2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

“EIN SPIELEN DER LIEBE MIT SICH SELBST…”
6. “Ein Spielen der Liebe mit sich
selbst…”
A truly scientific knowledge will be reached only when the circle is closed and all the
single-standing “systems” will have found their places in the harmonious whole thereby
transfiguring philosophy, the love of knowledge, into the proper Wissenschaft that awaits it
at the end of its development. By looking into it we will have a first prefiguration of the end
that begins, slowly, to take shape.
This circular, all-encompassing form that philosophy will assume has an immediate
and all too important consequence on its content, e.g. on what philosophy can be about. In-
deed, the very status of that word, “about,” is precisely what is at issue here. If philosophy
is, or will be, a totally closed system, then it cannot be about anything, properly speaking,
since its “aboutness” would imply the existence of something external to philosophy and
therefore outside its allegedly all-encompassing circle. Philosophy is a cognitive activity,
to put it in a very abrupt form, which can assume a circular shape only if the object of the
knowing act is not outside it. Since, on the other hand, to be an object, in a first approxima-
tion, means precisely to be standing over the subject in an act of reciprocal self-delimita-
tion, it seems to follow that the object cannot be inside it as well. In other words, the
circularity of philosophy breaks any characterization of knowledge implying a simple op-
position between a subject and a object standing opposed to each other and belonging to
two different and reciprocally external spheres. The circle can be a circle only if no “part”
of the subject is totally and ultimately outside of the object and, conversely, no “part” of the
object is totally and ultimately outside of the subject.
However, such a mode of expression is still radically inadequate, since it pays a heavy
linguistic tribute to an understanding of knowledge incompatible with the Hegelian char-
acterization. Words like “part of,” “inside,” “outside,” and “about” already presuppose in
their meaning a non-circular form: they become understandable only if the subject and the
object are reciprocally external. On the contrary, the circular shape of knowledge intimates
that the relationship between subject and object preserve the fundamental character of an
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