Gregor Moder : Hegel and Spinoza
Channel: pmilat
Date: 2016-07-06

* MaMa, Zagreb / 05.07.2016. *

Hegel and Spinoza are two giants of philosophy of the Modern Age who inspired generations of scholars and thinkers and instigated two of the most influential philosophical traditions that persist in theoretical combats to this day. Just as German Idealism of the 18th and 19th century legitimated its own project by an attempt to supersede the (perceived) determinacy of Spinoza’s system and secure within it a place for freedom of the subject, so one could say that the French Materialism of the 20th century — Althusser, Deleuze, etc. — justified itself by rejecting Hegel and fervently employing Spinoza as the ultimate champion of anti-Hegelianism. Even though Pierre Macherey sought to transcend this dichotomy in his Hegel or Spinoza (2011), the title of his book rather describes the current state of affairs in the theory: that of either Hegel or Spinoza, or even of Hegel versus Spinoza. This mutual theoretical rejection is perhaps nowhere quite as evident as in the controversies between contemporary Deleuzians and Lacanians.

The focus of this lecture is to take a closer look at the concept of teleology. For Spinoza, the illusion of the final cause is the defining illusion that prevents humans from adequately understanding their relation to the conditions of their existence. This allowed Louis Althusser to claim that his theory of ideology was in all essential point already present in Spinoza. At the same time, telos and teleology (Zweck, Zweckmässigkeit) are central concepts of Hegel’s philosophy; this was, in fact, the main point of Heidegger’s critique of ‘the onto-theological’ structure of metaphysics, but also one of the major reasons for the rejection of Hegel in French post-war thought. In this lecture, however, Moder will try to demonstrate that Hegel was just as critical of what he called ‘external’ teleology as Spinoza, Nietzsche and Althusser were. What he argued for with the concept of teleology was rather the idea of the self-determination of the concept—which is perhaps not incompatible with Spinoza’s own philosophical interests.

Gregor Moder works as a researcher and teaches Philosophy of Art at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a member of the editorial board of Problemi, a prominent Slovenian journal for philosophy, psychoanalysis and culture, and also the author of Hegel and Spinoza (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2013, in German) and Comic Love: Shakespeare, Hegel, Lacan (Ljubljana: DTP, 2016, in Slovenian). The English version of Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL: NUP).