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Modernism As a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture

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If memory serves, Professor Pippin was awarded a MacArthur grant in 2001: $1.5 million over 3 years. Imagine: getting paid half a mil a year to write on things like the problem of human finitude and the possibility of self-determining and self-grounding spontaneous subjectivity (see p.13)!

This book is, quite simply, one of the best of its kind in the English language. Pippin seeks to provide a defense of the philosophical project of modernity, especially against the criticisms of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their epigones. Pippin's project is thereby very similar to that of Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, but whereas Habermas seeks to accelerate modernity, as it were, Pippin seeks to return to what he considers its high point, the period dominated by German Idealism and, in particular, by Hegel. He states baldly in the Introduction to the 2nd edition that "the central practical issue at stake in debates about philosophy of the subject or of consciousness or of will, freedom and the possibility of a free life, has not been well posed and so has hardly been deconstructed, archeologically exposed, or destroyed" (xv). Needless to say, this thesis will be anathema to some and controversial to many.

I believe that Pippin delineates the terms of the basic philosophical problem quite well. For the sake of brevity, I will sketch that problem somewhat differently than Pippin himself does. It will lead us, however, to Pippin's argument. Lurking at the bottom of all philosophical disputes is the question of what it means to give an account of something. What are the relevant criteria (the epistemological Q)? But also, what are the necessary conditions for account giving to be possible (the transcendental Q)? And how can that question be answered in such a way that the answer presupposes nothing but itself? The very framing of the last question already sounds Hegelian.

The slight shifts in the framing of problem, from the epistemological to the transcendental to what I can only call the Hegelian question, coincides with the names Pippin uses to mark off the history of philosophy: Descartes, Kant, Hegel. According to Pippin, Kant initiates a profound change within the self-conception of philosophy. What Kant initiates Hegel completes in a more satisfactory manner than Kant himself does. Hegel's superiority to Kant is decided by his historicizing the transcendental unity of apperception. Hegel reconciles the two arguments of Kant's Third Antinomy, as it were.

It is just at this point that I find Pippin most unpersuasive. Pippin in effect sacrifices the Science of Logic upon the altar of history when he says that narrative must replace logic (Pippin's word is "rules")(p.68). But that disagreement cannot blind me to the quality of this book. Pippin writes in a mercifully accessible style, something much to be praised in a student of post-Kantian European philosophy. He is alive to the importance of the issues at stake. He is right to say that the philosophical project of modernity is practical in orientation. He is much too reserved to say in addition that the very possibility of philosophy, and of human wisdom, is at stake.

In short, this book is quite exceptional. For a counterpoint, I would recommend Stanley Rosen's Hermeneutics as Politics. Both Pippin and his teacher Rosen agree that Kant is the decisive figure of modern philosophy. They disagree as to whether Kant's revolution is boon or bane.