2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

O F LINES, CIRCLES, AND SPHERES.
128). The content must be retained, then, while its form must be suppressed: “the refutation
is the reduction of one principle to be a specific factor in the whole.” The double movement
of negation and conservation at the same time makes the whole process a dialectic progres-
sion where nothing, content-wise, is ever lost. Each single philosophy is conserved and re-
tained in the next one (Aufhebung is the typical Hegelian term for this process) so that the
latest philosophy “must contain it itself the principles of all the previous philosophies and
consequently is the highest one”(95); at the same time it will be the deepest and most con-
crete one, since it has absorbed all the determinations of the previous systems. It follows
that “the essence of the history of philosophy is that one-sided principles are made into fac-
tors, concrete elements, and preserved, as it were, in an amalgam” (98). It could not be oth-
erwise: a simple negation with no positive and conservative moment would mean that the
single philosophies are bound to fight each other in an endless battle with no real progress.
We have already seen that such a conception would entail the degradation of philosophy to
a battlefield of opinions and require its surrender to other disciplines. Dialectic mediation,
then, is required by the intrinsic necessity of Hegel’s conception as the only process that
can resolve the contradiction between truth and history or, which is the same, between phi-
losophy and its end. Hegel can therefore call the dialectic that governs historical develop-
ment an a priori: “the history of philosophy has simply to confirm this a priori, this heart
of the nature of the Idea; of this nature it is simply an example.”(94) The example has to be
shown to be such, of course, which is no small feat. The three volumes of historical analysis
following the introduction are devoted to prove in concreto what the introduction has es-
tablished in the abstract: that the historical succession of philosophical systems is in fact a
development governed by dialectical mediation.
Where does the process lead to? Is it going to continue forever toward more and more
inclusive and sophisticated form of philosophical knowledge? In geometrical terms: can we
envisage philosophy’s progress as a straight, slanted line that goes on to infinity without
ever reaching an endpoint? Note that the issue here is essentially different from the previous
discussion of the “scientific” model of progress, although the outcome turns out to be sim-
ilar. In that case, the temporal increase of knowledge proceeded by juxtaposition, e.g. by
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