The Divided Nation: The Roots of a Bourgeois Thinker: G. W. F. Hegel (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 485 whose preface is dated 1975 and for which the 1810 Stuttgart Lectures is a key text mentions the existence of unedited alternate versions but is unaware of their publication--Version inr des StuttgarterPrivatvorlesungen, ed. M. Veto. (Torino, Bottega d'Erasmo, 1973). MICHAELG. VATER Marquette University Jos6 Maria Ripalda. The Divided Nation: The Roots of a Bourgeois Thinker: G. W. F. Hegel. Translated by Fay Franklin and Maruja Tillmann. Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977. Pp. 221. Ripalda's principal theme is the state of the German nation in which Heget's philosophy is shown to have developed stage by stage. This is a nation shaped by the Enlightenment, romanticism, and the French Revolution, and later disrupted by the Napoleomc Wars. The focus is upon the young Hegel--his social and intellectual milieu and his literary work--and there are frequent allusions to the works of his maturity. Ripalda maintains at the outset that Hegel's scholarly work, as well as that of Christian Garve, upon which he regards it as having been based, must be understood as culturally acquired (p. 23). Left to conceive the term "culturally acquired" each according to his own tastes, few persons would take exception to this position, which might after all have been a way of affirming Hegel's concept of the historical self-consciousness. Ripalda appears to conceive cultural acquisition more narrowly, however , as later remarks will tend to confirm. The result is a kind of psychologization and sociologization of Hegel's system which seems scarcely to allow that he may at points have transcended the particularity of his personal circumstances to embrace principles worthy to be judged in respect to their universal and perhaps lasting import. This bias is complimented by a regrettable disposition to relegate to "the madness of speculation" that in Hegel's conceptuality which fails to fall within the perview of the author's vantage point. Certainly not every reader will find reason to accept the proposal that "'the grandeur of Hegel which is still impressive today, lies in the fact that his entire life was a struggle to reach an understanding of capital. At the point where he loses himself to both h)s friends and his detractors in the madness of speculation, he first perceives the contours of capital" (p. 163). One searches in vain for what he means by "'speculation" (nor does he seem to have taken account of Hegel's employment of the concept). It appears that he may mean something like "'rumination." This vantage point sets very definite limits to those aspects of Hegel's thought which prove highly visible, although it does not obtrude itself in such a way as to render the work without value to the reader who takes these into account. It sets the stage for emphasizing historical unfoldment, for example, but appears to leave the author blind to Hegel's concern to exhibit these stages as constitutive of presently experienced identities, and to a great deal else. The concluding lines of the work, following immediately upon the above citation, are suggestive of the psychologization and sociologlzation to which I referred. They suggest as well that Ripalda has accorded very little attention to Hegel's effort to give dialectical expositon to the concretely actual, a central aspect of his declared program. The uncontrollable impulse which led him to translate mto speculauon h~sfirst naive attempts m order to overcome more than personal lackmgs is that of abstractly nearing the supreme abstraction; of nearing it as concretely as it is itself concrete.... If Hegel still has not lost his spell, then neither has the great Abstraction But now there are to [sic] many who don't accept it (Pp 163f ) In the introduction the author sets the divided German nation over against the Enlightenment, which forms its immediate background. The first of the two parts following, "'The 'Divided Nation' ," 486 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY contains the following four chapters: "Before the Revolution," "The Diagnosis of the Epoch," "'The Historical Structure of Social Disruption," and "Scepticism and Mythology." Part 2, "'The New Nation," is constituted by chapters five through nine, respectively entitled "'The Nostalgia for Greece," "The Wake of the Revolution...