I. Hegel on ‘determination is negation’

As is well known, the ‘determination is negation’ principle emerges at the beginning of Hegel’s Logic, as part of the dialectical movement from pure being, to nothing, to becoming, to determinate being. Roughly speaking, here he argues that in order for what is to be anything more than an empty and abstract pure being (which is indistinguishable from nothing), and so be in a determinate manner, it must involve some negation—i.e., some sort of differentiation within it, whereby it contains some distinct elements that are heterogeneous in some way and so negate each other. The principle thus plays an important role within Hegel’s ontological position, where it is crucial to his case against Parmenidean monism, which treats reality as a ‘one’, lacking in any element of difference; rather, Hegel argues, reality must incorporate some element of differentiation, of distinctions within being, where without these ‘negations’ it would not comprise determinate being, but would be no more than the nothingness of pure being.

Now, in putting forward this position, Hegel seems to strongly associate himself with Spinoza, and to credit the latter with influencing his views. Thus, in the Science of Logic, he writes:Footnote ¹

Similarly, in the Encyclopedia Logic we find the following:

Not surprisingly, such comments have led to a common interpretation of Hegel’s relation to Spinoza on this issue, namely that in developing his position Hegel was following Spinoza’s lead. Charles Taylor thus represents a widespread view when he starts by setting out Hegel’s position along the lines I have suggested and then associates this with Spinoza:

But this means that being and non-being are joined together; for the only way to characterize determinate being is in terms of some property, and property terms can only be made intelligible by being opposed, contrasted to each other. In this sense Hegel takes up the Spinozan principle that all determination is negation. (Taylor Reference Taylor1975: 232)Footnote ³. In the secondary literature on Hegel, therefore, the idea that there is a positive connection between Hegel and Spinoza concerning this principle, notwithstanding their other differences, is well-entrenched.

But in fact, not everything is at it appears, where as we shall soon see, there are grounds for considerable doubt that Spinoza ever understood the principle in the way Hegel does. Now, of course, it has often been noted by Hegel scholars that he rewords the dictum, as Spinoza nowhere quite writes ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’—but this is frequently just put down to Hegel’s notoriously sloppy habits in giving quotations, and so signifies little.Footnote ⁴ Less frequently, some concern is expressed that perhaps Spinoza didn’t quite mean what Hegel means, but then this is not really explained or elaborated upon.Footnote ⁵ And in just a few cases, it is pointed out in more detail that Spinoza’s position is the complete opposite of Hegel’s—where it is this view that I now wish to defend, but in a way which is more sympathetic to Hegel than those who normally propound this position, who generally see Hegel as blind to this fact, or if not blind to it himself, as deliberately trying to obscure it from his readers in order to make it easier for him both to co-opt and criticize Spinoza for his own purposes.Footnote ⁶

II. Spinoza on ‘determination is negation’

Spinoza does not explicitly state the principle that determination is negation as such in his published writings, but in a letter to Jarig Jelles of 1674:

Nonetheless, the doctrine is also implied elsewhere, for example in Ethics 1p8s:

What position is Spinoza putting forward here, and what is his argument for it?

A crucial background idea is to be found in Descartes, where he writes in his fifth set of replies that ‘all limitation implies a negation of the infinite’.Footnote ⁸ With this in mind, we might set out Spinoza’s argument in the Jelles letter as follows:

It seems crucial to Spinoza’s view, therefore, that determination is a negation in the sense that it is a privation or taking away of being, as we move from the infinite to the finite.Footnote ⁹ This, certainly, is the point that is stressed by F. H. Jacobi, who did so much to generate interest in Spinoza in eighteenth century Germany:

But now we are faced by our puzzle, namely that Spinoza seems to take ‘determination is negation’ in a way that is opposite to Hegel. Whereas Hegel thinks that determination through negation is necessary for being in any real sense, Spinoza thinks that determination though negation relates to the non-being of what is determined in this way. Far from being at one on this issue, therefore, Hegel and Spinoza seem to be as far apart as possible. But if this is right, why did Hegel claim that his way of taking ‘determination is negation’ is ‘the proposition of Spinoza’?—where it is Hegel himself who seems to have misled many of his commentators here, who not unnaturally have taken his word for how things stood in relation to Spinoza.

I will now consider some possible answers to this puzzle.

