysical arguments for organicism; inlater sections we will examine his epistemological arguments(pp.100 7).In the realm of metaphysics Hegel s search for a rational founda-tion for his organic vision finally forced him to come to terms withSpinozism.Hegel s acquaintance with Spinoza goes back to hisearliest years in the Tübinger Stift.It was probably then that he readJacobi s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza.12 But it is striking how muchHegel seemed to have forgotten Spinoza during his Berne andFrankfurt years.He then saw Kant s doctrine of practical faith as theproper form of a rational religion.13 Only in his Frankfurt years didhe abandon this dour and rickety Kantian doctrine for the mysticalpantheism of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate.But even in this workthere is little trace of Spinozism.Hegel turned fully to Spinoza onlyin his early Jena years during his collaboration with Schelling, whohad been especially inspired by Spinoza, and who, even during hisFichtean phase, declared himself to be a Spinozist.But Hegel s turn-ing toward Spinozism was not simply the result of Schelling sinfluence.It fitted hand-in-glove with his own intention to findsome rational foundation for his organic vision.After all, therewere some deep affinities between Spinoza s doctrines and Hegel sThe Organic Worldview 91mystical pantheism; Hegel could only have admired Spinoza smonism, his immanent religion, and his intellectual love of God.Itwas indeed Spinoza who had first attempted to find a rational foun-dation and technical vocabulary for such doctrines.It is no acci-dent, then, that we find Hegel s first metaphysical writings in theJena years replete with Spinozist vocabulary and full of sympatheticreferences to Spinoza.Yet, for all his sympathy and affinity with Spinoza, there wereother respects in which Hegel was deeply at odds with him and hadto settle scores with him.Hegel could never proclaim, as Schellingonce did,  I have become a Spinozist! (Ich bin Spinozist geworden!).IfSpinoza s single universal substance was the starting point of phil-osophy, it could never be its goal or conclusion.For Hegel, therewere profound problems with Spinozism.For one thing, there wasits geometric method, its method of beginning with axioms anddefinitions and then rigorously reasoning from them.As a studentof Kant s Critique, Hegel saw the geometric method as a defunctremnant of the older rationalism, whose fallacies had been so ruth-lessly exposed in the Transcendental Dialectic. No philosophicalbeginning could look worse than to begin with a definition, asSpinoza does , Hegel wrote in his Differenzschrift (II 37/105).Thiswas already an implicit warning to Schelling, whose Presentation of MySystem had taken Spinoza s geometric method as its model.Foranother thing, Spinoza was an arch-mechanist; his model ofexplanation, and his concept of matter, were taken directly fromDescartes.Like Descartes, Spinoza held that the essence of matter isextension; and he saw the model of explanation as efficient causality,where the cause of an event is a prior event.In the Appendix to PartI of the Ethics Spinoza had explicitly rejected the older teleologicalmodel of explanation as anthropocentric.In the end, then, Spinoza ssingle universal substance was in fact nothing more than a giantmachine.Nothing could be further removed, then, from Hegel sorganic vision of the world.Hence Spinoza s philosophy was as much a challenge as it was a92 Hegelsupport for Hegel s organic metaphysics.The failure of Spinoza smethod, and his radical mechanism, made it necessary for Hegel todevelop a new foundation for his organic vision.But Spinoza ssystem presented not only a challenge but also an opportunity.Forthere was a fundamental weakness to Spinoza s philosophy, a ser-ious deficiency that Hegel exploited to the advantage of his ownorganic worldview.This was the ancient conundrum of the one andthe many, or how the world of difference and multiplicity everoriginates from primal unity.Spinoza did not solve this ancientproblem but only reinstated it, making its solution all the moreimperative.This becomes clear from a brief look at Spinoza s Ethics.According to Spinoza, all individual things exist in God (Ethica,Pt I, Prop.15), and are only modifications of his attributes (Pt I,Prop.25).But everything that follows from some attribute of Godmust be infinite and eternal (Pt I, Prop.21) [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]