Journal of the History of Philosophy

~46 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:1 JANUARY 199 4 taste, in which the subject goes beyond expecting the agreement of others and, knowing that he has made a judgment of taste, demands their agreement. Since judgments of taste lack logical or evidential necessity one subject can confirm that he has in fact made such ajudgment only by getting another to feel the pleasure he has experienced, and this he can do by pointing to features of the work. In order to provide a noncircular account of the demand for agreement, Kant looks to the necessity of making judgments of taste. He needs a reason, extrinsic to taste itself, for the importance of making such judgments, which he finds in their relation to morality. Although Kemal admits a plurality of such relations, he clearly favors the "enculturation" promoted by fine art. Whereas natural beauty is only derivatively an expression of our freedom, fine art is a "positive exploration of our rational and communal character," the development of which is always in progress. The commentary concludes with a brief and highly selective account of how the third Cr/t/que bridges "the gulf between nature and freedom." Among the merits of Kemal's commentary are its clarity and consistency. In an earlier book, Kant and Fine Art, he discussed at length the relation of art and culture. The present book shows how the whole "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" might be interpreted from this perspective. MARY GREGOR San Diego State University Robert R. Williams. Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press, 199~. Pp. xviii + 33~. Paper, $19.95. Hegel, on Williams's reading, is the first philosopher of "difference." In contrast to conventional depictions of Hegel as a metaphysical idealist, Williams argues that Hegelian Geist is intersubjective and historically situated, and as such more open to the "other" than the work of many of Hegel's current critics. The key to Williams's treatment is the establishment of the centrality for Hegel of recognition. The author begins with a valuable discussion of Fichte's path-breaking account of recognitionkan account whose importance for Hegel is frequently overlooked . In the author's view, Fichte is not the subjective idealist for which he is usually taken (or not that alone) but also the proponent of a view of the ego as both dependent on and open to something other than itself. What emerges is a conception of recognitive individuality as "socially conditioned and mediated" (6~), but which fails to overcome the tension between Fichte's intersubjective account of recognition and his egoistic theory of juridical compulsion. Williams then turns to the early Hegel, for whom the struggle to overcome "disunity " (74) issues in a theory of (Christian) love that is intersubjective without yet being social (81). Fichte furnishes Hegel with the conceptual means for incorporating individuality (which for Fichte is still bound up with domination) into Hegel's own earlier ruminations on intersubjectivity. In so doing, he is drawn toward a phenomenological account of right's genesis through "struggle" and "tragic conflict (83; 87). BOOK REVIEWS 147 Williams's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology proper owes much to Husserl, whose orientation differs less from that of Hegel, according to the author, than generally assumed (95)- Williams reads the Phenomeno/ogy as a "self-accomplishing skepticism" (96) that seeks to educate ordinary consciousness to a "universal-social consciousness" that is "pure self-knowledge in absolute otherness" (l 9l). The goal is a wholeness that, precisely by overcoming the solipsism of ordinary consciousness, genuinely includes and incorporates the other, an achievement that cannot be fully accomplished conceptually (or eideticaily) but which ultimately requires historically situated praxis (or what the author calls "empirics"). Williams's eidetics consists largely in a reading of the early sections of the Phenomeno /og) devoted to the dialectic of master and slave (for which the author furnishes a new and useful translation and commentary). According to his generally persuasive reading, Hegel moves beyond the c0gito of ordinary discourse through a conceptual process that finally transcends itself in a call for '~joint social action." If WiUiams's treatment can be faulted it is in...