The critic of substance immobility through negation constitutes the starting point of the ‘voyage of discovery’ of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, in which mind and body experiences are considered in terms of mutual recognition, without denying the subjectivity. In this article I am discussing some aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit after Nietzsche’s ‘experimentalism’ and Dennett’s theory of mind, in order to articulate, through Bergson, two fundamental reasons. The first concerns the subject and the dramatic awareness of its constitutional temporality (...) and, at the same time, the possibility to transcend the limit of ‘here’ and ‘now’. On this basis, the second regards the indefensibility of nihilism, because, thanks to consciousness and its continuous activity, the temporal subject, from Hegel to Bergson, persists as a ‘dark side’, in which a constant ‘overcoming’ (élan) of an implicitly normative and essentially social practice takes place. (shrink)

In this article I analyse some moments of Nietzsche’s reception and influence between Europe and America (namely in Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Papini and Josiah Royce) from a pragmatist perspective, in order to show how a selective monism and a realist pluralism emerge from their interpretations of Nietzsche. On the basis of this historiographic and theoretical reconstruction, I emphasize that Nietzsche, through both his monism and his pluralism, can question any presumed irreversibility in the moral field. By recognising the subject’s possibility (...) of change, of reversing the only superficial irreversibility of its Da-sein, Nietzsche’s pragmatism in this sense represents a great theoretical achievement, indispensable for the definition of a new bio-anthropological paradigm, in which identity can effectively coexist with difference. (shrink)