The Spiral Staircase Upward—What Was Prepared?
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Much of what began in this volume will unfold in Volume III. This is the spiral-staircase principle: themes return at a higher level.
Digitalization: began in Volume II, Chapter 24 (PC revolution, early AI). Will become in Volume III: the internet (from 1990), social media (2000s), deep learning (2012–present), GPT (2020s).
Postcolonialism: began in Volume II, Chapter 21.2 (Said, Spivak). Will become in Volume III: the decolonial turn (Mignolo, Quijano), pluriversality, epistemic justice.
Feminism: began in Volume II, Chapter 21.1 (Beauvoir, Irigaray, early Butler). Will become in Volume III: Gender Trouble (1990), trans theory.
Theories of positionality: began in Volume I, Chapter 12.8a (Du Bois—double consciousness 1903, psychological wage 1935) and in Volume II, Chapter 21b (Combahee 1977, Hartsock 1983, McIntosh 1988, Crenshaw 1989, Young and Hill Collins 1990). Will become in Volume III: identity politics as a mass phenomenon, privilege discourse, anti-racism as consciousness work. Here the spiral-staircase principle applies with a qualification that must be specifically noted: what returns is less than what began. The step lies lower, not higher—and the authors of the founding texts have expressly objected to what became of them.
Ecology: began in Volume II, Chapter 21.3 (Jonas, Næss). Will become in Volume III: the climate crisis (intensifying from the 2000s), the Anthropocene (2010s), New Materialism, posthumanism.
Media theory: began in Volume II, Chapter 23 (McLuhan, Baudrillard). Will become in Volume III: hyperreality becomes everyday life (social media, deepfakes, VR/AR).
Complexity: began in Volume II, Chapter 22 (Prigogine, Maturana/Varela, Luhmann). Will become in Volume III: the complexity sciences, network theory, emergence everywhere.
AI: began in Volume II, Chapter 24.6 (neural networks, backpropagation 1986). Will become in Volume III: the deep learning revolution (2012), AlphaGo (2016), the GPT series, LLMs (2020s).
These themes are not closed—they are beginnings, openings, forerunners.