III. Hegel and Spinoza on ‘determination is negation’

A first, and most obvious, answer is that perhaps Hegel just misread Spinoza and distorted the latter’s meaning through ignorance. This, however, is not very plausible, for two main reasons.

First, Hegel was very familiar with Jacobi’s writings on Spinoza, and as we have seen, Jacobi’s account gets Spinoza’s position on this matter right, so at the very least Hegel would have been exposed to an account very different from his own, rather than slipping into this through lack of awareness. Indeed, in his review of the third volume of Jacobi’s Works published in the Heidelberger Jahrbücher der Literatur in 1817, Hegel comments on this principle in relation to Jacobi, suggesting that he would have been perfectly well aware of the latter’s understanding of it.Footnote ¹⁰

Second, and even more significantly, in many of his own writings on Spinoza, Hegel himself offers a reading of the principle that is closer to Spinoza’s own—and moreover uses it to criticize Spinoza for thereby ending up with a monistic view of substance as a kind of Parmenidean one. This suggests that Hegel was perfectly well aware of how Spinoza meant the principle to be understood, as can be seen, for example, in this passage from Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy:

Hegel therefore shows himself to have been perfectly capable of offering a reading of the principle that was very different from his own way of using it, and of attributing this reading to Spinoza.

Moreover, in these discussions of Spinoza, where Hegel sees value in the principle, it is not because he reads it his way, but because he reads it as Spinoza intended. So, for Hegel, what makes the principle significant in Spinoza’s hands is not in showing that it can be used as an argument against Parmenidean monism, but because it establishes that the finite is not itself absolute, but must relate to the infinite qua substance—a view that Hegel himself endorses.Footnote ¹² Of course, and as we shall discuss further, Hegel also thinks that Spinoza gets this relation between the finite and infinite wrong in certain fundamental ways, in giving too much weight to the latter over the former—but still, where he deserves credit, and where the ‘determination is negation’ principle does good work, is in taking a step in the right direction:

What is remarkable here is that Hegel sees the context for the principle not as refuting monism, but as something much more Spinozistic, again suggesting that he knew well how Spinoza intended it to be taken, and how this differed from his own approach. So, it seems, we cannot hope to resolve our interpretative puzzle by holding that Hegel was unfamiliar with Spinoza’s thinking in this area, and got the attribution wrong through ignorance. In fact, our puzzle is now deepened yet further: given that he knew Spinoza’s position perfectly well, why did Hegel present his very different understanding of the principle as following in Spinoza’s footsteps?

Here a second answer might be offered: namely, that while Hegel thinks his own way of understanding the principle is a great insight, and while he recognized that it is very different from Spinoza’s manner of taking it, nonetheless Spinoza’s earlier conception of the principle made his own possible, which is why ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’ still deserves to be called ‘the proposition of Spinoza’, even though Hegel’s view of it diverges from the one Spinoza himself adopted.

Now, as we have just seen, this approach might fit the discussions where Hegel is reading the principle in a Spinozistic manner, where (in a way characteristic of his attitude to his predecessors) Hegel does seem to acknowledge that Spinoza was on to something important about how the infinite relates to the finite, but was too ‘one-sided’ in how he viewed that relation. So in this context, it makes sense to think of Hegel giving Spinoza some credit as a trail-blazer.Footnote ¹⁴ But when Hegel is using the principle as part of his refutation of Parmenidean monism, to claim that being requires negation, this position just seems too distant from Spinoza’s view to count as something the latter saw, albeit dimly. On the contrary, as we have been emphasising, it doesn’t seem to be Spinoza’s view in any way at all.Footnote ¹⁵ So, notwithstanding Hegel’s fondness for finding a place for all his predecessors within the big Hegelian tent, it would seem implausible to claim that this was his intention in claiming that the principle used in Hegel’s way is still somehow a descendent of Spinoza’s understanding of it for which Spinoza deserves acknowledgement.

It would seem, then, that to resolve our interpretative puzzle a more radical suggestion is required, which I now want to put forward as the right one: namely, that while Hegel undoubtedly held the doctrine that determination requires negation and that being requires determination, nonetheless when he himself actually refers to the ‘determination is negation’ principle, he meant it not in this sense, but rather in Spinoza’s—hence making it less surprising that he should attribute this principle to Spinoza, as in the contexts when he does so he was employing it in Spinoza’s way.

