Metaphysics of Difference

• Applicant: Dr. Thomas Ebke
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497213015

The aim of the project is to gain a new understanding of the phenomenon and concept of "difference", which has played an extremely relevant role in modern philosophy. The project is woven into the philosophical-historical context of the modern reception of G.W.F. Hegel's speculative idealism. The starting point is a conceptual distinction that has been explicitly put forward against Hegel's thinking, especially by the so-called "philosophy of difference" in the French tradition (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida...): while the latter is characterised by the structural development of the necessary "difference" (and the distinctness) of true identity in itself, the concept of "difference" marks a qualitatively radical singularity of the individual being and especially its temporal inability to be derived from the "reality of the concept" (Hegel). From this conceptual distinction and from its emphatically critical reading of Hegel, the (post-)modern philosophical constellation, especially in France, then drew the programmatic conclusion that the descriptive and normative liberation of difference, which was to be the focus from then on, could only be brought about by way of a final dissolution and abandonment of all "metaphysics". In contrast to this post- and anti-metaphysical constellation, my research project sees itself as a study in the history of problems, in which the possibility of a "metaphysics of difference" is to be freely prepared. It will be shown that philosophical attempts were made both during Hegel's lifetime, albeit at a distance from his speculative idealism, and in the direct reception and post-history of Hegelian thought to take up the phenomenon of difference in its full radicality, without therefore leaving the paradigmatic level of a "metaphysics". Against this background, the problem-historical route that our project would like to trace leads from the thought of F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819) as a contemporary of Hegel into French philosophy of the 20th century, namely to the transformative reception of Hegel by Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968): In Jacobi, the momentum of difference lies in a metaphysics of action and at the same time in a philosophical personalism that is focussed on the phenomenon of "real individuality". While Hegel's speculative idealism, in its claim to integrate precisely this dimension exposed by Jacobi into a "movement of the concept", transforms the moment of difference into a logic of difference (see above), Hyppolite will return to the format of a "metaphysics of difference" in Hegel himself, at the open ends of his speculative idealism. Idealism, Hyppolite will return to the format of a "metaphysics of difference". Unlike Jacobi, however, Hyppolite locates the impulse of difference in the tension between a logic of "sense" (sens) and a certain understanding of linguistic expression (expression).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants