There can be no doubt that issues about modality are at the very heart of Hegel’s philosophical enterprise. His views about the rational and monistic structure of reality, about nature and history, and about the nature of scientific (in particular, philosophical) reasoning all turn upon questions that concern the nature and the metaphysics of necessity, actuality, and possibility. Yet notwithstanding its importance for Hegel’s thought, we are far away from a detailed understanding of his views about modality. In particular, Hegel’s most extended discussion of modality, the chapter on ‘Actuality’ in the Science of Logic, has generally been misunderstood — or so I shall argue in this paper.Footnote 1
My aim is to offer an interpretation of this chapter that substantially differs from extant readings both with regard to important details of Hegel’s argument, and with regard to the very purpose that I ascribe to the entire chapter. Usually, the chapter is read as being primarily a presentation of Hegel’s positive views about modality.Footnote 2 In particular, it has often been claimed that Hegel introduces his positive account of necessity and contingency in this chapter — an account on which the necessity that governs reality requires the world to include contingent aspects.Footnote 3 By contrast, I will try to show that the overall intent of the chapter is critical, and that the primary target of Hegel’s critique is Spinoza. Footnote 4 On the reading that I will propose, the overall function of the chapter is to provide a critical assessment of the modal metaphysics of Spinozism.Footnote 5
The central tenet of Spinoza’s modal metaphysics is (at least on one very influential reading) the doctrine of necessitarianism — the view that all truths are necessary truths.Footnote 6 As I will reconstruct it, the modality chapter culminates in an argument against Spinozist necessitarianism.Footnote 7 This argument attempts to show that necessitarianism undermines the rationalist view of reality as thoroughly explainable which it is itself based on. The resulting critique of necessitarianism constitutes an essential element of Hegel’s engagement with Spinozism — an element which has been unduly neglected by extant accounts of Hegel’s critical reception of Spinoza.Footnote 8
Hegel’s chapter on modality falls into three sections, which correspond to three types of modality that Hegel distinguishes: ‘formal’, ‘real’, and ‘absolute’ modality. For the reading that I shall develop here, the third section, ‘Absolute necessity’, is the most important one: as I shall suggest, it is here that Hegel presents his argument against Spinoza’s necessitarianism. But in order to make the case for my reading, I will also have to address the other two sections. The section on absolute modality is closely linked to the preceding discussion of formal and real modality, and therefore can only adequately be discussed if an interpretation of those other sections is in place. In particular, I will single out elements in the discussions of formal and real modality that show how these sections together constitute a line of thought leading to necessitarianism — a line of thought that mirrors the cosmological argument for the existence of God.
The paper is organized as follows. Sections I and II are dedicated to Hegel’s discussion of formal and real modality in the first two sections of the modality chapter. Section III provides a preliminary discussion of Hegel’s notion of absolute modality. As I go on to argue in section IV, this notion can only be adequately understood if it is seen in the context of the cosmological argument and of Spinozism. On this basis, I will reconstruct Hegel’s argument against necessitarianism in section V. The textual case for my reading of the overarching function of the chapter (sections IV and V) rests on the interpretation that I give for Hegel’s discussion of the different types of modality in sections I-III. I therefore must ask the reader to bear with me while I go through this discussion, even though I will be able to address the actual purpose of Hegel’s analyses only in the later sections of the paper.
Some preliminary remarks are in place. First, it is crucial to see how strong a claim necessitarianism is, and in particular, that it is a much stronger claim than determinism, with which it is sometimes confused. Determinists hold (on one, sufficiently representative, interpretation) that the state of the world at a particular point of time is entailed by the conjunction of the laws of nature, and the state of the world at any point of time in the past. As advocates of compatibilist views about free will have traditionally argued, determinism does not entirely exclude contingency from reality. For determinism leaves open the possibility that the past and/or the laws of nature could have been different. Therefore, every actual state and event in the world could have been different in the conditional sense that it would have been different, had there been another past and/or other laws of nature. By contrast, necessitarianism does not leave room for such compatibilist manoeuvres, as it rejects every objective contingency. According to necessitarianism, everything, including the past and the laws of nature, is necessary; and nothing — not even the past and the laws of nature — could have been any other way than it actually is. (In other words, there are no unactualized possibilities.)
Second, for the sake of clarity, I will state formalized versions of Hegel’s claims throughout my discussion. The notation that I use includes the common modal operators ‘◻’ for necessity and ‘⋄’ for possibility, plus the additional operator ‘○’ for actuality (which Hegel treats as a modality in its own right). Both in formalizations and in plain talk, subscripts (‘possibleformal’, ‘⋄formal’ etc.) will serve to specify the relevant type of modality. ‘→’ stands for the material conditional, ‘↔’ for the material biconditional.
Finally, Hegel is not clear about whether his modal operators apply to proposition-like entities or to individuals. For the sake of simplicity, I will almost always treat his modal notions as propositional operators (which is the reading that usually fits best what he says), apart from one case which I will explicitly flag.
I. Formal modality
In accordance with his overall approach in the Science of Logic, Hegel structures his discussion of formal modality — as well as that of real and absolute modality — as a conceptual development that is not imposed by an external order, but is ‘immanent’ to the very categories at stake. This procedure leads Hegel to affirm very tight logical relations between different modal categories. Indeed, it is common to read Hegel’s account of formal modality as implying that the formal modalities — formal possibility, actuality, and necessity — are coextensional.Footnote 9 This implication contains the claim that everything that is formally actual is also formally necessary — and hence, necessitarianism with regard to formal modality. However, readings along this line face the problem that Hegel’s discussion of formal modality also includes statements implying that there are contingent facts — facts whose contrary is formally possible, too.Footnote 10 I therefore will pursue an alternative approach in the following discussion, and introduce a series of disambiguations which allow to understand Hegel’s formal modalities as extensionally disjoint (and hence, as non-necessitarian).
