After a quick first pass through Robert Pippin’s new book, I have some initial responses. It doesn’t seem either quite as momentous or quite as disruptive to the orientation I have been developing here as I imagined it might. It does give a nice survey of the various writings of Heidegger that address Kant’s and Hegel’s roles in Heidegger’s summary story about a rise and fall of “Western metaphysics”. It incorporates much material that has been only relatively recently made public in posthumous volumes of Heidegger’s collected works.

Pippin says in the front matter that he came to regard as chimerical the Hegelian “Absolute” that he so valiantly sought to explain in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. He also seems here to reject a thesis that he emphasized and I puzzled over in the other book, namely that “logic is metaphysics”. But of course “logic” here doesn’t mean logic in the ordinary sense, but rather an account of the conditions of intelligibility or something like that, and I go against the mainstream in dissociating Aristotle from the later “metaphysics” oriented toward being as such. I don’t think Hegel means to dwell on being as such either. “Metaphysics” simply is not an Aristotelian word. Aristotle speaks of first philosophy or wisdom, as what does seem to me to be a kind of “meta” level of interpretation. Hegel was the first modern philosopher to take Aristotle seriously, and he clearly says he is not doing metaphysics as traditionally understood. But in doing what he does he is doing a kind of first philosophy, in what I take to be the general ballpark of Aristotle’s sense, so in that sense Pippin is right.

That giving an account of the conditions of intelligibility (“logic”) could be seen as a development of meta levels of interpretation (“first philosophy”) sounds pretty reasonable to me. But Pippin is speaking in a more conventional way of metaphysics that is supposed to be an account of being qua being. This results in a very different claim. As Pippin rightly points out, on this interpretation it is closely related to Hegel’s claim that contrary to Kant, there is no irreducible gap between being and thinking; indeed that there could be none if thought is to be possible at all. I note that Schelling and Engels assert in actually very similar language that there is a fundamental dispute about whether being or thought comes first, that Hegel puts thought first, and that we should instead put being first.

This claim that being comes before thought is something I used to identify with. Now I would just say that the two are deeply interwoven. Does this mean “identity” in Hegel’s sense? But Hegel uses that term very loosely, as covering all kinds of cases where things are not unequivocally separable, as in Aristotelian hylomorphism.

Hegel claims not that we have perfect knowledge of being qua being, but that a Kantian/Hegelian notion of reflection like Pippin emphasizes in the other book straddles the boundary between so-called “subject” and so-called “object”, and — if pursued far enough — eventually opens the way to a concrete from which abstractions like “thought” and “being” are derived.

I suppose my own very minimalist version of a deflationary account of the misleadingly named Hegelian absolute must be considerably weaker in the sense of claiming less than it claims in Pippin’s interpretation. There are quite a few texts that pose problems for my minimalist view, but I think there are quite a few texts that pose problems for “stronger” readings as well.

Pippin devotes about equal space to Heidegger’s reading of Kant and of Hegel. He makes the rather obvious point that Heidegger’s claim that intuition is the root of all thought for Kant is tendentious at best. But in this book, he seems to recharacterize Hegel in ways that make it easier for him to agree with Heidegger. He talks about reason “exfoliating” things, which hardly seems an inviting metaphor. He now expresses sympathy for Heidegger’s claim that the whole tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel implicitly presumes the “availability” of being to knowledge, a presumption that Hegel is supposed to have finally made explicit via his identification of logic with metaphysics, thus “culminating” the metaphysical tradition. This is also related to what Heidegger called the “enframing” related to manipulation and technology, which I agree is a real thing. But what Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hegel, with their primarily ethical orientation of reason, have to do with dehumanizing aspects of technology, I have no idea. Heidegger’s argument is extremely telescoped and reductive.

I want to suggest that on the contrary, reason is built on reasonableness, or not over-reacting to things in life, which is largely a matter of emotional constitution.

The contents of our thought are not easily separable from what we imagine. It seems to me that any positive content will include an element of imagination. I don’t claim to rigorously know this or to have a proof of it, but I have high confidence in it. At the same time, I also have high confidence that there is something deserving of the term “knowledge”, in spite of all human frailty. But there is vastly more in which we can reasonably have high confidence than which we can seriously claim to know.

Next in this series: Culmination of the Culmination