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.

Bernard Williams once made the interesting point that both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche were trying to say something about what it might mean for philosophy to come to an end, for a culture to be cured of philosophy. He meant the end of philosophical theory, the idea that unaided human reason could contribute to knowledge about substance, being, our conceptual scheme, the highest values, the meaning of history or the way language works. For both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche there is no good or modest version of these attempts, any more than there are good and bad versions of astrology or alchemy. There is no such thing as philosophical theory and there never was[i]. Of course it has always been obvious that the status of the account that somehow makes this observation is immediately problematic, but Williams also noted that the case of Nietzsche was even more difficult than that of Wittgenstein.

The question of freedom in the modern German tradition is not just a metaphysical question. It concerns the status of a free life as a value, indeed, as they took to saying, the “absolute” value. A free life is of unconditional and incomparable and inestimable value, and it is the basis of the unique, and again, absolute, unqualifiable respect owed to any human person just as such. This certainly increases the pressure on anyone who espouses such a view to tell us what a free life consists in. Kant’s famous answer is “autonomy,” where this means first or minimally freedom from external constraint, coercion and intimidation (“thinking for yourself”), but even more importantly, being in a certain specific sort of self-relation. I can only be said truly to be “ruling myself” when the considerations that determine what I do are reasons. But if, finally, in exercising reason I am merely rationally responsive to inclinations and desires and aversions, I am letting such contingent impulses “rule” my life, however strategically rational or hierarchically ordered my plans for satisfaction turn out to be. So, Kant concludes, I am only truly autonomous, self-ruling, when the one consideration of importance (that is, normatively authoritative) in what I do is, as he says so frequently if still mysteriously, the “ form of rationality” as such. The more familiar name for such a necessary condition of autonomy is the Categorical Imperative. To make clear that this subjection to the “form” of rationality counts as autonomy, Kant also insists that this moral law be understood as “self-legislated,” that we must be able to regard ourselves as its “author,” and that we are bound to such a law because we bind ourselves to it

I am very grateful to both commentators for these thoughtful and stimulating questions and remarks and especially for the care and generous charity animating their summations of the position I defend in the book. That has not always been the case in discussions of the book.Both critics rightly note the importance of the French moralistes in my attempt to understand why Nietzsche should have said that “psychology” might now (that is, for him) become once again the “queen of the sciences” and so once more the “path to the fundamental problems.” My purpose in invoking the tradition of Pascal, LaRochefoucauld, and above all Montaigne, aside from the fact that Nietzsche’s frequent praise of that tradition and ..

Among Kant's innovations in the understanding of logic (‘general logic’) were his claims that logic had no content of its own, but was the form of the thought of any possible content, and that the unit of meaning, the truth-bearer, judgement, was essentially apperceptive. Judging was implicitly the consciousness of judging. This was for Kant a logical truth. This article traces the influence of the latter claim on Fichte, and, for most of the discussion, on Hegel. The aim is to understand the relations among self-consciousness, reason and freedom in the idealist tradition

Hegel is the most prominent philosopher who argued that 'philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought', and he argued for this with an elaborate theory about the necessarily historical and experiential content of normative principles and ideals, especially, in his own historical period, the ideal of a free life. His insistence that philosophy must attend to the 'actuality' of the norms it considers is quite controversial, often accused of accommodation with the status quo, a 'might makes right' theory of history, and the abandonment of philosophy's critical and reflective task. In this article, I explore Hegel's case for this position in his Phenomenology of Spirit, using as a model for his argument his account of the way the intention of an action can only be properly understood as it is 'actualized' in an action, and I consider some of the standard objections in the light of this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]\nCopyright of Inquiry is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to alls.)

Many philosophers have been suspicious of any “transcendental argument”. In the literature concerned with arguments such as Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, or the “private language” or “other minds” argument, there have been frequent charges that such attempts are “impossible,” spurious, or, even more frequently, incomplete, that their success depends on some controversial philosophical position, such as verificationism. A recent addition to the latter kind of charge is that a successful TA must involve a commitment to some form of idealism. This is, prima facie, quite a reasonable suspicion. Any argument about the necessary conditions of our belief can tell us something about objects in the world, it would seem, only if it can also be shown that the existence of such objects depends on our beliefs. Moreover, Kant, the originator of the modern form of antiskeptical TA’s, was also a famous idealist, adding to the suspicion. Bernard Williams has argued for this connection in recent articles on Wittgenstein and Shoemaker, and more recently, Ross Harrison, in “Transcendental Arguments and Idealism,” has tried to deny that there is such a connection and to argue that there can be a successful TA without any commitment to idealism. There may be some form of a TA that is nonidealistic, but an examination of Harrison’s case will reveal, I think, not only that he has not discovered such an argument, but that it is unlikely that there could be such a TA, except in trivial cases. Moreover, I also want to show that a consideration of his argument can be of help in discovering what kind of idealism is or is not involved in TA’s, especially in Kant, and what problems are apparent in that version of idealism.

The emergence of abstract art, first in the early part of the century with Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, and then in the much more celebrated case of America in the fifties (Rothko, Pollock, and others) remains puzzling. Such a great shift in aesthetic standards and taste is not only unprecedented in its radicality. The fact that nonfigurative art, without identifiable content in any traditional sense, was produced, appreciated, and, finally, eagerly bought and, even, finally, triumphantly hung in the lobbies of banks and insurance companies, provokes understandable questions about both social and cultural history, as well as about the history of art. The endlessly disputed category of modernism itself and its eventual fate seems at issue.