1. From actuality to formal possibility
Hegel’s ‘formal’ modality consists in a system of logical concepts that can be defined on the basis of propositional truth and logical consistency alone. It therefore corresponds to what is usually (both in the tradition and today) called ‘logical’ modality. The starting point for Hegel’s account of formal modality is the notion of actuality (sans phrase), understood as ‘nothing more than a being, or concrete existence in general’ (SL 11:381.31f./478). This is a broad, unqualified sense of actuality (as opposed to a specifically ‘formal’ notion of actuality which Hegel will later introduce). For the purpose of formalization, the broad sense of actuality (‘○’ without subscript) can be treated as equivalent to propositional truth (○p↔p).
On the basis of this notion of actuality, Hegel introduces a first notion of possibilityformal through the following inference rule: ‘What is actual is possible’ (SL 11:381.35/478). In formalized terms:
$$○p\to\diamondsuit _{{{\rm formal}}}\, p$$
The notion of possibilityformal is further specified by the following two-fold characterization, which will prove important for Hegel’s subsequent discussion: ‘Possibility includes, therefore, two moments. It has first the positive moment of being a being-reflected-into-itself’, and, second, ‘the negative meaning that possibility is … something deficient, that it points to an other, to actuality, and is completed in this other.’ (SL 11:382.6-11/479) I shall discuss both aspects in turn.
a. Hegel identifies the first or ‘positive’ aspect of formal possibility with consistency, or logical possibility: ‘In this formal sense of possibility, everything is possible that does not contradict itself; the realm of possibility is therefore limitless manifoldness.’ (SL 11:14-6/479) Thus, logical possibility constitutes one sense of formal possibility; for the sake of univocity, I will use the term ‘possibilitylogical’ (⋄logical) to refer to possibility in this sense. Put formally (‘⊥’ stands for any logical contradiction):
$$\diamondsuit _{{{\rm logical}}}\, p\leftrightarrow\,\sim(p\to \bot )$$
In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel points out that possibility in this sense is an ‘insufficient abstraction, something that, taken more concretely, pertains only to subjective thinking.’ (Enc. §143 Rem., 165.11f./213) For Hegel, such possibility is neither ontologically substantive, nor is insight into it of any proper epistemological value.Footnote 11
b. The negative aspect of formal possibility consists, according to Hegel, in the fact that what is (in some sense) formally possible is merely possible, and thus points to something else which complements it.Footnote 12 In the above-quoted summary of the distinction between both aspects, Hegel says that the merely possible is complemented by the actual. In this sense — which I will refer to as ‘unactualized possibility’ (⋄unactualized) —, something is ‘merely possible’ iff it is ‘possible but not actual’ (where the ‘possible’ in ‘possible but not actual’ ought to be read as ‘possiblelogical’, as no other relevant sense is yet available):
$$\diamondsuit _{{{\rm unactualized}}} \,p\leftrightarrow\diamondsuit _{{{\rm logical}}} \,p\,\&\sim{○}p$$
However, Hegel uses yet another notion of ‘mere possibility’ in his subsequent discussion. This notion comes up first when Hegel points out: ‘because this content [sc. of which possibility is predicated] is only a possible, an other opposite to it is equally possible. “A is A”; then, too, “– A is – A”’ (SL 11:383.5-7/480). Something is merely possible in this sense iff its contradictory is (logically) possible, too. I will refer to this kind of ‘mere possibility’ as ‘two-sided possibility’ (⋄two-sided). Two-sided possibility can be spelt out as follows:
$$\diamondsuit _{{{\rm two}{\hbox-}{\rm sided}}} \,p\leftrightarrow\diamondsuit _{{{\rm logical}}} \,p\,\&\,\diamondsuit _{{{\rm logical}}} \sim {p}$$
Note that this entails the following:Footnote 13
$$\diamondsuit _{{{\rm two}{\hbox-}{\rm sided}}} \,p\leftrightarrow\diamondsuit _{{{\rm two}{\hbox-}{\rm sided}}} \sim p$$
As it turns out, Hegel’s notion of possibilityformal is ambiguous between the distinct senses of possibilitylogical, possibilityunactualized, and possibilitytwo-sided.Footnote 14 The above proposition (1) holds only for possibilitylogical, and should therefore be specified as follows:
$${○}p\to\diamondsuit _{{{\rm logical}}}\, p.$$
2. From formal possibility to formal actuality
Having introduced the two aspects of formal possibility (i.e., possibilitylogical and mere possibility, which in turn comprises possibilityunactualized and possibilitytwo-sided), Hegel’s argument takes a rather surprising twist. For Hegel seems to be claiming now that in some sense the converse of (1*) (actuality entails formal possibility) is true, too — that in some sense, formal possibility entails actuality. As Hegel points out: ‘But this connection, in which the one possible also contains its other, is as such a contradiction that resolves itself. Now, since it is determined to be reflective and, as we have just seen, reflectively self-sublating, it is also therefore an immediate and it consequently becomes actuality.’ (SL 11:383.15-8/480)
Hegel seems to say here the followingFootnote 15:
$$\diamondsuit _{{{\rm two}{\hbox-}{\rm sided}}} \,p\to{○}p$$
But given Hegel’s account of possibilitytwo-sided, this claim would lead to a contradiction: taken together, (5) and (6) imply that the possibilitytwo-sided of p entails the actuality both of p and of ~p.
