The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

by Robert B. Pippin

The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to and critiques of the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, "bourgeois" form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical "actuality" of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutional practices such as medicine, as well as in other contexts such as modernism in the visual arts and in the novels of Marcel Proust.

Genres: Philosophy

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

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

[Leonardo]

...el Dasein puede triunfar en su compromiso solo con el fondo de un posible fracaso –«la estructura interrelacional del mundo del cuidado puede fracasar de forma tan catastrófica que el Dasein no aparecerá como lo que es, el agente comprometido, integrado en el mundo, abierto-al-significado en un mundo compartido, sino que de golpe por así decirlo, aparecerá como la nula base de una nulidad» (Pág.64)–, no está haciendo meramente la observación existencialista-decisionista sobre cómo «ser un sujeto significa poder fracasar en serlo» (Pág.67), sobre cómo la elección es nuestra y completamente contingente, sin ninguna garantía de éxito.

Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.318

[Soeine · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a nice follow-up of his earlier book: Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1991). In The Persistence of Subjectivity, Pippin offers more specific insights, especially in art by linking abstract art and the notion of self-consciousness. I take his philosophical accounts at face value, since he is the expert and I have no desire to argue against him. He offers comprehensive grounds for understanding the outburst of "self" in the modern consciousness. But when it comes to art or literature, he is a bit loose. What he offers is not about modernist art, but theories about it. Rather, he appropriates the theories of abstract art to construct his Hegelian theories of self-consciousness.

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does what the title says: defends the individual subject as a valid entry into epistemology