Dilthey and the Narrative of History (review)

BOOK REWEWS 309 down, Adam's "happy sin" sin was a fall "upward" that reversed involution (exile) and initiated the agonizing evolution (return) of consciousness. Following Gnosticism, Hegel maintains that the divine "image" according to which humankind was created lies not "in the archaeological past but in the eschatological future" (165). The third moment of the trinitarian narrative, Spirit, involves the process whereby finite humankind attains "sonship" with the infinite divine. In Hegel's Christology, the "death of God" represents the temporary divine absenceneeded for the emergence of divine presence in human community understood as Spirit. Far from constituting a once-and-for-all soteriological event, the life and death of Jesus opened the way for others to follow him to mystical union with God. For Hegel, mysticism involves not irrationality, but divine self-manifestation achieved in the highest form of knowing, Reason, available to the most illuminated members of the Christian community. Before closing his discussion of Spirit, O'Regan addresses the issues of 1) whether Hegel's theodicy fails to account adequately for the particularity of human suffering, and 2) whether divine self-realization as spirit in the human community (inclusive trinity) provides an adequate account of the divine transcendence prefigured in the immanent trinity. Finally, O'Regan examines Spinoza and Schelling's influence on the "denarratizing operators" used by Hegel to reconfigure the Christian narrative as a contracted, nonpunctilinear, onto-logical divine self-manifestation. O'Regan argues that the "constitutive problem of modernity" involves "the validity of any narrative construal.., which is relatively self-conscious of the difference between its narrative content and its epistemic justification" (364). Eschewing both denial (Christian fundamentalism) and despair (modern skepticism), Hegel's metanarrative "represents a provocation to postmodernism not because of apocalyptic tone, but because of apocalypse substance" (369). Hegel succumbed "to the lure of meaning and truth," because he believed that "the semantic and alethiological vocation is neither illusion nor delusion" (369). Rejecting postmodernism's dogmatic conflation of"the legitimacyof suspicion with the authoritarian legislation of guilt," O'Regan maintains that "if discourse does console, this may say less about the nature of human wish-fulfillment than the nature of discourse--indeed, not simply the nature of discourse but the nature of reality" (37o). In my own view, few readers could come away from this extraordinary text without adopting O'Regan's view that Hegel constitutes postmodernism's "hallowed enemy worth fighting," "perhaps the angel with which it wrestles to be blessed at daybreak" (370). MICHAEL E. ZIMMERMAN Tulane University Jacob Owensby. Dilthey and the Narrative of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 193. Cloth, $29.95. While many philosophers have had their reputations cemented on the basis of a single work, few have seen their names indelibly attached to a work they never actually wrote. But this has been the fate of Wilhelm Dilthey, who, after having professed the plan of 31o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL 1996 writing a "Critique of Historical Reason," must have finally come to suspect about history what Thomas Mann would also later realize: "Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?''~ Indeed, Dilthey would confess near the end of his life that, although he could make out the goal of such a task (namely, the articulation of the fundamental structures of historical consciousness), he would have to play the role of Moses, leaving it to his students and followers to take possession of the land he had only glimpsed.~Nevertheless , Dilthey's example and Mann's prescient warning have not kept many from attempting to resuscitate the dream of writing what Dilthey once called "a new Critique of Reason."3 In Dilthey and the Narrative of History, Jacob Owensby attempts to elucidate the nature of what would be involved in writing such a critique--not by attempting to reconstruct Dilthey's unwritten text out of various manuscripts, outlines, fragments and notes, but by uncovering the fundamental concerns that give rise to the need for such a critique--namely, the problems of "life, narrative, and historical understanding " 0). Owensby does not concern himself, then, with the speculative and counterfactual question of how...