The passage becomes less mysterious if it is interpreted as claiming that the possibilitytwo-sided of a content entails the actuality not of that same content, but of some relevant content. If p is possibletwo-sided, both p and ~p are possiblelogical. But they cannot both be unactualized, as it follows from the law of the excluded middle that either p or ~p must be actual. Hence (‘⊻’ stands for exclusive disjunction):
$$\diamondsuit _{{{\rm two}{\hbox-}{\rm sided}}} \,p\to{○} p \,{⊻}\, {○}\sim p$$
Thus, ‘[e]verything possible has therefore in general a being or a concrete existence’ (SL 11:383.34f./480) insofar as for everything that is possibletwo-sided, either itself or its contradictory is actual.Footnote 16
At the same time, Hegel introduces here a new, specifically formal notion of actuality. The broad sense of actuality that Hegel has used so far is compatible with the kind of necessity that is complementary to possibilitylogical. Hegel does not explicitly introduce this notion, but it can easily be defined as follows:
$${◻}_{{{\rm logical}}}\, p\leftrightarrow\,\sim\diamondsuit _{{{\rm logical}}} \sim p$$
By contrast, Hegel uses the connection between possibilitytwo-sided and actuality that is expressed in (7) to define another, more restricted notion of actuality, which implies the logical possibility of the contrary, and hence does exclude logical necessity. He characterizes this form of actuality, which can be called formal actuality, as follows: ‘This actuality[formal] is not the first actuality [i.e., actuality in the broad sense] but reflected actuality, posited as unity of itself and possibility. What is actual [sc. in the broad sense] is as such possible[logical]; it is in immediate positive identity with possibility[logical]; but the latter has determined itself as mere [i.e. two-sided] possibility; consequently the actual[formal] is also determined as something merely possible [i.e. possibletwo-sided]’ (SL 11:383.19-23/480) – i.e.:
$${○}_{{{\rm formal}}} \,p\leftrightarrow_{{}} {○}p\,\&\,\diamondsuit _{{{\rm two}{\hbox-}{\rm sided}}}\, p.$$
3. Contingency, necessity and the PSR
According to (9), formal actuality is a conjunction of actuality in the broad sense, and possibilitytwo-sided. This explains why Hegel talks about a unity of actuality and possibility in this context — a unity that he characterizes as contingency (Zufälligkeit). His definition of contingency shows that it is modally equivalent to formal actuality: ‘The contingent is an actual which is at the same time determined as merely possible’ (SL 11:383.36f./480).Footnote 17
Thus, the notion of contingency does not by itself introduce a new modal operator. Rather, it serves to highlight a particular explanatory status. Hegel characterizes this explanatory status in a seemingly paradoxical manner: by characterizing something as contingent, we imply at the same time that it is groundless, and that it depends on something else (SL 11:384.17f./481).Footnote 18 This claim can be understood as follows. The contingent is groundless or undetermined because it could have been otherwise just as well — at least as a logical possibility. Yet since it could have been otherwise but actually is not otherwise, there must be a factor which makes it the case that the contingent is this way and not otherwise — a factor which necessitates the contingent: ‘The contingent is therefore necessary because the actual is determined as a possible; its immediacy is consequently sublated and is repelled into the ground or the in-itself, and into the grounded’ (SL 11:385.2-4/481).
It is crucial to realize that the relevant notion of necessity is not the complement of possibilitylogical, i.e., necessitylogical as defined in (8): the contingent clearly cannot be necessary in that sense.Footnote 19 Rather, the necessity Hegel is speaking of at the end of the section on formal modality is the weaker necessity with which a ground (e.g., a cause, a law of nature) makes it the case that from two contradictorily opposed, equally possiblelogical states of affairs one rather than the other is actual.Footnote 20
Hegel will further elucidate this notion of necessity (together with corresponding notions of possibility and actuality) in the subsequent section on real modality. For the moment, it is only important to note that Hegel’s discussion of contingency and necessity at the end of the section on formal modality relies on the following view: everything which is formally actual (hence, both actual and possibletwo-sided) is contingent, and therefore (given Hegel’s comments on contingency) also necessary qua being dependent on a ground. This is equivalent to the view that there are no contingent facts which are simply groundless — or, in other words, that there are no brute facts: a claim that is well-known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). Hence, the transition from formal to real modality implicitly presupposes the PSR. We will come back later in much more detail to the role that the PSR plays in Hegel’s discussion; in particular, I will argue that the PSR figures here as part of a position that Hegel is criticizing, rather than as a principle that he would himself endorse. But for the time being, we should merely take note that Hegel is reconstructing a system of modal concepts which relies at least partly on the PSR.
***
Figure 1 summarizes the extensional relations between the different formal modalities.
Hegel’s ‘formal’ modalities.
As the diagram illustrates, the disambiguations that I have introduced allow us to see Hegel’s formal modalities as not being coextensional. In particular, none of the two types of actuality that figure in this context is coextensional with necessity (as the necessitarian readings that I mentioned at the outset of this section would have it).
II. Real modality
Real modality belongs to processes in the empirical world: ‘Real actuality is as such at first the thing of many properties, the concretely existing world’ (SL 11:385.30f./482). Hegel uses metaphysical categories which he had discussed earlier on in the Science of Logic (a world which consists of reciprocally interacting things with dispositional properties) in order to characterize the actualreal as a system which is articulated by processes of efficiency: ‘What is actual can act; something announces its actuality by what it produces.’ (SL 11:385.34-386.1/482) These processes of efficiency consist of ground-consequence-relations, which form the metaphysical basis of the ‘real’ modalities.
