Philosophie der Beschreibung (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 243 There is, however, a complication about creativity which there is not about order. Order, as we observed, is the concrete expression of the drift to unity. It cannot be similarly said that creativity is the concrete expression of the drift to multiplicity. Multiplicity is just presented to us, and in itself is not creative at all.... It is not, however, the opposite of order, which is chaos.... It is invention, initiative, an excursion into the unforseen .... Order is the springboard from which it leaps, and order is what (in a new pattern) it creates. The relation between order and creativity is asymmetrical. Consequently, they are not opposites.... But they are frequently poised against each other, particularly when each is functioning at a low level. It is bad order that is uncreative, and bad creation which is disorderly.... It is almost a law among values . . . that they are far apart at the base and converge as each approaches its climax. Order and creativity are seen as powerful "prolongations" (a richly developed concept) of God into His creation, the worId. And in His creation of man, He became the "Creator of Creators." Moreover, because he respects men as independent centers of creative will and thought, He remains, with divine modesty, hidden and veiled, the deus absconditus, who never answers directly and unambiguously (it is the "silence" of God that characters in Bergman's films complain so movingly about), because He wants men to make the creative effort, and endure the creative tension necessary, to try to understand His world and its ways. It is impossible here, to develop the beautiful and convincing edifice of thought and insight that Gibson erects upon this twin pair of fundamental concepts--order and creativity. He builds that edifice through nine distinguished chapters. His book is a consummate fusion of his own fundamental concepts of order and creativity; being creative, yet orderly; being orderly, yet creative. FREDERIC H. YOUNG Chapman College California Philosophie der Beschreibung. By Friedrich Kaulbach. (K61n-Graz: B6hlau Verlag, 1968. Pp. 488) The most celebrated and sometimes misused clich6 in the history of science is no doubt Newton's "hypotheses non fingo." Perhaps less misused, but still well-known is Kirchhoff's manifesto in the Introduction of his famous textbook, Lehrbuch der Mechanik (1874): "die Naturerscheinungen nicht zu erkl~iren, sondern vollst~indig und in der einfachsten Weise zu beschreiben." His effort not "to explain natural phenomena , but to describe them completely and in the simplest manner" was a natural outcome from the general view of sciences he had consistently held: "The highest object at which the natural sciences are constrained to aim, but which they will never reach is . . . the reduction of all the phenomena of nature to mechanics" (quoted by J. B. Stallo, Concepts of Modern Physics, [1884]). Kirchhoff's dictum was later expounded, if somewhat one-sidedly, in the philosophy of Ernst Mach. But the subsequent overemphasis on the annihilation of metaphysics by positivists ended up, quite logically, with "logic without ontology." That the latter is unnecessarily too restrictive is obvious in the light of such positivists' own enterprises as "logic of discovery" (~t la K. R. Popper, N. R. Hanson, etc.), "logic of explanation" (h la C. G. Hempel, etc.), and so on. Equally obvious then is that a philosophy of description cannot possibly remain within the overly restrictive domain of Russell's theory of description. 244 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Throughout the book under review, therefore, the author (a pupil of Husserl in philosophy and of Zermelo in mathematics) hardly ever mentions such names as Frege, Russell or Wittgenstein, although he (and his pupil, Prof. Kambarthel, University of Konstanz) once edited a work by Frege. The author's explicit aim is: "Es ist Aufgabe der philosophischen Theorie der Beschreibung--die in diesem Werk als ein Grundverfahren menschlicher Erkenntnis aufgewiesen wird~die verschiedenen ontologischen Beschreibungsbegriffe sowohl partiell zu rechtfertigen als auch sie zugleich als 'Charaktere ' des Grundverfahrens menschlicher Erkenntnis ~iberhaupt aufzuweisen." Ontology has to enter again, since, according to the author's view, "Die idealen Modelle, von denen die exakte Sprache redet, mtissen auf wirkliche Gegenst~tnde beziehbar sein, die ihrerseits aber nur in ihrer Wirklichkeit und Wesenhaftigkeit...