Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness [Paperback]

Robert B. Pippin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521379237 | ISBN-13: 978-0521379236 | Publication Date: February 24, 1989

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. The author offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel's idealism that focuses on Hegel's appropriation and development of Kant's theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a pre-critical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism, and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal of absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin explains and defends an original account of the philosophical basis for Hegel's claims about the historical and social nature of self-consciousness and of knowledge itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...the scholarship on which the book is based is first-rate and the presentation is genuinely philosophical...the book is an important one, and one any serious advanced student of German Idealism will have to read." Professor Raymond Geuss, Columbia University

"This is an important book, not only for our understanding of Kant and Hegel, but for the insights it provides into our current self-image as philosophers and historians of philosophy." Stephen Priest, Times Higher Education Supplement

Book Description

Hegel is presented as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant only enhance the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism in this original interpretation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 24, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521379237
• ISBN-13: 978-0521379236
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #833,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The standard for all future English language interpretations, January 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Paperback)

An outstanding achievement. This book has been profoundly influential in contemporary Hegel scholarship, outlining a new and exciting strategy for defending the Hegelian project against its many critics.

Pippin's main interpretive contribution is to take seriously Hegel's claim that his philosophy is properly conceived of as a completion of the Kantian Critical project: the attempt to defend substantive metaphysical conclusions without dogmatism. In so doing, Pippin seeks to put to rest the age old accusation that Hegel's philosophy marks a return the pre-Kantian (or "pre-Critical") metaphysics which Kant justifiably criticizes in the Critique of Pure Reason.

In the course of developing this interpretive line, Pippin backs off strong claims for the necessity of dialectical transitions and develops a somewhat 'deflationary' interpretation of the so-called "absolute knowledge" which is supposedly legitimated at the end of the dialectic. Instead of understanding the result of the dialectical argument as a Table of Categories (a la Kant), Pippin argues that what gets "absolutized" is the dialectical method itself. I.e., Pippin argues that the dialectic of the Phenomenology defends an account of the necessary conditions for the possibility of account giving, not an account of the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. In so doing, Pippin also reinterprets the significance of Hegel's famous End of History claim: what has come to an end is not the history of different models of experience or reality, but the history of how it is that we seek to these models.

Pippin's book is composed of three sections: the first traces the development of Hegel's philosophy out of trends and difficulties implicit within the Kantian and post-Kantian German Idealist tradition; the second develops a sophisticated interpretation of Hegel's most influential work, The Phenomenology of Spirit; and the third shows how the philosophical approach which Hegel develop in the Phenomenology informs his mature science (e.g., the Encyclopedia and the Science of Logic).

Pippin's book proceeds at a high level of philosophical sophistication and demands a lot from the "lay reader"; but its rewards are equal to the labors it demands. It is of relevance to anyone interested in German Idealism, phenomenology, the history of European philosophy, questions about the limits of reason, the philosophy of the subject, or the modern/post-modern debate.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars almost there!, February 3, 2010

By 

Justin Evans (Chicago, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Paperback)

Quite a conundrum with this one, since it won't be much use to you if you haven't read Hegel, but if you've read Hegel you've probably read it with the exact opposite assumptions to those claims with which Pippin convincingly claims you should be reading. In short: Hegel should be read as a Kantian. The Phenomenology of Spirit shows that self-consciousness is needed for any form of knowledge, and discusses a variety of forms of self-consciousness, most of which fail in the goal of providing us with the opportunity to know anything. Only one doesn't: modern, absolute knowledge. This is, in a sense, what is then laid out in the Science of Logic, which is not about crazy metaphysical monism of the mind, nor a mere category theory (that is, a theory of the concepts *we* use). It's something in between: both an account of the concepts we use, and a defense of the claim that they are also really determinate of the possibility of knowledge.

That's all pretty convincing, actually. The obvious flaw in the book is it's failure to look beyond Hegel at all: it's all well and good to claim that 'modern' Absolute Knowledge provides us with knowledge, but that's not actually a defense of modernity. That would require a defense of capitalism, amongst other unfortunate social features, or, alternatively, a critique of those features. But Pippin's dismissive attitude towards later Hegelians (e.g., the Frankfurt School) makes it impossible for him to take this next step. His book does, however, allow for the possibility of taking it.