NINA AURAS VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA

This research aims to consider the problem of language in Hegel's philosophy from an expressiveness-centered perspective. The idea of expressiveness as a focal point in Hegel’s overcoming of a Kantian-like absolute can be justified, among other texts, by the contents of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences’ section dedicated to the concept of spirit, where its concrete determination is indicated to be self-revelation. The discovery of the subjective-objective unity, through which the spirit finds itself in a differentiated unity and produces or reveals itself as an externally present and rationally configured world, is thus the spirit’s highest determinity. “Expressiveness” would then be a general term for what, determinedly, is “self-revelation”. More accurately, the effecting of that determinity is the identity between form and content in exposition, which corresponds to the identity between subject and object, both syntactical and semantically. The rigid categories of formal linguistics pose, therefore, an obstacle to the fluid organicity of the concept, which must, however, by its very definition, expose or extrude itself. In a series of moments, Hegel points to the linguistic sign or language in general as the element responsible for raising this identity to the ideality of thought. Indeed, a change of understanding in linguistic meaning is equated with the difference between representing and thinking, and changing representations into thoughts as such is shown to be the task of philosophy in general. Expressiveness can thus be linked to the concept of linguisticity [Sprachlichkeit]. With this objective, the dissertation considers Hegel's interaction with the linguistic criticisms in vogue of representative metaphysics and the peculiar consistency of the treatment of language throughout his work, particularly in the third volume of the Encyclopedia but also, more briefly, in the Text 58, the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic.