The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of "Bildung" (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 625 cerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre" (CCWL), a text which, surprisingly, has never before been translated into English in its entirety. Fichte's main subject here is the proper method of philosophy. Once again, the Wissenschaftslehreof 1794 itself has very litde to say on this topic, even though the arguments it makes often presuppose that the reader already have an understanding of the transcendental method it purports to employ. For this reason a familiarity with the CCWL is an indispensable propaedeutic to a reading of the Wissenschaftslehre.Furthermore, this text is the clearest of Fichte's technical writings---a clarity which is preserved in the present translation-and for this reason alone constitutes a good introduction to his system. Daniel Breazeale's translations are uniformly excellent, which is to say that they are not only technically accurate but readable as well. His ability to transform German texts into fluent and well-styled English is most apparent in his translation of the vehement prose of Fichte's polemical texts; but even the very technical articles translated here have been rendered into an idiom that is as intelligible as one could possibly hope for. All of this is done with a sensitivity to the technical nature of Fichte's writing as well and, in some instances, with important improvements upon the conventions of past translations. To cite just one example, Breazeale rightly chooses to render das Ich as 'the I' rather than as 'ego' or 'self', as previous translators have done. Breazeale has also edited this volume, providing an engaging, largely biographical introduction to the volume as a whole, as well as short but helpful introductions to each of the selections. The aim of these introductions is not to submit Fichte's writings to philosophical analysis, nor to construct a new, encompassing interpretation of Fichte's thought, but rather to situate each piece in its historical and philosophical context. This more modest aim is consistent with Breazeale's understanding of the current state of Fichte scholarship: The first step towards developing an adequate understanding of Fichte's thought in the English-speaking world must be to make available reliable translations of those texts that are essential to such an understanding. The present volume makes a significant contribution to that end. FREDERICK NEUHOUSER Harvard University John H. Smith. The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of "Bildung." Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 283. $3~.5o. Ours is an era of intensely renewed interest in the relationship of philosophy and rhetoric, of tropological speculation and metaphorical analysis. It is appropriate that this renewed interest in the relationship of philosophy and rhetoric should turn to a study of Hegel, for here if anywhere this relationship is a central issue. Hegel, after all, risked the rhetoric of "absolute knowing" in the construction of his speculative science, and the question immediately arises, how can any determinate discursive entity (like the Logic, for instance) claim- to give definitive expression to the science of knowing? Hegel rejects the Kantian limitation of knowing, and thus incurs the task of 626 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:4 OCTOBER 199o accounting for the relationship between an infinite speculative content and a presentational apparatus--ordinary language--shot through with grammatical and rhetorical limitations. John H. Smith has written an impressive and interesting work which raises and develops the problem of a rhetorical reading of Hegel in the context of a detailed study of Hegel's own rhetoric and views of rhetoric. One of the virtues of this text is its scholarly presentation of the particulars of Hegers own education in humanist rhetorical principles at the Gymnasium Illustre in Stuttgart. Smith examines the teachers, the texts, and the atmosphere of pedagogical doctrine in which the young Hegel was educated. There is a curious ambivalence in this study. On the one hand, Smith tends to put his rhetorical scholarship to a dubious use: a general strategy of interpreting the mature Hegel's theoretical innovations as mere reformulations of classical rhetorical theory. Smith's overall approach to Hegel's philosophical project is to offer a "translatio" of Hegel's speculative philosophy---ordinarily viewed as...