Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault

607

Modernity with pictures: Hegel and

Géricault

Katerina Deligiorgi

Debate about the so-called “end of art” has tended to domi-

modernism / modernity
nate discussion of Hegel’s aesthetics.1 One consequence of this is volume fourteen, number
that his remarks about the art of modern time (neuere Zeit) are four, pp 607–623.
interpreted in light of the historical thesis concerning art’s decline © 2007 the johns hopkins
or demise. It is possible, however, to examine what Hegel says university press
about the art of modern time, understood to mean not just the art
of his time but more generally art under conditions of modernity,
without becoming entangled in the search for its end. Although
Hegel’s scattered remarks do not constitute a fully worked out
theory of art, they contain important ideas about creative work
under conditions of modern freedom. Furthermore, because
Hegel’s account of the distinctive challenges that confront mod-
ern artists is shaped by a vision of the world to which the artist
belongs and from which he chooses his subject matter, it gives us
access to a Hegelian perspective on modernity. This perspective
is of value because it enables us to recover elements that are not
Katerina Deligiorgi is
habitually emphasized by prevalent interpretations.
a Lecturer in Literature
Hegelian reconstructions of modernity take their cue from
and Philosophy at the
Hegel’s frequently repeated claim that modern individuals University of Sussex.
realize their identity by making themselves “at home” in the She is the author of
world.2 The banishment of what is alien does not describe a Kant and the Culture of
single project, cognitive, metaphysical, ethical, or political, but Enlightenment (SUNY,
rather a cluster of projects that conjointly make it possible to 2005), and the editor
of Hegel: New Directions
encounter the world as a homely place.3 While it is possible to
(Acumen, 2006). She is
identify specific theses that make up this cluster, for instance
currently working on a
that no such a thing as an unknowable substance that remains new book, The Scope of
persistently beyond the realm of possible experience exists, the Autonomy: Kant, Schiller,
power of these reconstructions lies in their twining together Hegel.
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

608 several discrete elements into a broader progressivist narrative of humanity’s coming of
age. Modernity coincides with the attainment of a metaphorical maturity, as liberation
from unknown forces and from expectations of heavenly rewards brings about gains
in freedom and self-knowledge. In a critical discussion of Leo Strauss’s account of
modernity, Robert Pippin gives a succinct formulation of this view: “We ‘tear ourselves
apart’ for Strauss . . . because we in essence don’t know what we’re doing, not, as in
Hegel, because more and more gradually, we do.”4 The aim of this paper is to recover
the more nuanced image of emancipation—and of what we come to know “we’re do-
ing”—that can be obtained if we follow the clues that Hegel gives us in his remarks
on the art of modern times.
Two features, commonly emphasized in philosophical reconstructions of Hegel’s
narrative of modernity, concern us here: first, the normative side of the idea of emanci-
pation from nature, and from anything that can count as “nature,” that is, as “externally
given,” and second, the assumption of normative authority by an intramundane sub-
ject.5 In particular I want to examine how emancipation from external authority hooks
on to a process of internalization of cognitive and moral authority by a subject (often
presented as a putative “we”) which issues norms in its own name. I will be arguing
that the compelling force of an authority that appears as external and alien retains a
central role in Hegel’s account of modern freedom. Failure to appreciate this leads to
failure to appreciate the morally as well as epistemically ambiguous status of the telos
of inhabiting a tamed, familiar world.
I approach these issues at first from the vantage point offered by Hegel’s lectures
on aesthetics. Hegel lectured on aesthetics and philosophy of art for several years,
starting in 1818 in Heidelberg. The edition of the lectures that was prepared by H. G.
Hotho and published after Hegel’s death became the standard work of reference.
However, recent scholarship indicates strongly that in editing Hegel’s lectures Hotho
imposed a more rigid and systematic structure on the material than is detectable in
the extant student notes. In the present paper, while quotations are mainly from the
Hotho edition of the lectures, references are given also to the student notes, including
Hotho’s own transcripts from 1823. That such cross-reference is possible, given the
brevity of the student notes compared with the three volume edition of the Lectures on
Fine Art, suggests that the topic of the art of modern times was a central concern for
Hegel.6 Still, his discussion remains fragmentary and allusive. It is therefore useful to
establish as a point of reference a work of art which can be illuminated through Hegel’s
remarks and which, in turn, can function as a pictorial heuristic in understanding his
remarks about artistic freedom. This is attempted here with Théodore Géricault’s Le
radeau de la Meduse (The Raft of the Medusa), originally exhibited in 1819, one year
after the first set of Hegel’s lectures on art, which we can see as a modern painting, of
what Hegel terms the “human spirit actually self-determining” (A, 607, II 238; Hotho,
204). (Fig. 1)
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
609

