Doppio senso: natura e seconda natura

Abstract

There is a passage from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics in which he speaks of the duplicity of the word “sense”. This duplicity is truly remarkable because it indicates, at the same time, the corporeal immediacy of something and the meaning, the abstract, the universal of the thing. In what follows, I will first examine the purely linguistic layer of doubling; then, moving from words to things, I will focus on the fact that the doubling between the sensible and the intelligible is not just a matter of words. From here I will directly address the question of human nature as second nature, examining three doublings: the speculative one, of which Hegel speaks, when he sees in the death of what is merely natural the birth of the spirit; the physiological one, of which Freud speaks to us with a hypothesis reaffirmed by contemporary science, which sees a single origin in both the seat of sensibility, the skin, and in that of thought, the cerebral cortex; and the anthropological one, according to which the human mind, as part of an organism that is systematically connected with mechanisms, presents itself as, at the same time, embodied (it is part of a body) and equipped (it is endowed with supplements). I will conclude my examination by describing a circle, one that forms in the relationship of reciprocal conditioning between nature and second nature, as well as between organism and mechanism.

Keywords

• doppio senso
• organismo
• intelligenza artificiale