Robert Pippin

Characterizing Hegel’s complex assessment of modernity has always depended on which texts one looks at, and how one understands the “modernity problem.” It is obvious enough that Hegel’s pre-Jena and early Jena writings do indeed partly reflect what Nietzsche called a kind of German “homesickness,” a distaste with Enlightenment “positivity,” and an appeal to the models of the Greek polis and the early Christian communities as ways of understanding, by contrast, the limitations of modern philosophic, religious and political life. In these texts, the Enlightenment victory over religion is portrayed as Pyrrhic, as the idealization of a calculating, fragmenting model of rationality, all in a way that merely transferred an oppressive, alien law-giver from without to within. This Enlightenment is a “hubbub of vanity without a firm core,” a purely “negative” reaction to custom and religion that tries to “turn this nothingness into a system.” On such a familiar view, Hegel represents, together with Schiller, Schelling and others, a “romantic reaction” to modernity continuous with Rouseau’s Second Discourse, united in various attempts to reject the abstract, materialist, “dehumanizing” nature of modern institutions, without a regression into premodern forms of thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most important philosophers of the last two hundred years, whose writings, both published and unpublished, have had a formative influence on virtually all aspects of modern culture. This volume offers introductory essays on all of Nietzsche's completed works and also his unpublished notebooks. The essays address such topics as his criticism of morality and Christianity, his doctrines of the will to power and the eternal recurrence, his perspectivism, his theories of tragedy and nihilism and his thoughts on ancient and modern culture. Written by internationally recognized scholars, they provide the interested reader with an up-to-date and authoritative overview of the thought of this fascinating figure.

The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to, and critiques of, the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, 'bourgeois' form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical 'actuality' of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutional practices such as medicine, as well as in other contexts such as modernism in the visual arts and in the novels of Marcel Proust.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers often and with no apparent hesitation or sense of ambiguity to the mind. He does so not only in his justly famous destruction of rationalist proofs of immaterialism, but throughout his own, positive, ‘transcendental’ account in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. In the first edition of the Critique, he even proposed what he adventurously called a ‘transcendental psychology’ and, although this strange discipline seemed to disappear in the second edition, he left in that edition all his frequent references to forms ‘lying in the mind,’ and to the mind, or the self, or the subject of experience, or the ego, doing this or that. Curiously, though, despite an extensive secondary literature, there is in that literature relatively little discussion of what these expressions, in a proper, strictly Kantian sense, are supposed to refer to. There are two imaginative, extremely suggestive articles by Sellars, some hints at connections with eighteenth century psychology offered by Weldon, a tenebrous book by Heidemann, and some recent attention to the general issue of ‘Kant's theory of mind’ by Ameriks and Kitcher.

The belated genre classification, “film noir,” is a contested one, much more so than “Western” or “musical.”2 However, there is wide agreement that there were many stylistic conventions common to the new treatment of crime dramas prominent in the 1940s: grim urban settings, often very cramped interiors, predominantly night time scenes, and so-called “low key” lighting and unusual camera angles.3 But there were also important thematic elements in common.Two are especially interesting. First, noirs were almost always about crime, usually murder, often cold-blooded, well-thought-out murder. Even more surprisingly, the larger social context for such deeds, the historical American world in which they take place, was itself just as bleak, amoral, and ugly as the individual deeds and the characters themselves. Secondly, and perhaps most distinctively, many films challenged, in sometimes startling ways, many of our most familiar assumptions about psychological explanation. In ways that seemed both mysterious and credible, characters who had been righteous, stable, and paragons of responsibility all their adult lives were seamlessly and quite believably transformed in a few seconds into reckless, dangerous, and even murderous types, all suggesting that anyone, in the right (or wrong) circumstances, was capable of almost anything, and that one’s own sincere avowals of basic principles could be ludicrously self-deceived.4 This last theme—that a virtuous character can be as much a matter of moral luck (of having avoided by mere chance the particular temptation that would reveal the fragility of one’s principles) as an individual accomplishment—is connected with an even larger philosophical issue.

'Modernity' has come to refer both to a contested historical category and to an even more contested philosophical and civilisational ideal. In this important collection of essays Robert Pippin takes issue with some prominent assessments of what is or is not philosophically at stake in the idea of a modern revolution in Western civilisation, and presents an alternative view. Professor Pippin disputes many traditional characterisations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy. In their place he defends claims about agency, freedom, ethical life and modernity itself, all of which are central to the German idealist philosophical tradition, and in particular, to the writings of Hegel. Having considered the Hegelian version of these issues the author explores other accounts as found in Habermas, Strauss, Blumenberg, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.