Robert Pippin

The Significance of Taste: Kant, Aesthetic and Reflective Judgment ROBERT B. PIPPIN 1? THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" is easy enough to identify. On what basis, if any, could one claim some sort of universal a priori validity for judgments of the form, "This is beautiful"? In Kant's well-known analysis of this question, the issue is reformulated as: By what right could one claim that another person ought to feel pleasure in the presence of certain objects? Let us call this the "basic question."' There is controversy enough about what Kant means by this basic question and how a deduction of the validity of such judgments is supposed to work. However, shortly after Kant began serious work on a "Critique of Taste" in ~787, the whole issue became even more complicated when the proposed work became a full-blown Critique of Judgment. The question of aesthetic judg- ment was presented within the new, larger topic of reflective judgment, was presumably thereby linked to the problem of teleological judgments, and so to the great general theme of the whole of the third Critique: the purposiveness I am grateful, for comments and criticisms, to Henry Allison, Volker Gerhardt, Rudolf Makkreel, Miles Rind, and to two anonymous referees for this journal. ' Kant's own formulation: "How is a judgment possible in which the subject, merely on the basis of his own feeling of pleasure in an object,..

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kant says there is a duty to exit the state of nature, to enter into a civil state. He says this is a duty of right, not a duty of virtue. The article discusses the argument he gives to support this view, as well as the contemporary discussion on the relationship between this duty of right and the categorical imperative. The discussion is full of implications. Particularly significant is the view of the Kantian state emerging from it, which challenges the conventional account: instead of a state designed to protect pre-existing individual property rights, property rights are seen as something resulting from the very constitution of the state.

This series makes available in English some important work by German philosophers on major figures in the German philosophical tradition. The volumes will provide critical perspectives on philosophers of great significance to the Anglo-American philosophical community, perspectives that have been largely ignored except by a handful of writers on German philosophy. The dissemination of this work will be of enormous value to Anglophone students and scholars of the history of German philosophy. This collection brings together in translation the finest post-war German language scholarship on Hegel's social and political philosophy, concentrating on the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Many of the essays appear in English here for the first time; all are translated anew.