Robert Pippin

THE IDEA OF A "PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCE," something of a Fata Morgana in the West for several centuries, underwent a well-known revolutionary change when Kant argued that in all philosophical speculation about the nature of things, reason is really "occupied only with itself." Indeed, Kant argued convincingly that the possibility of any cognitive relation to objects presupposed an original and constitutive "relation to self." Thereafter, instead of an a priori science of substance, a science of "how the world must be", a putative philosophical science was directed to the topic of how any subject must "for itself" take or construe or judge the world to be. The nature and forms of such a self-conscious or even self-determining activity assumed center stage in later German philosophy, and, as many commentators have noted, was the decisive presupposition for Hegel's central, deeply obscure position on "the Absolute" as some sort of complete "self-consciousness."

In my ‘Reponses’ to critics (McDowell 2002), I devoted three pages to Pippin’s ‘Leaving Nature Behind, or Two Cheers for ‘‘Subjectivism’’ ’ (Pippin 2002). Pippin reprinted that paper in his The Persistence of Subjectivity (Pippin 2005),1 with a fifteen-page postscript, in which he connects a response to my response with some of the broader themes of the book. This is a response to Pippin’s response to my response, and I suppose I should worry about diminishing returns. But there is room for clarification of some issues.

Nietzsche described all modern moral philosophy, together with its psychological assumptions, as a doomed attempt to cling to the fundamental precepts of Christian morality, but without the authorizing force that made the whole “system” credible – a creator God. He understood this morality as essentially an egalitarian humanism, opposed to all forms of egoism or inequality and one promoting a selfless dedication to a perspective where one would count equally, as only “one among many,” in any reflection on what to do.[i] His own view of this attempt is made very clear in the section “Streifzüge eines Zeitgemässen” in Götzendämmerung when he indulges in one of his favorite pastimes, making fun of the English, this time at the expense of George Eliot

dimension is actually “the typical.”[i] There would seem to be little typical about a world of comatose women, a barely sane, largely delusional male nurse, a woman bullfighter, and a rape that leads to a “rebirth” in a number of senses. But comatose women, the central figures in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, are, oddly, very familiar in that mythological genre closest to us: fairy tales. Both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are comatose women who endure, “non-consensually” we must say, a male kiss, male sexual attention. (Siegfried’s awakening kiss of Brunnhilde in the extraordinary third act of Siegfried should also be mentioned.)[ii] Someone apparently must manifest some act of faith, must believe that these corpse-like women are not dead, and believe it strongly enough to kiss them. Then there is a kind of inversion of these fairy tales in Kleist’s story and Roehmer’s film, “Die Marquise von O.” Here the kiss is actually a rape, but the rapist again emerges as some sort of Prince Charming after all (he had originally saved the Marquise from rape by a group of Russian soldiers), and there are echoes of that somewhat disturbing notion of reconciliation as well in the Almodóvar film. (Alicia, after all, does awaken.) In the Kleist story, a woman must place an ad in a newspaper asking her unknown rapist (she was drugged and asleep) and the father of her unborn child to come forward. He does eventually and the story ends with their marriage and with one of the most enigmatic lines in all of literature, as enigmatic, I think, as our complex reactions to Benigno’s act: the Marquise says that she would not have thought her new husband a devil if he had not first appeared as an angel, as if one person can be both devil and angel, that, to the extent that one can be an angel, to that extent he also can be a devil.

In her book, Unprincipled Virtue, Nomy Arpaly is suspicious of reflective endorsement or deliberative rationality views of agency, those which tie the possibility of responsibility and moral blame to the conscious exercise of deliberation and reflection, and which require as a condition of blame- or praise- worthiness an agent's explicit commitment to ethical principles. I am in sympathy with her attack on standard autonomy theories, but argue that she confuses the phenomenon of unknowing and unreflective responsiveness to the right-making features of an action with incomplete and merely provisional commitment to principles and maxims of action, and argue that she is often arguing against straw men. I also argue that she has misinterpreted the fascinating literary examples she adduces to make her case.

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.