Abstract

Hegel’s claim on the unity of form and content founds the main normative criterion of philosophical exposition and thus of the «speculative proposition», which is in the Phenomenology of Spirit the own form of speculative thinking. This paper explains how the speculative proposition enacts the dialectical unity of form and content. My aim is to prove that the aesthetic or linguistic moment plays a constitutive role in the articulation of speculative thinking. To that end, I will examine the philosophical statement under the perspective of the writing practice. I will consider, first, the chiasmus of subject and predicate within the speculative proposition in the Phenomenology; second, the methodological role played by translation and metaphor in the Encyclopaedia; third, how these aspects reveal the rhetorical consistency of philosophy. In this way, I will describe a coherence in the development of Hegel’s notion of speculative thinking. Although the speculative proposition appears only in the Phenomenology, it remains in the mature system as a dispositive for the philosophical translation of the experience.