Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 3 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
d. In the fourth place Spinoza defines attributes, which, as the moment
coming second to substance, belong to it. “By attribute I understand
that which the mind perceives as constituting the essence of substance;”
and to Spinoza this alone is true. This is an important determination;
the attribute is undoubtedly a determinateness, but at the same time it
remains a totality. Spinoza, like Descartes, accepts only two attributes,
thought and extension. The understanding grasps them as the reality of
substance, but the reality is not higher than the substance, for it
is only reality in the view of the understanding, which falls outside
substance. Each of the two ways of regarding substance—extension and
thought—contains no doubt the whole content of substance, but only in one
form, which the understanding brings with it; and for this very reason
both sides are in themselves identical and infinite. This is the true
completion; but where substance passes over into attribute is not stated.
e. The fifth definition has to do with what comes third in relation to
substance, the mode. “By mode I understand the affections of substance,
or that which is in something else, through the aid of which also it
is conceived.” Thus substance is conceived through itself; attribute
is not conceived through itself, but has a relation to the conceiving
understanding, in so far as this last conceives reality; mode, finally,
is what is not conceived as reality, but through and in something else.
These last three moments Spinoza ought not merely to have established
in this way as conceptions, he ought to have deduced them; they are
especially important, and correspond with what we more definitely
distinguish as universal, 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. The mode is the individual, the finite as such, which
enters into external connection with what is “other.” In this Spinoza
only descends to a lower stage, the mode is only the foregoing warped
and stunted. Spinoza’s defect is therefore this, that he takes the
third moment as mode alone, as a false individuality. True individuality
and subjectivity is not a mere retreat from the universal, not merely
something clearly determinate; for, as clearly determinate, it is at the
same time Being-for-itself, determined by itself alone. The individual,
the subjective, is even in being so the return to the universal; and
in that it is at home with itself, it is itself the universal. The
return consists simply and solely in the fact of the particular being
in itself the universal; to this return Spinoza did not attain. Rigid
substantiality is the last point he reached, not infinite form; this he