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 major scholarly event jointly organized by the University of Padua and the University of Ljubljana—Faculty of Arts and AGRFT. The conference was conducted under the auspices of the research project Hegel’s Political Metaphysics (J6-2590), generously funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. The event brought together leading international scholars and featured keynote speakers such as Diogo Ferrer, Gilles Marmasse, Yitzhak Melamed, Vittorio Morfino, and Birgit Sandkaulen, all of whom contributed to a rich exploration of the enduring philosophical entanglement between Baruch Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

The thematic nucleus of the conference revolved around the constant yet often underappreciated presence of Spinoza within Hegel’s philosophical development. It is a widely accepted fact that Hegel passed through a Spinozist phase in his early years, during which Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance exercised a profound formative influence. Scholars have long recognized that this early Spinozism informed Hegel’s reflections on the unity of being and his rejection of abstract subjectivity. Similarly, Spinoza’s metaphysical framework undergirded the initial outlines of Hegel’s conception of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) during his years in Jena. However, as Zdravko Kobe’s analysis forcefully argues, a deeper and more original dimension of this influence lies in Spinoza’s political philosophy, particularly as articulated in the Tractatus Politicus, which helped shape Hegel’s mature theory of the concept (Begriff) and, by extension, the very architecture of his speculative system.

Kobe’s central thesis posits that the structural dualism Spinoza develops between aristocracy and monarchy as distinct regimes of political organization serves as a heuristic framework for understanding Hegel’s later distinction between Verstand (understanding) and Vernunft (reason). The argument proceeds from the claim that Spinoza’s political theory is not merely tangential to Hegel’s dialectical project, but rather forms a crucial substrate that allows Hegel to transcend the limitations of Spinoza’s own metaphysics. In this sense, Spinoza’s political writings offer the key not only to Hegel’s critique of substance as a static ontological category, but also to the genesis of the speculative concept that defines Hegelian rationality. Thus, Kobe inverts the standard narrative of Hegel’s break with Spinoza: it is not through rejection, but through internalization and transformation—mediated specifically by Spinoza’s political categories—that Hegel overcomes the metaphysics of substance.

The structural analogy Kobe identifies is anchored in Spinoza’s differentiation between aristocracy and monarchy as modalities of political rationality. In Spinoza, aristocracy is governed by an impersonal, external rationality enacted by an elite, insulated from the fluctuating wills of the multitude. This regime is coherent, yet rigid, and ultimately incapable of integrating the singularity and dynamism of subjective agency. Hegel’s notion of Verstand—the faculty of understanding—operates similarly: it is analytic, atomistic, and unable to transcend the externality of its categories. In contrast, monarchy in Spinoza’s political thought introduces a central subject of decision—a sovereign whose unity is not the negation of multiplicity, but its internalized integration. Hegel’s Vernunft, likewise, is the moment where the contradictions inherent in Verstand are sublated in a process of self-mediation that yields conceptual totality. The sovereign monarch in Spinoza corresponds, in this reading, to the speculative unity of reason in Hegel, in which oppositions are not annulled, but reconciled within a higher synthesis.

Kobe situates this theoretical transformation within the broader context of the post-Kantian reception of Spinoza, particularly the revival instigated by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who famously declared that one must either be a Spinozist or a nihilist. For the generation of German Idealists, Spinoza became the unavoidable point of departure—an emblem of systematic unity and a target of dialectical overcoming. While Schelling retained a largely affirmative stance toward Spinoza’s monism, Hegel’s engagement was more dialectical. Employing the method of bestimmte Negation—determinate negation—Hegel did not simply discard Spinoza’s ontology but reconfigured it by incorporating the logic of subjectivity into the very heart of the system. In this dialectical unfolding, Spinoza’s political philosophy provided the conceptual scaffolding for what would become Hegel’s radical rethinking of the concept, freedom, and rationality.

A pivotal component of Kobe’s reconstruction is Hegel’s theoretical shift from the classical ideal of the Greek polis—which he once revered as the highest expression of ethical life—to a more nuanced model of modern political rationality. Spinoza’s skepticism toward democratic governance, particularly his diagnosis of its internal instability, offered Hegel a compelling reason to rethink the viability of a political order based solely on the unmediated unity of individual and universal. Whereas Greek ethical life relied on the seamless integration of individual agency into a communal ethos, modernity, for Hegel, required a conceptual apparatus capable of safeguarding subjective freedom without dissolving social coherence. Spinoza’s monarchic model, predicated on the inclusion of the multitude through a unified sovereign, pointed toward a political logic that could maintain order while allowing for differentiation.

This dialectical motif reappears in Hegel’s treatment of the monarch in his Philosophy of Right. Far from being an arbitrary remnant of premodern governance, the monarch assumes the role of an irrational but necessary moment of decision. His authority, derived not from universal suffrage or rational deliberation but from hereditary succession, introduces a principle of pure positivity—a contingent singularity that anchors the otherwise abstract universality of law. For Kobe, this apparent irrationality is not a flaw, but a structural necessity within the speculative logic of the state: it marks the point where reason, in order to be effective, must pass through the moment of the arbitrary. This necessity of a singular decision—undeducible, ungrounded, but indispensable—mirrors the philosophical act of synthesis itself, which cannot be reduced to mechanical inference but must perform a creative integration of opposites.

Thus, Hegel’s speculative logic, as Kobe interprets it, is not a metaphysics of identity, but a deeply political ontology in which the very movement of the concept is patterned after the dynamics of governance and power. The Begriff, the central category of Hegelian thought, is not an abstraction divorced from reality, but a politically mediated structure that reflects the tension between unity and difference, authority and participation, necessity and contingency. Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus becomes, in this reading, not simply a work of political theory but a philosophical blueprint for the architecture of speculative reason itself.

By appropriating and internalizing the political distinctions Spinoza elaborated—particularly the relational dynamic between ruler and ruled—Hegel succeeds in formulating a logic that is at once metaphysical and political. Kobe’s contribution thus significantly reshapes the historiographical understanding of Hegel’s engagement with Spinoza. Rather than a simple dialectical antagonist, Spinoza emerges as an indispensable interlocutor whose political philosophy undergirds the speculative achievements of German Idealism. Hegel’s transcendence of Spinoza’s metaphysics does not consist in abandoning it, but in radicalizing its political implications and weaving them into the very fabric of his logic.

In the broader landscape of contemporary philosophical inquiry, Kobe’s thesis has wide-reaching implications. It challenges the false dichotomy between political theory and speculative metaphysics by demonstrating that the logic of the concept is irreducibly political. It offers a framework for rethinking subjectivity, sovereignty, and rationality in a manner that refuses to isolate philosophical reflection from the exigencies of political life. Finally, it revitalizes the study of Spinoza and Hegel by framing their relation not merely as a historical episode, but as an ongoing philosophical confrontation with the nature of freedom, power, and conceptual determination.

Zdravko Kobe, Professor of Classical German Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, has long been a prominent voice in the study of Kant and Hegel. His scholarly oeuvre includes the Automaton transcendentale trilogy, a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, as well as Three Studies in Kant’s Practical Philosophy. He has published extensively on the trajectory of German Idealism and its relevance to contemporary thought, and his translations of foundational texts—such as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Science of Logic and Elements of the Philosophy of Right—have made key philosophical works accessible to Slovenian audiences. His contribution at this conference deepens the understanding of how political structures underpin speculative thought and invites a reevaluation of the very terms on which philosophy thinks power, reason, and the concept.