Pratico e teoretico in Fichte e in Hegel

This paper clarifies the significance of the opposition between Hegel’s idealism and Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. Central to Fichte’s Doctrine of Science is the special relation between absolute and concept. This relation is characterized by a margin, an excess of the absolute. This does not compromise the possibility of knowledge, so as to trap it into that «bad infinity» that Hegel wished to identify. Fichte, instead, shows how this difference becomes the place for the reflection of knowledge in and on itself. The absolute manifests or reveals itself in knowledge to the extent that it recognizes and reconstructs its own conditions and presuppositions. This knowledge of knowledge does not establish itself as an immanent reflection, so as to objectify it in the same process. This maintenance of the conceptual structures of the Doctrine of Science creates the space for the indication of the transcendental difference that discloses the concept as the place of a self-overcoming, by the concept itself, and its reopening to «life». Philosophy articulates itself as the theoretical space of mediation of the absolute and, at the same time, as a practical indication.The analysis of the concepts of «impulse» and «Idea» in Hegel’s Science of Logic demonstrates that Fichte’s transcendental philosophy does not evade Hegel’s critique, but demonstrates, at the same time, that the Doctrine of Science, through its identification of the risk of overriding the difference between absolute and concept, shows ante litteram a critical value against Hegel’s abolute idealism. From this point of view this paper derives the possibility of verifying and criticizing the tenability of philosophy as an objective ‘absolute knowing’ or as a ‘doctrine of science’.