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Btdider shares ‘God as Light’ with a section in the third step of Hegel’s three, and Ibsen’s last, symbolic play, When We Dead Awaken, ‘adapts’ Hegel’s ‘The mineral form as the sacred human form-the Statue.’ when We Dead Awaken is, indeed, about a sculptor’s creation of the idealised form of a woman in a statue called The Day of Resurrection, and certainly Johnston brings out similarities between many of Ibsen’s plays and Hegel’s plot through history and culture.

Johnston then proceeds to examine the structure of the Cycle by seeking to find in each of the plays in turn examples sufficiently appropriate to his case to convince the reader of the truth of his revelation. Here, and in the more detailed treatment of Ghosts, Rosmersholm and l%e Master Builder which follows, Johnston argues by association in a tour de force of persistent empiricism. Occasionally his treatment is interesting enough in itself not to need the schematic prop upon which he balances his analysis. He nicely states, for instance, that Ibsen forced the ‘well-made play’ st~~ture of Hedda Gabier into containing what that French form had been designed to exclude, ‘those perspectives of the human spirit, its history and destiny, for which the . . . subjects of nineteenth-century Bourbon rulers had no more relish than the patrons of Broadway today.’

In the main, however, Johnston adopts not a critical language but one that is at the same time overloaded and empty, the vocabulary of messianism (‘I believe that in each of the plays in the Cycle he removes one veil of illusion, revealing some of the essential reality in the shifting realm of falsehood until . . . we come close to looking at the naked spirit’), of hyperbole (Ibsen’s achievement, meticulousness, richness and variety, etc. are regularly prefaced by the adjective ‘great’ and sometimes by quite clamorous superlatives) and of intellectual vacuity (‘We are astonished at the dramatist’s ability to enter so profoundly into the actions, sufferings and desires of such deeply rendered characters’).

Johnston’s efforts both inflate and reduce Ibsen’s plays by his claim that ‘his vivid gailery of moral portraits’is ‘a complete transformation of Hegel’s text.’ However much it may be true that Ibsen managed to ‘subtilize [sic] universal abstractions’, and to suggest that his characters were made up of their, and the world’s past, Johnston’s contrivance, which is designed to show that the Cycle is as much a whole of inter-related parts as Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Mysteries, or Shakespeare’s History plays, fails to convince since, however plausible it may be to see the sequence as a cycle and in some kind of correspondence to Hegel, and although it is done with an evident, even stifling, love for his author, Johnston’s is too much, at least for this reader, an exercise in simple faith.

University of Essex, Colchester Roger Howard

Dar Gott der relnen Vernunft. Die Aaseinandersetzung urn den ontologiscben Gottasbeweis van Anselm bis Hegel, Wolfgang Rod (Mtlnchen: Beck 1992), 239pp., DM48.

The ontological argument for the existence of God, i.e. the ‘attempt to perceive the existence of God without bringing in statements of experience and without being based on doctrine’ (p. 9; own translation), is not feasible according to critical thinking. Nevertheless again and again it is a challenging subject. Anselm’s motto of ‘fides quaerens intellecturn’ as a premise for the argument, which has been discovered by him for the first time, concerns theologians, while the immanent logical problems of the argument concern analytic philosophers. But in his study R&d dissociates himself from these two ways of

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discussing the ontological argument for the existence of God. The issue for him is neither a theology in a fideistic sense or interested in apology (p. 22), nor an ‘isolated’ reflection of the argument as an interesting, but in fact insignificant logical exercise (p. 21). Rod is not concerned with the logical construction, but with the ‘function’ of the ontological argument within the rational systems of modern philosophy (p. lo), for ‘the ontological argument for the existence of God presents itself as the keystone of the building of rationalistic systems; it keeps the vault together by which it is carried itself. As well as the dome falls in if the keystone is broken out, the rationalistic philosophy is invalidated if the ontological argument for the existence of God is rejected’ (pp. 9-10; own translation).

In my opinion, Rod puts the logical analysis of the ontological argument aside too soon. For the usefulness of the argument as a ‘keystone of the building’ depends decisively on its logical conclusion.

Thus, according to Rod, together with the ontological argument the possibility of a rationalised relationship to the world, the self and God with the claim for undoubted certainty and objectivity on the whole is at stake-as distinguished from, for example, an existentialistic or even nihilistic interpretation of the world.

