Journal of the History of Philosophy

608 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:4 OCT 1987 Donald Phillip Verene. Hegel's Recollection. A Study of Images in the Phenomenotogy of Spirit. SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. Pp. xiii + x48. $39.5o. The first thing to be said about Hegel's Recollection is that it is most definitely not a book for beginners. Instead, it presupposes readers who are not only familiar with Hegel's text, but acquainted as well with the interpretative controversies which--as Verene's book demonstrates wonderfully--continue to surround it. The second thing to be observed about Hegel's Recollection is that, though brief, it is really two books in one: The first book is the one named in the subtitle, a loosely-organized collection of studies of various powerful and obscure "images" which every reader of the Phenomenology will remember: "the Golgatha of Absolute Spirit," "the inverted world," "masterhood and servitude," "the spiritual zoo," "the beautiful soul," etc. The second book is a polemic in behalf of a controversial general thesis concerning the true nature of Hegel's enterprise and accomplishment. Against what he calls the "traditional" emphasis upon the "argument" and discursive structure of the Phenomenology, Verene insists upon the essential role of imagery and irony in Hegel's text and he is passionately concerned to show how the one-sidedly "logical" way of reading Hegel needs to be supplemented by a "rhetorical" reading. More specifically (and controversially), he wishes to challenge the usual view of the Phenomenology as a necessary sequence of steps which constitutes a rigorous "deduction" of the "scientific standpoint," with its attendant overcoming of the difference between subject and object, in-itself and for-itself. Rejecting this interpretation, Verene emphasizes the neglected importance of the concept of "recollection" (Erinnerung) for understanding the true nature of "Absolute Knowledge" and the final lesson of the Phenomenology of Spirit: hence his main title. Hegel's Recollection is thus a complex and multi-faceted work which manages to be provocative and informative at the same time. This, in itself, is a rare combination and a most welcome sign that American Hegel scholarship has not only come of age, but is currently enjoying a period of robust good health. The novelty of Verene's reading of Hegel can hardly be overemphasized. Though he begins his presentation by appearing to agree with "Hegel's regular commentators" that the concern of the Phenomenology is with the Begriff and not with the Bild, his thesis is that the Phenomenology actually demonstrates that the concept can never be separated from accompanying images, that a pure language of the concept does not and cannot exist, and, therefore, that Absolute Knowledge, or "the Standpoint of Science," as this has been understood by five generations of Hegel interpreters, is unobtainable. In contrast to these "traditional interpreters" of Hegel, Verene argues that "Absolute Knowledge" consists in the realization of this very impossibility. The gap between subject and object is absolute; the split between an sich and an sich fiir mich, between the object of knowledge and the knowing subject, cannot be overcome. Consequently, the appropriate "method" of philosophy is not any sort of formal "dialectic," but is rather the method of Erinnerung, of "internaliz- BOOK REVIEWS 609 ing" the somehow "necessary" sequence of images and "shapes," the movement of which constitutes the experience of consciousness and the life of spirit itself. As for this movement itself, it cannot be reduced to any pattern of logical necessity or implication; thus Verene boldly replaces Hegel's quite rigorous account of "determinate negation" with a vague theory of "ingenuity" which reduces the problematic dialectical necessity of the progress of shapes "to a series of fascinating jumps." To be sure, Verene is hardly the first author to propose a "soft" reading of the Phenomenologyand to forego any attempt to defend the formal necessity of Hegel's transitions (Loewenburg, Findlay, Kaufmann, and, more recently, Solomon have all done this); but he is surely among the first to contend that Hegel really was not claiming for his account the sort of necessity and "scientific" status which everyone hitherto has (mysteriously?) taken for granted. As Verene realizes...