Clearly, to make this plausible, we need to look again at the places where Hegel mentions Spinoza in the context of his own arguments against pure being, and thus in a way that has suggested that he thought that Spinoza understood the principle in his Hegelian manner. I will now argue that while Hegel does indeed mention Spinoza in these discussions, he nonetheless does so when using the principle in Spinoza’s way, not his own, so that the puzzle can be dissolved by taking this approach.

The first and most important passage to be considered, therefore, comes from the Science of Logic which we cited previously, where the key sentence is: ‘Determinateness is negation posited as affirmative—this is the proposition of Spinoza: omnis determinatio est negatio’ [‘Die Bestimmtheit ist die Negation als affirmativ gesetzt—ist der Satz des Spinoza: Omnis determinatio est negatio’] (5: 120–21; SL: 113; translation modified). Now of course, this could mean: ‘negation is something affirmative, something that enables things to be’, which would be the standard, non-Spinozistic reading, which then makes it hard to see how it can be called ‘the proposition of Spinoza’. But, I suggest, the sentence could also be read a different way, when we take into account the paragraph that comes before it. In that paragraph Hegel has spoken about conceiving reality as ‘the absolute power in which everything determinate is absorbed’, and with it all negations, which is thus to have an affirmative view of reality itself according to which determinateness is treated as a privation. This, I suggest, means that we should read Hegel’s problematic sentence as saying that on Spinoza’s view of determinateness, negation can be viewed in conjunction with an affirmative view of reality and thus is posited by Spinoza in this manner, as it is taken as a deprivation of that reality qua absolute power, by being a limitation of what is. Thus, while on Spinoza’s view, determination is a negation, it goes along with an affirmative view of reality as such, for while it involves privation, it relates to a metaphysics of affirmation. This, then, would give us a Spinozistic view of this sentence and hence make it unproblematic for Hegel then to say that this is a view of Spinoza’s, because it is.

What is to be said in favour of this reading? First, it resolves our interpretative puzzle. Second, it seems to fit Hegel’s actual words without torturing them. But there is also a third reason: it makes sense of what Hegel says in the paragraph that immediately follows this sentence:

Now, taking ‘determination is negation’ in the Hegelian way, it is hard to see how ‘the unity of Spinoza’s substance—or that there is only one substance’ could be the ‘necessary consequence’. For the Hegelian way of taking this principle is just the idea that determination comes about through difference, where it is not at all clear why a unified substance should follow from this in a Spinozistic manner.Footnote ¹⁶ However, if we take the principle itself as used here in an equally Spinozistic way, this claim makes much more sense, and in fact is in line with the passages from the lectures on the history of philosophy: namely, that if determination is the negation of a prior affirmative being, this affirmative being itself lacks any internal difference and determinacy, so there is no determinate difference between its attributes. They are therefore distinguished only by an external intellect and substance in itself remains an undifferentiated unity or one. The unity of Spinoza’s substance thus follows directly from the idea that determination is negation, if we take that idea in Spinoza’s way. The logic of Hegel’s discussion here therefore seems to require that we read his use of the ‘determination is negation’ principle in this context as Spinozistic, even if elsewhere he used it for his own purposes in a different way.

Indeed, not only does this following paragraph seem to require this approach; so does the sentence which follows Hegel’s reference to the principle, which goes like this:

I would suggest that the clause ‘only, negation as such is formless abstraction’ again fits with my reading, as a warning against the Spinozistic approach suggested in the first sentence, namely, that for Spinoza on his way of taking the principle, negation is treated as no more than a formless abstraction, while on Hegel’s way it is not—again signaling that Hegel is intending the principle to be read here in a Spinozistic manner, not his own.

Hegel’s other main discussion of Spinoza in the Science of Logic may also be handled in a comparable way (6: 195; SL: 536). Here, after writing that ‘Determinateness is negation—is the absolute principle of Spinoza’s philosophy’, Hegel goes on: ‘this true and simple insight establishes the absolute unity of substance’. Again, as in the earlier discussion, this second remark only really makes sense if we take Hegel’s understanding of the principle here to be the Spinozistic one, as it is only from that that the ‘absolute unity’ of Spinoza’s substance really follows.Footnote ¹⁷