The account of real modality that Hegel goes on to present combines this idea with the view, introduced at the end of the section on formal modality and motivated by the PSR, that whatever is logically contingent is necessary in so far as it is necessitated by a ground. On the resulting view, an object or state of affairs is possiblereal if and only if its necessary and jointly sufficient conditions are given. In this case, it cannot fail to be actualreal, and hence, is also necessaryreal: ‘[W]hat is really possible can no longer be otherwise; under the given conditions and circumstances, nothing else can take place. Real possibility and necessity are, therefore, only apparently distinguished.’ (SL 11:388.13-6/484)Footnote 21 It follows that the real modalities, unlike the formal modalities, are coextensional:Footnote 22
$$\diamondsuit _{{{\rm real}}} \,p\leftrightarrow{○}_{{{\rm real}}}\, p\leftrightarrow{◻}_{{{\rm real}}} \,p$$
Like the section on formal modality, Hegel’s discussion of real modality concludes by addressing the issue of contingency. Within the framework of real modality, contingency occurs insofar as real necessity is a relative form of necessity: ‘[T]his necessity is at the same time relative. – For it has a presupposition from which it begins; it takes its start from the contingent.’ (SL 11:388.21-23/484) The notion of a ‘relative’ or ‘hypothetical’ necessity is familiar from Leibniz’s compatibilist treatment of free will. It stands for the necessity of a conditional connection (◻(p→q)), whose antecedens may obtain or not.
Hegel’s point seems to be very similar. Necessityreal is the necessity with which something occurs if conditions are given that are jointly sufficient for it. But first, it is not necessarily the case that the conditions obtain: the entire process could have been different all along. Second, possibilityreal (together with the coextensional notions of actualityreal and necessityreal) requires compatibility with material constraints that derive from the existing natural kinds, and the laws of nature that follow from them.Footnote 23 In his 1817 lectures on ‘Logic and Metaphysics’, Hegel gives this example: ‘A flying horse is not impossible, can be thought. In relation to the air it is impossible that a horse qua horse can fly, hence an impossibility here as well.’Footnote 24 The reason why the horse cannot fly (at least under normal conditions on the earth) is that the natural kinds air and horse have properties (e.g., the relative density of air, the typical weight of a horse, the absence of a structural basis — such as wings — that could enable horses to fly) which, other things being equal, entail that horses cannot fly. But there could be different natural kinds than there actually are.
III. Absolute modality
Absolute modality is introduced as the counterpart to the relative modality that real modality turned out to be in the end. The actualabsolute is ‘an actuality which can no longer be otherwise, for its in-itself is not possibility but necessity itself.’ (SL 11:389.29f./486)Footnote 25 The necessityabsolute which is contained in actualityabsolute is not relative to contingent factors, and therefore not conditioned by anything external to it, but grounded in itself: ‘It is … because it is.’ (SL 11:391.14/487)
The interpretation of Hegel’s absolute modality is complicated by the fact that Hegel, as I have mentioned earlier, does not clearly distinguish between individuals and proposition-like entities as arguments of modal operators. Hegel’s earlier modal notions were most naturally read as operators that have proposition-like entities as their arguments. The case of necessityabsolute seems to be different. In Hegel’s framework, predicating necessityabsolute of a proposition p would be equivalent to saying that p is necessarylogical. That necessityabsolute requires more than that is clear from the following passage: ‘The category of absolutely necessary being involves the necessity partly of its being and partly of its determinations of content.’ (LPEG 323.19-21/153) The necessitylogical of a proposition does not ipso facto imply that something necessarily exists (‘necessity … of its being’). By contrast, both the necessity of ‘determinations of content’ and necessary existence naturally follow if necessityabsolute is understood as predicated of individuals.Footnote 26 On this reading, predicating necessityabsolute of an individual a entails, first, that a necessarily exists,Footnote 27 and second, that (possession of Cambridge properties and similar issues apart) everything that is true of a (its ‘determinations of content’) is necessarily true (the necessaryabsolute ‘cannot be otherwise’).
We can formulate both points together in terms of second-order logic (with ‘X’ as a predicate variable that ranges over a’s genuine properties and its existence):
$${\rm nec}_{{{\rm absolute}}} a\leftrightarrow\forall X(Xa\to{◻}_{{{\rm logical}}} Xa)$$
Once these implications of Hegel’s notion of necessityabsolute are appreciated, we can, for the sake of convenience, define a propositional necessity-operator ‘◻absolute’ that matches necabsolute in modal strength. To do so, it is enough to stipulate that the same entailment as in (11) holds with regard to the logical subject of the necessaryabsolute proposition:
$${◻}_{{{\rm absolute}}} Pa\leftrightarrow{◻}_{{{\rm logical}}} Pa\,\&\,\forall X(\sim\!(X\!=\!P)\to(Xa\to{◻}_{{{\rm logical}}} Xa))$$
Moreover, it is clear from Hegel’s discussion that he regards necessityabsolute and actualityabsolute as equivalent notions. Actualityabsolute is a form of actuality that ‘can no longer be otherwise’, and its ‘in-itself’, or essence, is necessity:
$${○}_{{{\rm absolute}}} Pa\leftrightarrow{◻}_{{{\rm absolute}}} Pa$$
Finally, in the case of the necessaryabsolute, possibility entails actuality (cf. SL 11:391.15). This applies to the actualabsolute, too: its actuality follows from its own possibility. Hence, there is a sense in which the actualabsolute can be characterized both as actual and as possible.Footnote 28 This motivates Hegel’s peculiar account of absolute possibility and contingency:
‘But because this actuality is posited to be absolute, that is to say, to be itself the unity of itself and possibility, it is consequently only an empty determination, or it is contingency. – This emptiness of its determination makes it into a mere possibility, one which can just as well be an other and is determined as possibility. But this possibility is itself absolute possibility, for it is precisely the possibility of being equally determined as possibility and actuality.’ (SL 11:389.31-390.1/486)
