Hegel's Dialektik: Fünf hermeneutische Studien (review)

416 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (pp. 321-430). Again the "Erste Einleitung" together with "Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien" and the third Critique provide the basis for the discussion; but references to the Opus postumum are also quite numerous and provide supportive evidence. The first topic being discussed is the interrelation of machanisms and purposiveness. Kant himself had argued that "in an animal body many parts can be conceived as concretions according to mechanical laws.... Yet the cause which brings together the required matter, modifies it, forms it, and puts it in its appropriate place, must always be judged of teleologically" (p. 324). This leads the author to a discussion of "external" and "relative" purposiveness (pp. 357-382); but the key to it all is Kant's statement in the third Critique that the principle involved here (which is at the same time a definition of the organism) is this: "An organized product of nature is one in which every part is reciprocally purpose and means." Nothing is without purpose, nor can it be ascribed to a blind mechanism of nature (p. 409). Corresponding formulations and arguments abound in the Opus postumum (pp. 411-425). But in the Opus also Kant goes beyond the third Critique, asserting, for example, that "the principle of the possibility of such bodies [i.e., of organisms] must be immaterial because it is possible only through purposes." And Kant wondered whether this "immaterial principle....encompasses the whole universe" and, "as world-soul (which must not be called spirit)," underlies all life, or whether there are several such principles subordinate to one another as levels of determination (p. 422). The author's "ultimate observation ": Kant has "decisively refuted any purely speculative philosophy" even as far as the ground of observable purposiveness is concerned. W. H. WERKMEISTER Florida State University Hegels Dialektik: Fiinf hermeneutische Studien. By Hans-Georg Gadamer. (Tfibingen: T. C. B. Mohr, 1971. Pp. 96) Three studies---bridge-pieces of an unwritten work--form the core of this small book. These contain analyses of portions of Hegel's Phiinomenologie des Geistes and Wissenschaft der Logik. They are: "Hegel und die antike Dialektik," "Hegel: die verkehrte Welt," and "Die Idee der Hegelschen Logik." Two previously unpublished Vortriige, "Hegel und die Heidelberger Romantik," treating Hegel's Heidelberg period, and "Hegel und Heidegger," complete the collection. According to Professor Gadamer, what Hegel correctly saw in the Greeks is that which he in general recognized in philosophy, the speculative element. Commensurate with this, he saw that the propositions of philosophy cannot be understood as judgments in the sense of the logic of predication. "Kant recognized the necessity through which reason involves itself in contradictions. Kant's successors, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher and Hegel took up the proof of the necessity of such dialectic, overcame the negative valuation of dialectic and thereby recognized the peculiar possibility of reason reaching beyond the limits of the understanding" (p. 7). Even though the reach of Hegel's reason beyond the understanding did not attain to the Begriff in its concreteness, on the author's analysis, and even though, as a consequence , "dialectic must take itself back [sich zuriicknehmen] into hermeneutics," Hegel occupies a special position in this undertaking. Gadamer's historical interpretation of Hegel's inverted world also pertains to the development of the concept of motion in that here also dynamics figures importantly. In this account, Hegel portrays the moment of the recognition of the concept of power as the truth of perception. Consciousness of perception, which is exhibited for the philosophical BOOK REVIEWS 417 consciousness, experiences the truth. The philosophical consciousness must recognize that behind the properties in truth stand powers, which work out their effects in relation to one another. Science, which, because it goes behind this externality to inquire of the laws which govern the powers, here is called understanding, grasps much better what the truth of reality is. (p. 35) Precisely this is the actual world, which consists in that it ever undergoes change, permanently becoming different. Permanence is then no longer the mere contradictory to vanishing, but it is itself the truth of vanishing. This is the thesis of the inverted world. (p. 36) The true world is... the truth conceived...