According to this idea, Rod develops the conception of the ontological argument starting with Anselm (chapter l), where the argument in Rod’s view still is a nonessential ‘extra’ (pp. 31,49), above all with regard to Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (chapter 2). Here Rod’s thesis has to prove its worth: ‘The ontological argument in the metaphysics of the 17th, 18th and 19th century is linked up with the rationalistic conception of knowledge and science with its characteristic claim for being able to show apriori the correspondence of thought and reality’ (p. 15; own translation). For this correspondence, i.e. truth (p. 82), is based on God to whose assumed essence his real existence necessarily belongs (p. 15). The ontological argument thus runs the bridge ‘between the order of concepts and sentences on the one hand, and the order of reality on the other hand’ (p. 61), which became questionable by means of radical metaphysical doubt at the beginning of modern

times. Now the thesis of the outstanding meaning of the ontological argument within the

metaphysics of modern times has also been supported in relevant ‘classical’ studies of German speaking areas (although not as straightforward, but also not as simplifying as in Rod’s study), namely by D. Henrich’ -whom Rod considers only marginally-and by W. Crameti-whom Rod does not mention at all. These two pointedly include Schelling and Fichte’s late philosophy in the explanation of the ontological argument, which suggests a question to Rod’s thesis:

Does not Descartes’ ‘cogito sum’, which has been confirmed beyond all metaphysical doubts, actually achieve what according to Rod the God of modern times’ metaphysics is supposed to achieve, namely the connection of thought and reality as the guarantee for truth? Do not essence and existence coincide in the transcendental Ego introduced by Fichte and Schelling as pure self-consciousness; the same as the ontological argument claims for God? Perhaps this is what Rod has in mind when he indicates that with Hume and Kant’s attack on the objectivity of rationalistic metaphysics-exaggerated as an attack on the ontological argument (chapter 3)-the chance for a new kind of metaphysics is given, namely transcendental philosophy (p. 19)?Then against Rod’s thesis the Ego qua self-consciousness would be the demanded bridge between thought and reality, and the ontological argument for the existence of God would not be constitutive in this function-at least not for all outlines of modern times’ metaphysics. With regard to Kant’s critique Rod mentions this problem himself (p. 168).

However, the ‘cogito sum’ itself still requires a justification (in God, in the Absolute)-this is pointed out by the meditations of Descartes, &helling’s differentiation between negative and positive philosophy as well as Fichte’s theory of the Ego as being the image of the Absolute in his later philosophy. And with regard to Descartes this

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justification is given by the ontological argument for the existence of God. But in this function it does not build the bridge from thought to reality, but establishes the certainty of thought. With regard to the later Fichte and Schelling an extreme sell-reflection shows that the Ego cannot be principle of itself (but nevertheless principle of the ‘adaequatio intellectus ad rem’). But this does not lead to the ontological argument for the existence of God, but to its conversion at most, not concluding God’s existence from his essence, but concluding his essence from the pure ‘that’ of his existence, as it is developed in the mythology and in the Christian revelation (Schelling).3

This conversation on the ontological argument, which was developed by Schelling in express contrast to Hegel, also hits its rehabilitation by means of speculative logic. For the fundamental critique of Hegel in Schelling’s late philosophy, which Rod unfortunately does not take into account in his portrayal of Hegel (chapter 4), performs that kind of immanent critique of the ontolo~cal argument (and thus of the rationalistic metaphysics in general), which Rod mentions in a concluding outlook without going into detail, namely a critique ‘of the assumption of a single, comprehensive and definitely true system of metaphysical concepts and judgements’ (p. 196; own translation). Thus ‘. . . ontological arguments of any form prove to be questionable, not only because of punctual weaknesses, but for principle reasons’ (p. 197; own translation).

On the whole Rod’s book, with certain reservations, is a readable, informative and comprehensible study as a first approach to the problems of the ontological argument for the existence of God.

Bergische UniversifZt Hartmut Rosenau

NOTES

1. Dieter Henrich, Der onfofogische Gottesbeweis (2 Aufl) (Tilbingen, 1967). See also the review of the above mentioned book by Wolfgang Janke, Ontotheologie undiUefhodik, in PhR, 12, pp. 179-217.

2. Wolfgang Cramer, Goftesbeweise und ihre Krifik (Frankfurt/M., 1967). 3. F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophic der Offenbarung, 8, Vorlesung.

Towns, Villages and Countryside of Celtic Europe, Francoise Audouze and Olivier Buchsenschtitz, translated by Henry Cleere (London: Batsford, 1992), 256~~. (inc. index), 222 illus., hardback.

The Celts of Europe can be defined as a linguistic group, but it is generally supposed that the European Iron Age south of the Rhine may be termed ‘Celtic’. This definition lies behind Audouze and Biichsenschiitz’s book. Reviewing the archaeology of Celtic Europe, the work introduces evidence for themes such as methods of construction, architecture, spatial organisation, and a few aspects of social structure.

Concentrating on description, their range includes production, demography, and the interpretation of settlement sites. Written sources are discussed, and the chronological framework clearly established. It is a book which provides an outstan~ng introduction to