Riccardo Roni

The critic of substance immobility through negation constitutes the starting point of the ‘voyage of discovery’ of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, in which mind and body experiences are considered in terms of mutual recognition, without denying the subjectivity. In this article I am discussing some aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit after Nietzsche’s ‘experimentalism’ and Dennett’s theory of mind, in order to articulate, through Bergson, two fundamental reasons. The first concerns the subject and the dramatic awareness of its constitutional temporality and, at the same time, the possibility to transcend the limit of ‘here’ and ‘now’. On this basis, the second regards the indefensibility of nihilism, because, thanks to consciousness and its continuous activity, the temporal subject, from Hegel to Bergson, persists as a ‘dark side’, in which a constant ‘overcoming’ (élan) of an implicitly normative and essentially social practice takes place.

In our age now deprived of the traditional metaphysical certainties, to study the moral dimension of subjectivity in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit is to make one's object of investigation that which is one of the themes of greatest philosophical interest, precisely owing to its great topicality. Hegel deals with the moral issue in a particularly profound manner, aware both of the contradictory and dramatic aspects of that experience and of the centrality of the motif of the «beyond». On the basis of this interpretative thesis, the analyses of Hegel's text made in this research are devoted to focussing on the experiences of the subject's constitution and legitimization together with the unexpected consequences deriving from the problematic relationship that the consciousness establishes with the self-sufficient immobility of substance. The result is a historiographical and theoretical study that slots effectively into the contemporary debate on the great topicality of Hegel's thought.