BOOK REWEWS 309 down, Adam's "happy sin" sin was a fall "upward" that reversed involution and initiated the agonizing evolution of consciousness. Following Gnosticism, He- gel maintains that the divine "image" according to which humankind was created lies not "in the archaeological past but in the eschatological future" . The third moment of the trinitarian narrative, Spirit, involves the process whereby finite humankind attains "sonship" with the infinite divine. In Hegel's Christology, the "death of God" represents the temporary divine absence (...) needed for the emergence of divine presence in human community understood as Spirit. Far from constituting a once-and-for-all soteriological event, the life and death of Jesus opened the way for others to follow him to mystical union with God. For Hegel, mysticism involves not irrationality, but divine self-manifestation achieved in the highest form of knowing, Reason, available to the most illuminated members of the Christian community. Before closing his discussion of Spirit, O'Regan addresses the issues of 1) whether Hegel's theodicy fails to account adequately for the particularity of human suffering, and 2) whether divine self-realization as spirit in the human community provides an adequate account of the divine transcendence prefigured in the immanent trinity. Finally, O'Regan examines Spinoza and Schelling's influence on the "denarratizing operators" used by Hegel.. (shrink)

The dissertation considers what is at stake when theoretical wonder ceases to be an originating affect for speculative thought and becomes, instead, a limiting concept for critical philosophy. It attempts to show that: wonder functions for its classical proponents in an entirely different context than that presupposed by the aesthetics of the sublime . This difference can be ascribed to the way in which the feeling of the sublime is operative in the overcoming of modern theodicy , whereas wonder is (...) an intimation of what Edward O. Wilson has recently called, the "consilient perspective" . Whereas, wonder suggests the beginnings of an overarching conceptual unity linking together mind and nature, the sublime, by contrast, is part of an ontology of freedom, in which our subjective capacity to withstand the blows of natural contingency without resorting to conceptual redescription or aesthetic totalization reveals the workings of an underlying "faculty of resistance." The resultant ambivalence of the sublime feeling is elucidated differently by Kant and Schiller, such that the former regards it as the cognitive lucidity resulting from the self-cancellation of the passions, whereas the latter views it as a function of the will, insofar as it suggests a subjective capacity to attend to things differently. Finally, it is suggested that the true source of sublimity in Kant and Schiller is the force of personality to lend unity and meaning to phenomena which would otherwise lack such. (shrink)