If our above interpretation of actualityabsolute is correct, the actualabsolute cannot be contingent or merely possible (either possibleunactualized or possibletwo-sided) in any robust sense. Rather, Hegel should be read here as employing epistemic notions of possibility and contingency. These notions express the idea that it is possible to characterize the actualabsoluteboth as possible and as actual (‘the possibility of being equally determined as possibility and actuality’), and that it is therefore contingent in which way it is characterized.Footnote 29 (Hegel’s reason for employing these epistemic notions of possibility and contingency becomes clearer once his implicit engagement with Spinoza’s necessitarianism is taken into account (see the following section): within necessitarianism, contingency is explained away as being merely a matter of our subjective attitudes.)Footnote 30
The epistemic notion of possibilityabsolute applies iff something is actualabsolute and necessaryabsolute. Therefore, the strict coextensionality of the absolute modalities extends to possibilityabsolute, too:
$${○}_{{{\rm absolute}}} Pa\leftrightarrow{◻}_{{{\rm absolute}}} Pa\leftrightarrow\diamondsuit _{{{\rm absolute}}} Pa.$$
IV. Contextualizing Hegel’s discussion
1. The cosmological argument
How is the transition from real to absolute modality motivated? We have seen before that real modality is introduced through an inference from (logical) contingency to (real) necessity that implicitly relies on the PSR. The transition from real to absolute modality can be similarly understood. For the section on real modality culminated in the notion of relative necessity: as it turned out, necessityreal is relative to factors that are themselves contingent (namely, the existing natural kinds and the past). According to the PSR, these factors stand themselves in need of an explanation. At this point, it won’t help to cite yet another factor that is only relatively necessary. Rather, the overarching process of relative necessityreal needs itself to be grounded in something that itself could no longer by any other way. This is precisely the kind of entity that displays the modal characteristics of necessityabsolute. Hence, Hegel’s transition from real to absolute modality, too, implicitly relies on the PSR.
It will easily be seen that Hegel is following here a familiar line of thought — namely, the ‘cosmological’ argument for the existence of God, or the argument ‘ex contingentia mundi’, according to which the existence of contingent objects entails the existence of a necessarily existent being that explains them.Footnote 31 While Hegel does not make this connection explicit, he hints at it in the section titles of the chapter (‘Contingency or Formal actuality, possibility, and necessity’; ‘Relative necessity or Real actuality, possibility, and necessity’; ‘Absolute necessity’). In these titles, the threefold division into formal, real and absolute modality is overlaid by another threefold sequence: contingency — relative necessity — absolute necessity. Hegel himself uses these very terms in the extensive discussion of the cosmological argument that he offers in lectures 10 to 16 of his Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God. As Hegel points out there,Footnote 32 the cosmological argument (1) starts from the observation that ‘worldly things’ (LPEG 280.13/101) are contingent, (2) explains these things in terms of the ‘external and relative necessity’ (LPEG 282.4/103) of causal laws, and (3) explains this necessity, in its turn, in virtue of an ‘absolutely necessary essence’ (LPEG 280.5/101) of the world, or God. Although Hegel does not explicitly state so, both the move from (1) to (2) and the move from (2) to (3) rely on the PSR.
What should we make of this connection with the cosmological argument? At first glance, it may suggest that Hegel’s notion of necessityabsolute is meant to refer to a traditional theist conception of God as ens necessarium.Footnote 33 On such a view, there is only one necessary being, God; while God is the explanatory ground of all truths about finite objects (through a decision of his will), these truths remain contingent, because God could have decided otherwise. However, such an account would not only be incompatible with Hegel’s notion of necessityabsolute (see (11) above), it is also contradicted by Hegel’s subsequent discussion. For in the second half of the section on absolute modality (SL 11:391.18-392.25), Hegel goes on to characterize the necessaryabsolute as a comprehensive unity which encompasses an ‘existing manifoldness’ (‘seyende Mannichfaltigkeit’) (SL 11:391.21/487) of independent objects or ‘actualities’ (‘Wirklichkeiten’) (SL 11:391.28/487). The independent actualities which are said here to be contained within the necessaryabsolute are specified in a twofold way.
a. First, the objects in question are characterized by Hegel as independent. They are said to exist as ‘free actualities, neither of which reflectively shines in the other, nor will either allow in it a trace of its reference to the other; grounded in itself, each is the necessary in itself.’ (SL 11:391.28-30/487) So the objects in question themselves possess full-blown necessityabsolute: they necessarily exist, and are self-grounding. Hegel captures the reciprocal isolation of these ‘actualities’ by describing necessityabsolute as blind (SL 11:392.25/488).
b. At the same time, necessityabsolute constitutes the underlying ‘essence’ (SL 11:391.39/488) of those apparently independent objects. When this essence exits from its hiddenness, or its being ‘averse to light’ (SL 11:392.1/488), it becomes manifest in the fact that the individual objects perish, and suffer a ‘blind collapse into otherness’ (SL 11:392.18/488) or ‘nothing’.Footnote 34 As Hegel also says that this manifestation makes visible both what the individual objects really are, and what the ‘essence’ itself really is (SL 11:392.4/488), he seems to imply that the essence or necessaryabsolute unity that had been said to comprehend the individual objects, is itself nothing else than the very passing away of those objects. This second characterization seems to contradict the first, as it negates any independent, self-grounding character of the objects in question.
