Vita e concetto. Hegel e la grammatica del vivente

“Life” is central concept to all philosophers belonging to the so-called classical German philosophy. The development of the notion of “life” marks the attempt to overcome a series of typical dualisms rooted in the modern philosophical tradition, i.e. soul vs body, thinking vs world, nature vs spirt. For this reason “life” is often defined in terms of unity, as “embodied soul” or “animated body”, for instance, as well as “spirit that is nature” (a famous Schellinghian expression) or “nature that is spirit”. In my paper I will first explore the motives underlying the development such a notion of “life”. The interest for the concrete phenomenon of life, as I will show, has in the first place a critical function, namely: it aims primarily at putting in questions the above mentioned conceptual structures coming from early modern philosophy. In particular, I will focus on Hegel’s treatment of “life”, exploring the original character of his conception with respect to the other concepts circulating in classical German philosophy. In the second part, I will therefore explore the function and the various meanings that the notion of “life” has in Hegel’s logic. I will answer the following questions: what does Hegel mean by saying that life is a “negative unity”? What does it amount to say that life is “absolute contradiction”? And in what sense does Hegel speak of life as a first form of the Idea?