Hegelian Reading Research Articles

Marek Siemek as a Hegelian. Between Marx and Lukács

In our article we discuss the Hegelian reading of Marxism put forward by the famous Polish philosopher Marek Siemek. He exposed the deep but often unrealized dependence of Marxism upon Hegelian thought. This is particularly true with regard to Marxism’s attempts to develop a theory of philosophical self-knowledge. For Siemek, this philosophical dimension of Marxism is manifested in a dialectical critique of ideology, which then develops into a mature critique of political economy. The conceptual matrix of historical materialism is in turn fully utilized in the work of György Lukács, who for Siemek was the perfect example of ‘Marxist philosopher’, with all the ambiguities that this term entails. By analyzing these issues, we will also identify an evolution in Siemek’s own thought: from Lukácsian/Hegelian Marxism to ‘transcendental social philosophy’ indebted to Habermasian communicative rationality. His transformation raises a question: does the dialectical Hegelian Marxist tradition lead, in its very conceptual structure – with the primacy of mediation, to the practical outcome of moderate social democratic policy, rather than revolutionary communism? Therefore, in our conclusion we would like to reconsider the possible internal limitations of this philosophical approach in the context of social praxis.

Трансцендентальная дедукция категорий как философское доказательство

My aim is to reconstruct the basic steps and the fundamental idea of Kant’s transcendental deduction of categories as well as Hegel’s interpretation and reframing of Kant’s idea. Hegel’s reading is crucial for two reasons: first, for fixing the basic form of the Kant­ian argument and secondly, for understanding its metaphilosophical relevance. For Hegel, philosophical proof has a specific nature, which distinguishes it from scientific proof and brings it closer to a juridical one. In this perspective the transcendental deduction, which is universally considered one of the most difficult chapters in the history of philosophy, reveals itself as the genuine clarification of specifically philosophical proof. I first present the idea of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as its Hegelian reading in the Science of Logic and reformulation as the very method of philosophy in the Philo­sophy of Right. I show what in the Kantian argumentation constituted the basis for Hegel’s own interpretation and transformation. In so doing, I highlight a ‘red thread’ between the two ideas of the transcendental deduction. I conclude by proposing a formal account of Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas and by summing up the main metaphilosophical insights we can gain from Kant’s idea and its Hegelian interpretation.

Marek Siemek as a Hegelian. Between Marx and Lukács

In our article we discuss the Hegelian reading of Marxism put forward by the famous Polish philosopher Marek Siemek. He exposed the deep but often unrealized dependence of Marxism upon Hegelian thought. This is particularly true with regard to Marxism’s attempts to develop a theory of philosophical self-knowledge. For Siemek, this philosophical dimension of Marxism is manifested in a dialectical critique of ideology, which then develops into a mature critique of political economy. The conceptual matrix of historical materialism is in turn fully utilized in the work of György Lukács, who for Siemek was the perfect example of ‘Marxist philosopher’, with all the ambiguities that this term entails. By analysing these issues, we will also identify an evolution in Siemek’s own thought: from Lukácsian/Hegelian Marxism to ‘transcendental social philosophy’ indebted to Habermasian communicative rationality. His transformation raises a question: does the dialectical Hegelian Marxist tradition lead, in its very conceptual structure—with the primacy of mediation, to the practical outcome of moderate social democratic policy, rather than revolutionary communism? Therefore, in our conclusion we would like to reconsider the possible internal limitations of this philosophical approach in the context of social praxis.

Literature, Powerlessness, and Modernity: A Reading of Takeuchi Yoshimi's “What Is Modernity?”

Abstract While the Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi is frequently mentioned in discussions of “alternative modernity” on the part of Asia, people have not sufficiently addressed the asymmetrical relationship between literature and politics in Takeuchi's thinking, as his literary analysis is oftentimes associated with a Hegelian reading of subjectivity. Through a reading of Takeuchi's “What Is Modernity?,” published in 1948, this article examines Takeuchi's discourses on politics from a literary standpoint that is radically nondialectical and “powerless” with regard to “politics” as he understands it. Takeuchi's critique of modernity as well as his idea of Asian nationalism cannot do without his idiosyncratic understanding of literature, especially his reading of Lu Xun, and his insistence on the powerlessness of literary resistance. Takeuchi's literary reshuffling of the political, the article argues, opens up a horizon where the very historico-political condition of possibility of existing political institutionalizations can be put into reexamination—it helps us reconsider the concepts of relation, otherness, and equality, which are still in operation to frame our understanding of the world.

