«Qué tipo de entidades son necesarias para hacer del mundo un mundo» [A propósito de Enciclopedia § 50] «What kind of beings are needed to make the world a world» [About Encyclopedia § 50]

Abstract

Hegel notoriously viewed Spinoza’s thought as a form of «acosmism», a topic which is here introduced by way of summoning the link between philosophy and world. Appropriately embedded in a succession of immediate contexts (Wolff, Platner, Maimon), the conceptual history of this notion leads to seeing the controversy surrounding it as a clash between opposite ways of understanding the «order of the world». Thereafter the Hegelian conception of the world is reconstructed along the claim that the absolute spirit overcomes the aporiae contrived by the objective spirit. This circumstance leads to perceive in the collision between Hegelian worldliness and Spinozist acosmicity the pitting of a «qualitative» temporality (of Christian-theological bent) against the merely extensive temporality implied by the homogeneous and isotropic universe of the new science. This outcome, in its turn, suggests ranging both models in the setting deployed by the antique «worldly wisdom» and the commitment to philosophy as «consolatio».