Herrschaft des Verstandes und Knechtschaft des Lebendigen: die Moderne in Hegels Jenaer Schriften

Ever since his earliest fragments, Hegel ascribes the responsibility for the different forms of splitting that have torn the classical ideal of harmony to the understanding [Verstand]. Nevertheless, the understanding plays an essential role in the process of knowledge. On one hand, the understanding is the faculty of limitation, which allows the oppositions of determinate and indeterminate, of finiteness and infinity. On the other hand it appears to be intrinsically rational, as it is a moment of determination of the content and a tool to understand the difference. Therefore, the understanding cannot be simply interpreted as a deficit and transitory form of the process of knowledge; rather, it embodies a specific way of interpretation of the world, which does not vanish sic et simpliciter in the immanence of the rational knowing. If the Hegelian philosophy was nothing more than the preservation of the Verstand’s cognitive modality under rational guises, the problem of the relationship between finite knowing and absolute knowing would not arise. But the problem instead comes up. So what remains of the understanding, once finite knowledge is included in the absolute knowledge? This essay aims at analysing Hegel’s answer to this question, proposing a rehabilitation of the function of the understanding in Hegelian epistemology. We will focus on the Jena phase of his reflection, in the belief that the theoretical declination of this concept in his mature works is nothing but the fine-tuning of a problem that finds a systematic elaboration in his first writings, starting from the reception of the post-Kantian debate and the critique of the so-called Reflexionsphilosophien. In the first part of this essay we will analyze the meaning of the concepts of understanding and reflection in the Differenzschrift; in the second part, we will examine the Erkennen’s section of the 1804/05 manuscript on Logic and Metaphysics in order to show the process of determination of the reflection by itself according to a cognitive modality close to the formulations of maturity.