GEOGRAPHY, GEOLOGY, AND HISTORY: THE (PROBLEMATIC) TRIUMPH OF POLITICAL TIME OVER THE EARTH IN G.W.F HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Abstract

The discipline of history nowadays is concerned with rethinking the distinction between natural and historical times. A new philosophy of history must question both the ethnocentric and anthropocentric assumptions of the idea of history and the alleged independence of the time of the Earth and the time of the human species. In this paper, I want to analyze Hegel’s conceptual relation between Geography, Geology and History as one case in which a radical differ- entiation between human time and natural time (that of other species or of the Earth) has taken place. This differentiation has made it difficult to discern the relations between human history and the history of the environment, resulting in estrangement between the two. I begin by briefly analyzing how this distinc- tion has been produced in the modern history of Western thought and then observe how this distinction operates within Hegel’s philosophy. Here, I will ex- plore the paradigmatic case of the American continent. Secondly, I will explore one of the consequences of the triumph of the temporal logic of spirit upon the logic of space, one Hegel does not seem to consider as problematic, that is, the demate- rialization of History (anti-thanatropic logic) understood as the destruction of the physical grounds upon which spirit develops. Finally, as a programmatic con- clusion, I will take up Nuzzo’s reading and suggest the need to talk in terms of a political geo-cosmology.