Both Marx, the founding father of what later came to be known as critical theory, and those who follow in his footsteps, regard critical theory as distinctive in that it will combine the critically normative dimension of traditional philosophy with the strict attentiveness to given facts (to “the real … material world”) definitive of modern empirical science. Critical theory contends that its unique fusion of science and philosophy will overcome their respective defects, correcting both the uncritical passivity of natural science and the speculative utopianism of philosophy. By so doing, it promises to give birth to a new kind of theory with emancipatory power.

Critical theorists from Marx to Habermas also see a thoroughgoing critique of Hegel as decisive for a critical theory. In their view, whatever insights Hegel may otherwise have provided, his philosophy is irreparably flawed because of its methodological commitment to a speculative method which cuts theory loose from reality and leads it to a distorted, mystically idealistic view of the human condition which is at once both Utopian and quietistic. According to critical theorists, Hegel's fundamental theoretical error lay in privileging the ideal over the real; because he does that, he is unable to get reality right. Consequently, he can neither comprehend freedom properly, as a normatively critical concept, nor understand the real conditions for freedom inherent in the status quo.

Marx's comments on Hegel's philosophy have left an ambiguous legacy for Marxism. One pervasive theme, though, is the interpretation of Hegel's idealist philosophy as being shrouded in mysticism. Marx's main contribution, according to this view, was to demystify Hegel's thought through a more materialist dialectical approach. At the same time, however, there have been those who have sought to rupture this Hegel-Marx connection and purge Hegelianism from Marxism altogether. Appropriate and expunge have therefore been the two main responses to Hegel's influence on Marxism. I will argue against these traditions, however, to assert a more direct relationship between Hegel's and Marx's dialectic. To do so, I want to identify some of the main Marxist thinkers that can be linked with the two main schools above. I will term these the Hegelian-Marxist Materialist Appropriators and the Idealist Expungers. In contrast I put forward the Hegelian-Marxist Materialist school which states that ultimately the dialectic of Hegel is the dialectic of Marx. Before this, I begin by considering some examples of Marx's critique of Hegel. The leitmotif of this critique is a depiction of Hegel's dialectic as mystical or idealistic in contrast to Marx's more materialist dialectic. As we shall see, such a criticism was begun by Marx, perpetuated by Engels as ‘orthodox’ Marxism and ultimately accepted even by those who sought to place themselves within an Hegelian-Marxist tradition.

A friend once said to me that he would be glad to discuss postmodemity if only he knew what modernity meant. There are so many descriptions. We're all modern: Modern society, modern art, modern philosophy, modern science, modern technologies. The reformation, the wars of religion, the American revolution, the French revolution, the Paris Commune, the world wars. Civil society, capitalism, the liberal state, the procedural state. Luther, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Manet, Cézanne, Rawls, Warhol. But also Novalis, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the German cultural conservatives. Derrida, Bataille, Levinas, Pynchon. And so forth.

Here is Robert Pippin's enumeration of what he sees as the common features of modern societies:

Hegel had his own theory of modern life and thought, centering around the culmination of spirit's teleology in objective and absolute spirit, based on the logical patterns of the movement of spirit's development. Modern times brought decisive liberations and completions, but also permanent tensions, and a loss of immediate rootedness in a natural or social home. Modern selves are strong enough to be bei sich in the midst of modern tensions and negativities, but it takes work and maturity to deal with the inner complexities of modern thought and the built-in tensions of modern institutions.

