2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

A BSOLUTE( S ) SPIELEN
the roots of this interpretation go back to Feuerbach, at least, it is alive and well even now-
adays. Jürgen Habermas, for example, comments as follows: “As absolute knowledge, rea-
son assumes a form so overwhelming that it not only solves the initial problem of
reassurance of modernity, but it solves it all too well. [...]reason has now taken over the
place of fate and knows that every event of essential significance has already been decid-
ed.” 11
Both interpretations forget what Hegel understood full well, namely that both aspects
must be present. If one of them is privileged over the other, the whole Hegelian solution to
the end of philosophy problem falls apart. Which means: Hegel is successful in designing
the topography of the ‘beyond’ of philosophy only if he can show that the concept of abso-
lute knowing, interpreted as a form of play, keeps together the work of the negative (e.g.
death) and the superior untroubled unity of this play with itself. Privileging the “negative/
serious” side (and pushing for a “pantragic” and “open” interpretation of Hegel) entails that
the circle cannot close upon itself: like a madly spinning top, philosophy can end up any-
where. Most likely, it will end up in the reassuring inanity of a textbook.
On the other hand, stressing the playful/positive side of the in itself, to use Hegel’s own
terminology (and therefore pushing for a “panlogistic” interpretation) implies that the ab-
solute is deprived of all its real features. It becomes a pure abstraction and its apprehension
can never be a science, since there cannot be any real knowledge of it but just, at most, a
felt intuition. To put it differently, the solution to the problem of the end of philosophy or,
in other words, the very possibility of philosophy’s existence, is contained in what seems
to be a real dilemma. Two conflicting and apparently contradictory constraints must be ful-
filled: first, in order to account for the “work of the negative,” e.g. the reality of human la-
bor, the tragedies and struggles of history, the structure that will account for them must be
necessarily open-ended. It must be and cannot but be a sequence of antagonistic confron-
tations. The game-like side of Spiel, in Hegel’s image, captures precisely this aspect of the
process.
10. Robert Williams’s formulation (who himself does not adhere to this view) in Recognition (Albany, NY:
State University of NY UP, 1992) 253.
11. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1987)42.
95