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Of the Introductory Remarks I: Leibnizian Reconstructive Imaginary Dialectics Contra Hegelian-Marxian-Heideggerian-Schmittian-Derridean Deconstructive Negative Dialectics; or, Of Analytic-Modernisms Contra Continental-Postmodernisms: Beyond So-Called Analytic and So-Called Continental Philosophical Modalities: Toward an Imaginary Dialectics Rooted in Leibnizian Harmony: Toward Reconstruction

Encyclopedia of American Idealism claims to defenestrate the influence that the Hegelian philosophical program has had over philosophy for the past two centuries. Employing the metaphilosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, Hegelianism as a system can be eviscerated, rather than ignored, as has been the tendency as of late, for the most part, outside of the Brandomian Pittsburgh School of Hegelianism.

Ransacking the Hegelian philosophical system, its jewels are taken and thrown into the intellectual hopper that, too, absorbs innumerable other Western philosophers, who are indiscriminately assessed based on the merits of their philosophies, whether Pragmatic, Continental, Analytic, or Historical.

A genealogical trajectory at the end of which lies international harmony, Encyclopedia of American Idealism along the way advances the literatures in the following domains of the philosophical arts and sciences: Dialectics, Epistemology, Cognitive Science, Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, Metalinguistics, Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics.

A concrete and composite philosophical system, akin to the systems of, for example, Spinoza or Hegel, this work gets started with a Leibnizian Reconstruction of the Ancient Greek question interrogated both by Isaiah Berlin and Ronald Dworkin: the question of the fox versus the hedgehog, or, the question that wonders whether it is better to be like the fox, who knows many things, or the hedgehog, who knows one big thing. Here, neither option is selected: instead, the Wittgensteinian Duckrabbit emerges as the winner of that race: philosophy from the point of view of the Duckrabbit is inherently versatile: it both knows one thing and many things, for it is a nuanced systemizer.

In the Anthropo -Epistemology, Metaphysics and a so-called First Philosophy trace the lines of thought employed by Descartes, Saint Anselm, Lewis, Goldman, Sosa, Plantinga, and many more toward the formulation of a Whiteheadian-Derridean Process Epistemology, and the realization of the Pragmatic-Cognitivist Consciousness, contrasted with its antithesis, the conspiratorial consciousness.

In the Anthropoprogrammatology division of this work, the domains of Cognitive Science and Metalinguistics are interrogated: Marx, Austin, Lacan, Althusser, and Fodor loom over the dialectic, toward the identification of the Hegelian-Lacanian Linguistic Superstructure, grounded upon the Lacanian symbolic register. Then, in the Metapolitics, which has three divisions – Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics – all number of different philosophers are taken to trial for their philosophies: these being, notably, Kant, Hegel, Rand, Habermas, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Foucault, and Nussbaum.

In the Aesthetics, there is a general discussion of Aesthetic Phenomenology and the Work of Art, as well as an improvement upon Chalmers’s Extended Consciousness thesis. Also in the Aesthetics, the phenomenologies of John Keats and the Marquis de Sade find their synthesis in the phenomenology of none other than George Gordon, Lord Byron, who embodies the fashionable consciousness. 

Die Unterfrau, functions as a foil to Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, and embodies the revolutionary consciousness itself. In the Ethics, following the reasoning of Parfit – Benthamite Utilitarianism, Kantian Deontology, and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics are syncretized into a new General Theory of Ethics: Virtue Cyclological Speculative Optimalism, grounded in the Theory of Justice as Leibnizian Harmony, a harmony of the identified eighteen ideal principles of morality, which, in the Politics, develop from mere ideals into concrete rights; these eighteen ideal principles of morality are none other than: perfection, gravitas, hope, autonomy, dignity, grace, utility, civility, peace, trust, hospitality, decoloniality, beauty, defocality, dehierarchality, experimentality, improvement, and harmony.

Process Epistemology develops into Process Ethics. At the tail end of the Ethics, the concept of the Boltzmann god is introduced, which has great implications for the rest of the work, and inaugurates the Birth of God Theology research program, contrasted with Death of God Theology. Ultimately, in the Politics division of this work, Just World Theory, which is comprised of four components, these being, Just Mind Theory, Just Rule Theory, Just Environment Theory, and Just Economy Theory is presented.

 Before Just World Theory is interrogated, the Holistic Theory of Personal Identity is represented as a counter to Siderian temporal parts theory and Parfitian personality nihilism; the theory argues that there are seven chief components of personal identity. The four theories inherent to Just World Theory are grounded in an Aristotelian Metaphysical Theory of the Individual and of the Nation-State, grounded surprisingly not in Aristotle’s Politics or Nicomachean Ethics, but in his Metaphysics.

The Just Mind is asserted to be the democratic consciousness, and across fourteen stages of development, is traced up from the initial dependent consciousness. Just Rule Theory culminates in the genealogical development of the democratic constitution, and synthesizes the political philosophies of Locke, Rawls, Habermas, and Dworkin. Just Environment Theory transcends the ubiquitous manichaean conflict between imperialism and indigeneity by proffering the democratic universal safe space, and, again, theorizes solutions to the Habermasianly identified social pathologies. Just Economy Theory functions as an a priori ethical critique of Capitalism – contra Marx’s arguably outdated, albeit Hegelian, das Kapital -- and asserts that any democracy must possess a democratic economy.

The Just World is argued to be the democratic world, which is, that world that exists at the end of the teleological development of world history, after all twenty-three of its stages and processes have taken place, which is, a world defined by its international harmony.

Dialectical harmonism is revealed to be the method for the work, and it is argued to replace Hegelian-Marxian Dialectical materialism; Dialectical harmonism is inspired by Gottfried Leibniz’s metaphilosophical and metaphysical emphasis on harmony. Whiteheadian-Derridean Process Epistemology and Process Ethics develop into a Process Politics and a Process Theory of Law. Furthermore, a Darwinian Theory of Ideological Natural Selection is employed to explain why some ideas and sets of ideas are more fit and persistent than others, etc. So much for a thematic overview of the work and its three segments, Anthropo Epistemology, Anthropoprogrammatology, and Meta Politicality.

Now comes the time for a tour of Hegelian dialectics, which is to be sublated into a coinage of your author: Leibnizian dialectics. If you’ll just buckle in your seatbelts, we’ll rev up the existentialist motorcycle and take the royal road into the jungle that is Hegelianism: just as Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlow in Heart of Darkness journeyed into the imperialist abyss that was the Congo, we’ll set out to find the dark heart of this historied system. What is so special about Hegel? First thing’s first: how do we grapple with Karl Marx, Hegel’s right-hand man, whose legacy in the West, as articulated in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, is almost as profound as Hegel’s? Any serious liberal must contend with Marx, unless, of course, like most liberals, they dismiss him and das Kapital out of hand: irrelevant and refuted, they say!

That would make sense were it not for the fact that Marx is grounded in Hegel, and no one today would say: incontestably, Hegel is irrelevant, for, his specter haunts on: ooga booga booga! To get rid of Marx, you have to go for his Hegelian jugular. Unfortunately, in the absence of any such Hegelian arterie, all we have to grapple with, instead, is a hypercomplex Quinean web of belief, encoded in abstruse and fundamentally eccentric language. Thus, there is no easy refutation to be had here.

Overcoming Marx and his liege lord, Hegel, is not an easy feat to accomplish. First, the merits of their respective systems must be concretely identified and measured against the whetstone of perfection, in order to expose their weaknesses. From there, antitheses must be procured, and applied, in order to effect a series of syntheses, which turns out to be a Hegelian move itself, if one is paying attention to the dialectics of it all. Thus, there is a turn, here, a Dialectical turn, wherein, the dialectic shifts not to the contents of any of Marx or Hegel’s respective philosophical views, but instead, to the metaphilosophical concept of dialectics itself.

It is only in this headspace that one can begin to gain headway in the subversion of Hegelianism, for, the Science of Logic -- the mature expoundation of Hegelian dialectics itself, the core of the Hegelian system – is the nigh impenetrable fortress within which the specter of Hegel and his vassals hide, grimacing at their detractors. If their very system is grounded in dialectics, perhaps that is the way to overcome them, as Derrida and Žižek identify as a possible aspiration for the philosophical literatures – one wonders why neither of them ever attempted to do it!