At first sight, the only thing that becomes clear from this part of Hegel’s discussion is that the theist reading of Hegel’s absolute modality cannot be adequate: according to point a. not only the overarching ‘essence’, but also the manifold individuals are necessaryabsolute.Footnote 35 But how is the puzzling characterization of finite objects as self-grounding, necessary entities motivated? Why does Hegel present this characterization together with a further one (b.) that seems to directly contradict it? Is the talk about ‘blind’ necessity meant critically? If so, what is the target of the critique? And last but not least, how does this puzzling section relate to the rest of Hegel’s chapter on modality? The reconstruction that I offer in the remainder of this paper will provide one possible way of answering these questions.
2. Spinoza
A solution for the problems that arise from Hegel’s puzzling treatment of absolute modality can be gained from Hegel’s discussion of the cosmological argument in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and his Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God. In both texts, Hegel offers a reading on which this argument is directly related to Spinozism. For as Hegel points out, the argument establishes the idea that the Absolute can be characterized in terms of the category of necessityabsolute. Hegel believes that there is a particular class of philosophical positions which has spelt out the consequences of this idea regarding the relation between God and finite objects:
‘The consistent working-out of the category of absolute necessity is to be looked for in systems that start from abstract thought. The working-out concerns the relation of this principle to the manifoldness of the natural and spiritual world. If absolute necessity as the solely true and genuine actuality serves as the foundation, in what relation do worldly things stand to it?’ (LPEG 308.36-309.4/134f.)
In Hegel’s subsequent discussion, it becomes clear what ‘systems’ he has in mind here: systems in which necessityabsolute is ‘hypostasized … as universal being or substance’ (LPEG 309.11f./135), or ‘systems of substantiality’ (LPEG 312.6/138) — the most important being Spinozism.Footnote 36 (In addition to Spinozism, Hegel mentions Eleatic monism: like many authors before him, he takes Spinoza and the Eleatics to share the same basic metaphysical views.)Footnote 37 According to such systems, finite objects are modes or ‘accidents’ of the Substance that pass away and give rise to other modes (LPR II 171n./266n.), whereas the Substance is the ‘unity of this process itself’, or the ‘necessity’ that ‘causes coming-about to pass over into passing away and vice versa’ (ibid.). In the Science of Logic, Hegel analyses this structure in his discussion of ‘Substance’: it is precisely this category that issues from Hegel's account of necessityabsolute (SL 11:392.27/488), and it is anticipated by the characterization of the necessaryabsolute as ‘essence’ that contains individuals which come into being and pass away.Footnote 38
So on the view that Hegel presents in his lectures, and that apparently forms the background for the discussion in the Science of Logic, Hegel believes that the cosmological argument leads, if consequently ‘worked out’, to Spinozism. Of course, this is not a trivial claim. Hegel’s justification for it can be reconstructed in two steps. First, Hegel can be seen as arguing that the cosmological argument entails necessitarianism. For it explains individual states or events in terms of nomological facts and causal antecedents; these factors are, in their turn, explained in terms of God as their absolutely necessary ground. But if God is really supposed to explain why the laws and the causal series are the way they are, rather than being otherwise, he must necessitate those laws and causal series — and, via them, the individual states and events that are explained by them. Any account on which God could also have brought about a different set of laws, and a different causal series, would not satisfy the PSR, for it would leave open the question why God has brought about the actual world rather than its possible alternative.
Hence, all actual facts about finite objects follow necessarily from God: there is a necessary consequence relation such that necessarily, if God exists, precisely those facts about finite objects obtain which actually do obtain. The necessity of this consequence relation must be unconditional necessity — otherwise, there would be a sense in which the relation could fail to obtain, and the PSR would require an explanation of why it actually obtains, rather than not. In the framework of the modal notions from Hegel’s ‘Actuality’ chapter, this unconditional necessity can only be logical necessity. Therefore (with ‘y’ ranging over finite objects, ‘X’ ranging over genuine properties and existence, and ‘E!’ as existence predicate:):
$$\forall Xy(Xy\to{◻}_{{{\rm logical}}} (E\rot 350{!}\,({\rm God})\!\to\! Xy))$$
Spinoza accepts a principle akin to axiom (K) of modern modal logic:Footnote 39
$${◻}({p}\!\to\!{q})\to({◻}{p}\!\to\!{◻}{q})$$
Since God’s existence is, according to the cosmological argument, logically necessary, it follows from this principle and (15) that:
$$\forall Xy(Xy\to{◻}_{{{\rm logical}}} Xy)$$
But this means that all individuals that (17) quantifies over — i.e., all finite objects — satisfy the condition for necessityabsolute stated on the right-hand side of the biconditional (11). Hence, all finite objects are necessaryabsolute: by virtue of the necessary consequence relation expressed in (15), they ‘inherit’ necessityabsolute from God, or the Substance. This is tantamount to a form of necessitarianism.Footnote 40
(It is important to notice that unlike facts about God or the Substance, facts about finite objects normally include a temporal index. In particular, this is the case with facts about the existence of finite objects. Hence, the absolute necessity of finite objects that has resulted from this argument does not imply that they are eternal. They exist necessarily in the sense that the fact that they exist during the determinate lapse of time during which they actually exist is necessary.)
In a second step, Hegel seems to argue that the resulting view entails Spinozist monism, too. As this additional claim is less important for my subsequent discussion than the point about necessitarianism, it will suffice to briefly sketch how Hegel seems to be reasoning here. It is an important consequence of the first part of the argument that God is an explanatory ground which necessitates everything real. As such, God is an all-pervasive power. He determines finite reality so much that he constitutes the very ‘subsisting of things’ (LPEG 309.13/135).Footnote 41 Thus, Hegel seems to assume that the total explanatory dependence of finite objects from God entails that they are totally ontologically dependent from God, too. Lacking any ontological independence, finite objects cannot possess substantiality. Therefore, the only entity that properly exists is God, and finite objects are only modes of the divine Substance.
