Kritik und absolute Methode in Hegels Dialektik (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 481 year, 1798, makes it clear that he had by then completely reversed the roles of reason and emotion . Yet Clark is so far from recognizing the centrality of the original argument, or the importance of Godwin's change of mind, that he asserts that "Godwin never offers a proof of the power of reason," despite Godwin's explicit and careful statement of that proof in just the chapter that Clark is discussing; and he misinterprets those aspects he does discuss, by using the formulation of the last edition, where Godwin had already replaced the identification of motives with beliefs about the consequences of our actions, with their identification with passions of hope and fear. There are one or two other places where Clark seems to me to misunderstand or underestimate Godwin's argument: for example, his discussion of Godwin's account of different levels of happiness or pleasure is solidly Benthamite, in terms of the intensityor duration of the pleasures involved, when Godwin is clearly arguing that pleasures with different objects are different types of pleasure, some of them more valuable than others. This recognition that pleasures cannot be detached from their objects, as pains can be detached from their causes, is surely an advance on Bentham's more naive view. There are also large areas of Godwin's thought--religion; population, and the controversy with Malthus; and most notably, education, which though a minor theme in Political Justice itself was a dominating interest throughout Godwin's life-into which Professor Clark does not venture at all. As mentioned before, Clark's final discussion of Godwin's social and political doctrines is the most valuable part of his book-more accurate, more critical, more sensitive to inconsistenciesin Godwin's position, more alert to the contemporary relevance of his doctrines. But despite these valiant efforts, and another forthcoming "philosophical biography" of Godwin, an adequate appraisal of his philosophy has still to be written. Do~ LOCKE University of Warwick G0nther Malushke. Kritik und absolute Methode in Hegels Dialektik. HegeI-Studien, suppl. vol. 13. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975. Pp. xv + 219. In Critique and Absolute Method in Hegel's Dialectics the term "critique" means that negative "moment" of Hegel's dialectics by which ideas taken over from the past are being modified and, at the same time, integrated into the Hegelian system. The critical aspect of Hegel's speculative dialectics consists in comprehending the categorical determinations and results of other philosophical systems in their deficiency and offering them nevertheless a certain place within the Hegelian system itself. By this procedure, they appear as essentially negative categories of thought, that is, as categorical determinations on which thinking cannot come to rest because they are recognized as being imperfect. The interpretation given the other philosophical theories in this Hegelian reconstruction is, to a large extent, determined by Hegel's method of integrating them as "moments" into his own system. As a matter of fact, Maluschke argues quite cogently, a complete realization of the philosophical thinking of the past, its adoption and actualization for active modern philosophizing , is made possible only by means of a systematic promotional development. Such reconstruction of historic philosophies entails the hazard of infusing one's own viewpoint into the thinking of other philosophers to such a degree that their ideas and insights are not actually amalgamated with modern philosophizing but rather are destroyed. This danger occurs precisely in Hegel's systematology because here the concept of philosophy itself is determined by the central formulation of his own problems absolutely based on their own foundation in his system so that in the evaluation of all other philosophical theories the objectives inherent in them are no longer taken into account; they are all considered in relation to the one basic idea of systematic philosophy whose deficient development is then seen as an indication of their imperfection. 482 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY This speculative principle to be found in Hegel's analyses of the history of philosophy causes the question of an adequate interpretation of the philosophical positions reconstructed by him as preliminary stages of his system to turn out to be of relatively little significance for the claim of...