But, there is a caveat, here: dialectics cannot merely be replaced, for it is the lifeblood of all philosophical praxis, for, dialectics is essentially performative: which is to say, there is no such thing as the Aristotelian analytic, for, a performance even performed by oneself still has the audience of oneself, and therefore all modalities of analytics are merely self-Dialectical, or self-discursive: this is to say that Analytic philosophy is really Dialectical philosophy. Instead of worrying about refuting the Hegelian Dialectical method, then, it is the manner of dialectics that must be, not refuted, but replaced: so, no matter what move we make here, we are still going to be stuck with a theory of dialectics: is that so bad? Famously, Dialectical materialism is the view espoused by Marx, and implicitly attributed to Hegel, despite those who repeat and repeat the view that Hegel was ‘turned on his head’ by Marx.

Yet, Hegel was arguing for a Philosophy of History the whole time: could there be a history, without a modality of materialism, or its recent theoretical friend, Lewisian physicalism? Of course not. Thus, Dialectical materialism was always itself a Hegelian view – or at least that is the Marxian view on the matter, shared by your author. Straight to the point: the chief methodology of this work will employ, not Dialectical materialism, but Dialectical harmonism. A harmonism of the dialectic argues that the infamous Hegelian aufhebung – or the overcoming-synthesis – may emerge not merely from matter, but any source of influence, and, most influences are sourced from phenomenological consciousness: hence the view, phenomenological constructivism, which argues that phenomenological consciousness is the root base to any conceivable Marxian or Althusserian superstructural Kantian-Searlean social constructs. 

Harmonism, therefore, traces any possible movement on the Dialectical chessboard: harmonism is the resolvement of any imaginary conflict, inherently. This dialectic, taken to its teleological endpoint, results in international harmony: nothing more, and nothing less. Thus, dialectics is not about negation, but temporal blocking: the resolvement of the conflict is not accomplished due to the negation of one term from another, but instead, is grounded upon the phenomenological realization that, there is no conflict at all, and that, there always existed a certain harmony between the two terms in the dialectic.

Until the temporal blocking is superseded, the realization of the inherent harmony between the terms is not conceivable. Thus, the improvement beyond Hegelianism lies not in negation, but in harmony. In social matters, there obviously exists a certain polynomial dialectics, wherein there are multiple if not innumerable terms inherent to the Dialectical process. The source of this work’s merits rest in its employment of Dialectical harmonism as a method – as a methodologically necessary development in Dialectical theory that takes us beyond the contributions of Hegel and Marx. In the division of this work labeled Ethics, even justice is defined as Leibnizian harmony, contra Rawls.

The whole of the natural procession of the world accords to Dialectical harmonism: should international harmony truly be an aspiration of the human race, first, Dialectical harmonism must become the applicative dialectic, in order to truly instigate the liberal dream of progress. Harmony is like gravity, where the dominant forces of the dialectic will always triumph: until human beings manifest the appropriate conditions for international harmony, there is no concrete way of knowing whether or not the teleological end of history shall be reached: the answer to that question is noumenal. In order to transcend difference, we must actively seek out the points of harmony shared among the terms in a given Dialectical equation.

This work attempts at an optimal application of Dialectical harmony to philosophical matters, and, according to the logic of that aspiration, provides a system of philosophy that may be referred to as American Idealism, for, with its emergence, the legacy of German Idealism may finally be challenged on its own terms, in an attempt to replace it with a fresh modality of performing dialectics. Hegel was right about innumerable things, one of those being that America was the place wherein dialectics would accomplish the greatest possible degree of human freedom. This freedom involves the freedom from Hegelian dialectics, however, which with the advent of American Idealism, truly are demonstrated to now be merely historical, rather than contributive to any contemporary debates on dialectics. 

Besides, although this is not the place for an a priori ethical critique of Hegelian dialectics, it goes without saying, that the Hegelian emphasis on negation contrasted with the Leibnizian emphasis on harmony – is inherently sadistic insofar as it is inherently combative to the extent that Hegelian Dialectical negation is built atop the logic of the master / servant dialectic, with entities engaging in an infamous Hegelian “battle for the death,” as articulated in Hegel’s famous Phenomenology of Mind. If Hegel and Marx have been philosophically dissected and discarded by means of Leibnizian Dialectical harmonism, which other Hegelians are next in line for the philosophical guillotine?

Let us now turn to Jacques Derrida, whose deconstructive method is none other than applied Hegelian dialectics, according to your author’s own reading and reconstruction of Derrida’s Of Grammatology: what could be more fundamental to Derridean deconstruction than the negation of binary oppositions toward a perpetual process of synthesis? If deconstruction really is applied Hegelian dialectics, then it too is centered on negation rather than harmony; and, to turn now to another philosopher whose Hegelian roots show like none other, Martin Heidegger in his Being and Time touted the Hegelian line through-and-through; indeed, Hegel was engaging in phenomenological research long before the birth of Heidegger.

