Hegel, Spinoza, and a Theory of Experience as Closed

HEGEL, SPINOZA, AND A THEORY OF EXPERIENCE AS CLOSED IN ORDER TO supplant in certain contexts the overworked labels " rationalist " and " idealist," I propose the term "panist." Although aesthetically its introduction represents a regression, conceptually its application affords insight into a similarity obscured by the use of the former terms. By paniMn I mean the ability to comprehend reality by a univocal method. Through the lens of the panist concept we can focus on a kindred systematic feature in the theory of experience of Spinoza and Hegel. I do not, of course, mean to imply that there is not also a consequential opposition between rationalism and idealism. But it is one that has satisfactorily been brought to our attention by historians of philosophy. The claim of this essay is that, due to a drive towards a terminal system expressed by a unique method, both rationalist and idealist close off the possibility of an element of unknowing or indeterminacy in experience. In this respect they are alike panist. The prosecution of a method determines a metaphysical position . The medium is, in this case, an interesting part of the message. By a limited case study approach I shall show how this aim and this method converge to rule out the possibility of affirming experience as open-ended. By a different method, for example, one that admits of the analogy of being, this possibility is open. In the concluding section I shall briefly look at this possibility. But, first, we turn to a key methodological trait in the doctrine of Spinoza. Spinoza and the " more geometrico " Recall the significance of Descartes' mathematical reform of philosophy for the function of the God-concept in Spinoza's system. The temptation to find the significance of mathematics 435 436 LAURENCE FOSS for philosophical method as the ideal of demonstrative science, and thereby to elaborate a philosophy more geometrico, has consequences which, in retrospect at any rate, seem capable of being anticipated. Harness this temptation both to the religious conviction that all things necessarily proceed from the unitary essence of God and the rationalist's quest for a one-to-one mapping of the order of ideas onto the order of things ( Spinoza being both theistic and rationalistic) and it leads inevitably, we might say, to an Ethica More Geometrico Demonstrata. At least it does so in the hands of a rigorously systematic thinker. In Euclidean science every expression, barring an economical number of primitive ones, is-in an older (Aristotelian) terminology-said to be " caused by " the primitive expressions . This is the exemplar deductive system. Ideally, these primitive expressions are maximally economical in number, i.e., they are one in number, such that every proposition of the system is "caused by" the one underived (uncaused) primitive . Given these conditions, the ideal is, for certain minds, too overwhelming to resist. Recall, too, that not until recently was the distinction between a deductive system as an uninterpreted calculus and as convertible into a physical theory drawn. This is a distinction drawn by means of assigning a meaning to the primitive terms and sentences of the systemassigning values to its variables, we would now say. However, these primitives, or axioms, were formally regarded not as uninterpreted symbols but as expressions of truths corresponding with real things outside the systematic context in which the symbols occur. This relationship of theorems to primitives is not simply one of logical dedw~ibility (according to a set of formation and transformation rules) of one set of symbols from another set. Rather, it gives expression to a causal dependence (in being) of consequent to ground; the ground is the raison d'etre of the consequent. Thus the logical progression more geometrico of all propositions or ideals from the ultimately single proposition (idea) is reflective of the real HEGEL, SPINOZA, AND A THEORY OF EXPERIENCE 487 progression of all things from the unitary essence of God. The nature of the method which Spinoza chose for philosophy determines , as it were, antecedently the metaphysical lineaments of its solution. At any rate this is my thesis. In Spinoza's hands the philosophical enterprise now resembles an effort to elaborate, from a single fundamental axiom, all its knowledge...