Antítesis - Revista iberoamericana de estudios hegelianos

The World, the Void: Anti-blackness in Hegel's Philosophy of History.

2023-07-25T10:40:26+02:00

This essay traces the logical structure of anti-blackness central to Hegel’s philosophy of history, which infamously posits Africa as outside of world or universal history (Weltgeschichte). Through a reading of the concepts of the world (Welt) and the void (das Leeren) as the logical underpinning of the anti-blackness in Hegel’s philosophy of history, the essay offers a critical evaluation of the Hegelian understanding of the Old and the New World. In dialogue with Rei Terada, Angelica Nuzzo, and Rocío Zambrana’s recent work, the essay also specifies such anti-blackness as a central aspect of the onto-epistemic rather than normative thrust of Hegel’s idealism.

Hegel, Latin America and the failed Aufhebung of coloniality

2023-07-24T11:50:36+02:00

For some time now, scholars have been discussing the scope and implications of imperialism, Eurocentrism, and racism within the Hegelian discourse. Our paper follows this same line of enquiry in an attempt to understand the role of the colonial matrix in Hegel's juridical and political thought, as well as the Hegelian affirmation of a necessary overcoming of the colonial moment. Our hypothesis is that colonial expansion does not function merely as an escape valve to the congenital maladjustments of capitalism, but it is situated at the speculative heart of modern consciousness, enabling the self-reflection of European society. Thus, beyond the institution of the colony in its strict sense, the Hegelian text accounts for a coloniality immanent to the very civilizing dynamics of civil-bourgeois society that persists even in the very movement of the independence of the new American nations. The normative horizon of nineteenth-century imperialism not only dictates the forms of colonial domination, but also organizes the modalities and graduality of the emancipation of the new countries and their inclusion in the concert of nations of the modern capitalist world. In this panorama, the Latin American condition is an anomaly. In contrast to what happens in the United States, the independences of the South of the continent show a deficient suppression-overcoming of the colony, which results in a structural instability of the institutional forms of modern rationality. In this sense, the Hegelian diagnosis of Latin America allows us to think about the reproduction of the civilizational paradigm in post-independence State construction, as well as the structuring function of the colonial fracture within liberal democratic societies. In order to reconstruct the Hegelian assessment of Latin America, we will begin our work by investigating Hegel's characterization of colonialism in his Lessons on the Philosophy of Right and on the Philosophy of History. Firstly, we will analyze the inherent relation between the colonial institution and the regime of capitalist production, which goes far beyond a simple external and indefinite reproduction of accumulation and shapes the very self-definition of modern capitalism as a historical principle. Second, we will reconstruct the differentiation made by Hegel between two very different models of colonization, one based on the expansion of territorial dominion in favor of a determined political and religious identity - which is paradigmatically expressed in the conquest and evangelization of America - and the other based on the globalization of a social logic - mercantile and capitalist - which formulates its mission based on the task of civilizing the peoples of the world. Finally, we will address the passages in which Hegel describes the Latin American political conjuncture as the scenario of a permanent vacillation of republican institutions and of a constant return of an unsublimated violence under the civilized forms of social rationality.

Has the American continent been "the land of the future"?

2023-10-21T23:41:09+02:00

By considering America to be a «new» continent «by virtue of its wholly peculiar character in both physical and political respects» Hegel reproduces the increasingly dominant image of America in the Europe of his time. This image crystallized in the context of the consolidation of the colonization process. According to Europeans, the inhabitants of the colonized lands were far less civilized than the inhabitants of Western Europe. Not a few thinkers found the explanation for that cultural difference in the natural difference of the respective geography, climate and race. In this general framework, Hegel considered the American Indians as people without history; as for the history of America after its conquest and colonization, it is in his eyes nothing else than an episode of the history of Europe itself. Insofar as it is through Europe´s history that human beings have attained self-consciousness of their essence, namely, freedom as autonomy and self-determination, Europe seems to be a non plus ultra of the ideological development of humanity. However, as seen from the 21st century the intellectual and political history of Europe can hardly be identified with the full awareness of the value and dignity of each human being as such. Since the countries of the American continent rely on the principle of civic nationalism and not on that of ethnic nationalism, which is typical for Europe, they mean in this respect a step forward with regard to the «principle of the European mind».

Hegel's Mistake: Family, Marriage and Gender in the Philosophy of Law

2023-07-24T11:31:45+02:00

This essay aims to understand Hegel´s mistake in his conception of family, marriage, and gender in his Philosophy of Right. It reconstructs the contrasts between the Hegelian model of marriage, on the one hand, and its Contractualist (in the Kantian version of the Metaphysics of Morals) and Romantic (in the version of Schlegel’s Lucinde) alternatives, on the other. Hegel´s mistake is shown to exhibit both a metaphysical and a political dimension. Finally, the essay argues why, precisely because of this error, it is important to understand Hegel´s political thought today.

Hegel y las Américas: aportaciones para una dialéctica ramificada

2023-10-15T03:06:19+02:00

The following article starts by highlighting the privilege Hegel grants to certain geographical regions in the context of universal history at expense of other social groups. It pointed how eastern civilizations lose relevance when the spirit of history moves towards the West, which appropriates all past turning it its own patrimony. Eastern people are considered the infancy of humanity and, when not extinct, continue to exist as living fossils. Likewise, people that do not constitute Europe's past lack any historical existence until they are discovered by the later. Thus, both those people who leave history and those that enter in it are measured according to a single present, which constitutes the spearhead of history, located in the current world power. Aiming to preserve the critical power of Hegelian thought in many other respects but correcting its obvious limitations assessing other nations and human groups, we offer elements to expand the logical space offered by his dialectic. We thus propose a “branched dialectic.” This would entail considering history as consisting of different simultaneous “threads” tied and untied both in a temporal sequence and in the geographical space of the world. Equally important is to pluralize actuality through different simultaneous foci. The challenge consists of maintaining a local, but not global, dialectical dynamic. To achieve such goal we resort to ideas of the German logician Gotthard Günther.

The Phenomenology of Spirit as a model for interpreting social subjectivation

2023-12-03T22:39:46+01:00

In this article, I defend the consideration of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a model for thinking processes of subjectivation in contemporary society, especially considering the notion of failure of experience and the figures of self-consciousness. For that, I divide the presentation into three parts: Firstly, based on the proposal by the Brazilian philosopher Marcos Nobre, in his book Como Nasce o Novo [How the New Is Born], to take the Phenomenology as a philosophical model for contemporary Critical Theory (based on its consideration as a phenomenological work describing processes of subjectivation, in contrast to encyclopedic works, in the dialectical-critical tradition). I critically analyze his book and argue that it does not present the relationship between his proposal for Critical Theory and his analysis of the Introduction of the Phenomenology. Secondly, I find his hypothesis useful, and so I approach Honneth's Struggle for Recognition (taken by Nobre as one of the models of a phenomenological work) and criticize his position concerning the Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular by not recognizing that this work implies a radicalization, and not a weakening, of the notion of intersubjectivity, in relation to Hegel’s earlier writings. I propose the notion of failure of experience as a guide to understanding social conflicts rather than the struggle for recognition, considering it a broader concept encompassing recognition. Finally, I consider self-consciousness in the Phenomenology as a model for understanding social figures and their problems, concluding that this idea can be helpful as a tool for interpreting contemporary society, especially Brazilian society, in the face of the rise of the new extreme right wing.

Towards an Anthropology of World History

2023-10-15T02:59:02+02:00

Especially in Latin American Anthropology, Hegel has become a red flag due to some of his problematic statements in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. This critical attitude towards his philosophy is reinforced by the great influence that structuralism, often characterised by explicitly anti-Hegelian positions, has exerted and continues to exert on Latin American social sciences. For some years now, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro have been at the forefront of a theoretical current within Amazonian anthropology that has set out to renew the interpretation of the cosmologies of Amerindian societies initiated by Claude Levi-Strauss almost half a century ago, drawing on post-structuralist philosophy. Cultures are no longer examined in terms of their concrete reproduction in a specific ecosystem, but are conceived as mere worldviews that would have been fixed on the basis of an original metaphysical deliberation, and for which ecological conditions seem to be only a kind of background noise. Descola uses the term ontology to describe them, and claims that all societies can be classified into one of the four kinds of ontologies he has elaborated: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism.

In this article, I first try to show how, using a concept that goes back to Karl Marx, namely that of vital activity, it is quite possible to determine the form and formation of certain ontologies according to different ecological parameters. The decisive intellectual mechanism at play in this vital activity is the destruction of the object, named by Hegel in his Differenzschrift ; through labour, society remodels the ecosystem it inhabits, so that natural phenomena lose their anthropomorphic character for the collective. From this intuition, it will be possible to trace the development of the ontologies named by Descola to Hegel's reflections on religion, formulated in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Finally, we will review some of Hegel's often (and partly justifiably) criticised observations on African and American societies and evaluate them in relation to the current state of anthropological research, but we will also show at the same time that some of the philosopher's lines of thought evidence an astonishing anthropological insight, and that his philosophy certainly allows us to rethink anthropological problems of the utmost importance.

Considerations on the Dialectics of Myth based on the Thought of José Carlos Mariátegui and Hegel

2023-10-15T02:43:09+02:00

In this essay we intend to show to what extent Mariátegui’s thought contributes to a better understanding and fulfilment of Hegel’s purpose of a concrete realisation of the spirit in the “land of the future”. We proceed in two stages. First, we reconstruct Mariátegui’s specific understanding of myth, while considering its problematic aspects. In doing so, we focus on its material constitution. Then, in a second step, we confront Mariátegui’s concept of myth with Hegel’s exposition of it. We thus try to show how the concept of myth, recovered in this way, has important consequences for the relationship between unity and difference, between the part and the whole. At the culmination of this process, we assess to what extent Mariátegui’s myth defends the Hegelian dialectic against itself and reopens the discussion between the speculative and the negative dialectic with respect to the problems of political practice.

The young Hegel and premodern societies: barbarism and ethical life

2023-11-25T17:41:40+01:00

The young Hegel, influenced by Rousseau and Herder, arrived to a critical understanding of capitalist Modernity, which didn’t place the civilized world above premodern modes of culture, on the contrary, he admired their political cohesion and cultural and erotical diversity. From this Hegelian intellectual horizon, one obtains a radical critique to Christianism and the superiority claims of modern civilization towards other life worlds. In Hegel’s intellectual evolution, the insertion of classical political economy, implies a theoretical turn, which ends in the mature conception of ethical life and civilizatory development. Hegel will not cease to be a radical critic of capitalist society and its colonial and erotical effects, but he will abandon his youth republicanism, his Herderian position towards savage and barbarian worlds, and his graecophile theologic positions.

Hegel's ambivalent legacy in the Americas

2024-02-14T16:48:11+01:00

Introducción al monográfico "Hegel sobre y desde las Américas"

HEGEL, Georg W. F. 2022. Creer y saber, o la filosofía de la reflexión de la subjetividad en la totalidad de sus formas, como filosofía de Kant, de Fichte y de Jacobi. Ed. bilingüe de María del Carmen Paredes Martín. Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme.

2023-09-27T15:20:58+02:00

Hegel's article Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen) from the Jena period was first published in 1802 in the Kritische Journal der Philosophie in Tübingen. In addition to the previous Spanish versions, those by Jorge Aurelio Díaz and those by Vicente Serrano, Spanish-speaking readers now also have the commendable bilingual edition prepared by Dr. María del Carmen Paredes Martín and published by Ediciones Sígueme. The reviewed work contains a succinct presentation by Dra. Paredes Martín, Hegel's text itself and a valuable commentary from the editor. As for Jena's writing, it has as its backdrop the faith-reason opposition openly unleashed by the Enlightenment. There the author reviews the three philosophies of the reflection of subjectivity, namely: the philosophy of Kant, that of Jacobi and that of Fichte. In short, Hegel disapproves of the fideistic agnosticism of these philosophies because they limit knowledge to the finite realm and consider reason powerless on its own to know the absolute, relegating it exclusively to the domain of faith. The German philosopher thus suggests the need for a new rationality capable of overcoming the limitations of understanding. Another relevant aspect of the article is the criticism directed at the metaphysics of finitude. As is known, in the face of the realism of finitude, Hegel would later explicitly propose an idealism of finitude. Finally, the much-discussed "death of God" in Believing and Knowing represents a symbolic constellation related, among other things, to the demise of the metaphysics of finitude and the absence of divinity. For the rest, we recommend reading Believing and Knowing, not only in itself, but as a preface to delve into Hegel's great work.