Interim Reflection: The Three Defensive Movements Against Postmodernism

Kai Froeb2026

This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.

The Common Opponent

Chapters 18a, 19, and 20 have – for all their differences – a common opponent: the postmodern claim that universality is impossible or dangerous. Lyotard had proclaimed the “end of the grand narratives,” Foucault had exposed every truth as an effect of power, Derrida had deconstructed the “metaphysics of presence.”

Three different strategies responded to this:

First Strategy: The Discourse-Ethical Defense (Chapter 18a)

Habermas, Taylor, and Apel defended reason by transforming it:

  • Habermas showed: universality is not substantive (particular contents) but procedural (procedures of understanding). “Communicative reason” prescribes no truths; it structures the process in which truth can be found.

  • Taylor showed: universality needs no hierarchy. The “sources of the self” are manifold and in tension – but they are not arbitrary. There are commonalities that can be found through dialogue.

  • Apel showed: universality is performatively inescapable. Whoever argues has already acknowledged truth, reason, recognition. “Transcendental pragmatics” demonstrates: one cannot criticize reason with reason without presupposing it.

What was gained: a reason that is more modest but not arbitrary. Not absolute knowledge (Hegel), but also not radical relativism (postmodernism).

Second Strategy: The Philological Defense (Chapter 19)

The German Hegel Renaissance II responded to postmodernism through close reading:

  • Henrich, Horstmann, Fulda said: before we criticize Hegel, we should first understand him. Most Hegel critique (including the postmodern variety) does not hit Hegel himself but misinterpretations of him.

  • The Hegel Archive in Bochum produced critical editions that showed: Hegel was not a dogmatic systematic thinker but a thinker in motion, constantly developing his positions further.

  • Theunissen (“Sein und Schein” / “Being and Appearance”) showed: Hegel’s logic can be taken philosophically seriously – not as metaphysical nonsense, not as an ideological document, but as rigorous science.

What was gained: a more differentiated picture of Hegel. Not the totalizer that postmodernism criticized, but a thinker whose method remains productive – even if some contents are outdated.

Third Strategy: The Ethical Defense (Chapter 20)

Hans Küng’s Global Ethic Project responded to postmodernism through empirical demonstration:

  • The major world religions and many other traditions converge on basic ethical structures: the Golden Rule, truthfulness, nonviolence, gender justice.

  • This convergence is no coincidence but shows: there are universal structures of human coexistence that different cultures have discovered independently of one another.

  • The “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic” (1993) formulated these commonalities practically – not as a philosophical principle, but as an ethical minimal consensus.

What was gained: universality is not a European projection but an intercultural discovery. The Golden Rule is found in China (Confucius), India (Buddha), the Middle East (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), and elsewhere – not because it was copied, but because it follows from the structure of human coexistence itself.

The Common Structure: Sublation of Postmodernism

All three strategies share a common structure – they sublate postmodernism in the Hegelian sense:

What is preserved:

  • Sensitivity to power in orders of knowledge (Foucault)
  • The warning against totalizing thought (Lyotard)
  • Attention to what is suppressed by systems (Derrida)

What is overcome:

  • The claim that every universality is violence
  • The confusion of Hegel’s B-forms (Eurocentric contents) with his A-structures (dialectical method)
  • The performative contradiction: arguing against truth presupposes truth

What is elevated:

  • A self-critical universality that knows its own limits
  • A procedural reason that does not prescribe results but structures procedures
  • An intercultural ethic that arises through dialogue, not decree

The Six Test Questions – Assessment of the Defensive Movements

1. Which of Hegel’s texts were read?

The philological defense (Ch. 19) read all of Hegel’s texts – systematically, critically, historically-genetically. The Hegel Archive’s work made visible what earlier generations could not see: Hegel’s development, his revisions, his differentiations.

Habermas and Apel read Hegel through Kant and the philosophy of language – a productive transformation. Küng did not explicitly read Hegel’s Logic; at least, in his book on Hegel he wrote only about Hegel’s theological writings[1], but his method (universality through particularity) is structurally Hegelian.

2. Were the logical foundations understood?

The philological school understood them best – Henrich’s work on the theory of self-consciousness, Horstmann’s substance-subject problematic, Fulda’s analysis of dialectic.

Habermas transformed the foundations: self-reference becomes communicative self-reflection, mediation becomes mutual understanding, sublation becomes discursive consensus.

Apel’s “performative contradictions” are structurally identical to Hegel’s method of “determinate negation” – every position that absolutizes itself sublates itself.

3. Was a distinction made between A-structures and B-forms?

Implicitly, yes. The defenders distinguished between:

  • Hegel’s method (worth preserving, transformable)
  • Hegel’s contents (partly outdated, partly open to criticism)

Küng’s project demonstrates this distinction in practice: the A-structure (universality through particularity) remains, while the B-form (European dominance) is overcome through intercultural symmetry.

4. What was justified in postmodernism?

The defenders took the critique seriously:

  • Habermas: “communicative reason” is more modest than Hegel’s “absolute knowledge”
  • Taylor: the “sources” are plural, not monolithic
  • Küng: universality arises through dialogue, not through decree

The philological school showed: some postmodern critique did not hit Hegel himself, but false interpretations of Hegel.

5. What was missed?

The defensive movements were not always consistently Hegelian:

  • Habermas remains too Kantian (reason without history, morality without ethical life)
  • Taylor remains too pluralistic (sources without hierarchy, tension without sublation)
  • Küng remains too harmonious (commonalities without conflicts)

The philological school was sometimes too antiquarian – it understood Hegel but did not always apply him productively to contemporary questions.

6. What can we learn?

That defense through transformation is possible. One need not choose between Hegel and postmodernism – one can sublate both:

  • Preserve the critique (no naive totality)
  • Overcome the exaggeration (structures remain valid)
  • Develop a self-critical systematics

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Transition to Part IX – New Horizons:

The defensive movements have shown: universality is possible, reason remains valid, ethics can be grounded interculturally. But one question remained open: who is the subject that recognizes this universality?

The following chapters (21-24) show: this subject too was still thought in particular terms. Feminist critique shows: it was male. Postcolonial critique shows: it was European. Ecological critique shows: it was anthropocentric.

These critiques are not postmodern – they do not demand the end of reason but its expansion. They show: the “universal subject” of the Enlightenment was in truth a particular subject passing itself off as universal. The task is not to abandon universality but to make it truly universal.

In parallel, new fields are developing (complexity research, media theory, AI research) that rediscover Hegelian structures – self-reference, emergence, mediation – in entirely different contexts. These chapters show: the structures Hegel described keep resurfacing everywhere – often without their discoverers knowing that they are repeating Hegel.

  1. “Menschwerdung Gottes: Eine Einführung in Hegels theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie” (“The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel’s Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology”) (1970) ↩︎