To return to our interrogation of Derridean deconstruction: the name of Derrida’s very deconstructive method came to him not whimsically, but instead from Heidegger’s own philosophical method of destruction: it’s all there, black and white, clear as crystal: deconstruction is itself based on negative dialectics, to the extent it is rooted in Hegelianism and also to the extent that it borrows from Heidegger’s own arguably Nazi method of destruktion; and need we even mention the political philosophy of the infamous Paul de Man? Therefore, to whatever extent Hegel and Marx can be successfully critiqued via Leibnizian Dialectical harmonism, so too can Derrida, and his entire project of deconstruction. 

To ask Lenin’s question: what is to be done? We cannot merely deconstruct deconstruction itself, for that would be to employ the same sadistic and combative form of Dialectical logic that Hegel championed in his magnum opus, the Science of Logic; it should here be noted that the Dialectical method of Hegel bears great semblance to the friend / foe dialectic espoused in Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, with entities coming into conflict with one another in manner where one negates the other, not altogether unlike the Hegelian master / servant dialectic; what’s more, Alain Badiou in his dialogue on German Philosophy with Jean-Luc Nancy, insists that Hegelian negative dialectics is too heavy in its approach – Badiou goes so far as to refer to Stalinist policies as being in accord with the method of negative dialectics itself.

To reconstruct Hegelian negative dialectics we must again turn to Leibniz: and, may also play the Hegel card on Hegel, by sifting the wheat from the chaff inherent both to Hegelianism and deconstructivism; to turn to Leibniz here, is not to even remotely consider negating either Hegelianism or deconstructivism: instead, Leibnizian Dialectical harmonism mandates that we appropriate, synthesize, and harmonize as much as possible.

Thus, deconstruction as a method must be replaced by reconstruction, or, a method by means of which entities are analyzed for their constituent Dialectical parts, and then conceptually reconstructed in order to effect a harmonious synthesis among the terms involved in the given Dialectical equation. Again, this is to assert the existence of a polynomial dialectics, wherein even an infinite amount of terms could be involved in a given Dialectical equation.

For yet another substantive critique of deconstruction: binary – nay, polynomial – so-called oppositions – which deconstruction claims to deconstruct – are inherent to the very praxis of deconstruction itself, for: in deconstructing any given positivist structure, or merely identifying its limits, even, one enters into an oppositional relation to the positivist structure under scrutiny – to whatsoever extent oppositional relations exist at all and are not merely imaginary constructs rooted in our cognitive capacities – therefore, deconstruction in entering into relations of scrutiny, itself perpetuates so-called binary and polynomial oppositions: between the structure and the deconstructionist; the key here is not to oppose the structure, but to reimagine and replace said structure by means of Leibnizian imaginative dialectics: hence, the key is to reconstruct, not to deconstruct; the key furthermore is to reconstruct positivist structures ad infinitum, according to the logic of Hegelian-Whiteheadian process epistemology and process metaphysics; the perpetual reconstructive positivism of structures inaugurates a new Project of Being: the perpetual encyclopedification of the world, eternally revised, eternally reconstructed, and perpetually re-posited: toward the ultimate aspiration of a perpetually improved applied methodology of praxis itself. Just as Hegel and Marx met their philosophical fates at the hands of Leibnizian Dialectical harmonism, so too have Heidegger and Derrida.

There is a call, here, to seek out negative dialectics wherever they emerge, and then pull them up out of the ground that nourishes them: and plant new seeds! In this way, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Schmitt, and Derrida – The Combative Metaphysicians -- have been uprooted, and now have only to be replaced by precocious scholars both at the senior and junior levels of academia. Leibnizian Dialectical harmonism, and reconstruction may be employed in any number of fields in the humanities ranging from: Anthropology, Sociology, History, Cultural Studies, English, Comparative Literature, and especially in Philosophy. 

