Phenomenology of Spirit as a search for a way of life

Abstract

This study is intended as a contribution, as well as a friendly and well deserved hommage, to the memory of Mariano Álvarez-Gómez. His dedication to philosophy was not only a poiesis, but also a praxis, a way of life in the domain of the best philosophical tradition. For this reason, his memory has suggested me this theme. The idea of a way of life has come into contemporary philosophy from different sources: L. Wittgenstein and his theory of language; helenism (mainly with the studies of P. Hadot); the proposal of an ethics of virtue after nihilism and as an overcoming of emotivism (A. MacIntyre), etc. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit «can be considered […] as the way through which the natural consciousness struggles to reach true knowledge or as the soul’s way throughout various figures of transition, up to spirit and knowledge of itself in itself by means of a complete self-experience». Certainly, the aim is science, absolute knowledge, which «should not be understood in the sense of a pure notional interiority, as distinct of its historical actualization, a sort of theory without praxis»; secondly, the term «absolute» «cannot be understood as a kind of perfection or a total here-and-now completed knowledge, encompassing all possible forms of knowing and action; thirdly, absolute knowledge, more than a self-enclosed system or a fixed dogmatic, should be understood as « the radical affirmation of a principle of discovery which continuosly offers itself as a contingent event».