&RPSRVLQJWKH6RXO5HDFKHVRI1LHW]VFKHV3V\FKRORJ\UHYLHZGlen T. Martin, Glen T. Martin

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 34, Number 1, January1996, pp. 152-154 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVVDOI: 10.1353/hph.1996.0007

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knowing." Absolute knowing is "the human community's coming to a reflective nonmetaphysical understanding of what it must take as authoritative grounds for belief and a c t i o n . . . " (267). Since this involves us in a continuous dialectic, dialectic "does not end in absolute knowing; it begins the task of renewing itself" (~68). From Hegel we get "a new paradigm for ph i losophy . . . " (z68).

The final chapter offers an account of the Philosophy of Right, and takes up the question of the nature of the institutionalized structure of our modern social space. This account focuses on the ambiguity of "rights" and of "autonomy" and the conflicts that these ambiguities foster. Pinkard offers a penetrating and useful analysis of our modern social and political existence.

Pinkard's treatment of the relativist questions arising from such a historicist posi- tion deserves our attention. The book also offers a very clear statement of a "nonmetaphysicar ' perspective on Hegel. Finally, if Hegelian philosophy is "open" as Pinkard argues, then the relevance of Hegel for our present human condition is unquestionable; for we have our own social space to examine, a social space that has developed since Hegel. The dialectic, as Pinkard understands it to work-- that is, very differently from the mystified, metaphysicalized, dogmatic understanding the text- book versions have given us--is our most powerful tool in coming to understand who we are.

One brief critical remark is to be made concerning the issue of"metaphysics." If by that term something is understood which involves transcending our own reality, or involves a search for some ultimate, teleological force governing reality, one must agree with Pinkard. But this understanding is a rather limited one, and should not have survived the Kantian revolution. Questions about the ontology of social space, about the ontology of the relata (historical human beings) and their relations, about being in social space, are certainly legitimate questions and do not take us to some transcendent realm.

There are other questions about this book. But if there were not, it would not be worth reading. It is a thoroughly philosophical book on Hegel's philosophy.

JOSEPH C. FLAY The Pennsylvania State University

Graham Parkes. Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, a994. Pp. xiv + 481. Cloth, $37.95-

This is a scholarly, richly detailed book, written for those who love learning and knowledge, and crammed full of rich references and resources carefully integrated into the main themes of the text. The book takes the time to delve, beyond Nietzsche's own writings, into the topics and thinkers with whom Nietzsche was involved. It will make delightful reading for those who are willing to read patiently and thoughtfully (as Nietzsche said all good philosophical books should be read).

This study encompasses Nietzsche's lifelong philosophizing with respect to the psy- chological dimensions of life as well as his own psychological development: his struggles,

BOOK REVIEWS 153

overcomings, syntheses, and awakenings. Because Nietzsche's entire thought was writ- ten, as he put it, in his own blood, it also encompasses many of the major themes of his philosophy as a whole, from the early articulation of life through images of the Apollo- nian and Dionysian, to his middle period with the emergence of a genealogical, deconstructive method applied to traditional values and ideals, to the final notions of Nietzsche's mature thought: eternal recurrence, will to power, and overman.

Part One of the book (chapters 1-3) traces Nietzsche's development from early childhood through the end of his first period in the late a87os. It provides a rich context for understanding the early Nietzsche, from Nietzsche's own juvenilia to those thinkers who provided a lasting influence: Emerson, Goethe, Byron, HOlderlin, and Schopenhauer. It also traces Nietzsche's relationship with his immediate mentors, such as Ritschl, Burckhardt, and Wagner, revealing the constellation of themes and images that would remain the basic material of Nietzsche's philosophical Aufgabe throughout his subsequent career.

Part Two (chapters 4-6) provides a study of the naturalistic imagery that informs every aspect of Nietzsche's thought.Just as Nietzsche made the well-known claim that "at bottom, I am every name in history," so he also had the most intimate identification with nature and a broad range of natural phenomena. This is laid out in a "taxonomy" of images generated by repeated tours through his published writings, unpublished notes, and letters. Since Nietzsche's thinking was fundamentally imagistic rather than abstract and conceptual, images from nature form a constant resource for his psychological reflections. We move from the most "elemental" level (landscapes, seascapes, earth, rock, suns, rivers, and lakes) to "vegetal" images (gardening, trees, preparing the soil, cultivation, irrigation, and fruition) to the [eve[ of animals and procreation (from wild- ness and domestication to Zarathustra's many animals and their symbolic signification).

