Sein und geist: Heidegger's confrontation with Hegel's phenomenology

This paper pursues the ‘thinking dialogue’ between Hegel and Heidegger, a dialogue centred on Heidegger’s ‘confrontation’ with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. To this end, I examine Heidegger’s critique of Hegel on the relationship between time and Spirit; Heidegger’s interpretation of the Phenomenology as exemplifying the Cartesian-Fichtean metaphysics of the subject; and Heidegger’s later reflections on Hegel as articulating the modern metaphysics of ‘subjectity’. I argue that Heidegger’s confrontation forgets those aspects of Hegel’s philosophy that make him our philosophical contemporary: Hegel’s thinking of intersubjectivity and recognition, of the historicity of the experience of spirit, and his critique of modernity. The point of this dialogue is to begin a retrieval of Hegel from Heidegger’s critical deconstruction, and thus to suggest that the future of Hegel—in Catherine Malabou’s phrase—remains something still to-come.