A Hegelian Reading of the Philosophy of Iranian Mythological History in Firdowsi's Shahnameh, Focusing on the concepts of "Gods and Servants"

A Hegelian Reading of the Philosophy of Iranian Mythological History in Firdowsi's Shahnameh, Focusing on the concepts of "Gods and Servants"

A Hegelian Reading of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I, to Philosophically Expound Ambedkar’s Critique of Caste in his 1932 “Statement of Gandhji’s Fast”

This paper will attempt a Hegelian reading of Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign Vol 1 lectures to unpack certain apories and paradoxes in Ambedkar’s brief 1932 statement on modern India’s founding figure, Gandhi. In that small text Ambedkar is critical of Gandhi’s seemingly saintly attempt at fasting himself to death. Ambedkar diagnoses that Gandhi’s act of self-sacrifice conceals a type of subtle coercion of certain political decisions during India’s independent movement from British colonialism. In order to unpack philosophical assumptions in Ambedkar’s statement, this paper examines Derrida’s startlingly original insights into animality, law, and sovereignty in confronting two of the Western tradition’s giants in political philosophy, namely Hobbes and Schmitt. My intuition is that Derridean deconstruction can be expanded further by deploying certain Hegelian resources. My ultimate aim is to show how Western notions of man, soul, God, the sovereign, and the state begin to dissolve when examining the Hindu metaphysical cosmology of the caste system. My thesis and concluding reflections argue that only by destroying that cosmological system of politico-metaphysical inequality can a true democratic notion of the sovereign state emerge in the Indian context.

Rameau´s Nephew as an Essay-Form

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse Diderot’s enigmatic dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew through a different ‘adornian’ lens. Against the canonical Hegelian reading of this dialogue as a symptom of the decadence of critical thinking in enlightenment philosophy, and the Frankfurt School emphasis on the systematic character of Enlightenment thought, I argue that the paradoxical and sometimes pessimistic nature of Rameau’s Nephew contains also some elements for an Enlightenment cure through its aesthetic form. By analysing the philosophical value of the pantomimes and musical performances by the character Rameau, I hope to unveil an aspect of the materialist aesthetics Diderot developed to oppose systematic thinking and the reification of thought at work in the Enlightenment movement of which he was a part.

