Abstract

The primary aim of this clear, scholarly, and well-developed study is to bring Hegel in relation to Kierkegaard in order to emphasize the similarities in their thinking and the differences between two subtle and difficult thinkers. Hegel and Kierkegaard are depicted as profoundly concerned with leading man out of "spiritlessness" and up to "authentic selfhood." Largely relying on exposition and commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Mind, Taylor emphasizes the stations or stages on the way to authentic self-existence in Hegel's thought in such a way as to indicate that Kierkegaard's various phenomenologies of stages of existence parallel Hegelian descriptions. This is a central theme of this lucid work, one that illustrates persuasively that Kierkegaard, in his own impressionistic way, offered phenomenological descriptions of the significant modes of human existence in the manner of Hegel. It is held that Kierkegaard ends with a stress on the isolation of the authentically existing Christian individual that cuts the person off from community and what is called the "social substance." In general, Taylor is sympathetic with Hegel's description of the journey to selfhood because he believes that Hegel integrates individual self-consciousness and relation to others or, as is sometimes said, identity-in-difference. It is correctly pointed out that the Momente or "stages" of the development of "shapes of consciousness" for Hegel are necessarily related in an immanent dialectic while, for Kierkegaard, the spheres or stages in human existence are realized by virtue of the "contingent resolution of the individual's free will". Although Kierkegaard's "Christology" is defended in relation to Hegel's "pagan," rationalistic evaporation of the absolute paradox of the God-man, Taylor presents Hegel's standpoint so forcefully and so sympathetically that SK's existential individuation is more or less consumed by the cunning dialectical mediations of Hegel's thought, and Hegel is made a champion of a more plausible, less self-defeating, "authentic selfhood." Taylor insists that genuine subjective individuation is not negated by Hegel's thought, but is preserved in a measured way. Others may see the goal of "rational self-consciousness" in Hegel's phenomenology as entailing a dissolution of the uniqueness and radical subjectivity of the person, the conversion of an "I" into a rational consciousness that belongs to everyone and no one. The "ideality" and universality of Hegel's understanding of the completion of the movement towards "true essence" seems to "sublate" the paradoxical self in-between "ideality" and "actuality" in such a way that there is no individual self that attains "selfhood." There is much that is provocative, stimulating, and absorbing in this thoughtful juxtaposition of two powerful philosophers of spirit.-George J. Stack, SUNY College of Brockport.