La circolarità di rappresentazione e concetto nella filosofia della religione di Hegel

Hegel conceives religion along his whole work as a primary background in human life. He changes however his view concerning the relationship between philosophy and religion: at the end of his early period in the so called Systemfragment he asserts that philosophy ends into religion because philosophy as thinking remains below life as a higher form of unification; Since he works at a system of philosophy in the Iena period the true philosophy, called speculation, is able to understand what in religion seems to be only something given. This turn is definitively established in the Phenomenology of spirit and characterizes also the late system in Berlin. This essay describes the main steps of this change but it questions the univocal conclusion according to which Hegel dissolves religion into philosophy. Referring particularly to Ricœur’s interpretation of representation, the last part of the essay argues the circularity of representation and concept in some passages of Hegel’s lecture on philosophy of religion of 1824 in which Hegel drafts an idea of signification grounded on the reciprocal movement from representation to concept and from concept to representation. This theory lets suppose a corresponding relationship between religion and philosophy.