THE AESTHETICAL PROJECT IN YOUNG HEGELS REPUBLICAN IDEAL

Abstract

By aiming at the origins of Hegelian political thought, the main objective of this project lies in assessing the relation of sensibility and imagination, its place and status in comprising an aesthetical project for ethics and politics. The research seeks to establish how sensibility and imagination are thought as primordial ethical powers conceived as the framework of subjective affections specifically placed within the social imagery of a people. Struggling against and at times ceding to the heavy Enlightenment influence of the intellectual environment of his time, Hegel reframes early in his youth this inheritance by crossing several tendencies. The aim here is to analyze the role Hellenism plays in this web and thereby evaluating in which way Hellenism constitutes a counterbalance to Enlightenment by way of conceiving a Republican ideal of State engineered through this aesthetical project. Texts and fragments dated up to Bern's period will be analyzed in order to integrate them and therefore offer a wider and clearer picture of the objectives here proposed. These objectives consist of exploring how three general guidelines lead Hegel's reflections: the sensible-intelligible duality problematic, the adherence to an Hellenic ideal of unity and the reframing of primal Enlightenment motifs, especially Kant's. These three main flows form the basis upon which we analyze how the categories of autonomy and simplicity are called upon by the young Hegel in the shaping of the concepts of his Republican ideal, namely the spirit of the people, sensuous religion and positivity. The intended result comprises of proving that this Republican ideal is constituted by a drastically reformed Enlightenment thematic within an indelible Hellenism.