«In der Tat ist der Geist der eigentliche Idealist»: idealità e oggettività nella filosofia dello spirito soggettivo di Hegel

Abstract

Nowadays, we tend to explain Hegel’s idealism by making reference to the concepts of a transcendent mind or an absolute I. However, Hegel himself regarded such concepts to be unusable for science. Hegel asserts that thought makes man free from the world as it is given. At the same time, he showed that liberation through thought does not mean just a subjective and mere abstract achievement. Most of Hegel’s work aims to demonstrate that thought is not only what we usually mean by ‘thought.’ It is not only the arbitrary and contingent product of an individual mind, in the first place because it does not coincide at all with a mere aprioristic product of mind. Consequently the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit has to be regarded as a theory of freedom that becomes accessible to man because of his capability of idealizing what appears, going beyond the picture of an already given reality, made of fragments of world, external bounds and isolated lives.