Jacobi, Hegel e il Proteo cartesiano. L’autocoscienza tra intuizione e mediazione

The article aims at comparing Hegel’s and Jacobi’s diverging conceptions of self-consciousness. To that purpose, I first put emphasis on the ambivalence of Hegel’s interpretation of immediate wisdom: on the one hand, Hegel praises Jacobi’s anti-Kantian understanding of the Ego as substantial personhood and life; on the other hand, according to Hegel, Jacobi is still a Cartesian, in that he reduces the Ego to the abstract form of intuition, and does not raise it to concrete spiritual mediation. Secondly, by outlining a possible Jacobian reply to the charge of Cartesianism, I contrast Jacobi’s model of a copresence of self-consciousness and life with Hegel’s dialectical dynamism of a substance becoming subject.