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Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts
Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge and reflect on the philosophical concerns that are integral to their meaning. His latest book, Philosophy by Other Means , extends this trajectory, offering a collection of essays that present profound considerations of philosophical issues in aesthetics alongside close readings of novels by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee.
The arts hold a range of values and ambitions, offering beauty, playfulness, and craftsmanship while deepening our mythologies and enriching the human experience. Some works take on philosophical ambitions, contributing to philosophy in ways that transcend the discipline’s traditional analytic and discursive forms. Pippin’s claim is criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophical reflection, and philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. In the first part of the book, he examines how philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Adorno have considered the relationship between art and philosophy. The second part of the book offers an exploration of how individual artworks might be considered forms of philosophical reflection. Pippin demonstrates the importance of practicing philosophical criticism and shows how the arts can provide key insights that are out of reach for philosophy, at least as traditionally understood.
The arts hold a range of values and ambitions, offering beauty, playfulness, and craftsmanship while deepening our mythologies and enriching the human experience. Some works take on philosophical ambitions, contributing to philosophy in ways that transcend the discipline’s traditional analytic and discursive forms. Pippin’s claim is criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophical reflection, and philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. In the first part of the book, he examines how philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Adorno have considered the relationship between art and philosophy. The second part of the book offers an exploration of how individual artworks might be considered forms of philosophical reflection. Pippin demonstrates the importance of practicing philosophical criticism and shows how the arts can provide key insights that are out of reach for philosophy, at least as traditionally understood.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
281 pages, Paperback
Published May 26, 2021
About the author
Robert B. Pippin
55 books82 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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 25, 2022
Pippin has written extensively on the arts and philosophy and in this latest book he brings together diverse perspectives, artists, and their works to illuminate a central point: that, as a form of collective self-understanding, art can be brought to bear aesthetically on the issues philosophy attempts to address discursively. Through this Hegelian lens, Pippin shows how post-Hegelian art continues to function as a necessary mode of self-knowledge which discloses in an affective sensuous manner the problems of modernity which were first intuited by Diderot and Rousseau. These problems arise out of the modern forms of social dependence which make living a non-alienating life difficult for self-conscious reflective agents. The book is divided into two parts with the first continuing the project started in his earlier books like After the Beautiful of tracing art’s coming to terms with modernity’s “crisis of theatricality” while the second part focuses on three representative literary modernists in light of this project.
Ch.1
To set the stage for his exploration of art’s bearing on “philosophical issues”, Pippin gives a sampling of the main theses of his earlier books on art in which he argues Hollywood westerns dealt with the transition from pre-legal to bourgeois law, film noires interrogate our assumptions of intentional action, Hitchcock addresses our fundamental relation of “unknowingness” to each other, and so on. While all these issues are topics for political philosophy, epistemology, or social ontology, art has something to say about them and in a way that is fundamental to art’s manner of presentation. That is, art doesn’t merely restate or embody a philosophical insight which could just as well be given propositional form, rather, art provides a unique understanding inseparable from its sensuousness. The things art “says” are, at least in some way, unsayable except as art. The rest of the chapter lays out the plan of the book.
Ch.2
This chapter is on Kant’s theory of tragedy—or lack thereof. Whereas Hegel sees tragedy as expressing some deep spiritual tension between competing ethical norms (the right to both revenge and justice in The Eumenides of Aeschelys or the obligations to both family and demos in Antigone), Kant is convinced that tragedy can serve no spiritually edifying or moral purpose. Pippin locates the problem in Kant’s ethical theory in which morality is the application of pure practical reason which cannot, definitionally, lead to contradiction. No contradiction, no tragic dilemma. For Hegel, morality is not the application of fixed rational rules but the product of a complex negotiation between what subjects think they ought to do in light of who they take themselves to be at a particular time. This very struggle between what we think we are and what we “really” are is a problem that tragedy itself helps clarify.
