For a critique of dialectics and nihilism: philosophy and the problem of the beginning in Fabro

Abstract

In these pages we aim to rapidly introduce and explain the contents of the volume of Fabro on the first reform of the Hegelian dialectic, which was published posthumously in 2004, and we will attempt to extend the critical analysis to some subsequent expressions of contemporary thought such as the “Hegelian pragmatism”. Philosophy is for Cornelio Fabro the search for primary evidence, for “the beginning”; and this will therefore obtain “without preconditions”, primarily as a requirement of the “essential thinking”. However, it is not internal to the thought itself, but involves a radical, non self-reflective openness of the self to the world and a connection of subject and object. Starting from this conviction arises the subsequent criticism of the philosophy of Hegel and of the Hegelian school, which in the name of immanentism denied the distinction between being and knowledge, between logical and ontological truth and which contributed to the spread of nihilism. Instead, Fabro along with Aquinas identifies “the beginning” in the “plexus” of existence and being, in the “transcendental concrete”.