Robert Pippin

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended, failed even, in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger's critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger's basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy's attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western rationalism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Charles AltieriRobert B. PippinIam very grateful to Charles Altieri for his attentive reading of and thoughtful critique of Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts.1 Let me proceed immediately to his main and quite important criticism of the approach defended there. It is this: "My one huge problem with Pippin's perspective is that I cannot accept his insistence that the distinctive form of thinking elicited by works of art is best treated as a mode of knowledge." And he offers a contrasting perspective: "Instead I propose that art should matter to society primarily as the achievement of constructed, specific, individual experiences that embody resonance and authority. Then we can claim that their capacities to engage audiences in particular imaginative situations dramatically stage responses to the historical conditions on which Pippin dwells." This is a densely stated alternative, and I am not sure I fully understand it or why stating it this way thereby shows why art "should matter to society" (art may do this, but why is that important?), but I have much to say by way of clarification before getting to the alternative.First, I meant the title to be as dialectical and so as paradoxical as it sounds. If the means are "other," then we have left philosophy altogether; if the other means are still philosophical, then they can't count as "other." By dialectical I mean simply the avoidance of such dualisms, while not collapsing distinctions through some sort of resolutive reductionism. The idea is to avoid two terrible examples of philosophical approaches to the arts that putatively avoid such dualisms: either provocative or illustrative. The former sees literature especially as embodying issues like moral dilemmas that can be understood to pose, to provoke, philosophical [End Page 249] questions that traditional philosophy should then take up and discuss on its own. (Examples are the way Samuel Beckett's plays, or Albert Camus's The Stranger, are sometimes taught.) The latter, the illustrative, sees literature, again paradigmatically, as providing something like the flesh and blood of abstract philosophical issues, instantiating and illustrating a particular philosophical approach, like moral sentimentalism. (Charles Dickens is often cited.)These are surely examples of what Altieri cites as, and quite rightly rejects, as "appropriating those [aesthetic] experiences for philosophical explanation." I want to reject such "appropriationism" too. In my first chapter, on philosophical criticism of the arts, the idea I defended was that attention to the philosophical value of literature (I will stay with this art form for a while) is attention to literature as a form of reflective thinking itself, in no need of appropriation by philosophy—even though, I claim, there can be a form of philosophical criticism. The point of such criticism is to illuminate that dimension of the work itself, something philosophically significant that the work can do but traditional philosophy cannot.This is couched within several qualifications. Such attentiveness can be valuable, but not for just any work of great literature. Some literature is great without being concerned with any aesthetic modality of "thinking." One can surely admire Samuel Richardson or Anthony Trollope or William Makepeace Thackeray and admit that their value stems from other qualities in the prose, plotting, and psychologically astute portrayal of characters. And for many other reasons, any of the arts can be said to be valuable even if a case can also be made for their bearing on philosophy.And finally, the concept of "philosophical knowledge" is quite complicated. Surely some philosophers, like G. W. F. Hegel, believe in such a thing, but I don't. As Altieri rightly points out, no Absolute exists. What interests me is the relevance of Hegel's claim that a sensible and affective modality of collective self-knowledge can be embodied in many great works. But the collective self-knowledge embodied in fiction is not like discursive or analytic or even speculative knowledge. I see no strict distinction between the object of interrogation and the interrogation itself. That is, the "self" in question (e.g., who have we become?) is what it is by virtue of its own self-interpretation. Self-knowledge in...

In the following, I want to suggest two different ways of understanding the relation between Kant's Critique of Judgment and the later German Idealist tradition. Commentators have long noted the point d'appui for any interpretation of this relation: Kant's remarks about an “intuitive intellect” (for him a divine, or creative intellect), and the interpretations of this doctrine offered by schelling (see Article 5) and hegel (Article 6). The first interpretation I want to consider might be called the received or standard view about that relation. I shall summarize it in sections I and II below. Roughly, according to this view, what Kant proposed as a mere regulative doctrine, of no central importance in the third Critique, was inflated by Schelling and Hegel, in a philosophically unjustifiable way, into a positive metaphysical claim about reality itself as a self‐positing divine mind.