▲
Fig. 1. The Raft of the Medusa, 1819 (oil on canvas) by Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) ©Louvre, Paris,
France/ The Bridgeman Art Library

1. “Only the present is fresh”—Hegel

In his introduction to the Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel claims that “the conditions of
our present time are not favourable to art” (A, 10, I 25; Pfordten, 54). He explains this
by saying that “our whole spiritual culture is of such a kind that [the practicing artist]
himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any
act of will and decision abstract himself from it’ (A, 11, I 25; see also Hotho, 203, 204).
It is in this context that the famous remark occurs that “art, considered in its highest
vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (ibid.). In order to concentrate on
Hegel’s account of modern artistic practice, it is important to isolate it from his broader
thesis about art’s changing vocation. If we do this, we are left with a powerful account
of the intimate relation between artistic creation and the modern culture the artist
inhabits. The key element in this relation, Hegel claims, is “reflection.” We may ask
then, how does “reflection” influence artistic practice?
At the close of the section on the “end of romantic art,” Hegel expands the point he
made earlier about the culture of reflection and argues that “the cultivation of reflection,
criticism, and . . . the freedom of thought” liberates the modern artist from “bondage
to a particular subject-matter and mode of portrayal” (A, 605, II 235; Hotho, 204, see
also Pfordten, 63). Whereas in the earlier passage Hegel stresses the ways in which
the artist is captive of his culture, here he emphasizes the emancipating forces existing
within this culture. The modern artist belongs to a social world that sets him free, a
world from which he cannot escape and from which he cannot “abstract himself” by
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

