2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

H EGEL’ S PARADOX
opened up for us, the end of all possibilities—death. It concerns nothing but death, it deals
with that limit that defines our finitude and all the possible ways to defy it, from simple de-
nial to utterly acceptance to dialectical overcoming. But we will leave this aside).
If speaking about philosophy as such brings up the issue of its end, the converse is as
much true although usually more readily acknowledged. Any reflection on the end brings
immediately up philosophy, since the attempt to disentangle the multitude of aspects that
‘end’ covers cannot but use the most traditional vocabulary of philosophy: telos, finis, ter-
minus, peras, etc., as we have witnessed in the previous exposition. Such meanings have
received their definition within the discourse of philosophy and it would be naive (and,
properly speaking, non-sensical in the strict sense of the term) to use them to position one-
self ‘outside,’ as it were, the philosophical discourse. Nonsensical, because if ‘end’ re-
ceives its meaning within the discourse of philosophy, then of what use can it be outside
such a realm? This is, or can be read as, an indictment of the possibility of speaking of the
end of philosophy—but only if such a task is joined (accompanied) by the pretension of
thereby stepping out of it. In other words, the strict relationship existing between ‘end’ and
‘philosophy’ means that any effort to think ‘the end of philosophy,’ in these terms, is there-
by totally within the scope of philosophy while striving to ‘step out’ of it. As the fly caught
in the spider web, its efforts only make the situation worse. Should we therefore declare
“over” any effort to investigate the end of philosophy? (While acknowledging that such a
gesture, paradoxically enough, is nothing but classical philosophy?) A clear example of the
difficulty involved in detaching the meaning of ‘end’ from ‘philosophy’ is shown by a pas-
sage in the lecture course Heidegger gave on Hegel’s Phenomenology in 1930, where he
refers to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as non-philosophers. Or, more precisely, he says that
we should not say offhand that they are not philosophers. Much less
should we hurriedly say that they are philosophers and thus part of the genuine
history of philosophy. Perhaps in both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—
and we cannot take them seriously enough—something has been realized
which is in fact not philosophy, something for which we have as yet no concept.
Therefore, in order to understand them and their influence, it is crucial
that we search for that concept instead of pitting them against philosophy.
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