Abstract

This essay intends to discuss the starting point of Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza. According to Hegel, Spinoza’s idea doesn’t manage, even though it wants to, to give an absolute foundation to difference and self-conscious singularity; that is why the Dutch thinker didn’t reach the specificity of the modem conception of freedom, as it is represented by Christianity and effectively developed in modernity by the mediation of the particularity in the civil-bourgeois society. Hegel hopes to demonstrate his thesis analyzing Spinoza’s concepts of substance, attributes and modes: there is not between them, according to Hegel’s criticism, an immanent negative development. Consequently, Spinoza’s thought ends up in an impasse: or the finite modes keep a juxtaposed existence to substance or they annihilate themselves because of it. To Hegel, it is the second alternative that characterizes Spinoza’s thought.