Nearly two decades ago I attended a series of lectures on Hegel
by Stanley Rosen–still in my estimation one of the leading authorities
on GWF–and he proclaimed only half-facetiously that including
himself, there were but six people in America that actually understood
what Hegel was talking about. After the publication of Elliot
Jurist’s book, Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche, Professor Rosen
may have to increase that number to seven. Jurist clearly understands
Hegel. Even if he had accomplished nothing else in this provocative
and insightful book, his exegesis, commentary, and extensions
of Hegel’s thought would make Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche worth
reading.

This is especially the case with his fifty page discussion of
“recognition” in Hegel. By setting his commentary within
the broader concept of agency, Jurist is able to slice through
one of the most challenging sections of the Phenomenology of
Spirit. Although he claims that his intention “is not
to try to settle large textual questions, nor will I strive to
offer a full commentary” he arguably makes headway on both
by narrowing his hermeneutic perspective, and developing within
it such critical Hegelian notions as the master-slave paradigm,
being-in-itself, being-for-itself and the transition to being-for-others.

Jurist is not merely an interpreter of Hegel, however. His excursus
on tragedy and the Phenomenology of Spirit, for example,
is an original and important work of scholarship in itself. In
this relatively short section, Jurist argues that although the
Phenomenology is not a tragedy in itself, “Hegel borrows
from tragedy and appropriates it for his own (philosophical) purposes.”
To develop that claim, he then traces the parallel arc of consciousness
in the phenomenology and the protagonist in tragedy, paying special
attention to the structural parallel between the role of the reader-spectator
and the consciousness-protagonist and the way that in both tragedy
and the Phenomenology what happens “on-stage”
shifts to what happens “off-stage.”

Jurist’s development of concepts he needs to record the dialogue
between Nietzsche and Hegel is also inspired. He convincingly
explains the Cartesian myth as the backdrop of objectivism against
which both Hegel and Nietzsche examine agency, and in so doing
offers a starting point for reflecting on why postmodern philosophy
has been scrambling to find a response to that myth’s collapse.
His development of agency as personhood with an existential twist
is also provocative on its own, as is “self-fathoming”
as a third-order relation of the agent to culture after customs
and Bildung. The parts of Jurist’s book are, in sum, brilliant
nuggets of insights.

Yet the sum of the whole does not quite meet the promise of its
parts. Although several of the sections and chapters can stand
alone as exemplary and provocative scholarship, they do not fit
neatly together under the umbrella of Jurist’s apparent objective.
The first indication that there is a problem appears about midway
in the book when Jurist presents a catalogue of themes developed
up to that point: the psychology of knowledge, self-fathoming,
tragic self-knowledge, the problem of modern culture, the need
for a renewal of agency, and ideas about self-objectivation and
self-exploration. Jurist claims that Hegel’s notion of recognition
holds the key for integrating these themes. Although the subsequent
chapter confirms this claim, one is left wondering if integration
is enough. With a plan for a narrative but no underlying thesis,
the issues seem to be related to each other more by association
than argument.

This criticism only makes sense against Jurist’s explicit intention.
He does not claim to have a unifying thesis that he hopes to develop,
and argues initially that his only objective is to establish an
alternative to the traditional juxtaposition of Hegel and Nietzsche
as philosophical opposites. Jurist seeks to demonstrate that contrary
to this traditional view, there is actually considerable overlap
which becomes apparent through the lens of agency. In the introduction,
he claims to bring the two philosophers together in a dialogue,
and in the epilogue, he says, “in challenging the juxtaposition
of Hegel and Nietzsche as opposites, I have sought to present
a more complex and differentiated sense of their relationship”.(283)
This is a reasonable goal for a less ambitious book; but it may
not be a sufficiently powerful idea to coherently unite the diverse
excursions into both Hegel and Nietzsche of this extraordinary
book. This problem will perhaps become more apparent through a
brief overview of the book’s two sections.

