What do you think?
Rate this book
The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy
A provocative reassessment of Heidegger’s critique of German Idealism from one of the tradition’s foremost interpreters.
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.
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.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
253 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2025
27 people are currently reading
235 people want to read
About the author
Robert B. Pippin
53 books76 followersRobert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 20, 2024
Quite tough sledding, but I was surprised that 70 pages in Pippin had managed to make Heidegger's objection to the entirety of Western philosophy on the question of being relatively clear. This is a very deliberately structured book where every sentence matters, it takes all 70 pages to get to that realization. The book frequently repeats itself - this is a feature, not a bug, because it's only in the slow buildup and repetition does Heidegger's difficult position slowly become graspable.
The central point is that Western philosophy assumes the world is thinkable - that we need to relate to beings rationally, in which the central point is to classify, organize, and put our disposal the beings of the world. Heidegger wants to suggest that assumes the question - why should we treat the beings around us as subject to conceptualization/rational analysis/productive exploitation in the first place. Heidegger suggests that no one in Western philosophy adequately answered this question - for the most part it is simply assumed. And in asking this question, Heidegger wants to assert that that should not in fact be our basic relationship to the world around us. That instead of a rationalizing comportment where meaning is a product of active understanding, we need to become dispositionally open and attuned to Being, in a poetic, non-conceptual sense.
My ultimate disappointment with the book, is the substance and implications of this alternate approach are never fully delivered. Certainly Heidegger is attempting to joust against the shallowness, thoughtlessness, and materialism of everyday 20th century life, but it's unclear how attending to the question of the meaning of being directly solves that problem, and Pippin, although he acknowledges this question, barely tries to answer it in a couple of pages. Nonetheless, it seems clear this is not entirely Pippin's problem, but is rather a problem of Heidegger's later writings in general.
Nonetheless, still five stars for making Heidegger make sense (to a degree).
The central point is that Western philosophy assumes the world is thinkable - that we need to relate to beings rationally, in which the central point is to classify, organize, and put our disposal the beings of the world. Heidegger wants to suggest that assumes the question - why should we treat the beings around us as subject to conceptualization/rational analysis/productive exploitation in the first place. Heidegger suggests that no one in Western philosophy adequately answered this question - for the most part it is simply assumed. And in asking this question, Heidegger wants to assert that that should not in fact be our basic relationship to the world around us. That instead of a rationalizing comportment where meaning is a product of active understanding, we need to become dispositionally open and attuned to Being, in a poetic, non-conceptual sense.
My ultimate disappointment with the book, is the substance and implications of this alternate approach are never fully delivered. Certainly Heidegger is attempting to joust against the shallowness, thoughtlessness, and materialism of everyday 20th century life, but it's unclear how attending to the question of the meaning of being directly solves that problem, and Pippin, although he acknowledges this question, barely tries to answer it in a couple of pages. Nonetheless, it seems clear this is not entirely Pippin's problem, but is rather a problem of Heidegger's later writings in general.
Nonetheless, still five stars for making Heidegger make sense (to a degree).
July 23, 2024
Pippen does really well to capture the complexities of the ideas of Kant and Hegel while maintaining a relatively clear position on how Heidegger's (also complex) thought relates to them. However, there were still some questions raised that felt like they were unanswered, and the grammar and phrasing is confusing at times.
June 8, 2024
The Culmination is a very profund and detailed book that presents an interpretation of Heidegger´s philosophy that is i) unitary, 2) anti-idealist and 3) relatively accesible to a reader new in the work of this thinker. Robert Pippin argues that the question of Being is a serious objection to the tradition of German Idealism and examines the heideggerian critique of Kant and Hegel. Also, Pippin search for an interpretation of Heidegger that unifies his early texts (like Being and Time) and his later work more focused on art, poetry, language and the destiny of Being. This unitary interpretation is very favorable for Heidegger because, for example, blocks the critique of Adorno (in Negative Dialectics), for whom the existentialist philosophy is idealism in a new disguise.
Pippin presents his arguments in a erudite, well-documented and still clear and accesible way, and that is a notable accomplishment. The first and last parts are the most innovative. The discussion of poetry as a form of thinking clariffies much of the metaphores that the "later" Heidegger uses and opens a wide range of possible relations with other philosophies to be explored in what concerns to aesthetics and politics. For this reasons, the last part of The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy can be read as a complement of After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism, another great treatment of german aesthetics written by Pippin.
However, this book has -for me- two main problems: in the first place, the Kant and Hegel chapters are illustrative, but very repetitive (the main critique to Hegel is, despite his long treatment in the book, in fact the one big critique that Heidegger does of all western thought of which Hegel is "the culmination") and, on the second, Pippin doesn´t adress the practical consecuences of the question of Being. Although in some places of the book he mentions the relation of reification and capitalism, is not clear what we should do next with, for example, hegelian ethics. Pippin is ambivalent on this issue: sometimes remarks that Hegelian developments in ethics and ontology doesn´t have to be dismissed completely, but at the end of the book he suggests that hegelian ethical life maybe should be dispensed. Considering the urge of recognition that Hegel identifies as a social need in the search of freedom and reconciliation ¿What is the alternative in Heideggerian philosophy? Maybe Heidegger pays more attention to the ontological difference, but ¿What is the solution? Is strange that we are left without an answer AND we have to answer this problem without (?) two influent normative theories as those of Kant and Hegel.
3/5
Pippin presents his arguments in a erudite, well-documented and still clear and accesible way, and that is a notable accomplishment. The first and last parts are the most innovative. The discussion of poetry as a form of thinking clariffies much of the metaphores that the "later" Heidegger uses and opens a wide range of possible relations with other philosophies to be explored in what concerns to aesthetics and politics. For this reasons, the last part of The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy can be read as a complement of After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism, another great treatment of german aesthetics written by Pippin.
However, this book has -for me- two main problems: in the first place, the Kant and Hegel chapters are illustrative, but very repetitive (the main critique to Hegel is, despite his long treatment in the book, in fact the one big critique that Heidegger does of all western thought of which Hegel is "the culmination") and, on the second, Pippin doesn´t adress the practical consecuences of the question of Being. Although in some places of the book he mentions the relation of reification and capitalism, is not clear what we should do next with, for example, hegelian ethics. Pippin is ambivalent on this issue: sometimes remarks that Hegelian developments in ethics and ontology doesn´t have to be dismissed completely, but at the end of the book he suggests that hegelian ethical life maybe should be dispensed. Considering the urge of recognition that Hegel identifies as a social need in the search of freedom and reconciliation ¿What is the alternative in Heideggerian philosophy? Maybe Heidegger pays more attention to the ontological difference, but ¿What is the solution? Is strange that we are left without an answer AND we have to answer this problem without (?) two influent normative theories as those of Kant and Hegel.
3/5
December 31, 2024
Served as an excellent exposition of the thought of Heidegger, Kant, Hegel… etc. The only issue is that it ends suddenly with a more detailed exploration of the alternative traditional metaphysics.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews