Consciousness and Reality: Hegel's Philosophy of Subjectivity (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 99 Joseph L. Navickas. Consciousnessand Reality:Hegel's Philosophyof Subjectivity. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. Pp. viii + 284. Gld. 60. Though the title does not say so, this is a commentary on Hegel's Phenomenologyof Spirit. The title does suggest that the author finds no more important issue in Hegel's thought than the distinction and relation between subjectivity and objectivity and that his aim in this book "has been to trace and to make intelligiblethe gradual constitution of Hegel's notion of subjectivity and objectivity" (p. viii). For this reason he begins with a chapter entitled "The Shift to the Subject in Modem Thought," which places the Phenomenologyin the context of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and Sehelling. There follows the consecutive exposition of the Preface, the introduction and the eight chapters of the text proper. Guided by the fourfold division of these chapters in the text, Navickas divides his account into four parts: the conscious subject, the self-conscious subject, the rational subject, and the spiritual subject. There is frequent criticism along the way of this or that particular feature of the Hegelian narrative, suggestive of different ways in which a particular phenomenological investigation might proceed. These are not allowed to usurp the primacy of interpretative exposition . On the other hand, they do not provide us with any evaluation of Hegel's project as a whole. There do seem to be two points at which the author has serious reservations about Hegel's accomplishment, but there is enough ambivalence in the criticism to make the author's position less than clear. He seems on the one hand very attracted to classical realism, yet powerfully impressed by Hegel's idealism, which he sees to be in conflict with the former. He also seems to think Hyppolite's criticism well taken, that in the chapter on religion the phenomenological perspective is suddenly replaced by a metaphysical or noumenological one. Yet he also seems to want to say that this is justified on phenomenological grounds. For the reader who wants to think for himself in and through the Phenomenologythis way of letting the questions arise and remain may be more helpful than one scholar's clear-cut resolution. Perhaps the most valuable chapter in the book is the second, which develops Hegel's theory of subjectivity according to the Preface. The three central notions of mediation, negativity, and universality are explored, and it is one of the strengths of the subsequent analysis that it takes advantage of the early development of these categories. There are two features of the Preface that deserve more serious attention than they get, however . One is the sense of history. One cannot read the Preface without realizing that Hegel thought his work belonged to a special, very important moment in the historical process, and that the mediation through which consciousness is constituted is a historical mediation. In Navickas's account of the constitution of subjectivity in the text proper, however, we are presented with a static, that is, ahistorical, theory of the stages of subjectivity's development, without any attempt to reconcile this with the strongly historical orientation of the Preface. Though the Preface was written after the main text was completed, with its long analysis of the social and religious dimensions of spirit, it strongly reaffirms that the task of the Phenomenology is to help us understand what knowledge is. One of the key tasks of reading the latter half of the text is seeing how the phenomenologies of society and of religion contribute to resolving the problem of knowledge as it was fn'st stated in the introduction. It is Hegel's claim that they are supremely relevant to this issue; and a commentary that is to help us grasp the unity of the Phenomenology needs to give more attention to this problem than Navickas has done in his lucid and insightful account. MEROLDWESTPHAL Hope College ...