Modalities of the Absolute: Spinoza, Hegel, Marx

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The central focus of the proposed research is the relation between modal logic and the thinking of the Absolute in Spinoza, Hegel and Marx. It will ask how far Marx has a figure of the Absolute in his philosophy corresponding to the Third Kind of Knowledge in Spinoza, and to the Absolute Knowing (or the "Absolute Method") in Hegel. The research will investigate whether approaching all three philosophical systems through the problem of modal logic offers a complementary reading of the ways they engage with the problem of the absolute.The research will first compare Spinoza's Intuitive Knowledge (as intellectual love of God; identity between God and Nature) with Hegel's Absolute Knowing (beyond representational thought/separation of subject and object) and Immanent Self-Determination, and then both with the understanding of the Revolutionary Subject in Marx (going beyond the separation of subject(ivity) and object(ivity)). Investigating the convergences and divergences between them and following Balibar's reading of all three of them as transindividual thinkers who articulate ontology, politics, ethics and political economy as constitutive function of relations, this research will ask how far the methodological approaches to modal logic in all three philosophical systems bind together the absolute moments in each of them. By investigating whether the Absolute moments in all three systems propose an alternative modality to Aristotelian/Kantian/Enlightenment modal logic, the research will investigate how far this alternative logic allows these thinkers to propose an alternative notion of immanent social rationality. It will also ask whether this alternative notion of immanent social rationality can inform an interdisciplinary approach to human sociality as a potentially feminist politics of care/ethics immanent to social being, merging distinctive philosophical categories such as ontology, epistemology, politics and ethics.