Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
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