2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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T HE END OF PHILOSOPHY
in Kant’s, and makes them vulnerable. The path to a true philosophy, e.g. to philosophy tout
court, passes necessarily through its resolution.
We can get a grip on this paradox—whose Hegelian solution will involve the develop-
ment of the concepts of Aufhebung and absolute Wissen, which he briefly recalls in the text
we are dealing with—by focusing on the concept of telos that underlies the definition of
philosophy given above. Let me recall it here, verbatim: philosophy’s end (as telos) is to
come to an end (as completion) by implicitly bringing all other philosophies to an end (as
terminus).
This telos, as provisionally defined by Hegel, hides an essential instability. On the one
hand, it contains an implicit reference to history that comes forth through the necessity to
bring to an end all past philosophies. On the other hand, it lacks an explicit acknowledg-
ment of history’s role within philosophy. Let me introduce a distinction often used to clarify
the meaning of the word ‘history’ in order to get a clearer sense of this instability. By ‘his-
tory’ we may refer either to the series of events that make up the past, to what is sometimes
called res gestae (the ‘accomplished feats’), or to the later analysis of the past events, to the
historia rerum gestarum (the “history of those accomplished feats’). Although the distinc-
tion is obviously highly idealized—historical facts are not presented to us in their bare
givenness, but rather reached through historical analysis, to name just one possible relation-
ship between the two meanings—it can still be helpful in the present context. In our previ-
ous characterization, history as res gestae (or should we say as res philosophatae) has a
place: it has to be negated. Yet, the history of past philosophies, the historia rerum
philosopharum is excluded by the interpretation Hegel is considering: the new philosophy
coming onto the scene looks only ahead and considers its past as an error to suppress. In
other words, history is and at the same time is not present: this philosophy depends, in some
crucial way on its history (as res gestae), since it has to negate it, but on the other hand is
never allowed to look back to it, since history (as H. rerum gestarum) is by definition out-
side its scope. Hegel’s strategy, at this point, is to proceed to unfold the truly paradoxical
nature of this double relationship and to examine the consequences for philosophy as a
whole.