The Problematic Self in Kierkegaard and Freud (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 117 tuality. This and related failures are involved in the proposed measure by comparison of Hegel's concept of Truth: "If that which [on Heidegger's account] shows itself to knowledge or concepts is only a side of being which is dominated by hiddenness or even evades genuine truth, then this is a radical opposition to the possibility [in Hegel] that the selfgrasping concept, the self which unfolds itself to true knowledge, can find itself again in the completed movement of thought determinations as the truth of the system" (p. 123). Here again the process aspect of Hegel's thought in the form in which it here pertains is omitted from consideration. The attainment of Truth on Hegel's account is construed in a simplistic uni-dimensional way, as though it involved the transcendence of dialectic as such, which would place it beyond history. The result of this is that Marx sees a more marked contrast between Hegel and Heidegger on the point at issue than in fact exists. Marx may well be intuitively correct in taking the measure of Hegel by comparing his thought with that of later philosophers who would seem to have spoken effectively to their time, rather than by the more standard approach of direct and piecemeal critique. It is only to be regretted that he has based this effort upon a work (the first six chapters) which, while it is a fresh and in some ways quite adequate introduction to Hegel's Phiinomenologie and hence to Hegel, falls short of providing a basis for such a comparison. The comparison of two important thinkers should force the philosophically fruitful exercise of rethinking them both. In the case of the present effort, such a rethinking should reflect a sensitivity to discriminations in Hegel to match the sensitivity of the author to discriminations in Heidegger. If superficial in ways which can be misleading, so that it detracts somewhat from the work as a whole, this brief attempt at least serves to indicate something of the nature of a task which might well be undertaken. DARRELE. CHRISTENSEN Salzburg, Austria The Problematic Sell in Kierkegaard and Freud. By J. Preston Cole. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971. Pp. 244. $7.50) One of the major claims of Cole's book is that many of the difficulties that pervade Freud's description of the human personality arise from his "attempt to express the historical reality of human existence within a naturalistic framework" (p. 3). Likewise, Cole contends, "Kierkegaard, no less than Freud, was saddled with an inappropriate conceptual framework for his task" (p. 4). Although Kierkegaard understood man historically rather than naturalistically, his reaction against Hegelianism was never so total as to liberate him from Hegelian influence. All of this is correct, of course, but all of it needs qualification . To some degree Cole does provide refinements of these generalizations about both Freud and Kierkegaard in the body of his book. However, one senses a certain lack of precision in all of this. If we must pose the question as a strict disjunction between the naturalistic view and the historical view of man, then I suppose Freud would have to be classified as a naturalist despite what appears to be a movement toward a richer view of man especially in the later Freud. Kierkegaard was certainly anti-naturalistic, but pervading his view of man is the tension between freedom and necessity, mind and body, eternity and time. Not only was the Incarnation--the eternal becoming present in time--a paradox for Kierkegaard, but there was also the great problem of how a nineteenth-century individual might become contemporaneous with Christ. The point is that it is a gross oversimplification to present Kierkegaard as embracing the historical view of man. Cole's approach is "to penetrate the conceptual structures in which both Freud and Kierkegaard seek to communicate their understanding of the character of human existence and to demonstrate the similarity of their insight which is otherwise disguised in the conceptual forms of vitalistic naturalism and the remnants of philosophical idealism" (p. 6). 118 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY One can hardly disagree with Cole's contention that neither extreme...