I conclude that the textual evidence from Hegel’s lectures suggests the following two points. First, Hegel believes that Spinozism (together with other, roughly equivalent ‘systems of substantiality’, like Eleatic monism) is the most consequent way to spell out the metaphysical view of the Absolute and its relation to finite entities that emerges from the cosmological argument. Second, both the overall structure of the ‘Actuality’ chapter in the Science of Logic, and the puzzling account of the necessaryabsolute as including a manifold of finite entities, are part of a critical reconstruction of Spinozism — more precisely, the modal dimension of Spinozism. In the next section, I turn to the question of how precisely Hegel’s critique of this position should be understood.
V. Hegel’s argument against necessitarianism
We are finally in a position to address Hegel’s critique of the modal dimension of Spinozism — i.e., Spinoza’s necessitarianism — in which the ‘Actuality’ chapter of the Science of Logic, according to my previous argument, culminates. We have already seen that for Hegel, both the cosmological argument and Spinozist necessitarianism are underpinned by the rationalist hope that we can explain contingent or relatively necessary states of affairs by interpreting them as necessary consequences of a necessarily existing being. On the reading that I will propose, Hegel’s aim at the end of the ‘Actuality’ chapter is to show that necessitarianism actually precludes the possibility of giving adequate explanatory accounts of facts about finite reality.
My reconstruction of Hegel’s argument for this claim turns on the two contrasting ways in which Hegel characterizes, as we have seen in section IV.1, finite entities in the context of necessityabsolute. First, Hegel described those entities — within Spinozism: finite modes — as possessing themselves both necessityabsolute, and ontological independence. Second, he characterized them as elements in a process of becoming and passing away that he identified with the overarching ‘essence’ — in Spinozist terms: the Substance. Let us address both descriptions in turn.
Regarding the characterization of finite modes as necessaryabsolute and ontologically independent, we have already seen why Hegel can believe that finite modes possess absolute necessity: they inherit it from the Substance. But why can Hegel claim that each such mode is not only ‘the necessary in itself’, but also ‘grounded in itself’ (SL 11:391.28-30/487)?
I believe that Hegel’s own comments on this claim, hermetic though they are, can help to identify an answer to this question. In particular, the following passage deserves scrutiny:
‘Necessity as essence is concealed in this being; the reciprocal contact of these actualities appears, therefore, as an empty externality; the actuality of the one in the other is the possibility which is only possibility, contingency. For being is posited as absolutely necessary, as the self-mediation which is the absolute negation of mediation-through-other, or being which is identical only with being; consequently, an other that has actuality in being, is therefore determined as something merely possible, as empty positedness.’ (SL 11:391.30-37/487f.)
According to this passage, the fact that a finite mode M1 possesses the modal status of necessityabsolute is incompatible with an ‘actuality of the one in the other’, or an ‘other that has actuality in being’ — that is, presumably, with M1 being the realization of a possibility (more precisely, possibilityreal) which another mode M2 gives rise to. On this reading, the relation of ‘realization’ in question would be a relation of ground and consequence — hence, an explanatory relation between finite modes. Given the necessityabsolute of all finite modes, Hegel claims, such a relation would be ‘something merely possible’, ‘contingency’, or an ‘empty positedness’. ‘Possibility’ can be read in this formulation as possibilityabsolute, i.e., as an epistemic possibility to describe a given object or state of affairs in different ways. Yet since Hegel also talks about ‘contingency’ and ‘empty positedness’, the possible description would seem to lack concrete content, and be a mere subjective construction.Footnote 42
Why should the fact that finite modes are necessaryabsolute exclude that they can meaningfully be described as standing in explanatory relations to other finite modes? According to Hegel’s reconstruction of Spinoza’s necessitarianism, (a) all truths about finite modes follow with necessitylogical from the fact that the Substance exists. At the same time, Spinoza also holds that (b) at least a broad range of truths about every given finite mode M1, including the fact that it exists during a determinate lapse of time, have their direct explanation in causal relations between M1 and other finite modes M2, M3 etc. Hegel’s worry is, on the reading I want to propose, that there is an important conflict between (a) and (b).
If (a) is accepted, all truths about any given finite mode M1 are necessarylogical. Unlike truths about the Substance, they are not so merely in virtue of M1’s essence; M1 is not itself a causa sui, and the truths about M1 could be otherwise, if they are only considered with respect to M1’s essence. But if, in addition, the necessary existence of the Substance and its consequence relations to M1 (which themselves follow from the essence of the Substance) are taken into account, truths about M1are logically necessary. Now this seems to imply that the necessary existence of the Substance plus its consequence relations to M1 offer a full explanation of all truths about M1: taken together, they are sufficient for all truths about M1 to obtain. But in that case, the explanatory relations between finite modes that are postulated in (b) become explanatorily idle. Explanatory grounds serve to make understandable why something is the way it actually is, rather than being any other way that it could possibly be. If there is already an explanation in place which entails that the explanandum has to be this and not any other way, there is nothing left to explain. If this is the point that Hegel is making here, he is entitled to describe finite modes as independent or self-grounding in a relative sense: they are ontologically independent with regard to each other, since they do not stand in mutual explanatory relations to each other.Footnote 43
However, this does not on its own suffice to show that Spinozism (and more generally, the rationalist metaphysics of ‘substantiality’ that is summarized in the cosmological argument) leaves no space for satisfactory explanations of facts about finite entities. For there is at first sight no reason why such explanations could not be given in terms of the direct dependence of such entities on God. It is in the second of the two characterizations of finite modes distinguished above that Hegel turns to the relation between finite modes and the Substance. In order to complete our reconstruction of his argument, we therefore have to turn to this part of his discussion now.
