Esercizi Filosofici 09, 1 (2014)

In the following article Herbert Spencer’s religious thought is accounted for by reference to a religious group active in the early 1850s through the columns of the weekly radical The Leader. It is showed how the Leader elaborated some important criticisms of the tradition of natural theology. Then, it is argued that the main tenets of the perspective of the Leader – i.e. the unknowability of the ultimate mystery, the instinctive nature of religious belief, and the criticism of natural theology itself – were to find their most powerful expression in Spencer’s essay on the Unknowable (1862).

Starting from the splitting of the world, theorized by Nietzsche, in the immanent and the metaphysical one, the German doctor, essayist and poet Gottfried Benn theorized the incurablity of such fracture. In this contribute we shall expose the philosophical reasons making that fracture nihilistic and, moreover, leading to the theorization of the double life. The biological and social-political life flourishes at the expense of the spiritual and artistic life, while the spirit is in turn bio-negative. Finally, we shall disclose the reasons why Benn believed that, even thou the artistic principle is bio-negative, it can none the less overcome the nihilism.

This paper recounts a dramatic paradigm shift in the debate on the value and significance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, from the harsh criticism it faced over the past two centuries to its reappraisal, in the last three decades, through both the vindication of Hegel’s competence in the empirical sciences and the appreciation of his assessment of organic life and habitat, at the intersection with anthropology. The paper concludes with the most recent trends in scholarship, which focus on the problem of the naturality of man in respect to culture and to democratic societies and on the systematic transition from Hegel’s philosophy of nature to the philosophy of spirit.