2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

H EGEL’ S PARADOX
for better or for worse, by a different one. 12 But a history, in this sense, of past philosophies
seems to make little sense, since, once again, on the one hand it would have to grant validity
to different, successive philosophies, and on the other it would allow one truth to suppress
another. A superseded truth is not very different from a mistake, being what has been rec-
ognized as such. Furthermore, such a narration would be totally irrelevant to philosophy
and philosophizing, given the necessity to start ex-novo every time.
Conversely, if philosophy has a history then it cannot be a science, i.e. it cannot be phi-
losophy, since there would have been truths objectively valid in the past. But again, multi-
ple truths do not add up to a greater truth but constitute rather a series of opinions. Unless,
of course, one is willing to abandon philosophy’s aspiration to be a science and set a more
modest goal for it: to provide a general world-view compatible with the time in which it is
developed. 13
We face a classic dilemma, a proposition that opens up to two incompatible and equal-
ly unsatisfactory consequences. Before we begin to explore it in further details, we may
start by appreciating its real scope. It would be easy to dismiss the contradiction by relegat-
ing it to the characteristic quagmires of a discipline, history of philosophy, which can serve
useful purposes but is nevertheless distinct from philosophy proper. Easy—but wrong. The
issue Hegel is trying to bring forth by pointing at the problematic relation between philos-
ophy and its own history does not concern primarily historians—rather, it concerns philos-
ophy itself (although it is well known that his solution of the problem will radically
undermine the very possibility of such a distinction between theory and history). Hegel’s
12. There is another possibility I am not exploring here: namely, that philosophy’s history be envisioned
as a continuous progress toward richer and richer theories. We are all familiar with this model of monotonic
growth, since it corresponds to the received view about science’s progress. Hegel deals with it
explicitly in the Lectures and I will discuss his position at length in section 4 below.
13. In fact Husserl, in his polemic against Dilthey, traces back to Hegel the origin of such a view of philosophy.
Husserl acknowledges that Hegel’s philosophy rejects such a view, but he claims that Hegel’s
strong conception of history allows such a possibility, once the concept of absolute Wissen is relinquished:
“Hegelian philosophy produced lasting effects by its doctrine on the relative justification of
every philosophy by its own time—a doctrine, it is true, which in Hegel’s system, pretending to absolute
validity, had an entirely different sense from the historistic one attributed to him by those generations
which had lost, along with their belief in Hegelian philosophy, any belief whatsoever in absolute
philosophy.” See Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as a Strict Science…,” 229-30.
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