Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness

by Robert B. Pippin

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Romanticism

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Robert 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.

Reviews

[Amir · Rating 4 out of 5]

اهمیت تفسیر پیپین از هگل در اینجاست که هگل رو هم‌زمان هم نقاد کانت و هم ادامه دهنده راه اون می دونه. زبان خاص فلسفه هگل در برخورد اول_و یا حتی در یک عمر کلنجار رفتن با آن_ این تصور رو در ذهن ایجاد می کنه که انگار هیچ کسی چنان کانت پا به عرصه وجود نگداشته و هیچ گاه حدود عقل بشری مشخص نشده و انگار که با هگل دوباره در دام همان مابعدالطبیعه ای خواهیم افتاد که کانت نسبت به رهزن بودنش هشدار داده بود.

برای من بخش مربوط به پدیدار شناسی واقعا جذاب بود اما باید اعتراف کنم که از دانش منطق هگل چیزی سر درنیاوردم و شرح پیپین هم کمک چندانی نکرد. لابد پیش زمینه هایی نیاز بوده که من نداشتم.

درباره ترجمه باید بگم که عالی بود. فصل هایی از کتاب رو از روی نسخه اصلی خوندم و با متن ترجمه شده مقایسه کردم و واقعا اقای حسینی گل کاشتن. بسیار از ایشون آموختم. ای کاش باقی مترجمانی‌که از سر تفنن سراغ متون فلسفه می رن، کمی دقت نظر ایشون رو داشتن.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kant’s transcendental idealism starts with ‘intuitions without concepts are blind,’ Hegel amplifies Kant to give ‘the deed comes before the word.’

Hegel amplifies Kant, bypasses Schelling and Fichte, and develops his logic of science and a science of logic through his spirit of the world as laid out in his Phenomenology. The strength from this book is the author’s connecting and relating Hegel back to Kant.

Kant thinks he’s a realist giving us objective Truth through our intuitions of space, time and reason and connecting them through a transcendental idealism through a thing-in-itself, and Hegel’s dialectic synthesizes Kant’s synthetic and analytic. Hegel lets our reflection about our awareness become aware of itself giving us our consciousness.

Among many other things, this book will discuss how our language understanding develops such that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s aphorism came to mind “All understanding is interpretation. Being that can be understood is language.” Pippen footnotes Gadamer frequently and that helps illustrate the depth that the reader will encounter from this book. The deed precedes the word in the creation.

Kant synthesizes Hume’s empirical with Leibnitz and Berkeley’s idealism favoring the empirical when necessary. Hegel leverages Kant and calls it logic when he really means metaphysics as Heidegger said. This author takes the metaphysical out and puts the realism back in. He does a good job, and by doing that we get to re-examine the relationship between Kant and Hegel.

This author spoke of Hegel’s stoic reconciling with the skeptic giving an unhappy consciousness. The Christian emerges and to me Hegel is mostly opposed to theology and would say that he knows there is a god because when he prayers to god he knows god hears him because he is the one the prayer is sent to. I just note that because the author seemed to give Hegel a serious theology and I don’t. The Quaker gives the spark of god within us and a consciousness of the other realized by the self’s own consciousness. Without the other there can be no self and Hegel’s dialectic needs another to unfold to completion.

There’s a collapse of the transcendental deduction that gives us the thought about the thought leading to consciousness’ self-awareness. Kant almost always makes thought about something. Hegel takes the thing out of the equation and makes the thought absolute in-itself.

No matter how many times you have read Kant and Hegel, or Schelling and Fichte this book will give you a different perspective to think about what Hegel was getting at and his connection to Kant.

[Zo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not in a position to evaluate the scholarly merit of this reading of Hegel relative to other interpretations, but I nonetheless found this highly compelling. Pippin's basic argument is that Hegel can be given a far less metaphysical reading if his work is understood as a response to Kant and Fichte on the nature of apperception (self-consciousness), and what that means for how much a subjects' conceptual categories determine the possibility of experience, and the nature of objects of experience (another way of putting the question: how idealist should we be in light of recognizing our own conceptual contribution to experience?). In Pippin's reading, the essential move Hegel makes is (like Fichte) rejecting Kant's doctrine of pure intuitions as not governed by our own conceptual system, and then proceeding to take a more dynamic view of the categories. There were times reading this book I felt like I "got" these moves and started coming around to "Hegel's side," but by and large I felt confused by them, and I think I end things still not feeling like I really get the argument for why the Kantian doctrine of intuition is wrong. I would say 95% of me thinks Hegel is wrong to reject Kant's theory of intuition and that everything which makes Hegel's writing crazy and borderline nonsensical is due to his rejection of intuition, but 5% of me thinks Hegel is actually right and getting at something very deep and that all the craziness of his writing is necessary to talk about this kind of "inescapable conceptuality" of thought. I feel this way about much of what Hegel has to say about immediacy/being/essence/contradiction/etc...reading this book was a good way of encountering kind of the "best" version of those ideas, but I still don't think I really get them (I might just have the wrong type of brain for properly appreciating such insights). That being said, I do think I gained a greater appreciation of Hegel's social (rather than theoretical) philosophy here. It wasn't the focus of the book, but I found the exposition of the master-slave dialectic and the way Pippin talked about mutual recognition really powerful. Trying to figure out what is going on in Hegel feels like an endless rabbit hole that one can never emerge from to make contact with the real world -- so I'm scared to go down it-- but this book only sucked me deeper down the hole. I want to keep excavating!

[Joey Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pippin argues that there is a plausible reading of Hegel that is not a precritical return to speculative metaphysics or a rampant monistic “spooky” idealism of a God-Mind self-creating it’s own awareness of itself in a collective totality with pockets of isolated awareness in communion with another.

In order to do this, he reads Hegel as essentially offering a post-Kantian critique of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling’s treatment of the problem of an apperceptive subject and its possible objects of knowledge. Thus reformulated, we have what is an alluring/plausible account of the relationship between the cognitive subject and the possible objects of knowledge, without relying on (what Hegel takes to be) Kant’s erroneous distinction between concept and intuition, Fichte’s non-starters, and Schelling’s esoteric obscurity of self-intuition. Hegel’s proposed solution amounts to it being ‘concepts’ all the way down.

Neat

[Will Macdonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

really good scholarship and pippin is a very clear writer. he may be pushing it at times by interpreting hegel so heavily as a sellarsian, but it’s not quite brandom-levels of offensive, so i can look past that.

[d. · Rating 3 out of 5]

pippin’s argument is that hegel principally focuses on a completion of kant’s theory of self-consciousness, bringing him to positing that both the mind and apprehension of truth are constituted historically within given social spaces.

this is a satisfying conclusion also reached by terry pinkard (they’re pulling from each other’s work, pippin is the more influential one) but the summary gets lost in the weeds in its closing chapter, where pippin attempts to refute all prior, positive readings of hegel, arriving at a conservative and uninventive conception that left-hegelians and marxists had already figured out long, long before the right-hegelians did.

this book is an excellent introduction to hegel that demystifies him and, importantly, refutes kojeve. but a political misreading is sometimes more interesting than someone who takes hegel at his word so literally that it exposes the banalities and limitations of an otherwise brilliant thinker, killing all dialectical spirit by denying what was immanent to his thought.

[Jet R · Rating 3 out of 5]

German idealism is just not it for me