Giulia Bernard | Adequate Cognition between Hegel and Spinoza: A Threat to Activity?

Adequate Cognition between Hegel and Spinoza: A Threat to Activity?
It is hard to overestimate the family resemblances between the exposition of Hegel’s Idea and the expression of Spinoza’s substance. The “eternal Idea”, one reads at the end of the Encyclopaedia, “eternally remains active, engenders and enjoys itself” (§577). Similarly, blessedness for Spinoza consists in “Love of God, a Love which arises from the third kind of knowledge [and] must be related to the Mind insofar as it acts” (Ethica V, D42). Pivotal in the shared emphasis on activity is how these activities are differently achieved and performed. While Spinoza expounds a direct proportionality between adequate cognition and activity, according to Hegel philosophy seems to imply an attitude that is coupled with passivity - or even violence: it is “thought determinations” that have us “in [their] possession” (GW 21, 14). In this paper, I want to challenge this reading by confronting Spinoza’s thesis of the Mind actively enjoying divine Love and Hegel’s science as “absolute Bildung and discipline of consciousness”. Through the exam of some key features of Spinoza’s and Hegel’s methods, and of the shared understanding of science as implying emendatio, I aim to clarify the different kinds of ‘activity’ of adequate cognitions by means of their irreducibility to ‘activism’ and ‘objectivism’. This will eventually shed further light on the question of the actuality of cognition and, above all, of true freedom and philosophy.
Giulia Bernard is Research Fellow in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Padova, Italy. Her research spans the fields of Classical German Philosophy (Hegel, Kant, Schelling, and Jacobi), Metaphilosophy, and Philosophy of Religion.
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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