Robert B. Pippin

What is the Question for which Hegel's Theory of Recognition is the Answer?

The claim I propose to defend is that Hegel’s ‘theory of recognition’ is intended as an answer to a specific question in his systematic philosophy. That question is the question of the nature and the very possibility of freedom.1 This will be controversial for several reasons. First I want to treat his mature theory of ethical life or the ethical community (Sittlichkeit) (the theory published as the account of ‘objective spirit’ in the Encyclopedias and most familiarly in the lectures on the Philosophy of Right) as an extension of the original, or Jena-period theory of recognition, not its abandonment.2 A widely accepted view has it that while Hegel was originally interested in accounting for the nature and authority of social institutions by appeal to a basic inter-subjective encounter and the ‘realisation’ of such inter-subjective links, he came later to abandon that view about inter-subjectivity, and believed instead that human social and political existence was best understood and legitimated as a manifestation of a grand metaphysical process, an Absolute Subject’s manifestation of itself, or a Divine Mind’s coming to self-consciousness.3 On this interpretation, what had been a competing modern theory about the nature of human sociality, a rival to Machiavellian and Hobbsean attempts to understand how and why persons forge the links of dependence and authority that they do and must, and so a rival account of an original dependence tied to the problem of recognition, status, esteem and solidarity, not fear, power and security, became instead a conservative, organic theory, with individuals mere accidents of ‘the truly real’ ethical substance manifesting itself in time and with no central role any more to inter-subjective experience. My claim will be that this interpretation is insufficiently attentive to the unusual foundations of the mature theory of ethical life, or to Hegel’s theory of spirit (Geist), and so to the very unusual account of freedom that position justifies. Once the latter is in view, I want to show, it is much easier to see how the ‘ethical life theory’ is an account of successful recognition, or a mutuality based on a kind of rational acknowledgement. Secondly the claim is controversial because defending that proposition will involve the claim that the theory of recognition is not primarily to be understood (as it often is in post-war Hegel scholarship) as a comprehensive transcendental theory about self-awareness, as if about the possibility of any self-relation (as if the contents of any such self-relation are and must be internalisations of ways of being-regarded by others), is not primarily a genetic theory about the formation

Naturalness and Mindedness: Hegel' Compatibilism

The problem of freedom in modern philosophy has three basic components: (i) what is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? (ii) Is it possible so to act? (iii) And how important is leading a free life?1 Hegel proposed unprecedented and highly controversial answers to these questions. (i) What we want to be able to explain when we ask ‘what is freedom?’ are the conditions that must be fulfilled such that my various deeds and projects could be, and could be experienced by me as being, my deeds and projects, as happening at all in some way because of me, spontan, sua sponte, etc. If they are ‘mine’, they shouldn’t seem or be alien, as if belonging to or produced by someone or something else or as if fated or coerced or practically unavoidable, and so forth.2 How exactly to say this, how to link such deeds and projects with me such that they count as due to me or count as mine and are thereby instances of freedom is the great problem.3 In answer to this question, and unlike many philosophers influenced by the Christian tradition, Hegel does not defend a voluntarist position on the nature of freedom, but instead, let us say, a ‘state’ theory. He does not understand the possibility of freedom to depend on the possession of a causal power of some kind by an individual, the power to initiate action by an act of will in some way independent of antecedent causal conditions. Contrary to many compatibilists, being free does not involve any sort of causality at all. In his Science of Logic, the ‘application’ of the causal relation to organic and mental life in general is unequivocally said to be simply inappropriate (unstatthaft).4 Instead, freedom is understood by Hegel to involve a certain sort of self-relation and a certain sort of relation to others; it is constituted by being in a certain self-regarding and a certain sort of ‘mutually recognizing’ state.5 This state of self-consciousness and socially mediated self-reflection, defined in a highly elaborate systematic way as a ‘rational’ selfand other-relation, counts as being free.6 This is an active state, a state of doing, a way of being that involves activities and practices that are distinguished as free by all being undertaken in a certain way, not by having a special causal origin. (ii) Hegel defends the possibility of freedom, but in what we would call (initially if a bit misleadingly) a compatibilist, not an incompatibilist form. Since I do not need to be able to think of myself as an uncaused cause in order to qualify as a free subject, I do not need to establish, either metaphysically or as a practical condition,

