2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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T HE END OF PHILOSOPHY
This progress is more precisely defined as proceeding in accordance with
the contrast of content and form. What conducts the forward development
is the inner dialectic of the thought-formations. I mean that what is shaped
is something determinate. It must have a character; determinacy is necessary
to its being and existing. But, if so, it is something finite and the finite
is not the truth; it is not what it ought to be. It contradicts its content, i.e. the
Idea, and must perish. [...] What conducts the development lies in this dialectic
of the inherent infinity of the Idea which exists in a one-sided form
and must cancel this one-sidedness.(94.)
Each single philosophical system must assume a determinate form in order to acquire de-
terminacy, or to exist: it must assume a specific principle, or set of principles, and work
them into a philosophical construction. That’s what gives it its determinate shape or char-
acter, what sets it apart from the others. Atomism, for example, takes the atom as the abso-
lute, Stoicism assumes thinking as its principle, Epicureanism defines feeling and pleasure
as the true (98). The contrast is bound to arise because these philosophies (as all the others)
suffer from the intrinsic contradiction between, on the one hand, the limitedness of their
principle, their one-sided form as determined by their guiding principle, and, on the other,
their common aspiration to be philosophies tout-court, that is, their striving to comprehend
the truth as a totality. In other words, each single philosophy, in virtue of its adherence to a
single principle, offers a knowledge that is relative to that principle and bound by it. But
philosophy in general cannot be relative to anything, since, as we have seen, philosophy’s
intrinsic goal is to be ultimate, to achieve its end by putting an end to all determinatedness
and one-sidedness. Of course, the limitations of a specific system cannot be seen from with-
in it, but only from the outside, as it were, from another philosophical system that opposes
a new principle to the preceding one and thus refutes the prior philosophy while, at the same
time, keeping the whole process in motion. Refutations of this kind have a double character,
Hegel points out immediately, since they are both negative and positive at the same time.
In fact, what is refuted is only the form of the specific system, not its philosophical content.
In other words, what is refuted is the claim to absoluteness grounded on a specific principle,
not the principle itself: “what is refuted is not the principle of a philosophy, but only the
claim of one principle to be final and absolute and, as such, to have absolute validity” (95/