Jurist begins with a discussion of the relationship between philosophy
and culture. He develops the idea that philosophy–contrary to
the Cartesian impulse to deny it–emerges out of a culture. At
the same time, philosophy reflects on culture. These ideas are
developed through a discussion of customs and an exposition on
Bildung. He points out and effectively provides textual
support for his view that both Nietzsche and Hegel recognize the
need to work out their philosophies within and in response to
culture.

He then coins one of his first concepts for helping in his juxtaposition
of Nietzsche and Hegel: the psychology of knowledge, which he
defines as: “A shared sphere in which Hegel and Nietzsche
reflect on knowledge and affirm the confluence of knowledge and
human flourishing.” (40) Since neither Hegel nor Nietzsche
refers to anything like the psychology of knowledge, one begins
to feel that Jurist is not simply juxtaposing these two philosophers
and their ideas, but elaborating on them and perhaps even offering
a solution to the problem of agency in culture. This possibility
is confirmed with his development of the concept of “self-fathoming,”
which, by his own admission, “is difficult to ground textually
and must be regarded as speculative.” (63) In other words–it
is an interpretive concept imposed on both philosophers by Jurist.
There is nothing wrong with this, of course, except it again seems
to imply that Jurist is moving beyond his limited aim and doing
something more than simply engaging the texts of these two philosophers
in dialogue without clarifying what more will be accomplished
through this movement.

Jurist’s subsequent discussion of how Hegel and Nietzsche both
rely on Greek culture and in particular on Greek tragedy seems
very much within his aim of demonstrating the overlap between
these philosophers. But the excursus on tragedy and the Phenomenology
of Spirit–although brilliant–seems once again to move beyond
the purpose initially set out by Jurist since there is no direct
link to Nietzsche, the other half of this equation. The concluding
chapters on modern culture return to a comparison and contrast
of the Hegel and Nietzsche and effectively reveal ways in which
they both identified deficiencies in modern culture.

However, the second part of the book once again begins to be difficult
to understand in terms of Jurist’s intention to bring the two
philosophers into a dialogue over their points of overlap. This
is because the first half of the second part is devoted to how
Hegel’s sense of “recognition” becomes manifest in agency.
It is a truly engaging analysis, but when he moves on to Nietzsche,
he has lost the connection with the main currents of thought in
the Hegel section, and the comparison seems contrived. This is
reflected in the chapter titles, one of which he labels: “Nietzsche’s
Ambivalence Towards Agency,” as well as in such statements
as “There is a danger of philosophical conceit in attributing
a theory of agency to Nietzsche.” (211) He overcomes this
by mining Nietzsche’s work for agency-related nuggets with his
theory of self-fathoming, but one must remember that that too
has no textual support.. This does not keep Jurist from developing
a significant theory of agency for Nietzsche which he can then
contrast with Hegel. Yet, one is left wondering whether this is
really a legitimate comparison of Nietzsche and Hegel, or a reflection
better attributed to Jurist with passing acknowledgment to Hegel
and Nietzsche for their inspiration.

After an initial catalogue of similarities, much of Jurist’s conclusion
is devoted to acknowledging that there are substantial differences
between Hegel and Nietzsche. Such differences in comparison might
help Jurist achieve his objective of setting the philosophers
in dialogue, since no dialogue occurs without difference. But
with significant sections of Hegel’s part devoted to developing
an issue of agency that has no counterpart in Nietzsche, and his
use of such contemporary philosophers as Derrida, Lacan, and Butler
to examine Nietzsche without any apparent relationship to Hegel,
one is left wanting more explanation of his purpose. Since he
does so much of what he sets out to do, perhaps the extra can
be generously seen not just as the frayed, untrimmed edges of
scholarship, bus as a bonus to what he attempted to accomplish.

Elliot Jurist has written an important book that provides a unique
insight on Hegel, Nietzsche and their relationship. To the degree
that there is a problem with the text, it is not in Jurist’s failure
to achieve his objective, but in his success at so far exceeding
it.

© 2001 Robert Makus, Ph. D.

This review first appeared online Oct 4, 2001

Categories: Philosophical