Content area
Full Text
John, Paul, George and Ringo remind us that "all you need is love." I suspect most would agree with The Beatles when, pausing in our scholarly endeavours, we glance about at the gloomy train wreck of many a personal relationship. When we return to our vocation's most gripping questions--How are community and individual autonomy to be harmonized? How is reason to be satisfied and yet ordinary emotional experience affirmed? How can democratic institutions be strengthened against technocratic thinking and control?--love is no doubt put aside and the serious work of theorizing real solutions begins. Ormiston's project is to rescue love as a solution to just such questions.
Love, indeed, is the answer. But it is not love as some pop nostrum that ought to be saved. Rather love is a much more robust concept, one articulating both the structure of union between "self and other, consciousness and being, finite and infinite" and the individual experience of that reconciliation (14, 15). Although not so divided, this rescue falls into two parts: a reinterpretation comprising the bulk of the book followed by a practically oriented diagnosis and prescription. The reinterpretation focuses on three texts over three chapters: the longest of Hegel's early and unpublished essays, "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate"; his first mature work, the redoubtable Phenomenology of Spirit ; and the last work that Hegel saw published, the Philosophy of...