We may also look at the troublesome passage from the Encyclopedia Logic, which again I suggest can be dealt with in a similar manner. The crucial sentence from §91Z is ‘The basis of all determinacy is negation (omnis determinatio est negatio, as Spinoza says’. While standardly read as making the claim that Spinoza shares Hegel’s view regarding the relation between determination and negation, the sentence that follows in fact suggests otherwise: ‘Unthinking opinion considers determinate things to be merely positive and holds them fast in the form of being’. This, it seems, is making a Spinozistic point, against ‘unthinking opinion [das gedankenlose Meinen]’, which mistakenly holds that ordinary finite entities are all that is real and are ‘positive’ in their own right, without (like Spinoza) recognizing that they are in fact a negation of a larger totality, where it is this Spinozistic point that is taken up in Hegel’s claim that ‘the finite is ideal’. Here again, then, the context of Hegel’s reference to the ‘determination is negation’ principle suggests that he was using it in a way similar to Spinoza—which then of course dispels the mystery that he should refer to Spinoza at just this point, notwithstanding his different take on the principle when it is used elsewhere.

It seems, then, that a solution to our interpretative puzzle has been found.

IV. The British Idealists on ‘determination is negation’

I now want to consider how the British Idealists understood the position of Spinoza and Hegel on these issues, as I think this also sheds an interesting light on the puzzle we have discussed.

As we shall see, many of the British Idealists referred to the principle, and of course many of them were familiar with the work of Spinoza as well as Hegel.Footnote ¹⁸ As we shall also see, it also turns out that the principle is relevant to a significant divergence within British Idealism between monists (such as F. H. Bradley) and critics who accused British Idealism of monism or anti-individualism (such as Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison), and those who defended a more holistic position (such as John and Edward Caird). For, if the principle is taken in a Spinozistic way, it can provide an argument for monism, by suggesting that the finite is no more than a ‘falling away’ from the fundamental reality of an infinite being, which is itself undifferentiated. On the other hand, if the principle is taken in a more Hegelian way, it can provide a defence against this same monism, by suggesting that in lacking negation it would also lack the determination necessary to distinguish it from nothing. But, at the same time, the principle still allows for the infinite to be related to the finite in a dialectical manner of some sort, leading to a kind of dynamic holism of the type famously suggested in Hegel’s claim in the Preface to the Phenomenology—that the absolute needs to be conceived not only as substance, but also as subject.Footnote ¹⁹

Now, precisely because different readings of the principle were used to defend different positions, the British Idealists fully recognized that when Spinoza used the principle, it was not in defence of the Hegelian position that being requires determination, and thus that the latter view should not be taken as a Spinozistic doctrine. As a result, therefore, metaphysical holists like the Cairds treated Spinoza’s use of the principle as problematic, much as Hegel himself does in his lectures, as we have seen. So, the Cairds argue, while there are some tendencies in Spinoza that pull against this, in the end Spinoza must end up in an excessively monistic position that ultimately renders his position unstable and the tensions with less monistic aspects of his thought unresolved—so that, in the end, his position needs to move into a form of more stable and satisfactory Hegelianism.

This approach can be seen clearly in the following passage from John Caird:

Caird takes Spinoza’s approach to the doctrine of ‘determination is negation’ as symptomatic of Spinoza’s underlying difficulties:

Other Idealist commentators on Spinoza take a similar view, such as Edward Caird and H. H. Joachim.Footnote ²⁰ So, for several of the British Idealists with interests in both Hegel and Spinoza, they recognized how Spinoza’s principle that determination is negation should be understood within the latter’s philosophy, rather than reading his position in Hegelian terms as many contemporary commentators do. And these British Idealists also argued that precisely because of this, the principle causes problems from an Hegelian perspective, by leading Spinoza into a Parmenidean monism, no matter how much other aspects of his thought may have meant that he wanted to resist this.

On the other hand, other British Idealists who were apparently attracted to something resembling such monism, or who weren’t but nonetheless feared that idealism must succumb to it, tended to view the Spinozistic conception of the principle as the right one to adopt.

