Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy

280 Pages·2015·0.98 MB·English

by  Robert B. Pippin

Interanimations

Interanimations

Receiving Modern German Philosophy
Robert B. Pippin
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in
the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the
College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including After
the Beautiful and Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, both also published by the
University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15  1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 25965- 9 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 25979- 6 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259796.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pippin, Robert B., 1948– author.
  Interanimations : receiving modern German philosophy / Robert B. Pippin.
   pages cm
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-226-25965-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
  ISBN 978-0-226-25979-6 (e-book)
  1. Philosophy, German—19th century. 2. Philosophy, German—20th century.
 3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. 4. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,
 1844–1900. I. Title.
 B2741.P57 2015
 193—dc23
2014044794
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Rigorism and the New Kant 11
2 Robert Brandom’s Hegel 29
3 John McDowell’s Germans 63
4 Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel 91
5 Axel Honneth’s Hegelianism 117
6 Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche 139
7 Bernard Williams on Nietzsche on the Greeks 159
8 Heidegger on Nietzsche on Nihilism 179
9 Leo Strauss’s Nietzsche 197
10 The Expressivist Nietzsche 219
11 Alasdair MacIntyre’s Modernity 235
Acknowledgments 257
Bibliography 259
Index 269

Introduction
Philosophy without the history of philosophy,
if not empty or blind, is at least dumb.
—Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics
I
“The history of philosophy,” along with its various subdivisions (“ancient,”
“early modern,” “nineteenth- century German,” and so forth), is now a stan-
dard category in academic philosophy. But it means different things to dif-
ferent people. In particular it means two different things.
For one group, the primary job of “the historian” is to state as clearly as
possible what a philosopher meant to say by writing what he did. The goal
is straightforward: explication de texte. For some in this group, this means
locating the writing in its proper historical context, both social and philo-
sophical, identifying the philosopher’s likely interlocutors, and understand-
ing the influences on the position as well as the way the ideas were taken up
by the philosopher’s successors. The history of philosophy, in other words,
is intellectual history, not philosophy.
For another, smaller group of “historians” in this first group, this local-
ization and context setting is useful but not so important. Their guiding
assumption is a kind of perennialism. The greatest questions—H ow ought
one to live? What is forever forbidden and why? How can a many also be
a one? Are we just atoms in the void?— are eternal and must reappear and
1
2  •  Introduction
must be faced by every age. The assumption is that attending to what the
greatest philosophers have thought and written about these questions is the
best way to think about them— the best way to learn how to think about
these questions— for oneself. The assumption is often that interpreting
what the philosopher meant to say can be extremely difficult, and that such
a difficulty is not eased by attention to inheritances, influences, or contexts.
One must, every age must, simply grapple with the classic text, engaging in
very careful “close reading.” The relation to the text can sometimes be more
pious than critical, rather as if one’s job is to understand and revere.
Scholars in philosophy departments engaged in recovery of the past can
be motivated by a belief in the inherent “preservationist” value of correctly
capturing the meaning of a text or the transmission of ideas. They might
differ from the professional historian of ideas only on the assumption that
a thorough training in philosophy is necessary to formulate the ideas prop-
erly. Or they might argue, as Sellars claimed, that the history of philosophy
is the lingua franca of philosophy itself.1 Without a proper education in such
a history, it could be argued, we can lose sight of why some contemporary
problem is a problem, can fail to appreciate either the depth or the triviality
of some current formulation, will not fully appreciate the varieties of ways
philosophy can go about its business, or can be busily reinventing the wheel,
unaware of how much work had already been done, how many dead ends al-
ready discovered. But, again, for anyone in this first group: the history of phi-
losophy is not philosophy. It is at best preparatory or ancillary to, or a kind
of reenactment of, philosophy, not a way of, as it is said, “doing philosophy.”
For a second group, writing about historical figures can indeed be a way
of “doing philosophy.” To understand such an idea, and to understand the
dangers of such an approach, we should first recall the striking remark by
Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff in his famous lecture at Oxford in
1908, “Greek Historical Writing.” Wilamowitz said something of relevance
to the authors discussed here. He said that
our task is to revivify life that has passed away. We know that ghosts can-
not speak until they have drunk blood, and the spirits we evoke demand
the blood of our hearts.2
1. Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 1. The whole paragraph is a fine statement, and it is the
source of the chapter epigraph.
2. Wilamowitz- Moellendorff, Greek Historical Writing and Apollo, trans. G. Murray, 25.
Introduction  •  3
I understand this gory metaphor to mean the following. While most with
any interest in a historical figure would concede the necessity of a thorough
scholarly preparation, and acknowledge that it is necessary to know the
original language and what a philosopher would mean by writing that, then,
and for whom, this preparation is not the end of the story. The simple ques-
tion driving this version of writing about great figures in the philosophical
past is: Is what the philosopher wrote true, or at least philosophically valu-
able for us today, comprised of ideas we can actually learn from? In fact, for
many in this group the historical/hermeneutical and philosophical/evalua-
tive cannot be separated. We cannot understand what a philosopher meant
to say without understanding why the philosopher felt entitled to claim
what he claimed. They are not separate questions. In approaching works of
philosophy, there is no separation between assessment and understanding.
This involves trying to reconstruct a philosopher’s arguments with some
charity and respect (often very hard to do, perhaps because one might have
to fill in gaps in an argument when they are seen to occur), or in effect “phi-
losophizing along with” the philosopher. The German Romantics, especially
Friedrich Schlegel in his Gespräch über die Poesie, even invoked a kind of
term of art for this and argued it was essential for philosophy, not just ex-
plicative: symphilosophieren, philosophizing with or together.3 This could be
one meaning of providing “the blood of our hearts”: to treat the philoso-
phers as living interlocutors in philosophy (or to bring them back to life),
not as dead figures of mere historical interest, the way a chemist might treat
the history of chemistry. These ghosts of the past will not speak to us unless
we “revivify” them with such a genuinely philosophical mode of address.
We must be so invested in this encounter that we are willing to admit that
some of our most deeply held philosophical convictions can be challenged
by these ghosts.
Wilamowitz was well aware of the dangers of such an approach. It is
after all our blood that we are supplying. He went on to say that, if such
ghosts drink, then “something from us has entered into them; something
alien, that must be cast out.”4 And it is true that some approach the his-
tory of philosophy as “plunderers,” or pirates, taking what they can use for
their own purposes, ventriloquizing their own ideas in the historical figure’s,
importing an alien, incompatible framework, and contorting the historical
3. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I, 2:285–86.
4. Wilamowitz- Moellendorf, Greek Historical Writing and Apollo, 25.