Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy (review)

This ambitious book presents an account of the relationship between Hegel's philosophy and its appropriation by recent philosophers such as Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and Richard Rorty. The author attempts to show how these thinkers have overlooked what is most valuable in Hegel, namely, the anti-realist tendencies he inherited from Kant. Rockmore's goal, however, is not merely to criticize the way some philosophers have misread a key historical figure; he makes it clear that his main goal is less to make a contribution to Hegel scholarship than to confront the relationship between Hegel and the entire tradition known as "analytic philosophy." His thesis is that a more or less naïve "metaphysical realism" has pervaded analytic philosophy from its inception, which has prevented scholars trained in that tradition from understanding the more nuanced epistemologies of Kant and Hegel, who teach that we know only what we construct.

Rockmore's three-part book begins appropriately enough with a brief history of idealism in the English-speaking world and, more importantly, of its criticisms at the hands of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. He reports this episode in the history of philosophy in the interest of arguing two points. First, the brand of idealism to which Russell and Moore were exposed was not identifiably Hegelian, but was instead an inferior and more metaphysically problematic philosophy, the manifesto of which can be found in McTaggart's 1896 opus, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic. Second, for this reason, the criticisms leveled against "idealism" by Russell, as well as the very different arguments proposed by Moore, fail to address the idealist position advocated by Hegel and, to a lesser degree, Kant. Rockmore argues (e.g., on 52) that whereas Hegel's holism was critical and epistemological, McTaggart and others reverted to a metaphysical or ontological holism.

Although Rockmore's formulation of the difference between Hegelian and British Idealism reflects a specifically late twentieth-century and (ironically enough) analytically-informed reading of Hegel, he succeeds in establishing that Russell and Moore "did not understand the idealism they rejected well enough to formulate telling objections to it" (9). His book also shows that there is much to gain from a study of this period by a scholar who is not slavishly devoted to the tradition of Russell and Moore. In regard to this last point, the book offers an attractive alternative to several recent attempts by analytically-trained philosophers to recount the early history of analytic philosophy.

The second chapter ("Pragmatism, Analytic Neopragmatism, and Hegel") treats a slightly more difficult subject matter, namely, the return to Hegel on the part of recent analytic philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell. The author's aim here is to show that the philosophers in question, like their predecessors in the analytic tradition, failed to appreciate the centrality to Hegel of the rejection of "metaphysical realism." The reason for this oversight, we learn, is that their pragmatist Hegel evolved from an analytic reading of Kant (viz. Sellars's), one that had already stripped the great Critical philosopher of his important idealist theses. Brandom receives the greatest share of criticism, with Rockmore insisting that he retains an "ordinary, uncritical form of the metaphysical realist view" (130–31). The conclusion at which the author arrives, however, will be astonishing to many: "Brandom, who claims to be a Hegelian, and Rorty, who makes no such claim, are both pre-Kantians; both still make the possibility of knowledge depend on knowledge of external reality" (132).

In the third and final chapter ("Hegel, Idealism, and Knowledge"), Rockmore offers a description of the epistemological insights that flourished in Kantian and especially post-Kantian idealism. It is worth noting, however, that he begins the chapter with a summary of "the analytic view of Hegel." This section is important in that Rockmore here moderates his tendency to present a caricature of "analytic philosophy" that centers on some purportedly naïve assumption about the reality of the world. Just as he...