Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 113 respectively, Greek and Latin rhetoric in the Middle Ages; chapter lO, the renaissance , including sections on Erasmus, Agricola, Ramus, and Bacon. Chapter 11 covers neoclassical rhetoric and includes discussions of Boileau, Locke--who lectured on rhetoric at Oxford in 1663 (p. z27)--Hume, Burke, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair, "the British Quintilian" (p. 235); it ends with Archibishop Whately, whose Elements of Rhetoric was "the last major treatment of rhetoric as a discipline in the classical tradition" (p. ~4o), and coincided with the beginnings of modern scholarship on the history of classical rhetoric, Walz's edition of Rhetores Graeci (1832-36). Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition covers a good deal of material in a relatively few pages, and it has the defects that such books necessarily have: broad outlines instead of detailed discussions of whole periods and movements; selection of few authors and works for more careful treatment. Specialists on particular periods or on other authors may criticize Kennedy's choices. But this is a synoptic history of classical rhetoric--in fact, the first of its kind--and it might better be evaluated by its results: the vision of the whole that it communicates and the new light in which it places matters with which the reader was already familiar. In both of these respects, Kennedy's work is certainly worth the attention of historians of philosophy . It points out to us how many influential philosophers were also interested, and influential, in rhetoric. And it suggests that, despite the substantial inattention of scholars in the history of philosophy, philosophy and rhetoric have been intimately related throughout the history of Western culture. GERALD A. PgESS Stanford University Mark C. Taylor. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 198o. Pp. 1 + 298. $7.95. There is at last a serious effort in English to treat comprehensively the Hegel-Kierkegaard relationship. Mark Taylor's Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard is one of the few books in any language to make this subject one of sustained and critical scrutiny. English-speaking scholars have over the last thirty years had to settle, for the most part, for a spate of articles analyzing the relationship from the standpoint of Kierkegaard's remarks about Hegel. The Kierkegaardians generally have faithfully repeated the polemics, and the Hegelians have as faithfully defended him against the now standardized Kierkegaardian assault? Niels Thulstrup has recently attempted to rescue the debate from its tired and predictable rut in his Kierkegaards Forhold til Hegel. ~ But, aside from the valuable historical information Thulstrup provides, he ' There are some exceptions. Among them are two articles by Robert Perkins: "Hegel and Kierkegaard: Two Critics of Romantic Irony," in Hegel in ComparativeLiterature(Baltimore: St. John's Universtiy Press, 197o), pp. 232-54; and "Two Nineteenth Century Interpretations of Socrates: Hegel and Kierkegaard," Kierkegaard-Studiet (international edition) 4 (1976): 9-14 9 (Copenhagen: Gldendal, 1967). Kierkegaard'sRelation to Hegel, trans. George L. Stengren (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 198o). 114 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY does not shed any new light on the philosophical and theological relationship between the two. Taylor's book is intended to be helpful at precisely this point. Complaining that the philosophical and theological richness of this relationship has yet to be appreciated because of the rut into which previous scholarship has fallen, Taylor offers neither an analysis exclusively from the standpoint of Kierkegaard's polemics nor a historical study but a constructive study of the two thinkers' fully developed thought. Taylor claims that this "inquiry is guided by the conviction that the distinctive features differentiating their viewpoints can emerge clearly only within the framework of their shared presupositions, assumptions, and intentions" (p. 12). Setting himself in direct opposition to Thulstrup, who argued that "Hegel and Kierkegaard have in the main nothing in common as thinkers, neither as regards object, purpose, or method, nor as regards what were for each indisputable principles" (p. 18), Taylor strives to demonstrate that in fact it is at precisely these points that the two share much in common. Moreover, this previously unrecognized commonality is what makes their differences so interesting and important. Taylor presents both thinkers as...