Simon Gros

The international philosophical conference Between Substance & Subject: The Presence of Spinoza in Hegel, held from October 26 to 28, 2023, at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television (AGRFT) in Ljubljana, was a significant scholarly event co-organized by the University of Padua and the University of Ljubljana—specifically its Faculty of Arts and AGRFT. This academic gathering formed an integral part of the larger research initiative Hegel’s Political Metaphysics (J6-2590), funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. Bringing together a diverse body of scholars and researchers, the conference focused on exploring the complex intersections between the thought of Baruch Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with particular attention to the transformation of substance into subjectivity, the dialectical implications of their metaphysical positions, and the critical reevaluation of Hegel’s philosophical development through the lens of Spinozism.

Among the most conceptually ambitious and theoretically rigorous contributions was Armin Schneider’s presentation, which reoriented the interpretative framework through which the Hegel–Spinoza relationship is typically understood. Instead of following the conventional narrative that centers on the theme of negativity—especially determinate negation—as the central axis of their divergence, Schneider proposed a far-reaching shift of emphasis toward the concept of becoming as the deeper, more esoteric structure underpinning Hegel’s engagement with Spinoza. This move did not merely supplement the exoteric reading based on negativity but fundamentally restructured the interpretative space, insisting that becoming constitutes the very ontological and logical terrain where Hegel’s true philosophical departure from Spinoza is enacted.

To support this thesis, Schneider returned to the historical and conceptual matrix in which Hegel’s engagement with Spinoza first emerged, focusing in particular on the role played by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza. Jacobi’s critique of Spinozism—framed as a rejection of any philosophy that excludes the possibility of creatio ex nihilo or becoming from nothing—served both as a polemical attack on Enlightenment rationalism and as an unwitting enabler of the post-Kantian turn toward subjectivity. For Hegel, Jacobi’s diagnosis of Spinoza’s metaphysical closure offered a launching point for reconceiving substance not as a static, infinite identity but as an internally dynamic and self-negating process. In Spinoza, the substance is self-same, eternal, and necessary, with no room for ontological genesis or self-division. In contrast, Hegel’s project aims to ground subjectivity in a dialectical process of becoming, wherein being and nothing are not mutually exclusive, but rather mutually implicative.

This dialectic of being and nothing, according to Schneider, culminates in the concept of becoming, which redoubles itself into two interdependent dimensions: becoming proper, as the oscillation between being and nothing, and positing, as the reflexive act by which this movement establishes itself as a self-relating totality. Schneider emphasized that this structure of redoubled becoming is foundational to the objective part of Hegel’s Science of Logic, particularly in the transition from being to essence, and ultimately to the concept. It is precisely through this self-positing dynamic that Hegel is able to articulate a passage from the impersonal ontology of substance to the mediated interiority of subjectivity. This is not a transition that can be explained by the logic of negation alone; it requires an understanding of becoming as a structurally split, self-differentiating process, wherein identity emerges only through the negativity that divides and reconstitutes it.

This theoretical redoubling, however, is conspicuously absent from the more schematic and didactic Encyclopedia Logic. Schneider drew attention to this absence, arguing that the Encyclopedia omits not only a detailed articulation of the structure of becoming-in-positing but also any sustained attempt at a refutation of Spinozism. Such an omission is not incidental but symptomatic: it implies that Hegel’s genuine philosophical confrontation with Spinoza cannot be confined to the simplified exposition of negativity and must be situated in the deeper logical architecture developed in the Science of Logic. There, Spinoza’s metaphysics is not refuted in any conventional sense; rather, it is sublated—preserved, negated, and elevated—within the dialectical unfolding of becoming, now understood as the immanent engine of conceptual self-determination.

Schneider further stressed that Spinoza’s system, while logically rigorous and metaphysically comprehensive, lacks a presupposed subject. For Spinoza, the absolute is an infinite substance expressing itself through infinite attributes and finite modes, but it does so without any internal fissure or reflexivity that could ground subjectivity. Hegel, by contrast, views such internal fissure as constitutive. Becoming, for Hegel, is not a continuous flow or smooth transition; it is an internally riven process, marked by a dialectical tension between its own moments. This dialectical tension—between being and nothing, immediacy and mediation, substance and subject—is what allows the concept to emerge as the active principle of thought and reality.

In Schneider’s reconstruction, becoming is not simply a phase in a linear progression; it is a logically self-contained process that mediates its own presuppositions through positing. This notion of self-positing—whereby the process of becoming constitutes its own conditions—marks the crucial break with Spinozist determinism. While Spinoza’s substance does not generate itself through negation or division, Hegel’s concept of becoming does precisely that. It negates itself into nothingness and returns through this negation as posited being—thereby initiating the internal differentiation required for subjectivity. The dialectic of becoming is thus the mechanism through which Hegel reclaims substance not as an inert given, but as a dynamic movement that gives rise to essence, concept, and ultimately spirit.

Schneider also emphasized that the logic of becoming introduces a reflexivity into the dialectic that is wholly absent from Spinozist thought. Each moment within becoming contains the totality of its own unfolding—not as an external succession but as an immanent self-differentiation. This makes possible the Hegelian notion of freedom: not as arbitrary choice, but as the self-determined unfolding of the concept. In this light, the movement from substance to subject does not signify the abandonment of Spinozism but its transformation. Hegel’s dialectic does not reject Spinoza’s commitment to rational necessity; it reconfigures that necessity as a self-mediated process grounded in becoming.

This reinterpretation has broad implications for how one understands both the history of philosophy and the internal structure of Hegel’s system. Schneider’s analysis challenges the reductive view that sees Hegel’s critique of Spinoza as an oppositional stance based solely on the primacy of negativity. Instead, he proposes that Spinozism is preserved within Hegel’s logic as a moment of immediacy that must be overcome—not through external critique but through internal sublation. Spinoza’s absolute substance is not eradicated; it is shown to be incomplete, requiring the dialectical negativity of becoming to fulfill its own implicit telos. In this way, the Hegelian subject is not the negation of Spinozist substance but its self-transcendence.

By re-centering the debate on the concept of becoming, Schneider uncovers the esoteric core of Hegel’s engagement with Spinoza. This core is not readily accessible through the familiar themes of negation, contradiction, or opposition, but only through the nuanced dialectical movement that constitutes the self-positing of the concept. In this sense, becoming is not only a philosophical theme; it is the generative principle of Hegel’s entire system, the medium through which substance is elevated into subjectivity. Through this meticulous reconstruction, Schneider offers not merely an alternative reading of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza but a reconfiguration of the very philosophical terrain on which their confrontation unfolds.