As we have already seen, Hegel characterizes in this part of his discussion the passing-away of finite modes as manifestation of the Substance, or the necessaryabsolute ‘essence’. On his reading, the Substance is not something over and above the process of passing-away of finite modes; rather, it is that process itself. The subsequent chapter on ‘The absolute relation’ further develops this account — now explicitly under the Spinozist heading of ‘The relation of substantiality’ —, and describes the Substance as ‘power’: ‘Substance manifests itself through the actuality, with the content of the latter into which it translates the possible, as creative power, and, through the possibility to which it reduces the actual, as destructive power.’ (SL 11:395.18-20/491) So the Substance is a ‘power’ to cause finite reality — and given necessitarianism, a power to cause precisely the finite reality that there is, and none other.
What consequences does this have for the possibility to give explanations for facts about finite modes? I believe that Hegel’s answer to this question becomes best visible when he draws, in related contexts, a connection between the Spinozist view of finite reality, and the ancient Greek fatalist belief in destiny.Footnote 44
As Hegel describes it, a characteristic expression of fatalism is to comment the course of things by making statements like ‘This is how things are’, or ‘It is necessarily so’.Footnote 45 Fatalists might just as well use the schema:
$$p,\,{\rm because \ it \ is \ destiny\ that}\ p.$$
(18) has the form of an explanation for p. And for a fatalist who holds that destiny is the metaphysical ground of all facts about finite entities, an assertion of the form (18) would even correctly indicate a sufficient reason for p. Nevertheless, it would be quite inappropriate to understand that assertion as an attempt to make p understandable. The point of the traditional idea of a destiny seems to be rather that there is nothing to understand about what happens in finite reality. An assertion of the form (18) would therefore normally be read not as proposing a way of understanding p, but as expressing a frame of mind which has ‘abandoned arguments in terms of causes and purposes’ (LPR II 69/163), or the quest for explanations in general.
In order to fully appreciate the point that Hegel is making by relating necessitarianism to fatalism, we have to ask why this is so — why is postulating a destiny not an explanatory endeavour? First, it may be replied, an explanation of the form ‘p, because it follows from A that p’ enables us to understand why p only if we can also understand in what way p follows from A. For instance, if A is a law of nature and p an observed regularity, we can explain p on the basis of A only if we can derive p from A. It seems obvious that in the case of fatalism, no such understanding is given at all, as it would contradict the idea of a blind fate.
Second, there is a further reason why statements of the form (18) do not qualify as explanations. When we invoke destiny, we presuppose that destiny cannot be any other way — not because there is a reason why it is as it is, but simply because it necessarily is the way it is. Hence, even if the fatalist could somehow ‘derive’ determinate facts from destiny, the mere idea that it is destiny which necessitates those facts implies that we could not possibly give any explanation of why destiny makes it the case that this, rather than something else, happens.
Let us now turn back to rationalist necessitarianism. Given the necessitarian account of the Substance as power to cause precisely this finite reality, rationalists can give explanations of facts about finite reality by simply using the following form of explanation:
$$\eqalignno{&p,\,{\rm because}\ {\rm the}\ {\rm Substance}\ {\rm is}\ {\rm a}\ {\rm power}\ {\rm that}\ {\rm is}\ {\rm necessarily}\ {\rm manifested}\ \atop{\rm in}\ {\rm a}\ {\rm reality}\ {\rm in}\ {\rm which}\ p,$$
which amounts to the same as:
$$p,\,{\rm because}\ {\rm it}\ {\rm follows}\ {\rm from}\ {\rm God} \rsquo {\rm ’s}\ {\rm essence}\ {\rm that}\ p.$$
Hegel’s point seems to be that such explanations have hardly more explanatory power than the fatalist statements of the form (18). For the same points that explained why ‘destiny’ is not an explanatory notion apply here as well. First, rationalists, too, will always (or almost always) be unable to spell out the connection in virtue of which the explanandum follows from the explanans. Second, even if rationalists were able to spell out the connection between the explanans and the explanandum, the resulting explanations would still remain deficient (just like in the case of fatalism). In order to spell out why the explanandum follows from the explanans, rationalists would have to identify determinate features that characterize the divine power or essence, and that are responsible for the consequence that p. But then we can apply the PSR once more, and ask why the divine essence includes these features. This question cannot be possibly given an answer. For the Substance, qua causa sui, is supposed to be self-grounding, and to be fully explained by its essence. Hence, the determinate features of that essence cannot themselves depend on something more fundamental. But since we can nevertheless raise explanatory questions about them, the explanations of facts about finite reality that are based on those features will remain incomplete.
This completes my reconstruction of Hegel’s argument in the final part of the ‘Actuality’ chapter: for if the last point is sound, Hegel is right to claim that rationalist necessitarianism does not only preclude (partial) explanations of facts about finite modes in terms of other finite modes, but also explanations of such facts in terms of their dependence on the Substance.Footnote 46 This result would undermine rationalist necessitarianism, for the latter view is ultimately motivated, at least on Hegel’s reconstruction, by the PSR. I do not mean to claim that the argument that I have ascribed to Hegel does not leave Spinozists without possible countermoves; nor can I possibly address here the question to what extent Hegel’s critique relies on an adequate interpretation of Spinoza. But at least, it should have become clear that underneath the surface of the ‘Actuality’ chapter in the Science of Logic, Hegel undertakes a detailed critical engagement with Spinoza’s modal metaphysics.Footnote 47