A case in point is Bradley. While he doesn’t cite the principle or refer to Spinoza in this context, it is arguable that he was close to Spinoza’s way of understanding the doctrine, in holding that all differentiation is a form of falsification of the underlying unity of the whole. Of course, for Bradley this doesn’t mean that this underlying unity is a mere ‘one’, as he also wants to allow that it contains some diversity. However, Bradley’s critics such as Pringle-Pattison feared that he could not consistently maintain this position, any more than could Spinoza. This point emerges clearly when Pringle-Pattison writes:

Thus, while Pringle-Pattison accepted that Hegel ‘dug philosophy’ out of the ‘pit of undifferentiated substance’, Bradley’s closeness to Spinoza on this issue meant that (despite himself) he put philosophy back in it again.

We have seen, then, that unlike some contemporary commentators, the British Idealist had a nuanced view of this issue, and one that seems to reflect the truth of the situation concerning the differences between Spinoza and Hegel. We have also seen how some of them sided with Hegel himself in using this issue to criticize Spinoza’s apparent monism, together with that of Bradley. In the final section, I turn to assessing the cogency of that critique.

V. Determination is negation and the problem of monism

It is clear that Hegel’s central objection to Spinoza is that he ends up in a Parmenidean position, with a conception of pure being as an undifferentiated and therefore empty one. But how is this Parmenidean reading of Spinoza meant to work, and is it fair? Some recent commentators on Spinoza have sought to defend him against Hegel’s charge, such as Yitzhak Melamed and Samuel Newlands.Footnote ²¹ How one sees this issue depends on what one takes Hegel’s argument to be, where this then depends on the role one sees for the ‘determination is negation’ principle within that argument. Having discussed the complexities of that principle, the hope now is that this can provide us with a helpful background in analysing and assessing Hegel’s objection.

One common way to understand that objection is as an argument to monism from acosmism, where (following Maimon)Footnote ²² this is taken to be the denial of the reality of finite things (qua cosmos), where that denial is then based on Spinoza’s version of the determination is negation principle. How, more precisely, might this argument be said to work?

A first way of setting it out might be as follows:

1. (1) All determination involves negation, in Spinoza’s sense—i.e., a deprivation of being.

2. (2) Finite things are determinate.

3. (3) Therefore, finite things involve negation as a deprivation of being.

4. (4) Therefore, because they involve determination and hence negation, they lack being.

5. (5) Therefore, finite things do not exist.

6. (6) Therefore, there is no universe of finite things (acosmism).

7. (7) Therefore, the infinite lacks any differentiation.

8. (8) Therefore, the infinite is a Parmenidean one.

So, because the ‘determination is negation’ principle leads Spinoza to deny being to finite things, he ends up with acosmism and hence monism.

But, if Hegel’s argument against Spinoza is taken in this way, then it would seem that it can be resisted fairly easily. First of all, there is a problem with the move from (1) to (5). For, even if determination involves some privation of being, this doesn’t mean that what is determinate ends up not existing at all—the ‘privation’ involved need not be full non-existence, but could just be a form or degree of reality that is somehow less that that pertaining to what is prior to such determination. Secondly, even if it is right that Spinoza is an acosmist in some sense, and so denies the reality of finite entities (so (5) is established), there are also problems with the move from (5) to (8), as monism can be avoided by attributing a plurality of properties or modes or attributes to the infinite instead, as is arguably Spinoza’s position. It seems, then, that this way of taking Hegel’s critique is of dubious cogency.

There might, however, be a second way to take Hegel’s argument which is more successful. This argument would focus on Hegel’s claim that Spinoza fails to derive or deduce plurality from his conception of the infinite properly, in a way that leaves the status of that plurality questionable or problematic. For example, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel remarks: ‘Spinoza does not indicate how these two [attributes, of thought and extension] proceed from the one substance … nor does say why he speaks only of two’ (VGP: 108; LHP: 158).Footnote ²³ So perhaps this idea could provide a key claim that can be used by Hegel to convict Spinoza of monism?Footnote ²⁴

However, I also think that this form of argument is not terribly convincing. Firstly, Spinoza does provide some account of how this link is meant to work, even if perhaps it is not very satisfying. So, he writes at Ethics 1p16:

Secondly, while Hegel does make this point concerning an absence of proof in Spinoza, it is not clear that Hegel is worried here about the monism issue. It seems more likely that he is making a different objection which he commonly raises against other philosophers, that a decent philosophical position can’t just take things for granted, which he seems to think Spinoza does here, in giving a weak argument for why the infinite must have a plurality of properties.Footnote ²⁵ But then his focus is on the way in which Spinoza’s position is not fully satisfying from the perspective of a speculative science, not with worries about its monism per se—so the concern seems somewhat misplaced.

