Congedo dal sapere assoluto. Genesi, esito, riscatto

Absolute knowledge is not simply the achievement, on the part of consciousness, of complete and absolute self-awareness; it is simultaneously the exposition of that knowledge as the ultimate substance of all reality. In this way, Hegel transforms into a genuinely ontological thesis what, over the course of the work, had appeared as a purely epistemological experience: “experience” becomes the absolute, and the critique of ontology that had accompanied this “experience” is converted into a new ontology. Against this outcome, however, it is possible to “redeem” absolute knowledge from the self-reflexive character that culminates in the identification of epistemology with ontology. Such a redemption becomes conceivable through a reconstruction of the intersubjective and normative foundations of spirit, and by preserving a conception of ethical life (ethos – Sittlichkeit) that cannot be subsumed under reflection or conceptual mediation. The phenomenological path thus remains the process whereby subjectivity learns, on the one hand, its mediation through an ethical objectivity that constitutes it, and on the other, the inescapable reflective mediation of reality. Yet the primacy of ethical life over reflection prevents any final subsumption of reality into conceptual mediation. In this sense, “phenomenology” reverts to being nothing more than the experience of consciousness.