Nietzsche's imagery of the soul as a community of persons, and the fullest examina- tion of his psychology, is reserved for Part Three (chapters 7-9). His thought is presented through a richly detailed comparison with the Socrates of Plato's dialogues, through reflections on the antecedent thought of Herder, Kant, Schiller, and Fichte, and through the subsequent thought of Freud and Jung. The focus here involves Nietzsche's notion o f a living multiplicity within the human soul which is usually obscured by the sense of a unitary self-conscious 'T' (ich) or ego. This "psychical polycentricity" is understood in terms of drives (Triebe), the resultants not only of biology and personal history, but also our "archaic inheritance," the voices and pres- sures o f human history still present within us. This psychical multiplicity, often imaged in the form of a community of persons within us, is examined in the light of Nietzsche's understanding of human greatness, "great health," and self-overcoming towards wholeness, that is, of his mature psychology as found in the later writings. The book concludes with a sensitive account of Nietzsche's final descent into madness.

This particular approach to Nietzsche's psychology involves many strengths, but also (perhaps necessarily) limitations. Several themes are virtually omitted which are surely vital to any attempt to engage this philosopher comprehensively. First, Nietzsche's psy- chology needs to include the theme of"play" (Spiel) which Richard Perkins. in a number of articles, has shown to be fundamental to Nietzsche's mature thought. In addition to

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the theme of play, the comparisons with Japanese and Chinese thought .would benefit from reflection on the psychological implications of Nietzsche's sense of" the innocence of becoming," emphasized, for example, by Joan Stambaugh in The Other Nietzsche. Finally, as I develop in my book From Nietzsche to Wittgenstein: The Problem of Truth and Nihilism in theModern WorM, Nietzsche's own understanding of his philosophical task was inseparable from the historical problem of nihilism and its overcoming in the modern world. To portray him primarily as the great psychologist he surely was is to perhaps unduly minimize not only his philosophical self-understanding, but his philosophical significance for our own engagement with the problem of nihilism in the twentieth century. Yet in spite of such limitations, this book remains a masterpiece of its kind.

GLEN T. MARTIN Radford University

Edmund Husserl. Briefwechsel. H usserliana Dokumente II 1/1-1 o. (Ten-volume set.) Karl and Elisabeth Schuhmann, editors. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1993. Cloth, $15oo.oo.

Why should anyone interested in a philosopher's philosophy need to read that philoso- pher's correspondence? Is not curiosity about someone's personal liti: and character irrelevant to grasping the value and meaning of that person's thought?

It is, of course, a basic philosophical issue to determine to what extent and for what reason the study of a particular philosophy must abstract from the person of the philosopher whose work is being studied, or, on the contrary, how this very abstraction would simply cut off sources necessary for the understanding of the work in question. The collection of letters and documents given in Husserrs Briefwechsel is essentially material that confronts us with that very question, a question which, in addition, lies in the very origins of the philosophic movement known as phenomenology, Husserl's monumental contribution to thought in the twentieth century.

The correspondence now in our hands in thus remarkable not solely because the letters to and from an important intellectual figure in a rich and fascinating period of our history must add greatly to our understanding of that period. (And the scope of Husserl's contacts and interests is broad indeed. He wrote, of course, to his mentor, Franz Brentano, and to now well-known students and associates in phenomenology: Martin Heidegger, Hans Reinach, Alfred Schi~tz, Felix Kaufmann, Roman lngarden; but also to his good friend and first president of Czechoslovakia Thomas Masaryk, to William Ernest Hocking, to Aiexandre Koyr6, to Paul Natorp, Heinrich Rickert, and Hans Vaihinger, to Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans Driesch, to name just a few.) Beyond that the more distinctive reason is precisely that Husserrs correspondence is a vivid demonstration of the tension between the two sides of the philosophical question out of which phenomenoiogy originated, and of the value of somehow holding the two antagonistic sides together in that tension.

Husserl launched his phenomenology with a sharp critique of psychoiogism, de- fending the validity o f the objectively ideal as constitutive of the possibility of philosophy