Anton Kabeshkin | Hegel and Spinoza on determinacy and negation

Hegel and Spinoza on determinacy and negation
Scholars have shown that Hegel interprets Spinoza’s dictum “determinatio negatio est” in a way that is nearly opposite to that of Spinoza. Whereas Spinoza understood negation as privation of being, so that being as such precedes negation, for Hegel negation is constitutive of any genuine being. Some scholars suggest that Hegel’s reversal of Spinoza’s position does not come from internal critique of the latter. I argue that in fact most of the early moves in Hegel’s Logic present an argument against Spinoza’s position. Hegel explicitly discusses the view that there are multiple attributes which are not constituted by negation in his critique of the doctrine of God as Inbegriff aller Realitäten. He claims that this doctrine collapses into the Parmenidean view of empty being. Why? In order for there to be multiple attributes that express reality but do not contain negation, they would have to differ from each other. Since they do not contain negation, these differences would not be constitutive of them. Now, what would be the reason for the attributes’ difference from each other? They would have to differ in virtue of their intrinsic nature, which would thus one-sidedly determine their relation to other attributes. Now, I argue that Hegel’s considerations on the being-for-itself and being-for-another in the chapter on Dasein of his Logic are supposed to undermine exactly this kind of one-sided determination by the intrinsic nature of something of its relation to something else.
Anton Kabeshkin earned his PhD in 2019 at JHU with a dissertation on Hegel's philosophy of nature and is currently working at the Universität Potsdam as a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter. He published multiple papers on Hegel and Schelling.
The international philosophical conference Between Substance & Subject. The Presence of Spinoza in Hegel (26-28 October 2023, AGRFT, Ljubljana) was organized by the University of Padua and the University of Ljubljana - Faculty of Arts & Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television. The conference was carried out as part of the project Hegel's Political Metaphysics (J6-2590), which is financed by the Slovenian Research Agency and will continue within the framework of the Hegel Congress 2024.
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