Hegel and the Experience of Forgiveness. Starting from the spirit of Christianity

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the theme of forgiveness in Hegelian philosophy - especially as it appears in the early text The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate and in the Phenomenology of Spirit - with the aim of emphasizing the specifically philosophical meaning of forgiveness. In the 1798-1799 text, in fact, forgiveness gains importance in relation to the comparison between the spirit of Judaism and that of Christianity. Starting from here, one can appreciate how, based on this theological background, the discussion that appears in the last section of the sixth chapter of the Phenomenology considers the experience of forgiveness as the paradigm of experience as such. In this sense, the moment of forgiveness is central insofar as it is a constitutively intersubjective experience.