Ch. 3
This chapter explores the role of art in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Starting from Kant’s insight that art is about reflection and judgment but rejecting his claim of art as “purposefulness without purpose”, Hegel sees art as “enlivening” practices and norms. Art thereby becomes a part of, and not a mere reflection on, Spirit’s development toward freedom by actually instantiating a conception of self that is publicly available and not just privately held belief. According to Pippin, Hegel takes privately held beliefs to be merely provisional and not definitive aspects of “who we are”. They only become definitive when we’ve taken a stand on those privately held beliefs in a publicly contestable way so that I can afterward say “I guess I really do believe in x, y, z”. This is how Pippin interprets the “inner/outer” dialectic in Hegel which is crucial to the story of how free judgments can be taken to have both objective purport and normative authority, how the dualism of subject and object is overcome by a speculative identity, and to how the Absolute can come to be known at all. Art is one way of mediating the inner/outer relation and raising the subject to universality.
Ch. 4
Moving on from this discussion about art in Hegel’s account of spirit in the Phenomenology, Pippin moves to Hegel’s account of art as the sensuous experience of the Idea in his Aesthetics. Four points argued: that Hegel privileges art’s content to its form (so long as the mode of apprehension is sensuous/affective, what is important is that “the Divine” be its content), the relation of beauty to the norms of fine art are not clearly stated by Hegel, that key to art’s being is its “appearing”, and Hegel offers no rich account of aesthetic experience proper in his lectures on fine art (though, I think there are flashes of such an account in passages like that on Rouch’s bust of Goethe). Following this discussion, Pippin dives deep into the connection between aesthetic and epistemological concerns which, for Hegel, means showing how sensible and conceptual content become cognitions through a speculative identity with one another. This requires, again, more discussion on the dialectic of the inner/outer as Hegel’s counterpoint to Kant’s scheme/content framework which necessarily leads to an intractable dualism.
Ch. 5
Chapter 5 further develops the theory of art's role in mediating the inner/outer dialectic but with a focus on painting as the paradigmatic art-form of romanticism. The idea here is that the form of painting is such that it most adequately expresses the Idea because the highly abstract/ideal/conceptually complex painting can make visible “infinite subjectivity” (at least more so than any other form).
Ch. 6
Staying on the topic of painting, Pippin begins discussing in more depth the specifically modern character of the art-philosophy connection in terms of a “crisis of theatricality” in which our social engagement feels evermore fixed, given, and scripted so that our life no longer seems to be ours at all (in the sense that we make our life according to our free will). This chapter develops many of the concepts Pippin will use when analyzing the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J.M. Coetzee later on. He argues that post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence explain art’s preoccupation with “authenticity” as a reaction against theatricality and the modernist forms of expression are evolving attempts to portray this authentic idea of the self. In this chapter, Pippin relies heavily on Michael Fried’s work and, specifically, his “absorption vs. theatricality” framework. Pippin also draws from Heideggerian social ontology to explain how modernism is Dasein’s attempt to cope with the unsettledness of its Being always “being at issue” without falling into the “chatter” of “das Man” where the issue is settled by others by submitting to the normalizing, conforming, routinized conventions of society. Pippin says it was Diderot and Rousseau who first noticed that in the “unique conditions of divided labor, ever larger and eventually mass societies, and social dependence in modernity” there are “fewer areas of human life not regulated by socially normalizing expectations.” With respect to painting, Pippin points to Manet’s works and their characteristic “facingness” which makes explicit the position of the viewer as a paradigmatic attempt to reclaim authenticity from the “expectation-generating gaze” of the other.
Ch. 7
This chapter extends the points made in the last to another modernist art form: photography. Pippin recapitulates the argument that the telos of modern art is to defeat theatricality, that there are various strategies for doing so, and that Manet’s was to acknowledge the beholder through the “facingness” of his paintings. Most of the chapter is about Thomas Demand’s photographs of large scale paper models and his anti-theatrical strategy of “indifference to, exclusion of, the beholder (the absence of elicited desire or elicited involvement).”