FROM BREXIT TO HEGEL

ABSTRACTBritish idealism has led an ambiguous existence in any overview of British historical and political thought in the twentieth century. Seen partly as an alien Continental intrusion into presumably typical British priorities of empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism, it was badly damaged by its putative associations with the military enemy of two world wars. Admir Skodo's meticulous study of British “idealist revisionists” during the postwar period 1945–1980 repairs this damage by showing the extended influence of that idealism as funneled through the “new idealism” of the interwar period represented mainly by the philosophers R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott. Skodo demonstrates how these idealist revisionists deeply influenced postwar British historiography by underscoring qualities of humanism, pluralism, and variety not characteristically associated with idealism, reinterpreted a range of important topics in British history from the Tudors through the English civil wars to the Victorian period, and came up with political theorizing that celebrated the postwar welfare state while indicating its vulnerabilities to an increasingly technologized society. Just as Skodo's protagonists negotiated the 1970s transition in Britain's turn to Europe, so his account proves stimulating for contemporary concerns regarding a post‐Brexit Britain. The final part of the essay therefore looks at some suggested models, such as the “Anglosphere” or a “Singapore in the Atlantic” for Britain, before concluding with reflections on the importance according to a Hegelian reading of the modern “rational state” of the continued influence of Oxbridge intellectuals on the evolution of British directions and goals since the Victorian age.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño: Philosophical Crossroads ed. by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Pedro Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno: Philosophical Crossroads. Ed. Andres Lema-Hincapie and Conxita Domenech. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2014. 191 ppTheeditors' introduction to this collection of essays lays out the ambitious project of challenging the entrenched perception that rberia's Catholic orthodoxy and geographic isolation prevented the modern philosophical currents of Western Europe from taking root on the peninsula. To confront this contention, an eclectic group of philosophers and Hispanists demonstrates the interaction of philosophy with one symbolic Spanish text, La vida es sueno. As a point of departure, the focus on this play unifies what might otherwise be an incongruent volume in its consideration of philosophy written both on and off the peninsula before, during, and after the time of Calderon.Philosophers will find of great interest those essays that employ the play as a test case to examine modern philosophical arguments. The choice of this emblematic work of literature to evaluate Iberian philosophy immediately engages the book with a question answered valiantly by philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia: Is La vida es sueno philosophy or literature? (65). His answer (spoiler alert: it is literature) relies on demonstrating the difficulty of adequately translating literary works, exemplified by La vida es sueno. Along similar lines, philosopher C. Ulises Moulines uses Segismundo and his fabricated dream experience as a thought experiment to answer the twentieth-century philosophical question of realism, that is, whether the external world is real (21). While the literary scholar may wish for greater attention to the established body of critical theory, these philosophical studies expand the interpretative possibilities of the play, giving ample food for thought as to its early modern and even modern philosophical undercurrents.The literary scholar will feel more at home in the chapters in which works of post-Calderon philosophy are used in more traditional hermeneutic analysis of the work. Philosopher Daniele Letocha demonstrates that a Hegelian reading of Segismundo distinguishes his character from the oft-compared Don Rodrigue from contemporary French playwright Pierre Corneille's Le Cid. Literary scholar Nelson R. Orringer drawls a comparison between the self-perception of Segismundo and the personal reality of Miguel de Unamuno, both of whom increasingly came to view their lives as dreams.Of particular note are those chapters that examine the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophical underpinnings that may have influenced the composition of the play. Andres Lema-Hincapie, versant in both literary studies and philosophy, investigates the similarities between Calderon's and Descartes's theories of doubt and sleep/wakefulness. Hispanists Conxita Domenech and Jennifer Brady interpret Segismundo as neither the ideal Christian nor the pure Machiavellian ruler, but the perfect Baroque prince according to the ideas of contemporary essayists, among them Baltasar Gracian. …

Rival readings of Hegel at the fin de siècle: the case of William Torrey Harris and John Dewey

William Torrey Harris and John Dewey were the two most important philosophers of education in America at the fin de siècle. This paper discusses their rival idealisms through an examination of their philosophical and educational pronouncements. As I will show, both are indebted to, and align themselves with, Hegel. However, each manifests his Hegelian reading in a particular way, leading to very different consequences for education. What these manifestations are, and how two very different understandings can be drawn from a similar source, constitute the matter of the paper.

Die Erklärbarkeit von Erfahrung. Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen Geistes (review)

Reviewed by: Die Erklärbarkeit von Erfahrung. Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen Geistes Michael Della Rocca Ursula Renz . Die Erklärbarkeit von Erfahrung. Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen Geistes. Frankfurt-a-M: Klostermann, 2009. Pp. 353. Paper, €49.00. Can one have one's rationalism and subjectivity too? That is, can one endorse a full-blooded Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)—the claim that everything is intelligible—and yet regard experience of the world from a finite, subjective perspective as a genuine feature of that world? Many have thought not. Viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis—as rationalism seems to require—leaves no room for the arbitrary privileging of a particular spatio-temporal location that is often the hallmark of subjectivity. When faced with this apparent dilemma between subjectivity and the PSR, Spinoza—a good rationalist—simply rejects subjectivity, or so many have thought. Such an interpretation has thrived since Hegel, according to whom subjectivity and finitude vanish, for Spinoza, in the undifferentiated sea of being. Much interpretive work on Spinoza over the last 100 years has been an attempt to save Spinoza from the clutches of this Hegelian reading. However, even though the finite in Spinoza has had many defenders, there has been no sustained effort to explain how Spinoza can be entitled not only to the finite in general, but also to subjectivity and experience in particular. Even worse (apparently), there has of late been a resurgence—some might say: a recrudescence—of a more or less Hegelian reading of Spinoza that has no room for subjectivity. In these perilous times, there is more need than ever to have a powerful defense of the finite and the subjective in Spinoza, a defense that does full justice to Spinoza's attachment to the PSR. The times demand, in other words, a defense of the view that, for Spinoza, experience is explainable. Ursula Renz's book meets this demand exceptionally well. We can, for Renz's Spinoza, make an experience fully intelligible by unpacking the representational content at its heart, and we do this by drawing on the subject's other thoughts and experiences and his full biographical, cultural, and physical background. This multi-layered and wide-ranging explanation of experience is Spinoza's holism of the mental at work. In drawing out such Spinozistic explanations of experience, Renz employs Spinoza's account of conatus to shed light on the persistence of irrational emotions and on the ability of reflection (i.e. of ideas of ideas) to play a positive role in the improvement of our lives. As Renz says, "Subjective experience is explainable and its successful explanation is of ethical relevance because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier" (11). One of the many pleasing aspects of Renz's methodology is her attention to textual detail. She operates with what might be seen as a "textual PSR": no feature of the text under discussion is extraneous or to be left unexplained. Let me give just one example. Spinoza says in the first corollary to Proposition 16 of Ethics, Part II, "[T]he human mind perceives [End Page 377] the nature of a great many bodies together [unà] with the nature of its own body." Here is Renz's explanation of that single word unà: It's thus not a matter of simultaneity, but rather of a genuinely synthetic moment: we perceive external bodies . . . in the same act in which we perceive our own body, and we do this in such a way that we endow external bodies with the same actually felt and present existence that we experience in our own body. (229) This seems exactly right and, one might add, her explanation goes a long way toward explaining why, for Spinoza, such amalgamated perceptions are confused. Throughout the book, as part of her effort to safeguard the reality of subjectivity in Spinoza, Renz believes that she needs to deny that finite individuals are modes that inhere in God (49, 58, 306) and to deny that God has ideas or knowledge (97, 119). Renz is, of course, aware of the many claims that seem to attribute knowledge to God (e.g...

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Žižek , John Milbank , Creston Davis (review)

[MWS 10.1 (2010) 121-137] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Slavoj liiek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Girist: Paradox or Dialectic? (ed. Creston Davis; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-01271-3. $27.95 and £19.95 (hbk). In The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? the Slovenian Marxist author Slavoj iiZek and the British Anglo-Catholic theologian John Milbank team up in an exchange on the meaning of Christian theological heritage for contemporary radical social and political causes. Èiiek kicks off with a chapter titled 'The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity', to which Milbank replies with "The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agree ing with Slavoj tiZek'. 2iZek gives a shorter concluding statement and the volume is helpfully introduced by a North American commentator, Creston Davis. Although the book has nothing to say about Max Weber, or even about sociology in any ordi nary sense (Weber is never mentioned in the volume, and neither is any other canon ical sociological figure, other than Comte), it deserves consideration in these pages, if only for how strikingly it testifies to Weber's ever recurring importance as a caution ary break on the free flights of fancy of contemporary 'neo-metaphysical' writing in current 'radical' religious social thought. Enfant terrible of the European left intelligentsia and doyen of an idiosyncratic blend of Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytic cultural theory, 2iZek turns his hand here to an appraisal of the dialectically coded revolutionary message of Christian teaching—an interest also visible in some of iiiek's earlier books such as The Fragile Absolute (2000) or Tlw Ticklish Subject (1999). Close antecedents to 2izek's in some ways rather familiar line of argument in this text are perhaps Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope—theorizing the dialectical persistence of the Gospel in its a-theist sublation in revolutionary praxis—along with numerous other twentieth century heterodox Marxist sources, from the thought of figures such as Kautsky, Lukâcs, Horkheimer, Adorno and the young Kracauer to Latin American liberation theology of the 1970s. The difference in 2iZek's case is that at just the moment when one might have thought that all of this had been quietly laid to rest, dissipated by postmodern irony, cultural difference and the demise of Marxism as an integral worldview, it all seems to come back—with a twist. For 2iiek, the mendacity of contemporary liberal pluralist discourse in Western democracies and its refraction in contemporary bien-pensant academic postmodernism is reason enough for an adventure of return to the thought of a politico-metaphysical 'absolute' of some kind. Like the French left philosopher Alain Badiou, liiek is impatient with multiculturalist and value pluralist positions in contemporary commentary that invoke moral universals— such as human rights—while simultaneously abjuring any commitment to structural social transformation capable of realising such universals and instead retreating into various evasive epistemological disclaimers.© Max Weber Studies 2010, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EY. 122 Max Weber Studies Pivotal for 2iZek's argument in his contribution to this book is Hegel's reference to the 'monstrosity' of God's appearance in the finite flesh of a human individual, Jesus Christ. "This is the monstrous [das Ungeheuere] whose necessity we have seen', wrote Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (quoted by iiiek, p. 74). Ziiek reasons here that the historical 'death of God' along with everything evoked by this dictum—Nietzsche, secularization, atheism and the natural sciences, de transcendentalization, Weber's 'disenchantment', modernity — itself occu rs in the Crucifixion, in the dying of God on the Cross. Combining Meister Eckhart's and other medieval mystic visions of God's absolute self-sacrifice and self-extinction in the soul of man with Hegel's dialectical elaboration of God's sublation into Christ and Christ into the Holy Ghost qua 'World-Spirit', Ziiek holds that the revolution ary self-education of the collective human subject of world history is itself the working out of the process of divine self-negation in historical material division and multiplicity—in the 'non-All'. 'In the...

