The Aufhebung of the soul (or) of man. Derrida’s interpretation of the truth of Hegel’s anthropology

Abstract

The author analyzes the problem of the place of man in Hegel’s speculative philosophy and the solution to this problem proposed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In or­der to save one of the most fundamental philosophical works for the French intellectual milieu, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, from an “anthropologistic distortion” (i.e. the “anthropologistic reading” proposed by A. Kojève), Derrida includes Hegel’s Ency­clopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in his analysis. Derrida explores two dialectically close sections of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, namely Anthropology and Phenomenology of Mind, and with the help of “a more rigorous reading” makes a conclusion about the logi­cal and necessary “end of man” already in Anthropology. This conclusion helps Derrida restore the proper meaning of Phenomenology and refine it from the image of man (that was discovered in it too hastily). However, despite his strong adherence to Hegel’s letter and spirit, the French philosopher makes the same mistake of an anthropologistic reading with respect to Anthropology when he takes this section of The Encyclopaedia for Hegel’s contemplation about man himself. Derrida, thus, erases the fundamental distinc­tion between contemporary philosophical anthropology and a section of speculative phi­losophy that bears the same name but explores a completely different object. Trying to justify his thought about “the end of man,” Derrida also neglects the distinction between the Phenomenology of the Encyclopedia and the big Phenomenology of 1807, which has another function in the system. The author analyzes Hegel’s texts as well as secondary works dedicated to Anthropology, the least studied subject of speculative philosophyand, firstly, claims that Derrida’s conclusions are incorrect, and, secondly, attempts to define the role and the limits of man in a dialectical discourse by analyzing the relation between “man,” on the one hand, and “the soul,” “consciousness” and “the spirit,” on the other.