Universal Lessons from Jewish Philosophy After Auschwitz - Sublation and History
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Engaging with Hegel after historical catastrophes is not a new challenge. In Chapter 8 we saw how Jewish philosophy after Auschwitz wrestled with fundamental misunderstandings of Hegelian philosophy. Emil Fackenheim, Yirmiyahu Yovel, and others had to correct two central misinterpretations: the reading of “sublation” as annihilation, and the understanding of the philosophy of history as determinism.[1] These clarifications, developed initially from the specific experience of the Shoah, prove to be universally valid and are essential for understanding the postcolonial reception of Hegel.
The first misunderstanding concerned sublation. Critics accused Hegel of holding that Judaism should be “sublated” in Christianity and thereby disappear.[2] But as shown in Chapter 8.7, this interpretation is absurd. If sublation meant annihilation, then at the end of the Logic only absolute philosophy would exist - everything else would have vanished. The family would have disappeared into civil society, mechanics into chemistry, nature into spirit. Clearly Hegel means something else.
Sublation means three things at once: first, the negation of the immediate form (Judaism as the sole conception of God); second, the preservation of the content (Judaism continues to exist); third, integration into a more complex system (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as different shapes of religious consciousness).[3] This clarification is fundamental to the colonialism debate: no culture is eliminated through “sublation” but rather transformed and integrated into a richer whole.
The second misunderstanding concerned the philosophy of history. Hegel was read as a determinist who claimed that history automatically develops toward the good. But as Fackenheim showed, Hegel’s position is different: reason is not IN history like a law of nature, but works THROUGH us human beings in history.[4] “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”[5] - philosophy comes after the deed; it understands retrospectively, it does not predict prospectively.
These insights are not specifically Jewish but universal. What held true for the Jewish experience after Auschwitz also holds for the African experience after colonialism, for the Latin American experience after the Conquista, for the Asian experience after imperialism. Domenico Losurdo’s thesis, as already presented in Chapter 1.3, makes this connection explicit: the methods that were applied for centuries against “natives” returned to Europe in the twentieth century.[6] The philosophical reckoning with both catastrophes requires the same methodological clarifications.
On the history of Latin American philosophy see Eduardo Mendieta (ed.): Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates (2003); Susana Nuccetelli et al. (eds.): A Companion to Latin American Philosophy (2010). ↩︎
Leopoldo Zea: América como conciencia (Mexico 1953). English translation: The Latin American Mind (1963). ↩︎
On Gaos’s influence see Tzvi Medin: Leopoldo Zea: Ideología, historia y filosofía de América Latina (1992). ↩︎
Zea: La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más (1969), p. 48. ↩︎
Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Werke 12, p. 114. Zea discusses this extensively in Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (1988). ↩︎
Augusto Salazar Bondy: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (Mexico 1968). ↩︎