Hegel has been widely, though erroneously, supposed to have rejected epistemology in favor of unbridled metaphysical speculation. Reputation notwithstanding, Hegel was a very sophisticated epistemologist, whose views have gone unrecognized because they are so innovative, indeed prescient. Hence I shall boldly state: Hegel's epistemology is of great contemporary importance. In part, this is because many problems now current in epistemology are problems Hegel addressed. In part, this is because of the unexpected effectiveness of Russell's 1922 exhortation, “I should take ‘back to the 18th century’ as a battle-cry, if I could entertain any hope that others would rally to it.” I shall elaborate on these thematic connections between Hegel's views and our problems below (§3), after summarizing the main features of Hegel's epistemology (§2). Thereafter I consider Hegel's views in relation to 20th-century empiricism (§4), Dretske's information theory (§5), and the on-going debate between realists and historicist relativists (§6). Sections 2–4 will be summary in character, for I have discussed these issues in detail elsewhere. Sections 5 and 6 shall consider more closely some important social aspects of Hegel's epistemology. Two themes of my remarks are that Hegel anticipated by 150 years the recent rejections in epistemology of concept-empiricism and of individualism, and more importantly, Hegel showed how rejecting these positions does not require rejecting commonsense realism about the objects of empirical knowledge. In part, this is because Hegel rejected “internalism” about mental content. The recent wave of anti-Cartesianism in epistemology and philosophy of mind has much to learn from Hegel. Benefiting from Hegel' insights and analyses, however, requires understanding just what were Hegel's aims, methods, and arguments in epistemology. These, however, have eluded most commentators, whether critical or sympathetic. So I begin by reviewing the main points of Hegel's epistemology.

The Cartesian concept of nature, which has determined modem thinking until the present time, has become obsolete. It shall be shown that Hegel's objective-idealistic conception of nature discloses, in comparison to that of Descartes, new perspectives for the comprehension of nature and that this, in turn, results in possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature.

If the argumentation concerning philosophy of nature is intended to catch up with the concrete Being-of-nature and to meet it in its concretion, then this is impossible for the finite spirit in a strictly a priori sense — this is the thesis supported here which is not at all close to Hegel. As the argumentation rather has to consider the conditions of realization concerning the Being-of-nature, too, it is compelled to take up empirical elements — concerning the organism, for instance, system-theoretical aspects, physical and chemical features of the nervous system, etc. With that, on the one hand, empirical-scientific premises are assumed (e.g. the lawlikeness of nature), which on the other hand become (now close to Hegel) possibly able to be founded in the frame of a Hegelian-idealistic conception. In this sense, a double strategy of empirical-scientific concretization and objective-idealistic foundation is followed up, which represents the methodical basic principle of the developed considerations.

In the course of the undertaking, the main aspects of the whole Hegelian design concerning the philosophy of nature are considered — space and time, mass and motion, force and law of nature, the organism, the problem of evolution, psychic being — as well as Hegel's basic thesis concerning the philosophy of nature, that therein a tendency towards coherence and idealization manifests itself in the sense of a (categorically) gradually rising succession of nature: from the separateness of space to the ideality of sensation. In the sense of the double strategy of concretization and foundation it is shown that on the one hand possibilities of philosophical penetration concerning actual empirical-scientific results are opened, and on the other hand — in tum — a re-interpretation of Hegel's theorem on the basis of physical, evolution-theoretical and system-theoretical argumentation also becomes possible. In this mutual crossing-over and elucidation of empirical and Hegelian argumentation not only do perspectives of a new comprehension of nature become visible, but also, at the same time — as an essential consequence of this methodical principle — thoughts on the possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature.

Hegel's lectures on aesthetics embrace the world history of art in its broadest sense, encompassing the advanced cultures of Asia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia as well as the specifically European tradition that extends from Classical Antiquity through to the art of the Nazarenes and the burgeoning Romanticism of his own day. This attempt to bring the different stages and forms of art into a coherent system and to tell the story of their successive unfolding from the standpoint of philosophy lies at the very heart of Hegel's aesthetics. Indeed, the detailed attention that Hegel pays to the historical development of art has led Ernst Gombrich to recognise him as the founding father of the modem discipline of art history, with all the ambivalence that this expression conveys. In this paper, however, I am concerned less with the way in which Hegel's aesthetics have informed, and continue to inform, our ongoing attempts to understand the art of the past than with the relevance that his ideas still possess in relation to the art of the present. I shall argue that Hegel's aesthetics can tell us a great deal about contemporary art and that, read in the right way, his views provide an important corrective to a significant strand of contemporary art theory.

To engage with Hegel's philosophy from a feminist perspective is necessarily to be confronted with questions about the politics of reading (specifically the politics of reading canonic philosophical texts). Politics, that is, both in the obvious, traditional ideological sense (since feminism involves an explicit political agenda) and in the less obvious sense of the politics of the relation between reader and text. For some scholars this automatically places feminist readers in the category of a dubious scholarship which rests on a mistaken understanding of the meanings of both politics and truth.

