Contingency in Hegel and Spinoza
Hegel and Spinoza appear to be the paradigmatic thinkers of necessity. Spinoza writes quite directly that there is nothing contingent in nature (nullum datur contingens) and that everything is determined to exist from the necessity of the divine nature. We only refer to certain things as contingent because of the imperfection of our knowledge. Even when Spinoza criticizes the notion of Divine Providence, his does not argue in favor of irreducible contingency in the order of nature: what he criticizes is the idea that God acts according to his free will, arguing instead in favor of God’s determination of all things. - Hegel, on the other hand, explicitly endorsed the idea of Divine Providence, arguing that philosophy of history is inevitably a form of theodicy, and even claimed that the flow of history is sustained by the ‘cunning of reason.’ Hegel criticizes Spinoza’s system precisely for not allowing for the freedom of the subject. Nevertheless, when he discusses the historical repetition, he explicitly claims that Caesar had to be ‘repeated’ in Augustus Caesar and other Caesars in order that the idea of the rule of one was universally accepted as something necessary, and not merely accidental or contingent. - This paper will put pressure on both Spinoza and Hegel precisely by discussing the question of contingency, a question which has risen in prominence in contemporary philosophical debates. The claim is that the true relationship of their respective systems to contingency is far more nuanced than what appears at the first glance.
Gregor Moder is Senior Research Associate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Ljubljana. He won a 3-year research grant for a project on the theatricality of power, and he visited Princeton in 2020 as a Fulbright scholar to pursue this question in the writings of Foucault, Hegel, and Shakespeare. His recent works include Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern UP, 2017) and an edited volume on the Object of Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He co-founded Aufhebung-International Hegelian Association and served as its first president (2014-2020).
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.
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18 сен 2024
