The Spirit of Hegel (review)

-506 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3~:3 JULY i99 4 Giuseppe Micheli. Tennemann: StoricodellaFiloso]ia.Padova: CLEUP Editrice, 199~. Pp. xii + 161. Paper, NP. This book mainly owes its importance to the prominent place of the German historian of philosophy, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann (1761-a819), in nineteenth-century philosophical writing. His two great studies Geschichteder Philosophie (published in a1 parts, 12 volumes between 1798 and 1819) and Grundmssder Geschichteder Philosophie (l 812) exercised a profound influence on the academic teaching of philosophy. Micheli carefully analyzes the structure of the two works and closely examines Tennemann's methodological justification of his new approach in the Introduction of Part I of the Geschiehte.Micheli's chief concern here is to show that Tennemann was the first historian to write history of philosophy from an explicit systematic philosophical perspective, in this case the system of Immanuel Kant. The critical philosophy of the great Ktnigsberger was presented as the first truly scientific philosophy. And on the basis of this mature final phase of philosophical development it was the task of scientific history of philosophy to describe earlier philosophical subjects in relation to this complete philosophy. Compared to Tennemann's predecessors this was clearly a step forward , since they too proceeded from a systematic philosophical view, but in a covert, veiled manner. At the same time Tennemann's approach had the obvious drawback that it measured the entire history of philosophy with the yardstick of the Kantian system of thought and so had to judge it as "not yet having reached the maturity of truly critical philosophy." After the positivist and postmodernist turns Tennemann's strategy seems very outdated and antiquated. Micheli's treatment of his subject is careful and detailed. The quality of the book's printing and stitching is considerably poorer. There are also far more printing errors than the thirty-one which the author has indicated on a list of corrigenda. One hopes that such defects will be remedied when the book is incorporated in Part 4 of the voluminous work by Giovanni Santinello (et al.), Storia dellestoriegenerali dellafilosofia (Brescia and Padua, x981- ). ABRAHAM P. gos Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam Errol E. Harris. The Spirit of Hegel. Adantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 279. Cloth, $45.oo. The Spirit of Hegel supplements Harris's book on Hegel's Logic. Its essays cover every other area of Hegelian philosophy except the philosophy of art; and it explicidy integrates the interpretation of these areas with the interpretation of the Logic. Five new essays appear for the first time in this volume. For a collection of essays, The Spirit of Hegel shows remarkable continuity and coherence. Every essay focuses on the structure of the concrete whole. In his analysis of this structure, Harris maintains a careful balance between the unity of the whole and the difference that must be preserved within it. The key to this balance is systematic BOOK REVIEWS 507 organization, whose paradigm is the organism. Within an organic whole, differences develop from a single principle and in their differentiation and relations maintain the unity of the whole. The whole exists as the essence of the parts; it is what they fundamentally are. This presence of the whole in the differences gives them an impetus toward organized relations so that existence within the systematic dynamic of the whole is the telos to which they direct themselves. The unifying principle of the whole, therefore, is not something set apart from the differences. Rather it exists in them as that which keeps them from falling into the randomness of disconnected particles. According to Harris, the impetus toward organization and connection explains how contradiction functions in Hegelian dialectic. If understanding tries to think a part of the whole as something isolated and set apart, the part contradicts this isolation by demanding its connection to something else. Harris uses this analysis of the concrete whole to demonstrate the relevance of Hegelian philosophy to contemporary developments in physics and biology, to answer Marxist objections and correct Marxist misinterpretations, and to challenge the way analytic philosophy interprets the law of identity. He appeals to the concept of the differentiated whole as a challenge to classic divisions...