Searching for Modern Culture's Beautiful Harmony: Schlegel and Hegel on Irony

Goethe and Friedrich Schiller stand together immortalised in Ernst Rietschel's statue at the centre of Weimar. In their lifetime, Goethe and Schiller shaped the culture of German-speaking lands, not only through their poetry, plays, and novels, but also in their role as editors of journals that helped to set the intellectual tone of the period. Schiller's journal Die Horen (1795-1797) and Goethe's Propyläen (1798-1800), although short-lived, were important literary vehicles of the period and provided a forum that brought scientists, historians, philosophers, and poets into conversation with one another. The late 1700s and early 1800s were years of intense intellectual development in Germanspeaking lands; the arts flourished and aesthetics developed as a serious branch of philosophy.During the ‘Age of Goethe and Schiller’, philosophy was dominated by Kant's philosophy and its post-Kantian variations. A problem with traditional philosophical histories of this period is the overwhelmingly Hegelian reading of it, a reading that subsumes all of the so-called minor figures under the shadows of the great system builder, Hegel. Richard Kroner's influential Von Kant bis Hegel of 1921 set the tone for this reading. Silenced by such narratives are the voices of the early German Romantics, a group of thinkers whose impudence created problems for them, and whose work posed hermeneutical challenges that continue to plague a proper understanding of the movement and the worth of its contributions. As we shall see, Hegel himself began to prepare the ground for a history of philosophy that would dismiss the contributions of the early German Romantics, a dismissal that is unfair and unfortunate: unfair because it is based on false characterisations of the movement, and unfortunate because such misreadings lead us to overlook the wealth of insights offered by the early German Romantics.

De Kojève à Foucault

Cet article propose de confronter le thème kojévien de « la disparition de l’homme à la fin de l’histoire » et le thème foucaldien de la « mort de l’homme ». Cette confrontation permet non seulement de faire apparaître le déplacement qui s’opère de Kojève à Foucault en ce qui concerne le cadre théorique de leur réflexion sur l’homme, mais aussi de souligner les effets contrastés de la lecture kojévienne de Hegel sur Sartre et sur Bataille.

Beyond Historical Tragedy: The Frankfurt School and Judeo-Christian Messianism

In "Beyond Historical Tragedy" the author compares and discusses Hegel's prescient understanding of the meaning of tragedy and how it differs from Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian theories. At the same time, he embarks on a critique of George Steiner's Hegelian reading of Sophocles' Antigone, and of tragedy more generally. He develops the idea that the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is closer to a Jewish or Christian perspective than to the tragic perspective - or to Hegel's modern version of the tragic perspective. The contrast is most clear in the way that the idea of fate is negated by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Benjamin.

