Hegel y las Américas: aportaciones para una dialéctica ramificada

Abstract

The following article starts by highlighting the privilege Hegel grants to certain geographical regions in the context of universal history at expense of other social groups. It pointed how eastern civilizations lose relevance when the spirit of history moves towards the West, which appropriates all past turning it its own patrimony. Eastern people are considered the infancy of humanity and, when not extinct, continue to exist as living fossils. Likewise, people that do not constitute Europe's past lack any historical existence until they are discovered by the later. Thus, both those people who leave history and those that enter in it are measured according to a single present, which constitutes the spearhead of history, located in the current world power. Aiming to preserve the critical power of Hegelian thought in many other respects but correcting its obvious limitations assessing other nations and human groups, we offer elements to expand the logical space offered by his dialectic. We thus propose a “branched dialectic.” This would entail considering history as consisting of different simultaneous “threads” tied and untied both in a temporal sequence and in the geographical space of the world. Equally important is to pluralize actuality through different simultaneous foci. The challenge consists of maintaining a local, but not global, dialectical dynamic. To achieve such goal we resort to ideas of the German logician Gotthard Günther.