Hegel's Phenomenology traces an education of consciousness, as a result of which it is to attain the standpoint of absolute knowing. For consciousness (as such) its object is other than itself. The goal is for this otherness to be aufgehoben — cancelled as the simple otherness it at first appears to be, though preserved at a higher level, as a “moment” in a more comprehensive conception. Inquiry will then in principle be able to avoid a certain sort of philosophical anxiety. We shall no longer need to be troubled by the spectre of a gulf between subject and object, which is the pretext for a transcendental scepticism.

At the standpoint of absolute knowing, the progress of knowledge is to become intelligible as the free self-development of “the Notion”. Hegel sees this conception as indebted to Kant, in a way he makes explicit when he writes, in the Science of Logic: “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Notion is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.” This is obviously an allusion to the Transcendental Deduction. There — especially in the second-edition recasting — Kant comes close to Hegel's conception of absolute knowing.

I shall begin by spending some time on this Kantian background. That will place the apperceptive I, whose unity is the unity of the I think, in the picture.

The idea of rethinking plays a central role in the philosophy of R.G.Collingwood. In undertaking his philosophical analysis of history, Collingwood conceives of the study of past actions to consist in their rethinking by means of the historian's scrutiny of the evidence that he or she assembles in the present. Rethinking, for Collingwood, is also an apposite term to capture the reflective activity of philosophy insofar as it analyses the conditions and practices of human conduct and thought, and in so doing explains them by rehearsing their interconnections in systematic fashion. Throughout his career, Collingwood takes these two modes of rethinking to be interconnected. Notably, Collingwood conceives of his own practice of analysing the fundamental concepts of history as, in turn, presupposing the prior development of a tradition of historical thinking and analytical reflection upon the methods of history. He himself draws upon this tradition in his self-conscious process of rethinking it, which is exemplified in the main body of The Idea of History. Collingwood also understands the practice of rethinking as implying a critical perspective on preceding modes of thought, hi his formulaic notion of historical explanation as consisting in the re-enactment of past thought and in his affiliated notions of rethinking, Collingwood does not assume that the act of rethinking is to be regarded as the same act as the original piece of thinking that is to be understood. Thought is universal so that the same thought can be the object of different particular acts of thought. The differences between acts of thought remain, however, so that rethinking a previous thought is to rethink in a significantly new context in which the thinker is aware of the pastness of the thought rethought. This contextual awareness, for Collingwood, underlies the critical interrogation of past thinkers and thought and provides for the possibility of progress.

In an early text on Bataille, Derrida notes that Bataille's reinterpretation of Hegel “is a simulated repetition of Hegelian discourse. In the course of this repetition a barely perceptible displacement disjoints all the articulations and penetrates all the points welded together by the imitated discourse. A trembling spreads out which then makes the entire old shell crack.” There is no doubt that this remark refers not just to Bataille's reading of Hegel, but also to the way in which deconstruction intends to make the old shell of Hegelianism, and hence of the history of philosophy in general, tremble. By doing this, deconstruction can be said to open up a way of reflecting on contemporary culture that from Plato onwards had been foreclosed by the predominant tendency of philosophy.

According to a famous saying by Hegel, philosophy grasps its own time in thought. This is to say that philosophy explicitly articulates the implicit self-understanding of the culture to which it belongs and out of which it emerges. If contemporary philosophy still faces the task of comprehending its own time, then it should develop a logic which is as philosophical as Hegel's, but which distinguishes itself from the latter by addressing the radical finitude of any effort to bring about meaning, truth, presence, harmony, stability, or justice. Such a logic should respond to the experience that the moments in which human life threatens to lose its dignity are not cancelled out by what is commonly called ‘progress’. To my mind, it is precisely this experience that deconstruction seeks to grasp in thought. I understand deconstruction as drawing attention to that which allows something — for instance a culture — to constitute itself, yet at the same time threatens to make it fall apart. Whereas philosophy can be said to have always shied away from the insight into the radical instability of whatever human beings may venture, Derrida, on the other hand, can be considered to take this very instability as the guiding principle of his philosophy. On the basis of such a principle, the ways in which human life organizes itself will no longer be interpreted in terms of increasing self-actualization, autonomy, or control, but rather by addressing the conflicts from which the various modes of human self-organization may not be able to disentangle themselves.

In ‘Le puits et la pyramide’, Jacques Derrida critiques the way in which Hegel privileges speech over writing at Encyclopedia §459. He traces that privileging back to Hegel's teleologically motivated view of time as the sublation of space, which he takes in turn to be motivated by Hegel's concern, as a metaphysical thinker, for validating and securing the philosophical dream of “full presence”. This, on Hegelian terms, involves subjecting the “materiality” of space to the “ideality” of time.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hegel himself openly concedes Derrida's first two points. By limiting his discussion of language in the Encyclopedia to consideration of its function as a vehicle for the expression of representations, Hegel requires himself to discuss the relative merits of spoken and written utterances, an issue which he then argues out in favour of the former. Within the written domain, alphabetic and hieroglyphic writing must also be compared, and it is hardly astonishing that Hegel should view the key contrast between the two as that of the temporality inherent in alphabetic speech, which captures sound, as opposed to the spatiality of hieroglyphics, which exist only as inscriptions.

Hegel's privileging of speech over writing is thus no mere slip; it is a whole set of consciously elaborated arguments, undertaken for specifically stated reasons. This casts doubt on the third of Derrida's points above: is Derrida mistaking the purpose of a specific discussion for the motivating force of teleology in general? Is Hegel's openly conceded privileging of spoken over written language justified by something other than a teleology dictated by an unexamined metaphysical preference for “full presence”?

I want to begin with two of Hegel's endings, one well known, the other less so. First, some words from the closing paragraphs of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: