ARTUR RIBEIRO DE MENDONÇA CARDOSO

The general objective of this dissertation is to compare the different ways in which both Hegel and Spinoza deal with the concept of “teleology”, that is, with the notion of final causality. This effort is part of a long tradition that opposes Hegelian and Spinozist philosophies in an indirect debate, built since 17th century Germany, based on Hegel’s own criticisms of Spinoza’s philosophy. First, we will understand how, in Spinoza’s philosophy, there is no place for final causes, and any notion of teleology would be seen as inadequate. Then, we will see how, in Hegelian logic, teleology is a crucial moment in the rational construction of nature. While, for one, immanent nature does not include final causes, for the other, teleology is fundamental to the conception of nature and natural beings. Having explained the two perspectives, we can confront them based on Hegel's criticisms of Spinoza's philosophy: in Hegel's eyes, the great flaw in Spinoza's philosophy lies in the misunderstanding of the productive dimension of negativity. Spinoza, according to Hegel, already had a notion of negativity that, if taken to its ultimate consequences, would have negation determined as its result, since “every determination is a negation”. The type of negativity that Hegel has in mind is that which constitutes the dialectical movement. From a Hegelian perspective, Spinoza's philosophy is a well-advanced but incomplete system. The lack of a final causality, in this sense, could be considered as a consequence of the insufficiency of Spinoza's philosophy. However, based on Mariana de Gainza's work, Spinoza: a materialist philosophy of positive infinity, we can consider a response to the Hegelian critique, since the notion of negativity used by Spinoza is fundamentally different from that which Hegel projected into his system: while for Hegel negativity is necessarily the driving force of the dialectical movement, for Spinoza it is the materialist element that denies any attempts to reduce the multiplicity of nature to a finite set of principles. The necessary infinite multiplicity of nature prevents the dialectical movement, in the Spinozist perspective, from being the only possible path to philosophizing. In this way, we can return to the difference in how both deal with the question of final causes and consider that the lack of a Spinozan teleology would not be a symptom of philosophical insufficiency, but evidence that Spinoza did not need a finalist causality to deal with questions similar to Hegel's.