Now that reconstruction is on the table, and its methodology of Leibnizian Dialectical harmonism has been established, might we turn to the most pressing philosophical debate of our times, namely, the tension between the Analytic-Modernists and the Continental Continental-Postmoderns? The Analytic-Modernists implicitly or explicitly hold dear the tenets espoused in Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, and respect and cherish so-called Enlightenment values – these folks are inherently logocentric, and a lot of them are Neo-Kantians for exactly this reason, and are shrewd and mathematically-oriented; all analytic philosophers except for the Brandomites are Analytic-Modernists.

On the other hand, the Continental-Postmoderns counter logocentrism with the infamous charge that it is not merely logocentric, but instead, too, phallogocentric, or the belief that the history of civilization has been dominated both by men and by reason. Nothing could be more false than the claim that history has been dominated by reason, which, ultimately, is a Hegelian claim, made in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History.

To whatever extent women have been dominated throughout history – which truly is an egregious fact of history – have we forgotten one of the most basic of all the Continental-Postmodern claims? Namely, that the master / servant dialectic entails that the servant in fact triumphs over the master by becoming more intimate with themselves, etc., and, as Nietzsche famously argues, what does not kill me makes me stronger, etc. Thus, the Continental-Postmoderns ignore this basic fact of the Hegelian corpus, famously written in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind; therefore, the Continental-Postmodern claim that phallogocentrism is the case is based upon an inconsistent internal logic.

The Continental-Postmoderns must choose between Derrida’s critique of phallogocentrism on the one hand and Hegel’s master / servant dialectic on the other on the other hand – a Sophie’s Choice par excellence. Here, Leibniz smiles: surely you have heard of my Law of Non-Contradiction? We need not like a cat toy with the Continental-Postmodern mice: to return to the inherent tension between the Analytic-Modernists and the Continental-Postmoderns: might there be a Leibnizian aufhebung between the two opposing camps of thought? Let us now discuss where Dialectical harmonism sees fit to take us: ontological harmonism – a harmony of all entities, not necessarily pre-established, but capable of being established – just as the Aristotelian dialectic goes on how the tree exists within the acorn, etc. 

Here, to digress, the infamous problem of evil may be dismissed out of hand, for, the mere possibility of utopia’s emergence, justifies any conceivable and so-called evil: thus, both with and against Leibniz: pre-established harmony does not exist per se, necessarily, however, it is certainly the case that it is possible for this world to accomplish international harmony, therefore the problem of evil is null and void, etc.; instead of being a vulgar consequentialist view, this proposition that the permanent manifestation of utopia justifies any so-called evil may be understood to be in line with your author’s own Leibnizian General Theory of Ethics, i.e., Virtue Cycological Speculative Optimalism.

Universal Harmony is the ideal aim of any conceivable effort, and certainly is the telos of Being. As mentioned before, there is no such thing as Analytic Philosophy – the word analytic philosophically originates in Aristotle’s Organon – because every act of reconstruction is self-performative, self-discursive, and hence Dialectical etc., thus, there is only Dialectical Philosophy. This work seeks to eviscerate Continental-Postmodernism via Leibnizian Dialectical harmonism, however, it also – just as Leibniz stole Spinoza’s philosophy – steals the best philosophies from every other competing philosophical program, most of all Continental-Postmodernism itself. People say all the time: Hegel’s system incorporates other systems, it is so kraken-esque, etc., however, Leibniz indubitably stole Spinoza’s philosophical program just about in its entirety, but, made it so much better, and made it idealist. Here, to go one step further down the ladder rung, everyone knows that Hegel is believed to be a pantheist – just as was Spinoza.

Thus, this tension between Leibnizianism and Hegelianism did not just materialize out of thin air: it has been in the background of the dialectic for centuries now. If this work hopes to accomplish anything at all, that something would be the demonstration of the triumph of the Leibnizian philosophical program against the joint philosophical program that is Spinozist-Hegelianism. To return to Universal Harmony: it and nothing else is the true telos of history, as is argued in the last subchapter of this work: Just World Theory: or, Of the Genealogical Development of Leibnizian International Harmony. Thus, Leibnizian Harmonism itself, may replace both Analytic-Modernisms and Continental-Postmodernisms. Just as David Hume’s billiard balls trigger other billiard balls, it is the aspiration of your author that this work will trigger its reader into the Revolutionary Consciousness, guided by die Unterfrau.

So much for the introduction to this work, the system of American-Idealism, and its Leibnizian method, Dialectical harmonism, its telos of history, international harmonism, as well as its Leibnizian philosophical modality: reconstruction.