Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 97

losophy with mediation and concretion in Christianity: “Through the agency of

Christianity concrete individuality is in the modern world present throughout

in spirit. But in spite of the infinite demands on the part of the concrete, sub-

stance with Spinoza is not yet determined as in itself concrete.”^25 The temporal

inscription signaled by Hegel’s “yet” exemplifies the supersessionary logic that

structures his reading of Spinoza throughout. Just as Judaism is “not yet” Chris-

tianity, Spinoza is “not yet” Hegel.^26

Faulting Spinoza for starting from formal definitions instead of deducing the

truth of his claims, Hegel aligns Spinoza with Jewish abstraction and formalism

in contrast to Christian and Hegelian concrete universal determination: “The

last three moments [substance, attribute, and mode (my addition)] Spinoza

ought not merely to have established in this way as conceptions, he ought to

have deduced them; they... correspond with what we... distinguish as univer-

sal, particular and individual. They must not, however, be taken as formal, but

in their true concrete sense; the concrete universal is substance, the concrete

particular is the concrete species; the Father and Son in the Christian dogma

are similarly particular, but each of them contains the whole nature of God, only

under a different form.”^27 Hegel reads Spinoza’s mode, the individual and fi-

nite form of substance, as substance manqué rather than as a true self-division

and mediation of universal substance with the concrete. Instead of differentiat-

ing itself and taking on the the form of concrete manifestations, substance—in

the form of the Spinozan mode—“only descends to a lower stage, the mode is

only the foregoing [that is, substance] warped and stunted. Spinoza’s defect

is therefore this, that he takes the third moment as mode alone, as a false indi-

viduality.”^28 In contrast to the false individuality and subjectivity of Spinoza’s

mode, which is “a mere retreat from the universal,” the true individuality and

subjectivity is “at the same time Being-for-itself, determined by itself alone.”

Such particularity is “the return to the universal and in that it is at home with

itself, it is itself the universal.... [T]o this return Spinoza did not attain. Rigid

substantiality is the last point he reached, not infinite form.”^29 Hegel’s remarks

are replete with Christian overtones: Spinoza cannot overcome quintessentially

Jewish unhappy consciousness and alienation. With the notion of substance at

its core, Spinoza’s is a philosophy of sublimity that awaits completion in Hegel’s

philosophical mediation.

At other moments Hegel contrasts Spinozan with Christian subjectivity even

more explicitly, contending that Spinoza understands God only as substance

and not, in contrast to Christianity, as spirit and subject.^30 In Spinoza’s philoso-

phy “it may with justice be objected that God is conceived only as Substance,

and not as Spirit, as concrete. The independence of the human soul is therein also