Language and Perception in Hegel and Wittgenstein, and: Hegel: From Foundation to System (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 44 l the nature and of the necessity of transcendental synthesis for empirical cognitive syntheses could, however, dispel this misunderstanding. Other, maybe more external , indications of what has gone wrong here in Findlay's thinking are that transcendental objects are called transcendent, that appearances are said possibly to violate logical laws, and that Kant in the Amphiboly is said to agree with Leibniz on how things truly (correctly) are. On the positive side, Findlay very nicely argues that transcendental unity of apperception is not sufficient for objective validity of cognitive syntheses, ahhought it seems to this reviewer that Kant is rather more aware of this than Findlay allows. The best chapter in many ways is chapter 8, in which Adickes's discussion of appearances of appearances is summarized, improved upon, and brought into connection with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and with Kant's way with force, matter, and sense-perceptible properties. At the same time, affection, double and otherwise, has to be rethought from this new point of view, and there is talk of a tertiary affection (p. ~6~). In his discussion of spontaneous action in chapter 9, Findlay appears to disallow empirical practical reason and, in this reviewer's opinion, comes down far too heavily on the side of nontemporal choices and acts (actually performed by subjects) when trying to account for Kant's notion of action not explained by causation of the Second Analogy. But this chapter, as well as chapter lO on free beauty, contains a good deal that is interesting. The suggestion in chaPter lO that much of Kant's discussion of aesthetic evaluation is directed against the naturalist fallacy is very interesting but needs far more working out than it receives. Findlay's book provides an ambitious overview but also views not always compatible with one another; and quite often the problem is"Findlay's, not Kant's. Equipped with Findlay's book, the reader will certainly want to return to Kant, sometimes to agree, sometimes to disagree, with what Findlay has offered for his perusal. RALF MEERBOTE University of Rochester David Lamb. Language and Perception in Hegel and Wittgenstein. New York: St. Martin's Press, 198o. Pp. xiii + 135. $2o.oo. David Lamb. Hegel: From Foundation to System. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, t98o. Pp. xviii + ~34. G66.oo. In his Jena "Wastebook" Hegel noted sarcastically that "Kant is quoted with admiration as having said that he taught philosophizing and not philosophy--as if someone could teach carpentry but not how to build a table, a chair, a door, a cabinet, etc.''~ It might, with some justice, be said of Wittgenstein that this is just what he did. Many K. Rosenkranz, LebenHegels(1844; reprint ed., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , 1969), p. 552; trans, in IndependentJournal ofPhilosophy3 (1979): 4. 44 ~ HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY students have learned a way of philosophizing from him (or from his writings). But very few seem to have achieved a clear conception of what the technique was for. The main thing these critical experts might learn from Hegel is an answer to this question that claims to be definitive. It is not a simple answer, but an immensely complex one, because the grounds for the claim that it is definitive have to be laid out in the giving of it. For the "philosophy" that methodical philosophizing produces cannot be displayed in isolation from the process of its production. Wittgenstein grasped the impossibility of showing students the products of philosophizing separated from the process of their production; and one of David Lamb's signal merits is to have perceived this resemblance between Wittgenstein and Hegel, in spite of the obvious and overwhelming constrast between doing philosophy piecemeal (as Wittgenstein did it, or at least generally appeared to be doing it, after the publication of the Tractatus) and doing it systematically (as Hegel always did it, after he abandoned his early theological essays unpublished in a desk drawer). Philosophy, they both held, is the study of the necessary structures of language regarded as the general assemblage of all the forms of human (i.e., self-conscious) communication, or sharing of life and experience. The product cannot be sundered from the...