Kant's Sadism

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan says: “So as to produce the kind of shock or eye-opening effect that seems to me necessary if we are to make progress, I simply want to draw your attention to this: if The Critique of Practical Reason appeared in 1788, seven years after the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason there is another work which came out six years [!] afterThe Critique of Practical Reason a little after Thermidor in 1795, and which is calledPhilosophy in the Boudoir” (78). What is supposed to produce the shock effect is not the simple juxtaposition of dates, of course, but the implicitly Hegelian reading of history which makes those dates significant, and which comes out in full strength when Lacan says, in Kant avec Sade: “The Philosophy in the Boudoir comes eight years [!] after the Critique of Practical Reason. If, after seeing that the former agrees with the latter, we prove that it completes it, we will say that it gives the truth of the Critique” (Ecrits II 120; my translation). Lacan’s “proof,” however, is anything but rigorous or systematic; so his provocative statement will probably sound inspiring to Lacan enthusiasts and gratuitous to virtually anyone else. Which is a pity, because the statement is absolutely correct: it is indeed the case that Sade brought to their extreme consequences the characteristic premisses of Kant’s ethics, thus unfolding their truth in ways which the man Kant might even have vehemently resisted, but which were nonetheless necessary. Here I would like to provide more of a systematic and rigorous defense of this statement, though I make no claim as to how faithful my reconstruction might be to Lacan’s “intentions” (the irrelevance of this issue from the point of view espoused here will soon become apparent; hence it will also become apparent that it is an issue this point of view need not be concerned with).

Dialectical Identity in a “Post-Critical” Era: A Hegelian Reading

Dialectical Identity in a “Post-Critical” Era: A Hegelian Reading

History and the Paradoxes of Metaphysics in Dantons Tod

History and the Paradoxes of Metaphysics in Dantons Tod is the first in-depth analysis exploring the dynamic relationship between Hegelian metaphysics and Georg Buechner's literary masterpiece. This study illuminates the fascinating paradoxes emerging from Buechner's portrayal of the collision of historical reality with the monumental concept of freedom developed in the monistic idealism of Hegel. It also brings to light much-neglected interconnections between Buechner's Hegelian reading of Spinoza and his theories on nature and history.

Edmond Jabes and the Poetry of the Jewish Unhappy Consciousness

When Derrida invokes Hegel and identifies unhappy consciousness as Jewish, he appears to endorse dialectic wherein Judaism would be incorporated in and by discourse of a postmodernism that essentializes Other as negative image of logocentrism. In pages that follow, I wish to investigate this Hegelian reading of Jabes. We should keep in mind that Derrida's Hegel is not only philosopher of Absolute Idea, the last philosopher of book, but he is also the first thinker of writing (OG 26).2 This status of Hegel is, I will argue, applicable

Perpetual War/Perpetual Peace: Kant, Hegel and the End of History

Recently our particular end of history has been characterized as the coming of age of a post-communist, liberal nation-state system and global political economy. On this interpretation of history and international relations, the philosophy of world history is no longer needed, since the meaning of history, its goal and end, are already known. In essence, we have arrived at the Kantian regulative ideal of perpetual peace, not in the form of a world state, but of an international order in which commerce can take over the role of war and deterrence in ensuring progress. In this paper, I will be arguing for a different understanding of the end of history, one which recalls the philosopher's attention to world history as the realm of the self-relation of spirit most in need of philosophical comprehension. In order to do this, I will be examining the differences between Kant's treatment of history and war in the critical philosophy, and Hegel's speculative transformation of that treatment in his own work. It will be argued that in Kant's work a posited end of history serves to undermine the philosophical comprehension of history, by removing that comprehension from history. Whereas in Hegel's work the experienced end of history opens up the understanding of history by acknowledging the philosopher's identity with his time. The paper falls into three sections. In the first part I will present a reading of Kant's philosophy of history and war, and try to illustrate its consequences for attempts to theorise and moralise about world history in the present. In the second part I will demonstrate how Hegel's philosophy of history and war differs from Kant's, giving us an alternative starting point for our contemporary comprehension of the end of history. Finally, I will comment on a recent Hegelian reading of world history by Hayo Krombach, Hegelian Reflections on the Idea of Nuclear War.