Substance, Spirit, Struggle: From Spinoza through Hegel to Marx (and Beyond)

In this unlocked patreon episode Breht traces and explains a subterranean philosophical lineage running from Spinoza through Hegel to Marx and Louis Althusser. Beginning with Spinoza's conception of God or Nature as a single, immanent Substance, he explores how Hegel transforms Substance into a self-developing Subject, how Marx grounds the dialectic in material social life and class struggle, and how Althusser attempts to remove the final hidden Subject from Marxist theory.

Along the way, he examines the concept of immanent critique, Kant's transcendental idealism, Hegel's master-slave dialectic, Marx's materialist transformation of idealism, and Althusser's concepts of overdetermination, interpellation, theoretical anti-humanism, and history as a "process without a Subject."

What emerges is an ongoing struggle over immanence, contradiction, human agency, and whether history possesses either a sovereign author or a guaranteed destination.

Listen to these related episodes to learn more:

• Economics and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844

• Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

• The Nature of All Things: Spinoza's Philosophical Odyssey

• Intro to German Idealism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, & Hegel

• Hegelian Dialectics: Contradiction, Marxism, & the Freudian Unconscious

 

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