Robert Pippin

In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ _Red River_ and John Ford’s _The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance_ and _The Searchers._ Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected. Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.

Hegel, in a chapter called “Absolute Knowing,” end his most exciting and original work, the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit, with a quotation, or rather a significant misquotation, of a poet? The poet is Schiller and the poem is his 1782 “Freundschaft” (Friendship). This immediately turns into two questions: Why are the last words not Hegel’s own, and why are they rather a poet’s? I will turn to the details in a moment but, as noted, such an inquiry may not be worth the trouble. Authors, even philosophers (who, with only a few exceptions, are not known for their literary style) like to cite poets..

The notion of modernism, originally a classificatory term in art and literary criticism, now a common term of art in many philosophic (and anti‐philosophic) programs, has remained an elusive, often vague point of view. For a discussion of the notion's historical accuracy and philosophic legitimacy this article selects an author greatly responsible for setting out the problem (called by him ‘nihilism') and philosophically sensitive to the issues involved in claiming that something essential to a tradition has ‘ended’ and something new ‘begun’: Nietzsche. Such issues are: what needs to be shown in order to demonstrate that indeed a complete ‘break’ in a tradition has occurred, especially if part of that claim is that this break ought to have occurred? And: what consequences follow, particularly with respect to the possibility of ‘post‐modern’ ‘justification'? Nietzsche's answers to these questions are more subtle than has been appreciated, and can, when pursued properly, help reveal the strengths and weaknesses of such post‐Nietzscheans as Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida.

So much philosophy is so unavoidably guided by intuitions, and such intuitions are so formed by examples, and such examples must of necessity present so cropped and abstract a picture of an instance or event or decision, that, left to its traditional methods, philosophy might be ill-equipped on its own to answer a question about the true content of an historical ideal like ``autonomy'', or authenticity or ``leading a free life''. One needs to bring so many factors into play at once that one non-traditional but more promising path might be through reflection on the modern novel—or modern drama or poetry or film or even modern painting.

Forthcoming in Conference Proceedings, Jena Phänomenologie conference I Hegels Charakterisierungen der neuen, von ihm entwickelten philosophischen Form, der Phänomenologie des Geistes, stellen vor allem deswegen ein Problem dar, weil sie so zahlreich sind. Bei einigen handelt es sich um klar erkennbare Reformulierungen oder Spezifizierungen anderer, in vielen Fällen aber scheinen die Beschreibungen inkonsistent zu sein oder unterschiedliche Perioden in Hegels Denken widerzuspiegeln, das sich während der Jenaer Zeit zwischen 1802 und 1806 rasch entwickelte. Ursprünglich war eine Phänomenologie eine „Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewußtseins“. Sie ist auch eine „Wissenschaft der Phänomenologie des Geistes“. Sie stellt eine Einführung in das wissenschaftliche System dar und bildet zugleich den ersten Teil eines solchen Systems. Die Enzyklopädie bezeichnet die PhG als „die wissenschaftliche Geschichte des Bewußtseyns.“ Im Hauptteil nennt Hegel das Werk den „Weg der Seele, welche die Reihe ihrer Gestaltungen, als durch ihre Natur ihr vorgesteckter Stationen durchwandert, daß sie sich zum Geiste läutere, indem sie durch die vollständige Erfahrung ihrer selbst zur Kenntniß desjenigen gelangt, was sie an sich selbst ist” (55). Berühmt ist seine Bezeichnung der Phänomenologie als „Weg des Zweifels“, ja, als „Weg der Verzweiflung“, und als „ausführliche Geschichte der Bildung des Bewußtseyns selbst zur Wissenschafft“. (56).

This fresh and original book argues that the central questions in Hegel's practical philosophy are the central questions in modern accounts of freedom: What is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? Is it possible so to act? And how important is leading a free life? Robert Pippin argues that the core of Hegel's answers is a social theory of agency, the view that agency is not exclusively a matter of the self-relation and self-determination of an individual but requires the right sort of engagement with and recognition by others. Using a detailed analysis of key Hegelian texts, he develops this interpretation to reveal the bearing of Hegel's claims on many contemporary issues, including much-discussed core problems in the liberal democratic tradition. His important study will be valuable for all readers who are interested in Hegel's philosophy and in the modern problems of agency and freedom.

Nietzsche regarded 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' as his most important work, and his story of the wandering Zarathustra has had enormous influence on subsequent culture. Nietzsche uses a mixture of homilies, parables, epigrams and dreams to introduce some of his most striking doctrines, including the Overman, nihilism, and the eternal return of the same. This edition offers a new translation by Adrian Del Caro which restores the original versification of Nietzsche's text and captures its poetic brilliance. Robert Pippin's introduction discusses many of the most important interpretative issues raised by the work, including who is Zarathustra and what kind of 'hero' is he and what is the philosophical significance of the work's literary form? The volume will appeal to all readers interested in one of the most original and inventive works of modern philosophy.

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.

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.

Questions of medical ethics are often treated as especially difficult casuistical problems or as difficult cases illustrative of paradoxes or advantages in global moral theories. I argue here, in opposition to such approaches, for the inseparability of questions of social history and social theory from any normative assessment of medical practices. The focus of the discussion is the question of the legitimacy of the social authority exercised by physicians, and the insufficiency of traditional defences of such authority in liberal societies (voluntarist, informed consent approaches), as well as traditional attacks on such strategies (ideology critique). Seeing such authority as institution bound and role based, it is argued, can help reframe, more broadly and more adequately, what is an “ethical problem” in medical practice and why

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.