Decolonizing the Canon? Insights from Contemporary Hegel Scholarship
(2025) Radboud Annual Continental Philosophy Conference 2025: Canon and Critique
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- Abstract
- The Eurocentric nature of the modern philosophical canon has become a prominent topic of debate, both within European and North American academia and in research based in the Global South. This discussion concerns the limited diversity within the philosophical traditions typically studied as well as the need to examine the colonial-imperial histories that shaped the emergence of philosophical modernity. In this context, contemporary critical philosophy is still in search for answers to the question of what to do with the canon of modern philosophy and its most important figures. In this paper, I propose to examine different historiographical and methodological strategies that recent scholarship has advanced for a critical engagement with the canon. To this end, I will delve into the paradigmatic case of Hegel scholarship, within which there has been an arduous debate on the relationship between the author´s theoretical system and his positions on European cultural supremacy and its imperial-colonial expansion. In that sense, I propose to distinguish three critical attitudes in the field of Hegelian and post-Hegelian studies. (1) In first place, I claim that it is possible to identify, in a significant part of the scholarship, the strategy of universalizing Hegel normative principles beyond and against his own Eurocentric positions. Those who adopt this direction contend that, despite the Eurocentric claims of the Hegelian text, there is the possibility of using Hegel´s own principles to refute them and establish a truly universal horizon of emancipation. (2) One can find, as I shall argue, a second critical attitude that stresses the systemic character of Eurocentrism in Hegel’s theory of freedom, history or politics and that, contrary to the first option, insists on relating Hegel’s work to the concrete history of imperialism and colonial domination. I propose to understand this orientation, in the terms that are those of D. Chakrabarty (2007), as the attempt at provincializing Hegel. (3) Finally, there is a third option, I argue, which explores the possibility of creolizing Hegel and other canonical figures of modern thought (Bird-Pollan, 2015; Gordon, 2014; Monahan, 2018). As I understood it, the creolization strategy aims to investigate the ways in which Hegel’s philosophy has been reappropriated, reinvented, and sometime transfigured, in different intellectual and political contexts of the Global South, as well as within minorized communities of the North. In order to explore the critical scope of each of these options, I will begin by identifying some of the elements of Hegel’s philosophy that were specifically targeted in the context of the attempt to decolonize the philosophical canon. I will then reconstruct what I take to be the three general attitudes mentioned above -universalization, provincialization, and creolization - and argue why I believe the third has a more radical critical potential that the previous two. Finally, I will suggest how these strategies might inform broader debates on the modern philosophical canon and the stance that contemporary philosophers can take in engaging with it.
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KU Leuven
Citations
Manuel Tangorra. (2025). Decolonizing the Canon? Insights from Contemporary Hegel Scholarship. Radboud Annual Continental Philosophy Conference 2025: Canon and Critique. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239563