In view of these misgivings, therefore, I therefore want to offer a third Hegelian argument, which turns more on the ‘determination is negation’ principle itself, and what we have learned about it so far. The central claim of this argument is this: precisely because Spinoza takes the principle his way, he therefore does not take it Hegel’s way, where the claim is that this way of taking it is necessary to move from pure being to determinate being, and thus to ‘escape’ the monism of the former. Thus, Spinoza is stuck at the level of pure being, with Parmenides, exactly because he thinks determination involves a privation of being, rather than seeing it (with Hegel) as a necessary condition for being. Thus, for Hegel, what leads Spinoza into monism is the same as what leads Parmenides into monism: both have a purely affirmative conception of being, from which negation is excluded (along the lines of Spinoza’s version of the principle), and so conceive of being as pure being rather than determinate being (for which one must accept Hegel’s version of the principle).

I think that this way of taking Hegel’s position is suggested by Stephen Houlgate when he writes:

The argument may therefore be put as follows:

1. (1) Spinoza holds that determination is a privation of being.

2. (2) He therefore holds that being itself is purely affirmative, lacking in any such determination through negation.

3. (3) But Hegel holds that being requires such determination.

4. (4) So for Hegel, Spinoza’s purely affirmative being is indistinguishable from nothing.

5. (5) Therefore, for Hegel, Spinoza’s being cannot contain any differentiation, and must just be an empty Parmenidean one.

Thus, on this account of the debate, it pivots precisely on the different views each has of the ‘determination is negation’ principle, in steps (1) and (3) respectively. In the end, then, on this account Hegel’s critique of Spinoza turns out to depend on which of them is right in their understanding of the principle—is determination through negation a privation of being as Spinoza holds, or a condition for it, as Hegel maintains?

Moreover, this third way of taking Hegel’s argument strengthens his hand in the earlier two. For, because Spinoza does not think that being gets to be at all through differentiation, there is no argument for why there should be a plurality of properties belonging to the infinite substance and not just one (cf. the second argument), where it is not possible for there to be just one property of substance with no negation, so this substance would be left propertyless, and hence an empty one (cf. the first argument). We have seen, then, how the debate between Hegel and Spinoza turns on this issue, and what work the ‘determination is negation’ principle can be taken to do.

Nonetheless, it could be argued, even when Hegel’s case against Spinoza is understood in these terms, it is still problematic. For some commentators have argued that Hegel makes a further important error in his handling of Spinoza’s position here.Footnote ²⁶ The error is not to mistake his Hegelian conception of the principle for Spinoza’s, but rather to take Spinoza’s principle to apply to all determination, and so to treat all determination as a privation of being—which of course leaves being determinateless and ‘empty’ in the way Hegel suggests. However, the claim is that Spinoza in the letter to Jelles is only talking about figure and perhaps by extension finite bodies as involving negation in his sense, but not about other aspects of substance, such as its attributes, which therefore need involve no such privation but can be viewed affirmatively. As a result, therefore, it can be argued that Spinoza does not have to view all determination as negation in a privative sense, but can in fact accept that some determination applies to substance, and so save it from being an empty one.

Now, fully to deal with this issue would require an almost complete account of Spinoza’s entire philosophy, to exactly gauge where his sympathies may be said to lie—and obviously this is not possible here. But let us grant for the sake of discussion that this criticism of Hegel is right, and that he is thus perhaps too quick to generalize from the letter to Jelles and even other related remarks of Spinoza’s,Footnote ²⁷ and thus too quick to conclude that Spinoza’s infinite substance must remain indeterminate. What would follow from this? Of course, one thing that would follow would be that Hegel’s claim to have somehow uncovered a fundamental difficulty with Spinoza’s thinking would be put in jeopardy, and so too would his related claim to have ‘got beyond’ Spinoza. But conversely, it could be argued, at a purely philosophical level (rather than an interpretative one) it would now rather look as if Hegel and Spinoza are broadly thinking along similar lines—namely, both would seem to agree that being cannot be a Parmenidean one, and that without some degree of differentiation, what is would be indistinguishable from what is not.Footnote ²⁸ Perhaps, then, the lesson really to be learned from this tangled history is to see where these two great metaphysical thinkers ultimately converge, rather than what fuels their apparent disagreements.