Georges Faraklas

There is even a paradox in the name of philosophy. Philosophy would rather love wisdom than have it. This is what exasperates those who interrogate it for answers and not questions. But this love must not be unhappy: being satisfied with unsatisfied love means loving love and at bottom feeling contempt for its object. It changes the object, the beloved wisdom is not what one thought one had. Those who say they have wisdom do not doubt, what they have is dogma, but those who doubt whether they have it may gain another wisdom, knowledge. Wisdom seems to change according to its place: it is false wisdom at the beginning of the cognitive process, but may be true in one or other of its relative terms. Knowledge is a wisdom that one works towards and to gain it one must deny having it, know that one does not know. Thus, in order to grasp what philosophy is, we must ask what a knowledge of not-knowing can be - a Socratic question - and what kind of cognitive process it is that can start with what is false to reach what is true; and this is a question to which the answers might be Platonic or Aristotelian. From Plato to Aristotle the ousia, what truly is, which is translated as essence in Plato, and as substance in Aristotle, changes places in this process. And if every philosophy decides to see true being as the thought essence of things or else as their particular substance, it would be a good idea to formalize the difference - gnoseological, ontological, political - between the two philosophers. It is a tricky project because it will have to contravene the rules of interpretation to produce this formal reconstruction.

Hegel et Machiavel ne sont pas vraiment deux théoriciens de la « raison d'État » comme le veut Meinecke. Après avoir essayé de montrer que Machiavel soumet la conservation du pouvoir à un impératif de justice sociale, je soutiens ici que Hegel ne s'autorise de cet auteur, passant outre à la tradition du contrat social, que concernant l'imposition initiale, nécessairement illégale, de la loi. Cet appel apparaît justifié au vu de son interprétation favorable, expressément machiavélienne, de la tyrannie fondatrice ainsi que de la révolte contre l'oppression, deux références concrètes de la dialectique « domination et servitude ». Hegel and Machiavelli are not really two thinkers of the « raison d'État », as Meinecke affïrms. Having tried to show that Machiavelli subjects the conservation of authority to a requirement of social justice I hereby daim that Hegel makes legitimate use of Machiavelli, getting thereby round the tradition of social contract, as far as the, necessarily illegal, initial imposition oflaw is concerned. This use seems justified if we take into consideration his, specifically machiavellian, favourable interpretation of the founding tyranny, as well as the revolt against oppression, which are two concrete examples of his dialectic of « domination and servitude ».