Hegels System. Der Idealismus der Subjektivität und das Problem der Intersubjektivität (review)

630 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:4 OCTOBER 1989 ing. It does not use specific empirical concepts to define its objects, but must function in accordance with the general categorial framework of the understanding. Otherwise the products of the imagination would become nonsensical. The wide gap that Kr~imling establishes between the theoretical object and the aesthetic object could be the result of the fact that his discussion of the Critique of Pure Reason was focused almost exclusively on ideas and ideals of reason. Kant himself admits that the ideal of the highest good in the Critique of Pure Reason has speculative implications only for the "intelligibele Welt... da die Sinnenwelt uns von der Natur der Dinge dergleichen systematische Einheit der Zwecke nicht verheiBt" (KdrV, A814/ B842 ). But this indicates a limit of the systematic pretensions of theoretical reason, not a limit of theoretical reason in the application of the categories of the understanding to experience. For the understanding there is an essential relation to particularity which is expressed in its determinant judgments about experience. The advance of reflective judgment for systematic questions is its capacity to apprehend the sensuous content of experience as possessing its own immanent form as distinct from form that is imposed from without in determinant judgments. But these two senses of form are not exclusive. Determinant judgments make it possible to understand external relations among objects. From the perspective of reflective judgment, each object is potentially a reflexively or internally related system, whether aesthetically or teleologically . Determinant and reflective judgments involve complementary approaches to reality, which should neither be isolated nor fused. Kr~imling's claim that the distinction of these two modes of judgment is "lediglich eine methodische Abstraktion" (39) threatens to fuse them. The overall contribution of the book is to confirm the relation between the aesthetic and the moral suggested by the idea of symbolism in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment through a conception of culture as a teleological-practical mode of realizing the highest good in the human historical world. If the first Critique defined the realization of the highest good as a speculative hope, and the second Critique specified it as a transcendent duty, then the third can be said to transform it into an immanent challenge. RUDOLF A. MAKKREEL Emory University Vittorio H6sle. Hegels System. Der ldealismus der Subjektivitiit und das Problem der lntersubjektivit ~it.Band i. Systementwicklung und Logik. Band 2. Philosophie der Natur und des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987. Pp. lii + 675 (total). Vol. 1, DM 148; Vol. 2, DM ~68. This is a very important book. HOsle has undertaken the task of evaluating Hegel's entire system, and he has done so with rigor, clarity, insight, and an eye to questions of relevance today. The critique functions in two ways: first, H6sle defends the basic Hegelian enterprise of finding a first principle and developing it logically even as he argues for major and minor revisions in Hegel's logical system; second, H6sle evaluates Hegel's Realphilosophie (the philosophy of nature and spirit) in relation to the Logic, BOOK REVIEWS 631 then from the standpoint of the revisions suggested in H6sle's critique of the Logic,and finally in relation to the discoveries of modern science. Volume 1 opens with a historical account of the inner logic of transcendental idealism. Interesting is the focus on Fichte's programmatic Ober den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre.What follows is a thorough and extensive analysis of Hegel's systematic enterprise, including a very helpful commentary on the relation of Realphilosophie to the individual sciences. Of particular significance in H6sle's analysis of the Logic are the reflections on forms of contradiction, including an invaluable contribution to our understanding of pragmatic contradictions, and a detailed reading of the concept of subjectivity in the Begriffslogik. Throughout his commentary H6sle pays special attention to those structures and arguments in the Logic that appear flawed, and he contrasts them with alternative positions in part from the earliest Hegelschiiler. What is rejected as a result of H6sle's critique is not the idea of absolute idealism--that there is nonhypothetical a priori knowledge and that the laws of this knowledge are also...