Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 245 Absolute, I find Rosen's explication of Hegel's solution to the Parmenidean problems far less clear than his original formulations of the problems as they appear in Plato, Aristotle, and Fichte. Although part of the reason for this is no doubt Hegel's responsibility, part also is Rosen's tendency to lose himself in immensely opaque analyses of particular sections of Hegel's theory. A supreme instance in point is Rosen's analysis of Hegel's phenomenological interpretation of the Enlightenment, especially the section on spiritual alienation which Hegel ascribes to the growth of culture. This last I find either opaque or (as in Rosen's play with the Athenian and Spartan relations to the mean and noble spirits) perverse? In his final chapter Rosen reformulates with customary diffuseness some traditional criticisms of Hegel. Thus Rosen contends (1) that Hegel must supplement the coherence of his discursive interpretation of the Whole with Platonic-Aristotelian intellectual intuitions of positive and determinate forms, since he has failed to establish that the coherence of his system is not simply a construction rather than a revelation of the Whole; (2) that Hegel has never explained how Absolute Spirit as negative activity can produce anything positive; and (3) that Hegel never satisfactorily explains how the Whole can be eternally complete and yet intrinsic to that completeness require its historical development towards that completion. These problems are too complex for summary answers, but I should think that the experiential grounding Hegel provides in and through the Phenomenology does constitute the needed substitute for the intuition of static forms. I should think, too, that the positivity of the object of discursive thought, which is necessary, after all, to delineate the negativity of discursive thinking, is so intrinsic to Hegel's conception of Spirit that the issue of its creative power as pure negativity can never arise. As for the third problem, I find that the dilemma Rosen introduces escapes me. Since the logic is implicit in (indeed, in actuality inseparable from) the historical dialectic of the principles of world civilizations, and since, furthermore, the historical consummation of that dialectic is at least conceivable, it would seem that that consummation can provide the Hegelian universal perspective of the Whole which is in principle (although not in contingency) its completion. But this, I suppose, is from Rosen's perspective merely restating the problem (see pp. 130-140). Restating the problem is, however, frequently what one wishes Rosen would do. JAMESP. FRANK University of Colorado Studio su Dilthey. By Claudio Vicentini. (Milano: Mursia, 1974. Pp. 240. Paper, L. 6,000) Vicentini uses the writings of Dilthey (from the Einleitung in Geisteswissenschaften to his last works) as a vehicle to clarify some questions which contemperary aesthetics has raised but not yet sufficiently examined: What are the complex relations which connect the modalities of the work of art and of aesthetic interpretation to the modality of form in general and of its understanding? What are the general conditions of form and its comprehension? PostCrocian aesthetics has recognized that art is an activity which is present in and inseparable from all human activity. However, the problems of the individuation of not specifically artistic particular form, its consistency in the historicity of its expression, its relations with other human products, its very nature as a human expression, as well as its comprehension, have yet to be explicated. They comprise the theme of Vicentini's inquiry. The modes and the construction of a work of art, then, represent some of the particular aspects of the more general problem of the conditions of the form of human production and its comprehension. During the development of Dilthey's thought the general problems of the characteristics of human expressions and of their comprehension are treated under the topics of aesthetic 4For a contrast in lucidity and interpretation, compare Jean Hyppolite's Studies on Marx and Hegel (London, 1969),pp. 35-70. 246 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY production and interpretation. From the Einleitung to the Ideen Dilthey is confronted with this question: What is the relation between the individual, who in his fundamental unity cannot be completely explained and who in his essential freedom constitutes the...