Dan Dennett is a closet Hegelian. I say this not in criticism, but in praise, and hereby own to the same affliction. More specifically, Dennett is convinced that human cognitive life is the scene or arena of a swiftly unfolding evolutionary process, an essentially cultural process above and distinct from the familiar and much slower process of biological evolution. This superadded Hegelian adventure is a matter of a certain style of conceptual activity; it involves an endless contest between an evergreen variety of conceptual alternatives; and it displays, at least occasionally, a welcome progress in our conceptual sophistication, and in the social and technological practices that structure our lives.

With all of this, I agree, and will attempt to prove my fealty in due course. But my immediate focus is the peculiar use to which Dennett has tried to put his background Hegelianism in his provocative 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. Specifically, I wish to address his peculiar account of the kinematics and dynamics of the Hegelian Unfolding that we both acknowledge. And I wish to query his novel deployment of that kinematics and dynamics in explanation of the focal phenomenon of his book: consciousness. To state my negative position immediately, I am unconvinced by his declared account of the background process of human conceptual evolution and development – specifically, the Dawkinsean account of rough gene-analogs called “memes” competing for dominance of human cognitive activity.