Stephen Houlgate

Presentaremos un recuento de tres momentos que consideramos de una influencia notable en las interpretaciones de Hegel en el mundo anglosajón a partir de 1975 y que han representado una renovación de su recepción. El primer momento corresponde a la publicación de Hegel de Charles Taylor, que vigorizó los estudios he- gelianos fuera del círculo académico en el que se habían desarrollado hasta entonces. Taylor presentó una lectura demasiado metafísica y que no era lo suficientemente apegada a la documentación históri- ca y bibliográfica a juicio de sus críticos. Uno de ellos fue Robert Pippin que en 1989 publicó Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Esta obra representó un nuevo giro en las inter- pretaciones de Hegel al proponer su obra como una continuación del idealismo trascendental kantiano y una perspectiva epistemoló- gica de la obra hegeliana. El tercer y último momento corresponde a los trabajos de Stephen Houlgate y William Maker, que pretenden conciliar las lecturas anteriores al apelar a las intenciones de Hegel, en particular a lo presentado en la Ciencia de la lógica.

William Desmond has, beginning in Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness (1987), and continuing in his metaxu trilogy Being and The Between (1995), Ethics and The Between (2001), and God and the Between (2008), developed an influential ‘metaxological critique’ of Hegel’s dialectic.  Metaxology is, for Desmond, the logic of the ‘in-between’ (metaxu) that mediates the ‘positive plurality’ of ‘given being’ on the side, not of the self, but of the other.  He has proposed four potencies of being with which to reduce dialectic to the equivocal, suspend the equivocal from the analogical, and supercede dialectic through this other-mediation of metaxology.  And he has argued, against Hegel, that where dialectic merely mediates ‘on the side of the self’, metaxology also mediates on the ‘side of the other’.  Desmond’s metaxological critique thus pivots around this radical otherness of mediation on the side of the other.  And the viability of his metaxological critique, no less than Schelling’s Hegelkritik, rests on such an extra-systematic possibility of radical otherness.  I propose to make the following three arguments against Desmond’s metaxological critique.  First, since metaxology pivots around mediation on the side of the other, and such a distinction between self-mediation and other-mediation does not appear anywhere in Hegel’s system, Desmond’s metaxological critique appears to amount to an extra-systematic and extrinsic critique, begs the question of radical otherness, and thereby remains uncritical.  Second, since such radical otherness amounts to a dogmatic presupposition, and nothing that is dogmatically presupposed can prove to be presuppositionless in any alternative system of science, Desmond cannot construct an alternative system of science with which to sublate dialectic into metaxology.  And, third, if, for these reasons, Desmond’s metaxological critique can be shown to be both uncritical and dogmatic, and the difference of the other in the radical otherness of other-mediation can always be dialectically reversed as difference is reflected into identity, then Hegel could, especially in the Doctrine of Essence, also have anticipated a counter-critique with which to dialectically reverse, annul, and sublate metaxology into dialectic.  Desmond’s metaxological critique appears on these arguments to be uncritical, dogmatic, and imminently reversible through this dialectical destruction of the otherness of otherness as the difference of otherness is reflected in and for the reflective identity of the ground of essence.  Desmond has recently responded to this suggestion of such a dialectical reversal of other-mediation into self-mediation by radically reaffirming the difference of the other of metaxological mediation on the side of the other.  Such a radical reaffirmation of the difference of the other can, at best, beg the question of radical otherness, and, at worst, reinstate this radical otherness in an endless equivocity of oppositive otherness.  I propose, for the purpose of developing a Hegelian counter-critique of Desmond’s metaxological critique of dialectic, that Hegel can, especially in the Doctrine of Essence, successfully sublate every such externality of otherness, difference, and, finally, of any 'positive plurality' of mediation on the side of the other into the self-reflective identity of the idea of essence.