2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

“EIN SPIELEN DER LIEBE MIT SICH SELBST…”
The circle is such only at the end, after its closure has been reached, and it is possible
to live in it and reach the form of knowing that will inaugurate science only when its end
will have joined its beginning. This means that no immediate knowledge of the Absolute is
possible, as Hegel stresses over and over again. First, because it would not constitute a
knowledge at all, and therefore it would not be philosophy. Rather, it would be an intuition,
a feeling of an indistinct unity of and with an Absolute that “is not supposed to be compre-
hended, [but] felt and intuited. Not the concept of the Absolute, but the feeling and intuition
of it must govern what is said and must be expressed by it.”(4) Furthermore, and more im-
portantly, such a self-contradictory philosophy cannot get to the absolute at all, since it re-
duces it to an empty, contentless entity. The intuition of God and God’s Love become the
slogans of a position that refuses to provide penetration and comprehension by reducing
philosophy to a mere edification that “shrouds in fog the manifold variety of its earthly ex-
istence its thought”, and “pursues the indeterminate enjoyment of this indeterminate divin-
ity.”(5) But such a position is so vacuous it can find anywhere the “ghosts” it has allegedly
discovered.
Hegel, instead, wants to recover the concept of God and the Absolute as Substance that
Spinoza had already put forward and that inspired so much debate in Germany around the
turn of the century. To think the true as substance comports to think it in both its universality
as well as in its concreteness, that is, in the multiplicity of forms in which it develops. The
Substance, however, cannot be external to the subject, as it still is in Spinoza, lest the whole
characterization of philosophy as a circular structure that reaches its beginning at the end
collapses in the reciprocal externality of subject and substance. The substance has to be
thought as subject—this, Hegel claims, is the basic insight from which everything else fol-
lows.
This is the basic, and only, difference that Hegel acknowledges between the “highest
point of philosophy’s development” and the Spinozian characterization of the Substance.
As he says in the final pages of the Vorlesungen, while summing up the principal phases of
philosophy’s history:
Being and thought are opposed and identical in Spinoza, who has the fun-
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