Kierkegaard's Thought (review)

538 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY "they are difficulties which have a particular importance in the discussion of art .... " Podro's clarification is largely made through the asking of questions which the authors themselves did not ask and then suggesting answers to these questions in the light of what the authors did say. The two chapters on Schiller form the core of the book. Schiller's theory of art and aesthetic education of man is placed as central to Podro's account of an aesthetic tradition beginning with Kant and ending with Fiedler. The "tradition" detailed in Podro's book is described as having two underlying assumptions. The first was that any account of art must indicate distinctive or at least characteristic uses of our perception, uses which if not exclusive to art are at least necessary to it, and which are seen in art in a particularly striking way. The second assumption was that art involves our attitudes, in the sense of our serious purposes as human beings. The disagreements which reveal the core of the tradition turn on how these two assumptions were understood and how they were seen to be related to each other. First of all, with the exception of Schopenhauer, all our writers follow and amplify Kant on the question of perception: his notion of the mental ordering of the components in perception by forming analogies and his conception of that richness of interconnected meanings in aesthetic ideas recur and are amplified in Schiller and Herbart. Over the way these operations of perception are related to the wider context of our attitudes and purposes, our writers come into conflict. However, even in their conflicts they agree that these wider interests centre on the question of our freedom as human beings. This is a well-written and careful exposition which Podro offers as antidote to recent critics' attempts to "clear up conceptual confusions" while knowing "very little about what the theories they were criticizing were concerned with," and without sufficient understanding of what the writers "were trying to do with their language." JEAN G. I"IAI~.ELL California State University, Hayward Kierkegaard's Thought. By Gregor Malantschuk. Trans. by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Pp. 338. $12.50) The basic concern of this interesting and scholarly study of Kierkegaard is to provide an explication of the "dialectical structure" of Kierkegaard's authorship. In doing so, the author argues for the unity of Kierkegaard's thought and for the continuity of purpose in his diverse "aesthetic" and "edifying" works. In passing, there are a number of interesting insights offered concerning the influence of Danish thinkers upon some of the details of Kierkegaard's thought. An overriding assumption in this study is that there is a discernible movement in Kierkegaard's dialectical presentation of his views from the objective realms of knowledge to the subjective dimensions of existence. In his Journals Kierkegaard had stated as one of his projects the need to develop an authentic "anthropological contemplation," which would require a psychological analysis of the individual, as well as an attempt to describe the spiritual dialectic of human existence . This project led Kierkegaard into the region of philosophy, into an analysis of ontological issues, problems of freedom and history, and the boundary between ethics and metaphysics (p. 69). The treatment of such issues was informed by Sibbern's Hegels Philosophie (Copenhagen, 1838), I. H. Fichte's Die Idee der Personalichkeit (1834), the writings of Marbach, Erdmann, Tennemann and (most important of all) Trendelenburg. In his dialectical presentation of his thought Kierkegaard sought, as Malantschuk persuasively argues, an organic unity of thought which would be attained dialectically (p. 111). It is shown that Kierkegaard adopted some of the philosophical views of Sibbern, especial- BOOK REVIEWS 539 ly those in his Om Erk]endelse og Granskning (On Knowledge and Research), and incorporated them into his analysis of subjective actuality. This is especially the case in regard to Sibbern's notion that in the individual there is a collateral relationship among cognition, feeling and will (p. 128). In what is called Kierkegaard's "dialectical method" of presenting the various aspects of human existence, he was concerned...