Hegel and the image theories of the late antiquity

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to explore a field of studies that until now has not gained the attention of the Hegelian scholars: the relationship between the Hegelian Philosophy and the philosophies of the Late Antiquity. The paper is divided in two parts, following what I consider the change of paradigm in image theories, during the passage from the Pagan to the Christian world. In the first part I consider Hegel’s thesis on what we could call the Greek image theory, defined by the rationality of the human figure, until its slow decay. Such a decay will not be a simple disappearance but a transformation to what would later be the new principle for a Christian image theory: the speculative likeness. At the end of this essay, I will try to highlight the principle that undergoes the whole Hegelian treatment and that corresponds not to historical or empirical facts, but to his gnoseological theory, developed in the section of the Subjective Spirit in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The whole essay should be considered as a brief contribution to the construction of what is aimed to be a Hegelian theory of images and particularly to what I call “endogenous iconoclasm of the image”.