John McCumber

This fascinating study reveals the extensive influence of Cold War politics on academia, philosophical inquiry, and the course of intellectual history. From the rise of popular novels that championed the heroism of the individual to the proliferation of abstract art as a counter to socialist realism, the years of the Cold War had a profound impact on American intellectual life. As John McCumber shows in this fascinating account, philosophy, too, was hit hard by the Red Scare. Detailing the immense political pressures that reshaped philosophy departments in midcentury America, he shows how the path of American philosophy was altered to follow a political agenda. McCumber begins with the story of Max Otto, whose appointment to the UCLA Philosophy Department in 1947 was met with widespread protest charging him as an atheist. Drawing on Otto’s case, McCumber details the conservative efforts that, by 1960, had all but banished existentialism and pragmatism—not to mention Marxism—from philosophy departments across the country. These paradigms were replaced with what McCumber calls Cold War philosophy, ideas that valorized scientific objectivity and free markets and which downplayed the anti-theistic implications of modern thought. As McCumber shows, the effects of this trend can still be seen at American universities today.

From the perspective of a contemporary German reader, one consideration is particularly important from the start. Illumination of the political conduct of Martin Heidegger cannot and should not serve the purpose of a global depreciation of his thought. As a personality of recent history, Heidegger comes, like every other such personality, under the judgment of the historian. In Farias’ book as well, actions and courses of conduct are presented that suggest a detached evaluation of Heidegger’s character. But in general, as members of a later generation who cannot know how we would have acted under conditions of a political dictatorship, we do well to refrain from moral judgments on actions and omissions from the Nazi era. Karl Jaspers, a friend and contemporary of Heidegger, was in a different position. In a report that the denazification committee of the University of Freiburg at the end of 1945, he passed judgment on Heidegger’s “mode of thinking”: it seemed to him “in its essence unfree, dictatorial, uncommunicative.”7 This judgment is itself no less informative about Jaspers than about Heidegger. In making evaluations of this sort Jaspers, as can be seen from his book on Friedrich Schelling, was guided by the strict maxim that whatever truth a philosophical doctrine contains must be mirrored in the mentality and lifestyle of the philosopher. This rigorous conception of the unity of work and person seems to me inadequate to the autonomy of thought and, indeed, to the general history of the reception and influence of philosophical thought. I do not mean by this to deny all internal connection between philosophical works and the biographical contexts from which they come—or to limit the responsibility attached to an author, who during his lifetime can always react to unintended consequences of his utterances. 7. Ott, “Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus,” p. 65. Jürgen Habermas is professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His most recent books include the two-volume work Theory of Communicative Action and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures . John McCumber is an associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason

That Hegel had an “epistemology” at all is only one of the preliminary points argued in this demanding, but extremely rewarding book. Rockmore argues that, though Hegel abandoned the traditional epistemological standpoint of an isolated subject seeking a foundation for knowledge, he was clearly concerned throughout his career with the more general issue of the justification of knowledge claims überhaupt. Moreover, Rockmore shows that Hegel’s views are strikingly relevant to contemporary philosophical debates, since justification in Hegel’s view is, as circular, non-foundationalist: The initial point of a theory is not established in and for itself, but is “justified in terms of the explanatory capacity of the framework to which it gives rise”.

The ultimate purpose of Alan White’s careful and detailed confrontation of Hegel with Schelling is to rehabilitate first philosophy itself. In this effort, White argues two subtheses: that first philosophy is possible as “Hegelian transcendental ontology”; and that Hegel’s thought makes sense only as “transcendental ontology.” Defending Hegel against Schelling is crucial in two senses: first, Schelling’s Hegel-critique contains, “in at least rudimentary form, all of the fundamental criticisms that have ever been made” of Hegel ; second, because Schelling generally takes Hegel’s thought to be theological, rather than ontological, in character, showing how he often misses Hegel’s point provides an opportunity to disengage fundamental features of an “ontological” reading of Hegel.

Hegel’s account of China, based mainly on the reports of European travelers and missionaries, is hardly trustworthy. Attention to it, however, can illuminate Hegel’s own critical practices. Displacing his claims about China onto the imaginary nation of “Baffinland,” I argue that Hegel’s critical standards derive from the basic nature of his thought, which requires that a good society be one that not merely tolerates but encourages the full development of human diversity. As an example of how this might work, I turn to the Rwandan practice of imihigo, in which an individual publicly spells out the contributions that only he or she can make to the community.

In ‘Le puits et la pyramide’, Jacques Derrida critiques the way in which Hegel privileges speech over writing atEncyclopedia§459. He traces that privileging back to Hegel's teleologically motivated view of time as the sublation of space, which he takes in turn to be motivated by Hegel's concern, as a metaphysical thinker, for validating and securing the philosophical dream of “full presence”. This, on Hegelian terms, involves subjecting the “materiality” of space to the “ideality” of time.Perhaps surprisingly, Hegel himself openly concedes Derrida's first two points. By limiting his discussion of language in theEncyclopediato consideration of its function as a vehicle for the expression of representations, Hegel requires himself to discuss the relative merits of spoken and written utterances, an issue which he then argues out in favour of the former. Within the written domain, alphabetic and hieroglyphic writing must also be compared, and it is hardly astonishing that Hegel should view the key contrast between the two as that of the temporality inherent in alphabetic speech, which captures sound, as opposed to the spatiality of hieroglyphics, which exist only as inscriptions.Hegel's privileging of speech over writing is thus no mere slip; it is a whole set of consciously elaborated arguments, undertaken for specifically stated reasons. This casts doubt on the third of Derrida's points above: is Derrida mistaking the purpose of a specific discussion for the motivating force of teleology in general? Is Hegel's openly conceded privileging of spoken over written language justified by something other than a teleology dictated by an unexamined metaphysical preference for “full presence”?

A vast amount of attention has traditionally been paid to the relation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to the system of “science” which complements it in his thought. Recently, Errol Harris has suggested that the Phenomenology is also related to “science” as we understand it today, and this view has been worked out in some detail by Paul Thagard. The approach seems of interest for the philosophy of science because of the increasing contemporary awareness that empirical science is not based simply on “value-free” observations, but incorporates critical reflection on previous theories, and hence—like the Phenomenology—has an historical dimension. As I hope to show here, attention to the relation of the Phenomenology to natural science can also enhance our understanding of Hegel.