Continuità e limite: Hegel e la trasformazione del reale

Hegel’s conception of becoming can be said to arise from his intense confrontation with the debates of his time on continuous and mathematical infinite, in which also the thesis about time and movement of Aristotle’s Physics converge. According to Hegel, mathematical infinite already includes the true infinite, which is essentially relation. Basing his insights on the Newtonian rather than on the Leibnizian theory of differential calculus, Hegel draws the idea that the quantum exists only as a ratio ; as such, however, the quantum sublates itself into the category of quality. The continuous is for Hegel (as well as for Aristotle) the concept of this unceasing sublating of the quantity (of the homogeneous seriality) into the quality (i.e. into the qualitative difference): as some of Plato’s claims show in the Parmenides, the instant is the limit of this transition into the other. The Hegelian concept of Aufhebung (sublating) is this operation of “passage to limit”. In it, the process of the quantitative increasing gives rise to a new figure, to something heterogeneous compared with the previous figure, as in the case of the polygon inscribed in a circle, whose sides are multiplied to infinity until it becomes the circle itself. So understood, the becoming – as well as its metaphysical presupposition, i.e. the true infinite – is an unceasing “passage into the other”: the continuous is not a succession of homogeneous entities, but the process of the unceasing differentiation of the real. In this paper, I argue that this conception of the becoming is the presupposition of the process of liberation that, according to Hegel, is immanent to the becoming itself: if the differentiation happens at every instant, the liberation is, correspondently, possible at every instant.