German Studies Review

In an series of highly subtle readings of paradigmatic philosophical texts from the Western canon, the monograph examines how Erinnerung functions as a central concept in the emergence of historical consciousness and the development of the philosophy of history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taking cues from Hegel’s hyphenated concept of “Er-Innerung,” the book distinguishes recollection (reminiscentia) as an internalization process, which incorporates and adapts what it recalls, from memoria, the mere storing of content. Erinnerung is not approached as a mental ability but as a particular hermeneutic practice, a reading technique, which recollects, rewrites, and rethinks earlier instances of interpretation. The book’s three main chapters are organized accordingly around three sets of double readings, juxtaposing Lessing with Augustine (and Augustine’s Confessiones with his Soliloquia), the late Kant with the critical Kant, and finally Hegel with Hölderlin. With this approach, Gilgen hopes “to lay open a space for the simultaneous reconstruction of different understandings of history” (225). [End Page 649]

While presenting us with a highly differentiated view that accommodates a great degree of simultaneity, the study nevertheless charts a historical narrative with a rather clear trajectory. The narrative is framed by two authors who surprisingly (considering that they receive as much attention as Lessing, Kant, and Hegel) are missing from the book’s title, namely Augustine and Hölderlin, and centers around historical changes in semiotics as first conceived by Koselleck, Foucault, and Derrida. In a nutshell, the development of the philosophy of history is tied to the transition from medieval scholastic forms of exegesis to a hermeneutic practice guided by the idea of a transcendental signified for which the written word becomes a dangerous supplement (in the Derridean sense). Recollection serves as a chiffre for the emancipation from the letter and the unearthing of the spirit of the text qua its internalization. If Augustine emerges as the “godfather” (277) of the philosophy of history, it is because he first applies, Gilgen argues, this new method to the reading of the Bible, of himself, and of history. In Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, the transcendent position that God held in Augustine is secularized. The transcendental signified is seen as immanent to the progress of history (103). Overcoming the limited human perspective requires time, but also the liquidation of the letter, a “vollständige Er-Innerung” (103) equated with a reading practice where “paratext, text, and resonating context can no longer be separated from each other, but mutually implicate each other” (104).

Concerns with the limited human perspective and the fragmentary nature of historical truth, which Lessing still frames in a theological language, Kant transfers into the autonomous domain of reason. For Kant, the central question is what evidence in history makes accessible its purposiveness. How can meaning and purpose be derived from what empirically in history appears as its opposite, as chaos, randomness, fragmentation, and so on? Kant, Gilgen argues, fails to answer this question sufficiently in his “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte” from 1784 and in the Kritik der Urteilskraft from 1786. But he solves the problem in Der Streit der Fakultäten, in essence by rereading the history of the problem in his own writings. That is, in this late text Kant approaches the earlier concern about individual “unwillingness” by applying the logic of the sublime, which, as Lyotard noted, derives finality from openness, pleasure from un-pleasure. Historical progress thus hinges on an act of reading, on the compassionate observer of history (the audience of the French revolution) understanding historical events as a sign, which will lead the observer to put rational constraints on corresponding events in the future. With Kant, history enters into a recursive process: it starts reading itself, recollecting and incorporating its past in anticipation of its moral telos.

The tension between the particular (events of history) and the general (its teleology) receives a more speculative treatment in Hegel. Gilgen’s discussion of Hegel centers around two hyphens...