Alterità, critica, intersoggettività. Il contributo della Scienza della logica di Hegel alla teoria critica.

In the first part (Chapter I) of he Dissertation we will focus on the important subject of Alterity in Hegel‘s Science of Logic. Alterity is a decisive concept, since its presence enables us on the one hand to demonstrate the structural “opening” of the works as a whole, which is resistant to any pre-constituted teleology; and on the other hand to weave a non-linear relationship between dialectical logic and real philosophy, by showing the role played by first in the problematizing of some issues belonging to the second. The presence and the meaning of Alterity in the Science of Logic will also allow us to analyse at a deeper level one of the central themes in Hegel’s philosophy, Negativity, and its critical value for dialectical logic – since the latter finds its own source in Negativity. Moreover, the study of the relationship with the Critical Theory, developed by the so-called Frankfurt School, also finds its justification in the category of Negativity (Chapter II). This is why we will start with a theoretical reconstruction of the the Frankurt School’s epistemological focal point: the “immanent critique”. In its various forms, this is the name that was given to the Hegelian “determinate negation”, famously described in the introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit. As happens in the Hegelian antecedent, also for the Frankurt School the immanent critique is not meant to set some axiological-justifying criteria external to the object; its aim is rather to measure the correspondence (or the absence of correspondence) of the object to itself – setting the lines of an internal process. There are “variations” of the immanent critique; however, they do nothing but re-propose an ambiguity of Hegel’s determinate negation, which is suspended between the immanent context of a given object and that “claim to truth” according to which Conscience judges the correspondence (or not correspondence) of that object to its concept. Thus, the analysis shows the inadequacy of this paradigm (the determinate Negation/immanent Critique paradigm) for a critical theory and, secondly, it proposes its integration. How? By moving back from the epistemological-normative level to the ontological level. This fundamental change of approach is made available by the deepening of the determined Negation trough the selbstbezügliche Negativität – the speculative configuration of which must be sought in the entire Logic of Hegel. The relation that is so established between negativity, concept and subjectivity allows us to cross the boundaries of the Logic itself, and to introduce the study of a new social category: that of inter-subjectivity (Chapter III). The importance of this category for the critical theory of society has gradually become evident in the history of post-Hegelian thought, as shown in the theoretical proposals of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. Intersubjectivity was then taken up again, in a multidisciplinary perspective, by various philosophers who have intended to place themselves in the orbit of the Frankfurt School. Starting from a reconstruction of Habermas’s and Honneth’s theories of inter-subjectivity, we will show how it is possible to suggest a critique of intersubjectivity through Hegel’s Logic. The limits of this study do not allow us to follow the social and political implications that the critique of inter-subjectivity brings with it. We will rather remain on the ontological (or better: logical-ontological) level that was highlighted, in the course of the previous Chapters, through the close examination of Alterity and the self-referential Negativity. The critique of intersubjectivity means an Aufhebung of the exteriority of the relationship, together with the deepening of its reflective value: a value through which the relationship itself is constituted as subject.