Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (review)

116 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY historical considerations because Hegel was seeking to do a historical systematization. Here Wagner makes a final plea for the helpfulness of Hegel's theory, implying that what is needed today is literary theory which is adequate both to the historical development of art and to the systematic structure of literature as to types and functions. With that claim one may undoubtedly agree, even if one is not convinced that Hegel provides the particular means for attaining such a theory. And Wagner's book may serve as a reminder to us of the depth and scope of Hegelian theorizing, such that Hegel may be an exemplar for us in an age when aesthetic and literary theory have gone the way of most scholarly endeavors, toward compartmentalization and extreme specialization. The book is clearly oriented toward a German audience, in that virtually the only figures referred to are from the German tradition or are currently writing in German. Jonas Cohn, Nicolai Hartmann and Georg Lukfics are the thinkers to whom Wagner most often compares and contrasts Hegel, although Kant, Heidegger and others are also taken into account. And all references are to German editions--a practice perhaps not surprising in regard to Croce or to authors who use lesser-known eastern European languages, but decidedly a bit awkward for the serious reader outside of Germany when applied, as it is here, to Sartre or Wellek and Warren. Unlike many other monographs in the Bouvier VerlagAbhandlungen series, the book lacks an index. As a result, Wagner's rather helpful and sometimes fairly extensive discussions of, and comparisons to, those German thinkers are lost to all but the dedicated reader of the whole work, when they might otherwise have served as useful reference points for those not particularly steeped in German literary theory. MICHAEL R. NEVILLE Washington State University Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self By Mark C. Taylor. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Pp. xiv+391. $18.50) Taylor has made a timely contribution to Kierkegaard research. The work is painstakingly done, the research is broad and thorough and the writing is at every point lucid and clear though he does tend to be quite "quotey." The title of the book is misleading, for it is not a study of Kierkegaard's "Pseudonymous Authorship." It is rather "A Study of Time and the Self," as the subtitle indicates, in Kierkegaard 's pseudonymous authorship. The better title without the necessity of a subtitle would have been Time and the Self in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship. This title would have been simpler and would have paralleled John Elrod's Being and Existence in Kierkegaard 's Pseudonymous Authorship from the same publisher in the same year. Extended comparisons and contrasts between these two books are beyond the present assignment. The subject of the book is indeed an important one, for the problem of time is central to Western philosophy and because an extensive study of Kierkegaard's concept of time has never been done. That "the self" is conjoined with "time" in the subtitle indicates in a most emphatic way the limits and nature of Kierkegaard's contribution to the study of the nature of time. The contrast between Kierkegaard and most of the philosophy of time in the West is one of the major concerns of the book. Yet the historical reflections on the nature of time are quite incomplete. Plato's philosophy of time meets us only in the opening sentence and Plotinus never appears at all. Aristotle is adequately treated. The result is that Aristotle's philosophy stands de novo and the significant transitions from Plato and Aristotle through Plotinus to Augustine are passed over. This causes one to question why it is claimed that for 1400years the significant insights of Augustine lay dormant. To be sure, Augustine's philosophy of time was without explicit historical consequence and since Kierkegaard the concept has been central in a way it never BOOK REVIEW 117 was before. Yet numerous medieval developments had the problem of time at their core. The problem of foreknowledge, the perpetual offering of Christ in the Eucharist, the definition of Christology, the...