Ch. 8
The eighth chapter was the most difficult in my opinion, probably because I haven’t read anything from Adorno who is a main focus. Basically, Pippin seeks to correct a misinterpretation of Hegel by Adorno through an analysis of several senses of the word “negation” in dialectical thinking (from “predicate or propositional negation” to “negation as indeterminacy, abstraction, dissonance”) as well as an excursus into German Idealism and its main commitments (eg. that a priori knowledge is possible, that being conscious of an object necessarily involves self-consciousness, and that this is not a duality but an identity).
Ch’s 9 – 13
These are the chapters in which Pippin takes as sort of case studies several examples of modernist art and applies a Hegelian reading to reveal the how they bear on philosophical issues of the age. In the chapter on Henry James’s What Maisie Knew Pippin claims a number of epistemological concerns are addressed through the main character’s coming to know herself: that just because first-person knowledge is not inferential doesn’t mean it is immediate, that first person knowledge is more an “avowal” than a “report”, that the self is constituted through public social interaction where private belief (while a necessary component) is always merely provisional if not “externalized”. The chapters on Proust cover the nature of love and jealousy, the problem of authenticity and something like the problem of other minds, and the possibility of “escaping” subjectivity to come to have some objective hold on the world. The final chapters are about the writer J.M. Coetzee, especially his early novels on the psychology of political authority and to which Pippin applies a Hegelian reading drawing extensively on the master-slave dialectic.
Ch.1
To set the stage for his exploration of art’s bearing on “philosophical issues”, Pippin gives a sampling of the main theses of his earlier books on art in which he argues Hollywood westerns dealt with the transition from pre-legal to bourgeois law, film noires interrogate our assumptions of intentional action, Hitchcock addresses our fundamental relation of “unknowingness” to each other, and so on. While all these issues are topics for political philosophy, epistemology, or social ontology, art has something to say about them and in a way that is fundamental to art’s manner of presentation. That is, art doesn’t merely restate or embody a philosophical insight which could just as well be given propositional form, rather, art provides a unique understanding inseparable from its sensuousness. The things art “says” are, at least in some way, unsayable except as art. The rest of the chapter lays out the plan of the book.
Ch.2
This chapter is on Kant’s theory of tragedy—or lack thereof. Whereas Hegel sees tragedy as expressing some deep spiritual tension between competing ethical norms (the right to both revenge and justice in The Eumenides of Aeschelys or the obligations to both family and demos in Antigone), Kant is convinced that tragedy can serve no spiritually edifying or moral purpose. Pippin locates the problem in Kant’s ethical theory in which morality is the application of pure practical reason which cannot, definitionally, lead to contradiction. No contradiction, no tragic dilemma. For Hegel, morality is not the application of fixed rational rules but the product of a complex negotiation between what subjects think they ought to do in light of who they take themselves to be at a particular time. This very struggle between what we think we are and what we “really” are is a problem that tragedy itself helps clarify.
Ch. 3
This chapter explores the role of art in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Starting from Kant’s insight that art is about reflection and judgment but rejecting his claim of art as “purposefulness without purpose”, Hegel sees art as “enlivening” practices and norms. Art thereby becomes a part of, and not a mere reflection on, Spirit’s development toward freedom by actually instantiating a conception of self that is publicly available and not just privately held belief. According to Pippin, Hegel takes privately held beliefs to be merely provisional and not definitive aspects of “who we are”. They only become definitive when we’ve taken a stand on those privately held beliefs in a publicly contestable way so that I can afterward say “I guess I really do believe in x, y, z”. This is how Pippin interprets the “inner/outer” dialectic in Hegel which is crucial to the story of how free judgments can be taken to have both objective purport and normative authority, how the dualism of subject and object is overcome by a speculative identity, and to how the Absolute can come to be known at all. Art is one way of mediating the inner/outer relation and raising the subject to universality.
