Alfredo Ferrarin - Hegel and Phenomenology

Pursuing the history of philosophy appears wholly unlike pursuing the history of any other discipline. An inner connection between the subject-matter and the story we are telling animates and organises our work. Unless we philosophise along with the thinkers we consider and are therefore prepared to run the risk of arbitrariness as we examine their arguments from what is necessarily a perspective external to theirs the result we are likely to get is little more than an assemblage of moot facts. The ideal of historiography, clothed in the seemingly noble garments of respectful self-restraint inviting us to forsake originality to let things speak authentically for themselves, is the restitution of other philosophers thought to be preserved unaltered and intact by contamination with ours. This ideal is correctness. But as long as we let ourselves be guided by this ideal, we wind up condemning ourselves to silent repetition.

For a historiography that looks for influences, appropriations and derivations, and fears getting astray by superimposing on its questions something undocumented that was not already there, nothing seems more futile or otiose than a comparative analysis of Hegel and Twentieth-Century Phenomenology. Truth be told, Husserls neglect of Hegel is nothing more than a sign of his indifference and ignorance; Hegelians, in turn, find it hardly interesting to examine Hegel in light of phenomenology or learn anything from what they see as a form of subjective idealism. For historiography, there is no room for a dialogue.

Hegel thinks that the history of philosophy is philosophy at its best when it engages in a living exchange with the past and does not limit itself to reporting a gallery of dead opinions. As he says, the realm of truth is the eternal essence of spirit, a life neither moths nor thieves can enter or corrupt (Hegel 1986, 578). To use and paraphrase now Husserls language, taking philosophical positions as indexes of possibilities rather than facts (which requires imaginations eidetic variation, including counterfactual considerations of what we examine) allows us to establish an invariant core, so that Husserl goes to the point of saying that fiction, properly understood, is the vital element of phenomenology as well as of all eidetic sciences (Husserl 1976, 70). For an imaginative history of philosophy in search of fresh insights and provocative challenges, a discussion of certain thematic relations between dialectic and phenomenology can prove more than interesting. It does not have to compromise on rigour, for it can become a compelling manner to test critically the respective key theses. In the end, what guides us is not the life of spirit as in Hegel or the supposed realm of fiction as in Husserl but a different standard of truth than in the positivism and historicism historiography tacitly assumes.