2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

O F LINES, CIRCLES, AND SPHERES.
only because we often think we are assuming unreachable ends as goal of our behavior
when in reality we are dealing with a totally different situation. “To be the best writer in the
world” may be an unreachable goal but to be a better writer is so much a goal at hand that
hardly anyone would try to improve his writing if he or she didn’t believe it reachable. “To
become a slightly better writer,” then, far from being the by-product of an asymptotic pro-
cess is the real goal that rules one’s self-improvement. This means that if philosophy’s di-
alectical progression could never reach its end, philosophy itself would be forced to change
its telos. But since such a telos was, in Hegel’s discussion, only derived from the definition
of truth, such a possibility entails that truth itself has to be put under discussion. Or rather
the truth of truth, its structure and inner being. The only way to escape such a possibility is
to accept that the dialectical process can reach its end. In other words, the development can
stop because the contrast between the form and content of philosophical systems has dis-
appeared: the form of the system has reached the ability to give expression to the absolute
Idea. The system in question here is not, we may recall, any single thought formation, but
rather the entirety of philosophy’s development.
On the other hand, reaching the telos in the usual sense comports the end, in the sense
of termination, of the correlated process. Philosophy’s reaching the end, in the positive
sense of the terms, entails that philosophy itself, as a process, ceases to exist because it has
attained its goal. But how can philosophy’s end be a disappearing of this sort? If we are to
remain faithful to Hegel’s argument, such an ending cannot be an interruption but rather a
completion that gathers up all and the whole of philosophy in its final and utmost perfec-
tion. History of philosophy cannot reach its terminus by a simple coming to an end that in-
terrupts it, because the consistency of the process—e.g. dialectics—requires that nothing
will be lost. Therefore, philosophy cannot annul itself with a self-effacing gesture that
would bring about something “else.” Or, even worse, by a gesture that would point to some-
thing other than philosophy, to some different form of knowledge perhaps, lying outside
and beyond philosophy itself. The line representing the philosophical development must
reach an end, but it cannot obviously terminate by leaving anything beyond and beside it-
self, both in space and in time, as if something would be left to explain or as if something
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