The Relationship Between Subject, Substance and Nature in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract

The aim of my essay is to show how Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was able to propose, since the dawn of the nineteenth century and in the light of Kant’s “Copernican revolution”, a rereading of the notions of Subject, Substance and Nature in a dialectical-relational sense, that is functional at the same time to overcome dogmatic visions of man and the world of an essentialist, reductionist and creationist nature. To this end, I will divide my contribution into three parts. In the first introductory paragraph, we will see how for the Hegel of the Phenomenology the dialectical and immanent relationship between Self and Other-than-self could certainly not be reduced to some form of metaphysical or ontological dualism. Thereby, in the second part it will be clarified how only through the experience of conscience is it possible to understand how the Spirit – the true Subject of the entire movement in progress – can free itself from its own Entfremdung, so as to reach Entäußerung – the recognition and re-appropriation of true effective substantiality of the Self and the Other-then-Self (which therefore will disappear as absolute otherness). Finally, in the last paragraph, we will briefly see how the still metaphysical-speculative outcomes of the Hegelian system, set out in definitive form in the 1830s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, do not prevent us from using today some Hegelian categories to critically grasp the nature of our present.

Subject; Substance; Nature; Consciousness; Experience.