444 Book Reviews

This is not a consistently easy book to read. There are some delightful stories in its
earlier historical parts-and in particular where the ‘orality’ of Vito’s intellectual context
is discussed: but the later more theoretical sections can be somewhat unrelenting.
Nevertheless, the work constitutes an impressive synthesis; it is excellently structured, and
clearly-written; and every attempt is made to help the reader through some difficult, but
illuminating and intellectually-suggestive material. Furthermore, with its own exemplary
repudiation of disciplinary boundaries and its aspiration to respond to contemporary
relativism, it is also potentially of enormous practical consequence.

Beverley Southgate
University of Hertfordshire

Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, Andrew Bowie (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1990), vii + 284 pp., 835.00 H.B.

Anyone who has been observing recent philosophical developments will have noticed
that an ‘aestheticist’ turn has taken place. This turn has a great deal to do with the fate of
both philosophy and politics in our time and with the sense that we are living in a ‘post’
age: post-philosophical, post-modern, and post-political even. The aestheticism which
characterises so much philosophical thinking at present-I am thinking, for example, of
the work of thinkers as diverse as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois, Richard Rorty, and
Gianni Vattimo-rests on an abandonment of ‘strong’ metaphysics, in which there is
belief in things like Truth and Reason, in favour of what Vattimo has usefully called ‘weak
thought’, a style of thinking which affirms a ftctionalised account and experience of
reality.
Andrew Bowie’s book seeks to showthat much recent philosophical thought represents
a re-tracing of key debates and developments which took place in the nineteenth century
in the wake of Kant and his failure to resolve the antinomies of reason. As is well-known,
after an initial scepticism about the application of the word ‘aesthetics’ to the domain of
‘taste’ (the term originally designated the area of epistemological inquiry concerned with
principles of sensuousness), Kant took up the work of Alexander Baumgarten on
‘aesthetica’ (1750 and 1758), and attempted to unify theoretical and practical reason
through a ‘critique’ of judgement. Bowie sees his telling of the story of how aesthetics and
subjectivity became entwined in modern German philosophy-‘from’ Kant ‘to’
Nietzsche-not as an arcane exercise, but as one which has great contemporary
importance. In this claim, I think he is right. He offers a rich and remarkably lucid account
of the work of a group of thinkers whose work reveals a preoccupation with the theme of
the book. There are generous chapters on figures whose work is often neglected and little
understood in the English-speaking world, such as Fichte, &helling, and Schliermacher, as
well as on more widely-discussed figures such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
For Bowie, the centrality of aesthetics within modern philosophy, which is now being
repeated in our own post-modem time, is to be understood in terms of the crisis of
metaphysics-of truth, reason, freedom, God, etc. -which is brought about as a result of
the Cartesian and Kantian revolutions. In turn, the work of Descartes and Kant reflects
real and profound changes in the social sphere: the demise of the theological world-view,
the rise of anthropocentrism, the development of capitalism, and so on. These
developments give rise to a crisis of ‘subjectivity’, which is essentially a legitimation crisis
(a crisis of authority). If the ancient theological picture is no longer tenable, then on what
Book Reviews 44s

basis can the human subject establish the validity of its truth-claims about nature, the
universe, humanity, and so on? How can we know that our judgements-whether they be
epistemological, moral, or aesthetic-possess the status of apodictic certainty and
universality? It is at this (modern) point that philosophy becomes foundational and
inaugural, preoccupied with tribunals of reason and epistemological/hermeneutic circles.
Aesthetics, as a distinct branch of philosophy, has become important for modern
thought for a number of reasons. I will mention a few of the examples Bowie gives.
Aesthetics, which is not simply to be equated with Plato’s view of beauty as the symbol of
the good, is a reminder that there are other ways of seeing nature and the world which
result in experiences qualitatively different from the dominant technocratic and
instrumentalist modes of ‘seeing’ which govern modern culture (to appreciate an object
aesthetically is to appreciate it without regard for its usefulness or exchange value).
Aesthetics throws into relief, in a stark and instructive manner, the problem of
establishing the relationship between universal and particular, which was of such concern
to modern German thought (e.g. how can philosophy, which is concerned with concepts,
abstractly grasp the particular without abolishing its value as the particular?). Finally, an
aesthetic appreciation of nature and the world can help promote ecological awareness
since it shows human beings how to view the universe non-anthropocentrically and to
value nature in an intrinsic manner.
The research the author has carried out for this book is of a high scholarly standard, and
the presentation is both accessible and engaging. Some of the discussion I found a little too
superficial (e.g. the chapter on Nietzsche), and the concluding reflections, in which
Adorn0 is pitted favourably against the ‘obscurantist’ Heidegger, did not convince me.
Nevertheless, this is a first-rate piece of work which has an important story to tell. It will
undoubtedly inspire further work in this vitally important area of philosophy.

Keith Ansell-Pearson
University of Warwick

Crossings: the Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914, Walter Nugent (Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 256 pp., 16 b&w photos, 23 tables, 11 maps, $29.95.

In one slim volume, Walter Nugent synthesises the vast scholarship on transatlantic
migration between 1870 and 1914 to provide a compelling way of thinking about this
dramatic movement of people. By considering the various ‘donor countries’ in Europe as
well as multiple ‘receiving countries’ in the Americas, Nugent shows convincingly that
Europeans migrated in these decades much as they had for centuries within Europe.
Steamships, of course, greatly facilitated their migration to and from destinations in the
Western Hemisphere, but Europeans migrated to the Americas in the late-nineteenth
century for the same reasons they had moved between countries in Europe before then: in
the hope of improving their material existence.
Crossings is divided into three major sections. The first is devoted to the Atlantic world
of the late-nineteenth century-’ its demographic characteristics and typical patterns of
migration. Nugent reveals a world in which regional differences abounded. He uses that
regional diversity to test the assumptions made in modernisation theory, which has been
the chief paradigm employed in the analysis of late-nineteenth-century immigration.
Nugent demonstrates persuasively that none of the countries in the Atlantic world
conformed to the usual pattern of modemisation: traditional populations maintained by
both high fertility and mortality rates followed by a decline in mortality, population