Theoria

I haven’t had the opportunity to read this book yet, but it is worth mentioning not only because the topic is intrinsically interesting, but also because I audited Vernon’s seminar on Kant’s First Critique one summer.

Jere O’Neill Surber review’s Jim Vernon’s Hegel’s Philosophy of Language (Continuum, 2007) at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Hegel’s views regarding language have provoked a good deal of discussion and often controversy since about the middle of the last century. Among those who have weighed in to one degree or another can be counted such well-known figures as Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Nancy, and Žižek. However, it would be difficult to describe any general contours or results of such discussions for two reasons. First, Hegel himself never provided anything approaching a self-standing ‘philosophy of language’ that could be compared with his philosophies of art, religion, nature, politics, or history. Rather, his views on language are expressed, in part, in several relatively extended discussions which form parts of other philosophical projects and, in part, in quite numerous comments and asides. To complicate matters even more, both longer and briefer reflections occur over the entire course of his philosophical career. Second, prior to the appearance of the present work, there has been (with one exception that I will mention later) no serious attempt to articulate what such a ‘Hegelian philosophy of language’ might look like. As a result, such earlier discussions have something of the quality of dinner gossip about an absent guest, revealing more about the various parties’ own preferences and prejudices than about anything that Hegel himself might have recognized as his own views. Jim Vernon has quite bravely attempted to address this issue head-on. He seeks, in an admirably direct and focused way, to provide a cogent account of language that at once bases itself on some of Hegel’s more important passages on this topic, attempts to remain true to Hegel’s overall philosophical project, and supplies some of the important connective tissue that Hegel himself either omitted or merely glossed.

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All this said, Vernon’s work is an important one in numerous ways, not the least of which is presenting a clear marker, up to this point lacking, against which subsequent discussions of Hegel’s linguistic views can be assessed. As one who has long been intrigued by the possibility of articulating a ‘Hegelian Philosophy of Language,’ I began reading Vernon’s work with great interest, but in the end it managed to confirm what had been my own suspicions all along: that one can, perhaps, articulate an (or perhaps several) alternative philosophy(ies) of language from a generally Hegelian perspective, but it (or they) will either only highlight one or the other aspect of Hegel’s broader linguistic ideas or will end up violating Hegel’s own idea of the nature of systematic philosophy and will hence be, at best, ‘Neo-Hegelian.’ In the end, I think that Vernon’s work, impressive as it is, manages to be a bit of both: it neither does justice to the entire range of Hegel’s linguistic thought nor is it entirely Hegelian — in fact, I would regard it is as, in the end, more Fichtean than Hegelian. Still, I know of only one other attempt to do something similar (that of Bruno Liebrucks in his multi-volume Sprache und Bewusstsein) and, of the two, Vernon’s is by far the most explicit, focused, and helpful for further discussion. I think it is fair to say that any future consideration of the theme of language in Hegel must take Jim Vernon’s work as an indispensable reference point.