Francesca Brencio

Il pensiero contemporaneo ha subito la seduzione del negativo, sulla scia anche della riflessione hegeliana che, come riconosce Nietzsche, è stata la prima a portare la contraddizione nel cuore stesso della filosofia e della storia, facendone il nerbo logico e dialettico della realtà tutta. Hegel, infatti, ha portato la filosofia verso un confronto radicale e necessario con il negativo, senza prospettare alcuna possibilità di fuga davanti a esso. Il libro indaga il tema della negatività hegeliana nell’interpretazione fornita da Heidegger, partendo dalla ricostruzione della Auseinandersetzung che Heidegger ha intessuto con Hegel nel corso di un quarantennio, ed evidenziando come questo sia stato un interlocutore privilegiato nella sua riflessione per la formulazione della tematica del nulla.

Martin Heidegger has been one of the most influential but also criticized philosophers of the XX century. With Being and Time (1927) he sets apart his existential analytic from psychology as well as from anthropology and from the other human sciences that deny the ontological foundation, overcoming the Cartesian dualism in search of the ontological unit of an articulated multiplicity, as human being is. Heidegger’s Dasein Analytic defines the fundamental structures of Dasein such as being-in-the-world, a unitary structure that discloses the worldhood of the world; the modes of being (Seinsweisen), such as fear (Furcht) and anxiety (Angst); and the relationship between existence and time. In his existential analytic, anxiety is one of the fundamental moods (Grundbefindlichkeit) and it plays a pivotal role in the relationship of Dasein with time and world. The paper firstly focuses on the modes of being, underling the importance of anxiety for the constitution of human being; secondly, it is shown the relationship between anxiety and world, and anxiety and time: rejecting both the Aristotelian description of time, as a sequence of moments that informs our common understanding of time, and the Augustine’s mental account of inner time, Heidegger considers temporality under a transcendental point of view. Temporality is ek-static, it is a process through which human being comes toward and back to itself, letting itself encounter the world and the entities. The transcendental interpretation of time provided by Heidegger may give its important contribution in psychopathology.

As a fundamental feature of our existence, melancholy is an inescapable characteristic of our ontological constitution. However, there is a distance between the clinical condition of melancholia and the human feeling, the capacity to feel sorrow and nostalgia. In this sense, melancholy and melancholia are similar but different. During the XIX century just few among philosophers have tried to described melancholy in terms of disorder, using philosophical tools rather than clinical definitions, drifting the accent from melancholy to melancholia. Hegel has been one of them, one that has seen inside the depth of human being in order to understand and describe what is the “the nocturnal point of the contraction”: melancholia, in terms of clinical condition. The philosophical exploration of madness and its parameters is essentially an ontological project: this is how Hegel addresses “the Concept of derangement in general” and melancholia in particular, anticipating most of Freud’s consideration on this topic.

"Heidegger [...] è uno di quei filosofi che non si possono solo studiare, ma esigono dal proprio lettore uno sforzo interpretativo che, nella più autentica tradizione ermeneutica è anche partecipazione attiva all'impresa del pensiero [...]. Francesca Brencio [...] si presenta, con questo lavoro, come una mente filosofica che bene coglie lo "spirito del proprio tempo", [...] praticando una storia della filosofia che è ermeneutica rigorosa e al tempo stesso non dogmatica [...]. Brencio sta offrendo il proprio importante contributo, modificando in modo originale un approccio e uno stile tipico della tradizione continentale (in senso lato) e tedesca (in senso stretto), ma rimanendo aperta ad altri contributi". Dalla Prefazione di Paolo Diego Bubbio.

Ludwig Binswanger has been one of the first psychiatrists who used in his medical approach the Daseinsanalyse of Martin Heidegger in order to understand the mental disorders of his patients. However, as it is well-known, one of the most critical interlocutor of Binswanger was Heidegger himself. Rebuilding the controversial case of Ellen West and the relationship between Heidegger and Binswanger on the ground of analysis of human being, the aim of this paper is to verify if Heidegger’s approach can give to psychoanalysis and psychiatry its most radical re-orientation by providing a new paradigm for understanding human being and the pathologies of existence.

This paper aims to rebuild the relationship between the Seinsfrage and Catholicism in Heidegger’s meditation and to shed light on his critique to Christianity as a philosophical necessity rooted in his broader critique of modernity in the context of the Black Notebooks. In order to reach these purposes, this contribution will be articulated in two parts: in the first one, I will rebuild Heidegger’s relationship to Catholicism and in the second one, I will focus on Black Notebooks as important tools in understanding Heidegger’s critique to Catholicism, a critique that is built on three levels: historical, speculative and political. The essay will show how the Schwarze Hefte illuminate Heidegger’s attempts to answer the question of Being in an incessant tension with the coeval seven major treatises on the Seinsgeschichte, in which Christianity, metaphysics and nihilism are inextricably tied together.

The aim of my paper is to show that the issue of death is central in Hegel’s philosophy and it has a strong relationship with the notion of negativity, which is not intended as a “trick” of the system, but as a moment of life, that is a central concept in his meditation. At a later stage, I will shed light on the inner teleology into every organic nature, understanding that this allows Hegel to preserve the notion of negativity through the concept of “lacking” being (die Tätigkeit des Mangels). In this sense, the strive to connect Philosophy of Nature and Logic shows that in the Hegelian system there is no place for the “long night of nothingness”, but only for the Life that becomes Spirit: the promise of philosophy is the path the lead from the deepest desperation to the strongest Hope.

Around 1930, Martin Heidegger approached Hölderlin’s poetry, welcoming his solicitations and hints in order to redeem the experience of the usage of language after the linguistic interruption of Being and Time that showed him the poverty of metaphysical language. Linguistic poverty is closely linked to metaphysical poverty and to the historical and destiny-related impossibility to grasp Being. From the 1930s onwards, the issue concerning the sense of Being becomes for Heidegger an issue concerning the sense of language. Heidegger appears to be “employing” Hölderlin, subordinating his philosophical intuitions to the gears of ontology. Thus, in Heidegger’s meditations, Hölderlin’s merit is outlined as the intuition of the outcome of Western metaphysics in terms of the extreme oblivion of Being and the rambling of thinking, foreseeing the end of an era and introducing the dawn of a second beginning: the one of poetizing thinking.

Conceptually, recognition claims a cardinal role in many prominent philosophical theories. Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, uses the German word Rekognition—a term that in many ways has no antecedent in prior tradition—to signify the identification, the grasping of, a unified meaning through thought. However, it is through Hegel that a substantial step in practical philosophy is taken, and recognition is put into dialogue with self-consciousness and freedom. Hegel uses the German word Anerkennung, in the period of Jena Realphilosophie, to mean the "real" actualization of freedom through a struggle which leads to two different levels of recognition: legal and moral—their forms constituted by love...