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Stony Brook University SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... The Specter of Spinoza: The Legacy of the Pantheism Controversy in Hegel’s Thought Dissertation Presented by Harrison Fluss to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University December 2016 Copyright by Harrison Fluss 2016 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Harrison Fluss We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Allegra de Laurentiis – Dissertation Advisor Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy Jeffrey Edwards - Chairperson of Defense Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy Andrew Platt - Internal Reader Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy Stephen Houlgate – External Reader Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Nancy Goroff Interim Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation The Specter of Spinoza: The Legacy of the Pantheism Controversy in Hegel’s Thought by Harrison Fluss Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University 2016 This dissertation seeks to trace Hegel’s shifting attitudes towards Spinoza, and its significance for later interpretations of the Hegel-Spinoza relationship. In contrast to virtually all other approaches, it will be argued that Hegel’s earlier defense of Spinoza in Faith and Knowledge (1802) was superior to Hegel’s interpretation of Spinoza shaped after his break with Schelling. There is precious little in the Anglophone literature that compares and contrasts the approaches of the young and “mature” Hegel regarding Spinoza’s metaphysics. In most discussions, the young Hegel’s views on Spinoza are mentioned, but only perfunctorily, and not granted a sustained analysis. This hurts our understanding of Hegel’s relationship with Spinoza in multiple ways, but it also obscures the deeper connections between these two thinkers made clearer in Hegel’s earlier writings. iii For Samantha iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………………vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: Spinoza’s Bones 1.1. Lessing’s Secret ………………………………………………………………………….16 1.2. Jacobi’s Critique of Spinoza 1.2.1 The Impossibility of Substance …………………………………………………...23 1.2.2 (Non)-Knowledge of God ………………………………………………………...29 1.2.3 The Hordes of Reason……………………………………………………………37 1.3. Jacobi’s Religious Atheism ………………………………………………………………44 Chapter Two: Spinoza’s Cube 2.1. Tübingen Spinozism ……………………………………………………………………...51 2.2. Hegel’s Acquaintance with Spinoza ……………………………………………………...54 2.3. Kant Spinozified ………………………………………………………………………….59 2.4. That Worthy Sentry of the Town Walls …………………………………………………..61 2.5. Spinozistic Froth …………………………………………………………………………75 2.6. Spinoza’s Turtle ………………………………………………………………………….79 2.7. The Double-Headed Eagle ……………………………………………………………….87 Chapter Three: Spinoza’s Abyss 3.1. The Party of Jacobi ………………………………………………………………………93 3.2. From Bamberg to Heidelberg …………………………………………………………..100 3.3. Switching Sides …………………………………………………………………………102 3.4. Hegel’s (New) Critique of Jacobi ………………………………………………………110 3.5. Jacobian Dialectics ……………………………………………………………………..113 v 3.6. The Much Maligned Shade ……………………………………………………………..118 3.7. Spinozist and Protestant Cultures ……………………………………………………....124 3.8. Hegel’s Esoteric Spinozism ……………………………………………………………..128 Chapter Four: Spinoza’s Spirit 4.1. Friedrich Tholuck ………………………………………………………………………138 4.2. The Dead Dog Spinoza…………………………………………………………………140 4.3. Spinoza in The Science of Logic 4.3.1 Benedictus from Elea, or Spinoza as Parmenides ……………………………...144 4.3.2 Determinate and Absolute Negation ……………………………………………146 4.3.3 Spinoza sive Shiva ………………………………………………………………147 4.3.4 On Method ……………………………………………………………………...149 4.4. Subject as Substance 4.4.1 determinatio negatio est………………………………………………………...150 4.4.2 EIp16 ……………………………………………………………………………151 4.4.3 Faith and Knowledge Revisited ………………………………………………...158 4.5. Enter Feuerbach ………………………………………………………………………..160 4.6. Enter Schelling 4.6.1 Schelling’s Jacobian Critique of Spinoza ………………………………………168 4.6.2 Schelling’s Jacobian Critique of Hegel ………………………………………...172 4.6.3 Schelling’s Counter-Tradition: Pascal, Hamann, Jacobi ………………………175 4.7 Purging the Dragon Seed ……………………………………………………………….177 Epilogue: Left-Hegelians vs. Left-Heideggerians on the Spinoza-Hegel Connection ……..180 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………...188 vi Acknowledgments This dissertation marks a break from my previous master’s thesis on Spinoza’s relationship