Hegel at the end-time: philosophy running out of time

Abstract

In the preface he wrote to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel critically confronts his contemporaries and offers one of the main collaborations on the tasks of philosophy and of philosophers developed in the modern era, defending patience as an unavoidable attribute for philosophical reasoning. The text celebrates its bicentenary in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, when not only the virus, but also heated philosophical polemics spread on a global scale. Against the coronavirus outbreak backdrop, the preface's 200th anniversary raises the question: is it possible to do philosophy in the heat of the moment? Induced by this question, we seek to read the Hegelian text facing the diagnosis of present time developed by Günther Anders in his “Theses for the Atomic Age”, in order to reason about the proper time for philosophical reasoning and the difficulties faced by philosophy within a time of emergency, when the coronavirus is just the most recent episode of what Anders characterized as “End-time”.