Verità e certezza nella Fenomenologia dello spirito di Hegel

Abstract

If we consider at the same time both Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the secondary literature concerning this work, we will discover a significant disproportion: compared to the huge number of interpretations focused on the connection between the phenomenological path and the progressive realization of ‘truth’, the number of the contributes which investigate the role of ‘certainty’ in the same context is meagre. This ‘quantitative datum’ anticipates the corresponding ‘qualitative datum’: most interpreters recognize in the Phenomenology the ‘Bildung’ of the Consciousness to reach the point of view of the truth, and the docking of the Spirit at the kingdom of the ‘true knowing’. Nevertheless, there is a further element, whose recursivity in the work cannot pass unnoticed: the ‘certainty’. This paper aims at demonstrating the necessity of the determination of ‘certainty’ in order to realize the ‘absolute knowing’. In other words, ‘certainty’ plays an essential role in the constitution of the speculative truth. It‟s Hegel himself who defines, in the last chapter of the work, the ‘absolute knowing’ as the identity between ‘truth’ and ‘certainty’. According to Hegel’s declarations, the speculative truth is achieved when the „true content‟ is shaped in the ‘true form’: i.e. when the ‘true content’ receives the «shape of the Self».