610 an act of will or decision. This is a peculiar predicament. The artist is only bound by
conventions to the extent that he so chooses. Reflection emancipates him from inherited
tradition, from having to depict this and thus. But precisely because every artistic choice
is considered, deliberate—in a word, reflective—freedom is unavoidable: whether the
artist decides to adopt inherited forms and subject matter or not, his relation to artistic
tradition becomes an expression of his freedom.7 “Reflection” in this context signifies
the unavailability of tradition as a given, formative power. The modern artist has to
choose anew, inhabit his culture, and root himself in the present: “Only the present is
fresh, the rest is paler and paler” (A, 608, II 238; see also Hotho, 199, 200).
In Hegel’s description, however, the social and cultural world which the artist is asked
to occupy and make his own is not immediately inspiring. It is, we are told, a world
of “prosaic actuality” (A, 196, I 257; Pfordten, 170–71, Hotho, 44, 201). This “prosaic
state of affairs,” Hegel admits, offers little scope for “ideal configuration” (A, 193, I
253; Pfordten, 174). In the “world of today,” he explains, “the individual subject may of
course act of himself in this or that matter, but still every individual, wherever he may
twist or turn . . . does not appear himself as the independent, total, and at the same
time individual living embodiment of this society, but only as a restricted member of
it’ (A, 194, I 254–55; Hotho, 87). The “civilized, legal, moral, and political conditions”
(A, 193, I 253; Hotho, 88) that shape modern individuals into potentially educable
bearers of claims, rights, and obligations also render impossible the task of identify-
ing any one among them as embodiment of the sum total of these conditions. Since
there are many ways in which one can be an individual—just as there are many ways
in which the modern artist can be who he is—no ideal representation of the modern
individual is possible. This adds a further dimension to the idea of artistic freedom and
choice identified earlier, namely that modern culture is inherently plural and resist-
ant to unification. There are many different stories that can be said about a culture of
individuals, and each of these stories remains provisional or partial with respect to the
whole.8 Writing in a different context, David Kolb aptly describes this condition of ir-
reducible plurality as one in which “we are strung out within multiple fields of possibility
that do not come neatly individuated one by one or as a totality. We can be aware of
our rootedness and our identification with ways of thought and life only piecemeal.”9
The counterpart of the culture of reflection, then, is that no single narrative about
modern individuality imposes itself with obvious necessity. The world of institutions
that define, nurture, and recognize modern individuality is a prosaic world that is not
suited to the heroic and the ideal (A, 194, I 255; Hotho, 85–86). Of course, saying this
is also saying that there is one such single narrative, namely the story just given of the
birth or constitution of modern individuality. But this is precisely where the creative
problem arises in the first place. The peculiar predicament of the modern artist, in
Hegel’s account, is that the artist is a “tabula rasa,” free from traditional constraints
on his art (A, 605, II 235; Hotho, 204). This statement of artistic freedom is clearly not
an accurate description of specific artistic projects, at least not any with which Hegel
might have been acquainted, and it would be a mistake to take it as such. The level
of generality of Hegel’s discussion at this point suggests that the portrayal of the artist
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
as a tabula rasa has a different function. It helps clarify what is involved in the very 611
aspiration of artistic freedom that becomes possible under conditions of modernity.
The picture of a tabula rasa conveys the idea of emancipation from the authority of
tradition—this freedom is both the artist’s and the culture’s, scraping off the markings
of tradition is a possibility for the individual only insofar as it is an epochal possibility.
Yet this picture also conveys the idea that unless something is impressed on the tablet,
it will remain blank. This suggests a more complicated view of artistic practice than was
at first visible. Under conditions of modernity, the category of necessity is rendered
problematic but it does not evaporate. The artist can freely choose what to present
and how, and so he can define anew what is worthy of artistic representation. Through
this activity he both affirms his freedom and his bond to his culture. At the same time
though, unless we are to imagine the tablet magically inscribing itself, the realization
of the artist’s choice, and hence of his freedom, requires submission to some end that
presents itself as a pressing need and which can be retrospectively recognized as such.
The task now is to discover how, by argument or by example, Hegel captures this dual
process of artistic freedom and necessitation.
One pressing need that Hegel identifies as characteristic of art of modern culture
is timeliness. Art that is of its time is art that draws from the “common domestic life,”
the “ordinary civil life” of the people who inhabit this modern world (A, 596, II 224),
art made out of material that is everyday, “immanent” and “indigenous” (A, 597, II
225), art, finally, that looks to “the contingency of immediate existence which, taken
by itself, is unbeautiful and prosaic” (A, 596, II 223). For an example of such timely
art, Hegel reaches back to seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Emphatically resisting
the label of “genre painting,” he lovingly describes the domestic interiors and tavern
scenes, the still lifes, and the landscapes, praising the Dutch artists for choosing the
“content of their artistic representations out of their own experience” (A, 169, I 222;
Hotho, 200–201).
Hegel’s vindication of the importance of Dutch art has led some commentators
to view it as emblematic of his account of modern artistic practice in general. Terry
Pinkard, for instance, glosses Hegel’s point about prosaic actuality by arguing that “the
world of freedom—institutionalized in the prosaic, that is non-aesthetically satisfying
world of constitutional law, markets, bourgeois families and the like—is outside the
realm of beauty” (GP, 298). He then explains that “in capturing the moments of modern
inwardness, of the bourgeois life surrounding us,” Dutch art “presents the truth about
modern freedom in as aesthetic mode as can be presented” (GP, 299). This qualifica-
tion, however, simply serves to reinforce the point that the “whole truth” cannot be
presented aesthetically and therefore “art cannot matter to us as it once did” (GP,
299). Although starting from a very different account of modernity, Stephen Houlgate
reaches a similar conclusion. In Houlgate’s account, art undergoes a process of secu-
larization, which contributes to its “growing autonomy” but also to the “relativisation of
art’s value, because it is only in religion and philosophy that the truth that art intimates
comes to be fully revealed.”10 Consequently, the thematic modesty of Dutch art can be
seen to reflect the diminished status of art, its impotence to communicate fully “the
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

