Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy

by Robert B. Pippin

In this latest book, renowned philosopher and scholar Robert B. Pippin offers the thought-provoking argument that the study of historical figures is not only an interpretation and explication of their views, but can be understood as a form of philosophy itself. In doing so, he reconceives philosophical scholarship as a kind of network of philosophical interanimations, one in which major positions in the history of philosophy, when they are themselves properly understood within their own historical context, form philosophy’s lingua franca. Examining a number of philosophers to explore the nature of this interanimation, he presents an illuminating assortment of especially thoughtful examples of historical commentary that powerfully enact philosophy.

After opening up his territory with an initial discussion of contemporary revisionist readings of Kant’s moral theory, Pippin sets his sights on his main objects of Hegel and Nietzsche. Through them, however, he offers what few others an astonishing synthesis of an immense and diverse set of thinkers and traditions. Deploying an almost dialogical, conversational approach, he pursues patterns of thought that both shape and, importantly, connect the major neo-Aristotelian, analytic, continental, and postmodern, bringing the likes of Heidegger, Honneth, MacIntyre, McDowell, Brandom, Strauss, Williams, and Žižek—not to mention Hegel and Nietzsche— into the same philosophical conversation.

By means of these case studies, Pippin mounts an impressive argument about a relatively under discussed issue in professional philosophy—the bearing of work in the history of philosophy on philosophy itself—and thereby he argues for the controversial thesis that no strict separation between the domains is defensible.

Genres: Philosophy

272 pages, Hardcover

First published July 6, 2015

About the author

Robert 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.

Reviews

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book collects a number Pippin's essays, offering commentary and criticism of the readings of Hegel and Nietzsche by prominent philosophers and political theorists. Particularly interesting were the papers about Brandom, McDowell, Honneth, and MacIntyre. Pippin argues that each of these figures has drawn upon but also omitted important elements of Hegel's framework, elements that would have enable these philosophers to avoid specific limitation in their respective theories.

Pippin criticizes Brandom and McDowell for failing to adequately take into account the importance of history in Hegel's account of the way that norms of various sorts gain rational authority. The basis for and / nature of the rational authority of norms is of course central for both Brandom and McDowell. Each tells different stories about such norms function and why we have good reason to recognize their authority. But Pippin's questions the adequacy of these purported accounts of the normative basis of good reasons.

For Brandom, the problem is that we have no way of even making the distinction between norms that are procedurally correct, which are instituted properly and accorded authority by the community, but which are inadequate and lacking a rational basis, and norms for which their are actually good reasons to endorse. Pippin argues that we can only make this distinction by appreciating the historical pattern in which various norms lose their grip on specific agents and come to be replaced by more adequate norms. This suggestion is plausible and intriguing but a chapter or book length focus on this topic is needed to adequately spell out its implications for Brandom's position. Pippin also notes the inadequacies of Brandom's two-ply account of perception offering a basis for a view of perception closer to McDowell's, arguing that their is no way to link the normative and the causal in Brandom's account.

Interestingly, Pippin's critique of McDowell is similar to his primary criticism of Brandom. He argues that McDowell relies upon an ahistorical conception of perception that functions as a tacit given grounding our norms. This suggests that Pippin is presenting a reading of Hegel that cuts a middle path between Brandom and McDowell. again, one can only hope that Pippin offers an extended reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit in these terms.

Critiquing Honneth, Pippin argues that a consequence of Honneth's focus on Hegel's practical philosophy and avoidance of Hegel's Logic is that "without this 'frame Honneth often seems to be depending on a variety of claims in so-called philosophical anthropology or developmental psychology, or on a reversion to claims about human nature, reformulated as claims about 'social ontology.'" In other words, Honneth is appealing to a type of given to ground his normative claims about recognition. Pippin takes it that the Logic provides an account of the development of subjectivity such that the importance of recognitive relationships as developing historically becomes apparent providing a more adequate grounding to Honneth's social theory.

A final chapter offers a critique of MacIntyre's After Virtue. Pippin's criticisms take two forms. First, he argues that MacIntyre's dichotomy between virtue and self-interest or manipulative and non-manipulative, and his account of modern morality as inherently emotivist in its use, fails to adequately appreciate the extent to which normative concepts are sufficient to make distinctions of worth in contemporary contexts. Thus, a more sympathetic appreciation of the way that ordinary persons in modernity use normative concepts would illustrate the indispensability of such concepts.

Pippin points to Hegel's Philosophy of Right as a alternative account of the way that rights, obligations, and goods may be seen to fit together in a complex but coherent fashion.

Second, Pippin argues that any return to the polis, or a form of community sufficiently like a polis will face difficulties such as Hegel identified in the Phenomenology, difficulties concerning the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, and the relationship between individual agents and the community. In other words, MacIntyrean communities can only function insofar as agents accept communal norms, as a type of given. As such, it is far from clear that MacIntyre's account of a radical deliberative politics is sustainable and able to overcome radical divisions and conflict.