The following is a chapter of a book and I should say something at the outset about the content of the book. The topic is Hegel’s “social theory of agency,” and that topic, given how the problem of agency is usually understood, raises the immediate question of why anyone would think that “sociality” would have anything at all to do with the “problem of agency.” That problem is understood in a number of ways; most generally – what distinguishes naturally occurring events from actions (if anything)? (Sometimes the question is: what, if anything, distinguishes responsible human doings from what animals do?) The most prominent approach has it that actions are things done intentionally by individuals, purposely, for a purpose. This is sometimes said to mean: acting from or on or because of an intention, although as we shall see this nominalization can be quite misleading. Or, of the many possible descriptions of some occurrence, it is an action is there is a true description which is intentional. This is often taken to mean simply that if you ask a person why he is doing something he can express this intention to explain himself, most often in the form of a reason. He does not (except in extraordinary circumstances) describe why he is acting in the way he might describe what caused his..

The relationship between philosophy and aesthetic criticism has occupied Robert Pippin throughout his illustrious career. Whether discussing film, literature, or modern and contemporary art, Pippin's claim is that we cannot understand aesthetic objects unless we reckon with the fact that some distinct philosophical issue is integral to their meaning. In his latest offering, Philosophy by Other Means, we are treated to a collection of essays that builds on this larger project, offering profound ruminations on philosophical issues in aesthetics along with revelatory readings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee.

Idealism in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel has nothing to do with the minddependence of the world or a mind-imposed structure in experience, or a socalled objective idealism (a claim about the nonmaterial nature of the real, in favor of its ideal nature). Instead, it is a claim about the capacity of pure (empirically unaided) reason to determine of all that is knowable that it is knowable, and how it is knowable. Human reason can thus be understood to be self-authorizing, a tribunal unto itself. In the Hegelian version, this determination of the knowable is a determination of all that there is in its knowability, and so a metaphysics. For Hegel, the determination of the knowable is not the determination of a limitation, as in a limitation just to the knowable-for-us. Or, in Hegel’s famous and controversial phrase, this determination is “absolute”. Since Hegel, this claim has been subjected to a wide range of criticisms, the most important of which insist on the finitude of human reason. The most important critics are Schelling and Heidegger, and in this paper I begin to assess those criticisms.

Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of theimplications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge.

There is an unusual link between the two most prominent themes in Proust’s In Search of Time Past: the psychological dimensions of love and the experience of lived temporality. Each experience is shadowed by, and intensified by, even seems to require, absence. The absence of the beloved is the source of jealousy, and that experience is treated as inseparable, and sometimes as indistinguishable, from love itself. And the absence of reliable access to the past, or the vanishing of the past into a realm of fantasy and projection, undermines any confidence in our mutual interpretability. At the extreme, jealousy is depicted as sustaining a love all by itself, something captured in Swann’s famous, puzzling closing statement at the end of the “Swann in Love” section of the first novel: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I have experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.” The aim of this paper is to understand the dynamic of presence and absence, its role in the link between these two themes, and thereby to understand such a claim as much more than a singular character’s expression of a neurotic obsession.

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss the legacy of Alexander Nehamas's 1985 book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. I concentrate on his basic claim that “Nietzsche's model for the world, for objects, and for people turns out to be the literary text and its components; his model for our relation to the world turns out to be interpretation.” The criticisms of this notion that I raise have to do with whether this “model” accounts for the way Nietzsche understands self-knowledge and self-realization. I note as well the dangers of too aestheticized a view of Nietzsche's enterprise.

On the surface, The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, is a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo. This, however, is a book by Robert B. Pippin, one of our most penetrating and creative philosophers, and so it is also much more. Even as he provides detailed readings of each scene in the film, and its story of obsession and fantasy, Pippin reflects more broadly on the modern world depicted in Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock’s characters, Pippin shows us, repeatedly face problems and dangers rooted in our general failure to understand others—or even ourselves—very well, or to make effective use of what little we do understand. Vertigo, with its impersonations, deceptions, and fantasies, embodies a general, common struggle for mutual understanding in the late modern social world of ever more complex dependencies. By treating this problem through a filmed fictional narrative, rather than discursively, Pippin argues, Hitchcock is able to help us see the systematic and deep mutual misunderstanding and self-deceit that we are subject to when we try to establish the knowledge necessary for love, trust, and commitment, and what it might be to live in such a state of unknowingness. A bold, brilliant exploration of one of the most admired works of cinema, The Philosophical Hitchcock will lead philosophers and cinephiles alike to a new appreciation of Vertigo and its meanings.