“The shortcoming thus acknowledged to attach to the content turns out at the same time to be a shortcoming in respect of form. Spinoza puts substance at the head of his system, and defines it to be the unity of thought and extension, without demonstrating how he gets to this distinction, or how he traces it back to the unity of substance. The further treatment of the subject proceeds in what is called the mathematical method. Definitions and axioms are first laid down: after them comes a series of theorems, which are proved by an analytical reduction of them to these unproved postulates. Although the system of Spinoza, and that even by those who altogether reject its contents and results, is praised for the strict sequence of its method, such unqualified praise of the form is as little justified as an unqualified rejection of the content. The defect of the content is that the form is not known as immanent in it, and therefore only approaches it as an outer and subjective form. As intuitively accepted by Spinoza without a previous mediation by dialectic, Substance, as the universal negative power, is as it were a dark shapeless abyss which engulfs all definite content as radically null, and produces from itself nothing that has a positive subsistence of its own.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences: The Logic
G - L, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Baruch Spinoza 210
Dutch philosopher 1632–1677Related quotes
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences: The Logic
G - L, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, Ch. 6: Algebra
Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?"
A - F, Louis Althusser
As quoted in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 285
Context: We worship unity in trinity, and trinity in unity; neither confounding the person nor dividing the substance. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
I.
Outline of the Doctrine of Knowledge (1810)
Context: The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from all special and definite knowing, proceeds immediately upon Knowledge itself, in the essential unity in which it recognises Knowledge as existing; and it raises this question in the first place — How this Knowledge can come into being, and what it is in its inward and essential Nature?
The following must be apparent: — There is but One who is absolutely by and through himself, — namely, God; and God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life. He can neither change nor determine himself in aught within himself, nor become any other Being; for his Being contains within it all his Being and all possible Being, and neither within him nor out of him can any new Being arise.
"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (1965)
Context: Now he had form and substance.
He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades ago. But there it was, and there he was, a very definitely imposing personality. In certain circles — middle-class circles — it was thought disgusting. Vulgar ostentation. Anarchistic. Shameful.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) [original in German]
S - Z