Abstract

What typifies the dialectic structure of Hegelian subjectivity, meant as an internal purposive process of circular self-closure and self-determination, is the position that is therein occupied by the alterity of the other. in the first section of the article, drawing from some pages of The Phenomenology of the Spirit and from some paragraphs in Hegel’s 1830 Encyclopedia logic, the following question arises: “What becomes” of the other’s alterity in the dialectic thought of subjectivity and in the logical structuring of the Concept? the second part is focused on the analysis of the first form of the manifestation of the Concept within nature, living organic subjectivity, and therefore on the way in which the Kantian concept of internal purposiveness is introduced by Hegel in the description of the living. indeed, on one hand it is the internal purposiveness that allows one to understand the circular movement of the whole and of the parts that is the basis of the self-closure and self-determination of the totality of the organism; on the other hand, such movement can once again be interpreted in the light of the process of “assimilation” of the other in the immanence of the Concept, being in this case corporeality itself, in its organic and functional differentiation, the original form of alterity that living subjectivity leads back to the identity of the self