Ch. 4
Moving on from this discussion about art in Hegel’s account of spirit in the Phenomenology, Pippin moves to Hegel’s account of art as the sensuous experience of the Idea in his Aesthetics. Four points argued: that Hegel privileges art’s content to its form (so long as the mode of apprehension is sensuous/affective, what is important is that “the Divine” be its content), the relation of beauty to the norms of fine art are not clearly stated by Hegel, that key to art’s being is its “appearing”, and Hegel offers no rich account of aesthetic experience proper in his lectures on fine art (though, I think there are flashes of such an account in passages like that on Rouch’s bust of Goethe). Following this discussion, Pippin dives deep into the connection between aesthetic and epistemological concerns which, for Hegel, means showing how sensible and conceptual content become cognitions through a speculative identity with one another. This requires, again, more discussion on the dialectic of the inner/outer as Hegel’s counterpoint to Kant’s scheme/content framework which necessarily leads to an intractable dualism.
Ch. 5
Chapter 5 further develops the theory of art's role in mediating the inner/outer dialectic but with a focus on painting as the paradigmatic art-form of romanticism. The idea here is that the form of painting is such that it most adequately expresses the Idea because the highly abstract/ideal/conceptually complex painting can make visible “infinite subjectivity” (at least more so than any other form).
Ch. 6
Staying on the topic of painting, Pippin begins discussing in more depth the specifically modern character of the art-philosophy connection in terms of a “crisis of theatricality” in which our social engagement feels evermore fixed, given, and scripted so that our life no longer seems to be ours at all (in the sense that we make our life according to our free will). This chapter develops many of the concepts Pippin will use when analyzing the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J.M. Coetzee later on. He argues that post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence explain art’s preoccupation with “authenticity” as a reaction against theatricality and the modernist forms of expression are evolving attempts to portray this authentic idea of the self. In this chapter, Pippin relies heavily on Michael Fried’s work and, specifically, his “absorption vs. theatricality” framework. Pippin also draws from Heideggerian social ontology to explain how modernism is Dasein’s attempt to cope with the unsettledness of its Being always “being at issue” without falling into the “chatter” of “das Man” where the issue is settled by others by submitting to the normalizing, conforming, routinized conventions of society. Pippin says it was Diderot and Rousseau who first noticed that in the “unique conditions of divided labor, ever larger and eventually mass societies, and social dependence in modernity” there are “fewer areas of human life not regulated by socially normalizing expectations.” With respect to painting, Pippin points to Manet’s works and their characteristic “facingness” which makes explicit the position of the viewer as a paradigmatic attempt to reclaim authenticity from the “expectation-generating gaze” of the other.
Ch. 7
This chapter extends the points made in the last to another modernist art form: photography. Pippin recapitulates the argument that the telos of modern art is to defeat theatricality, that there are various strategies for doing so, and that Manet’s was to acknowledge the beholder through the “facingness” of his paintings. Most of the chapter is about Thomas Demand’s photographs of large scale paper models and his anti-theatrical strategy of “indifference to, exclusion of, the beholder (the absence of elicited desire or elicited involvement).”
Ch. 8
The eighth chapter was the most difficult in my opinion, probably because I haven’t read anything from Adorno who is a main focus. Basically, Pippin seeks to correct a misinterpretation of Hegel by Adorno through an analysis of several senses of the word “negation” in dialectical thinking (from “predicate or propositional negation” to “negation as indeterminacy, abstraction, dissonance”) as well as an excursus into German Idealism and its main commitments (eg. that a priori knowledge is possible, that being conscious of an object necessarily involves self-consciousness, and that this is not a duality but an identity).
Ch’s 9 – 13
These are the chapters in which Pippin takes as sort of case studies several examples of modernist art and applies a Hegelian reading to reveal the how they bear on philosophical issues of the age. In the chapter on Henry James’s What Maisie Knew Pippin claims a number of epistemological concerns are addressed through the main character’s coming to know herself: that just because first-person knowledge is not inferential doesn’t mean it is immediate, that first person knowledge is more an “avowal” than a “report”, that the self is constituted through public social interaction where private belief (while a necessary component) is always merely provisional if not “externalized”. The chapters on Proust cover the nature of love and jealousy, the problem of authenticity and something like the problem of other minds, and the possibility of “escaping” subjectivity to come to have some objective hold on the world. The final chapters are about the writer J.M. Coetzee, especially his early novels on the psychology of political authority and to which Pippin applies a Hegelian reading drawing extensively on the master-slave dialectic.
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