It seems to me a mistake — and an inexcusable conceit — to say as some now do, that all scholarship is somehow ‘political’ or is itself politics practised by other means. That view demeans both politics and scholarship. Now this is not to say that a scholar's motives must not be political, only that the methods and results of her researches must be judged according to scholarly standards and not political ones. The aim of scholarship is to seek and to tell the truth, as best one can discern it, and not to promote any particular partisan cause. (Ball, 1995: 24)

Ball here confines the role of politics in the traditional (ideological) sense to the Weberian category of ‘value’, which may motivate and orient scholarship but which cannot provide the criteria according to which scholarly work is carried out or its findings are judged. He dismisses the relevance of the category ‘politics’ to the understanding of the relation between reader and text as such and instead, argues that ‘truth’ is what that relation should be about. Yet, the work of interpretation and reflection in the reading of texts insofar as it involves a process of interaction between reader and text always problematises, I would argue, the distinction between politics and truth upon which Ball's analysis relies. There are various models on offer, both descriptive and prescriptive for what the process of textual interpretation does or should involve. One can contrast the notion of ‘scholarly standards’ as the route to the true meaning of a text with Skinner's new historicism, the virtuous circle of hermeneutics or the destabilising ambitions of deconstruction (Tully, 1988; Bamett, 1998). These approaches elicit very different interpretive results but they also differ in their assumptions about what is or ought to be taken as authoritative for understanding and interpretation and in this sense they are characterised by a politics of the interplay between reader and text. This is a modest claim but one which disrupts the politics/truth distinction even if it doesn't necessarily imply the end of distinguishing between good and bad, valid and invalid understanding/interpretation.

L'Avenir de Hegel [Hegel's Future] is the title of the book I published in 1996 and which bears the subtitle: “Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique” [Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectics]. I intend to examine here the kind of reading of Hegel put to work in that book. I must add that l'Avenir de Hegel, before becoming a book, was the title of my doctoral thesis undertaken under the supervision of Jacques Derrida with whom I have been working for many years now. A question emerged recently which I had never considered until now, at least not so directly, so simply: can the interpretation of Hegel that I attempt to elaborate be qualified, immediately and without reservation, as a “deconstructive reading”?

This presupposes, of course, that one can define what a deconstructive reading is. Although Derrida, as we know, refuses to consider deconstruction as a constituted theory from which one could extract axioms and formalize the method, it is nonetheless possible, as I shall attempt to do here, to describe the process of a deconstructive reading.

In writing l'Avenir de Hegel, I had present in my mind the exegetical imperative set out in Of Grammatology under the heading of a “task of reading”: Derrida asserts, “The reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce” (De la Grammatologie, p. 227; tr. Spivak, p. 158).

I will ask precisely: what does it mean to produce or open a reading, a reading which protects the text in order better to expose or endanger it?

In making “plasticity” (Plastizität) play a major role in Hegel's thought, I undertook to respond to the demands of this “task of reading”. In doing so, I nonetheless discovered, under the very title of plasticity itself, a resistance of the Hegelian text to its own deconstruction. I shall thus have to specify this resistance at the same time as I develop the program of the task of reading.

Postmodernism and religion. The discussion continues to become increasingly rich and complex. In the background of much of it is Heidegger's critique of onto-theology, in which Hegel is one of his two prime paradigms. He introduced this term in 1949 in relation to Aristotle's completion of his ontology with a theology of the Unmoved Mover. When he returned to it in 1957, it was in the context of a seminar on Hegel's Science of Logic. There he described onto-theology as allowing God to enter philosophical discourse only on philosophy's terms and in the service of its project and complained, in the spirit of Pascal and Kierkegaard, that this God was religiously otiose. What he says there specifically about Hegel will best be understood after we see in what sense Hegel is a pantheist.

It is possible to date quite precisely the time when Hegel abandoned theism for good. Ironically, it was in 1795 in correspondence with his two friends from seminary days at Tübingen. Schelling and Hölderlin had become Fichte enthusiasts, as we see from letters they sent to Hegel early that year. On the basis of prepublication access to Fichte's 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling wrote on January 5,