The Modern World of Leo Strauss

There are a number of very well known controversies associated with Leo Strauss.1 However, while arguable, it seems fair enough to claim that it is his complex and multifront attack on the insufficiencies of modernity that stands as his most influential legacy in America, both inside and outside the academy. This probably has something to do with the unique importance of the ideas of Enlightenment, religious tolerance, and scientific optimism in American political life, when compared to the more homogeneous societies of Western Europe. The very possibility and fate of an American nation-state is tied deeply to the possibility and fate of Enlightenment modernity, and so Strausss reflections were bound to find a distinct (and distinctly contentious) audience in the United States. Moreover, the problem of Strausss reception has become even more fascinating and confusing in the contemporary American academy. His attacks on the self-satisfaction of post-Enlightenment culture, his doubts about the benefits of technological mastery, about the attempted avoidance of any public reliance on religion, and about the modern confidence in the power of enlightened self-interest in the formation of a polity, all often delivered in a rhetoric sometimes bordering on biblical prophecy, have now suddenly reappeared, in different theoretical garb but just as insistently, on the agendas of neo-Aristoteleans, critical theorists, communitarians, and

Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art History

My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be authentic), but they are robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquelymodern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in themodern novel. Why talk about paintings in such terms? The Western art tradition has been in a famous conundrum about the status of artworks—thedissolution of the borders between art and nonart, and the possibility of great art—for some time now, but it has rarely seemed to any discussant in that tradition that the normative issues at stake in a possibly modern art are like the questions sketched above about authenticity in a life. But it began to seem that way to Denis Diderot, a dimension of his work rescued, developed, and transformed with great elegance and persuasiveness by Michael Fried. In

What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel)

1 I am much indebted to Thomas Pavel for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper, to Thomas, Eric Santner, and Terry Pinkard for many fruitful conversations about Hegel’s Lectures during a seminar in the spring of 2001, and to the audience at a conference on abstract art held at the University of Chicago in October 2001, where an earlier version of this paper was first presented. What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel)

The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophical Fate of Modernity

In Natural Right and History Leo Strauss argues for the continuing “relevance” of the classical understanding of natural right. Since this relevance is not a matter of a direct return, or a renewed appreciation that a neglected doctrine is simply true, the meaning of this claim is somewhat elusive. But it is clear enough that the core of Strausss argument for that relevance is a claim about the relation between human experience and philosophy. Strauss argues that the classical understanding articulates and is continuous with the “lived experience” of engaged participants in political life, the ordinary, and he argues (in a way quite similar to claims in Heidegger) that such an ordinary or everyday point of view has been “lost.” The author presents here an interpretation and critique of such a claim.

You Can't Get There from Here

WHAT IS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT? Beginning around the summer of 1802, Hegel began to prepare his friends and students for the immanent publication of his own “system” or at least a part of it. For a young professor out to make his mark, this was apparently the thing to do in those heady days in the university city of Jena, which had already seen several of Fichtes “Doctrines of Knowledge” and Schellings influential “System of Transcendental Idealism.” But no such work appeared, since Hegel began to change his mind rapidly about a number of important elements in such a system, especially, after the lectures given in the 1803-4 academic year, about the relation between his category theory, or logic, and his metaphysics, and even more deeply, about many of Schellings ideas. These changes also prompted an interest, sometime around 1805, in a proper “Introduction” to such a system, a work that was to be a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” and that would be published, together with his “Logic,” in a single volume at Eastertime 1806.

What Is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford's The Searchers

It is generally agreed that while, from the silent film The Great Train Robbery (1903) until the present, well over seven thousand Westerns have been made it was not until three seminal articles in the nineteen fifties by Andre Bazin and Robert Warshow that the genre began to be taken seriously. Indeed Bazin argued that the “secret” of the extraordinary persistence of the Western must be due to the fact that the Western embodies “the essence of cinema,” and he suggested that that essence was its incorporation of myth and a mythic consciousness of the world.1 He appeared to mean by this that Westerns

Hegel on Historical Meaning: For Example, The Enlightenment

“ Reading the morning paper is a kind of realistic morning prayer ” Hegels best known treatment of the European Enlightenment (in his Phanomenologie des Geistes ) singles out the problem of religious faith, or the new, modern struggle between insight and faith, between enlightenment and what its defenders saw as mere “superstition”. This treatment is distinctive and on the face of it highly controversial. For one thing, while the topic is simply announced as die Aufklarung, Hegel makes no attempt at a comprehensive survey. Bacon, Swift, Smith and the British seem to play no discernable role; oddly, neither do Lessing or Mendelssohn or the German, “Berlin” Enlightenment. If there is a focus in these highly typological and categorial distinctions, it is clearly le siecle du lumiere, not die Aufklarung or the Battle of the Books; if there is a representative figure, it is unquestionably Diderot; if there is a theme, it is ethical and broadly normative, not scientific or even political.

Reconstructivism On Honneth’s Hegelianism

In this paper I express enthusiastic solidarity with Axel Honneths inheritance and transformation of several core Hegelian ideas, and express one major disagreement. The disagreement is not so muc...