to Hegelian philosophy. Conversations with David Landon Frim were the “proximate cause” of my transition from being highly critical of Spinoza to one that appreciated Spinoza as a dialectical thinker. Landon, together with Hamad Mohamed Al-Rayes, Miles Hentrup, Soren Whited, and Wakagi Takahashi were among my most important friends and philosophical interlocutors at Stony Brook. We were all educated in German Idealism together. I want to thank Anna Stizmann, Alyssa Adamson, Chris Fremaux, Andrew Dobbyn, Brendan Conuel, Johanna Schaufeld, Alexander Najman, and Ethan Hallerman for their intellectual support and friendship. From the journal of Historical Materialism , I would also like to thank Peter Thomas and Sara Farris for their support and criticism. Benjamin Noys and Ishay Landa provided extensive commentary for different drafts of the thesis, and Alex Steinberg, Manfred Baum, Peter Hallward, Timothy Brennan, Zachary Kimes, Jeffrey Bernstein, Borna Radnik, and Doug Greene’s willingness to engage with the dissertation is appreciated. I am indebted to Allegra de Laurentiis, Jeff Edwards, Andrew Platt, and Stephen Houlgate for agreeing to be part of my doctoral committee. My advisor professor de Laurentiis has been with me every step of the way throughout my doctoral career, and along with professor Edwards has been a model teacher. Besides my committee, professor Harvey Cormier has challenged me to refine my commitment to rationalism and I am thankful for his intellectual friendship. I would also like to acknowledge my professors at Florida Atlantic University, Clevis Headley and Marina Banchetti, for the early encouragement they gave to pursue philosophy as a discipline. To my family, I would like to extend my warmest thanks and love, especially to my brother Joshua, my parents David and Deborah, and my grandparents Judith, Carol, and Carl. To vii Mark and Molly Miller, thank you for housing me during my deepest phase of hermetic dissertation writing. I dedicate this dissertation to my partner, Samantha Miller. She has endured many stressful days and sleepless nights as I pored over Spinoza and Hegel, and her patience and love more than anything else have helped me to write this thesis. viii ix Introduction The common ground of social and spiritual freedom is morality, the highest good, the “perception of God,” as Spinoza puts it, or the self-consciousness of the “Absolute Spirit,” as the Hegelians ineptly put it. It is the spirit’s consciousness of its likeness to itself in its becoming something else, the overcoming of otherness as fixed, the transformation of determined nature into self-determination. Without all this, neither equality nor inner freedom is possible. ---Moses Hess , “ Philosophy of the Act,” 1843 The Hegelian dialectic is, to be sure, the ultimate word in philosophy and hence there is all the more need to divest it of the mystical aura given it by Hegel…Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him. --Marx to Lassalle, 1858 This dissertation seeks to trace Hegel’s shifting attitude towards Spinoza, and its significance for later interpretations of the Hegel-Spinoza relationship. In contrast to virtually all other approaches, it will be argued here that Hegel’s earlier defense of Spinoza against Jacobi in Faith and Knowledge (1802) was superior in its understanding of Spinozistic substance to the interpretation Hegel shaped after his break with Schelling in 1807. There is precious little in the Anglophone literature that compares and contrasts the approaches of the young and “mature” Hegel regarding Spinoza’s metaphysics. Indeed, in most discussions, the young Hegel’s views on Spinoza are mentioned perfunctorily, but are not granted a sustained analysis. 1 This hurts our understanding of Hegel’s relationship with Spinoza in multiple ways, but it also obscures the deeper connections between these two thinkers made clearer in Hegel’s earlier writings. Hegel never reckoned with the earlier positions he held on Spinoza after his break with 1 Despite many illuminating discussions on the Hegel-Spinoza connection, the two most recent anthologies on Spinoza and German Idealism contain no sustained engagement of Hegel’s early reception of Spinoza. See Hasana Sharp and Jason Smith’s Between Hegel and Spinoza: A Volume of Critical Essays (London: Continuum, 2012) and see Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed’s Spinoza and German Idealism (New York: Cambridge, 2015). 1 Schelling, and while the young Hegel
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