Hegel on Philosophy in History ed. by Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines (review) Christopher Yeomans Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 55, Number 4, October 2017, pp. 740-741 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article Access provided at 19 Jun 2019 19:31 GMT from Purdue University https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2017.0081 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/672450 740 journal of the history of philosophy 55 :4 october 2017 lectures on philosophical theology will find an adequate guide. The book's absence of polemic against the less theological readings of Hegel may even be a virtue. But readers who are not already fluent in Hegel's vocabulary and logic will learn much less from it. K e v i n J . H a r r e l s o n Ball State University Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines, editors. Hegel on Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 260. Cloth, $99.99. Hegel on Philosophy in History is a Festschrift for Robert Pippin, one of the most important contemporary Hegel scholars. Pippin's importance has to do not only with the way in which he opened up the field of Hegel studies beginning in the 1980s, but also with the extraordinary number of other figures and discussions in philosophy with which he has brought Hegel's thought into connection. These aspects of Pippin's importance are connected, of course, since it is the latter that allowed the former to blossom into a whole field with wide-ranging discussions and a fruitful plurality of perspectives rather than to fade after a brief renaissance. Those Hegel scholars (including this reviewer) who have more recently taken up professional positions in academic philosophy certainly owe Pippin a tremendous debt of gratitude. In this connection, I am happy to report that this Festschrift does justice to both aspects of Pippin's influence, and can be highly recommended as a substantive contribution to the field that his influence helped to open up. Two features of the book allow it to stand out from the ranks of ordinary Festschriften. First, it features an all-star lineup of authors from the current debate about the meaning of Hegel's philosophy. There are contributions from authors such as Paul Redding and Terry Pinkard, who have points of view relatively similar to Pippin's and who have long been associated with each other under the general banner of generally sympathetic, post-Kantian interpretations of Hegel. There are contributions from authors such as Christoph Menke and J. M. Bernstein, who are far more critical of Hegel's views and of their philosophical defensibility as Pippin reconstructs them. There are contributions from authors such as Ludwig Siep, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Karl Ameriks, who take a more traditionally historical approach than Pippin, and then contributions from authors such as Slavoj Žižek and Jonathan Lear, who emphasize the supplementary value of post-Hegelian psychoanalytical approaches to the topics Hegel treats. When reading over these papers, one cannot help but be struck by the wide variety of ways Hegel's thought has become relevant to contemporary philosophical perspectives, which makes the book somewhat of a Festschrift not only to Pippin but to the discursive space he was and continues to be so instrumental in carving out. Second, it is organized around a particular theme, namely, history and the question of its centrality to Hegel's thought, to its contemporary relevance, and to the philosophical issues that Hegel treated. Though, of course, some of the chapters engage more or less with the theme than others, all of the contributions take up the relation of history to Hegel's thought in some way or other. From John McDowell's and Robert Stern's argument that one ought not emphasize history as much as Pippin does, to Sally Sedgwick's consideration of the question of the historicity of even the most abstract and apparently a priori part of Hegel's system (namely, his Science of Logic), there is a multilayered discussion of the different ways in which actual historical events and historicity itself can be relevant to different issues in philosophy as Hegel treated them. Axel Honneth's contribution treats Hegel's contribution to the theory of freedom itself as a historical watershed that must be incorporated into contemporary reflection on the topic. And Bernstein and Žižek come to different conclusions about the philosophical tenability of Hegel's views, but on the basis of the same basic perspective of examining them against the background of the historical experience that lies between our world and Hegel's own. In reading the collection it becomes 741bo o k rev i ews clear in how many different ways history can play a role in philosophical reflection. As a result, the book is useful for at least three purposes: first, in giving a multiperspectival introduction to the body of work of one of the most important living Hegelians; second, in thus providing a good introduction to the field of Hegel studies and its current state of knowledge; and third, in providing a collection of considerations (both textual and philosophical) pertinent to the question of whether it is necessary to build a conception of history into philosophical accounts of other human phenomena (such as metaphysics or normativity). C h r i s t o p h e r Y e o m a n s Purdue University Fred Rush. Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 312. Cloth, $85.00. The founder of early German Romantic philosophy, Friedrich Schlegel, is a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy because of the way that he establishes many of the themes by which nineteenth-century continental thought separates itself from Kant. Yet our view of his depth and originality as a thinker has often been distorted by his proximity to Hegel, who propounded a highly polemical and reductive reading of Schlegel. One of the ways in which our view of Schlegel is distorted by Hegel's reading is our association of Schlegel with the stance of irony. While Schlegel considered irony as merely one of several fruitful ways to rethink the relation of the subject to the absolute, Hegel used a reductive reading of this notion of irony to dismiss Schlegel as an immoral and unserious figure with no binding positions or methods. Fred Rush's study, Irony and Idealism, seeks to challenge the subordinate and lesser position of Schlegel within nineteenth-century thought, first by developing a reading of Schlegel as the key, founding figure in German Romanticism, and then by advancing from this reading, first to challenge the methodological primacy of Hegel as a dialectical thinker, and second to trace the Schlegelian provenance of certain themes in Kierkegaard's philosophy. In the first main chapter, Rush constructs an argument to emphasize the originality and centrality of Schlegel as the key, founding figure in Jena Romanticism (rather than Novalis). Within the burgeoning field of Romanticism studies, this is hardly a claim that needs to be made, as most accounts already acknowledge Schlegel's founding status. (Indeed, Rush struggles to produce a single example of a scholar who would disagree with him.) The chapter demonstrates that irony is by no means the central figure in Schlegel's rich methodological vocabulary, and places more emphasis on Schlegel's use of the term Wechselerweis (reciprocal proof) and his notion that all experience is founded on regulative ideals. Schlegel challenges us to think of experience as guided by an absolute that is never given in experience and that does not and cannot exist as an object or event. Rush coins the term 'global regulativity' to describe Schlegel's epistemic method. This reading seems well suited to get us beyond a simplistic understanding of Romantic irony as an unserious, uncommitted or relativistic attitude, although it raises the question why subsequent chapters make irony into the central term of comparison. Although I agree with many of Rush's conclusions about Schlegel, his style of exegesis makes it hard to reconstruct his reading because he seldom uses Schlegel's primary texts to advance his argument. Schlegel writes in a manner that is by turns fragmentary, provocative, fascinating, self-reflexive, enigmatic and confusing. First time students as well as seasoned scholars of Schlegel need help in unpacking the primary texts and seeing how they connect. Rush rarely cites key texts at crucial phases in his argument, and engages in heavy paraphrase, often using neologisms. At many points in Rush's argument, I found myself asking: what is his evidence for that reading? What phase of Schlegel's complex development would support that interpretation?