612 truth”; what art can still do is to “afford us a breathing space in which to feel at one
with ourselves and with the world.”11
While these two interpretations present very different assessments of modernity, they
converge in the view that Hegel’s account of modern artistic practice helps to explain
his thesis about the status of art in modernity. In other words, both commentators take
Hegel’s remarks on Dutch art as illustrative of the historical diagnosis of the role of art
in the modern world. As a result, both accounts encourage us to search for a lack in
modern art. The temptation here is that because we know how the historical narrative
ends, we look at Hegel’s examples in terms of what art cannot do. This preoccupation
leaves largely unexplored his views about what such art can do. And yet it is on this
last that we need to focus, if we are to reach a better understanding of his account of
modern artistic freedom and necessitation.
The subject matter of timely art, the one that presses itself on the artist who inhabits
a free culture as a necessary choice, is, Hegel claims, “Humanus, the universal human-
ity” (Hotho, 204). What shape or content might be given to such a subject matter is as
yet unclear. Here is how Hegel describes the artistic process that leads to this choice
of subject matter:

[It is] a withdrawal of man into himself, a descent into his own breast, whereby art strips
away from itself all fixed restriction to a specific range of content and treatment, and
makes Humanus its new holy of holies: i.e. the depths and heights of the human heart as
such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates. Herewith the artist
acquires his subject matter in himself and is the human spirit actually self-determining.
(A, 607, II 237–38; also Hotho, 42, 204)

One way of understanding the meaning of the “withdrawal of man into himself” is as
a turn towards a subject matter that treats of the familiar and the everyday (Hotho,
200). This interpretation is confirmed by the example Hegel uses of Dutch art which
he praises precisely for its unheroic virtues. But even granting its exemplary status in
Hegel’s narrative, seventeenth-century Dutch art cannot but be one constituent in
the schema of the art of modern time. The elevation of Humanus into subject matter
clearly allows for as much variety in conception and execution as there are “depths
and heights” in the human heart.
What then would an artistic presentation of “the human spirit actually self-determin-
ing” look like? One recent attempt to answer this question is Robert Pippin’s discussion
of twentieth-century abstract art from a Hegelian perspective.12 Pippin’s interpreta-
tion is embedded in his own strong reading of modernity, which supplements Hegel’s
scattered remarks in the lectures to create a rather more robust and systematic view
on aesthetic modernism than is tenable on textual evidence alone. More importantly,
as I argue shortly, it presents a view of Hegelian modernity that is fundamentally Pro-
methean: human beings are at home in the world because they recognize this world as
one of their own making. What is lost in this reconstruction is the ambiguity of Hegel’s
account of modernity. To appreciate this and the way this account leads on to complex
issues about how modern individuals experience their freedom, I want to start with a
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
painting that fits chronologically with Hegel’s lectures, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. 613
What is especially interesting for our purposes is the availability of extensive docu-
mentation concerning the topic, construction, and reception history of the painting,
which allows us to consider in the particular the elements of creative process we have
until now considered only in the abstract.

2. “Nothing Above, Nothing Below”—Géricault

Even by the standards of nineteenth-century painting, the Raft of the Medusa is

conspicuously large, measuring 491 x 716cm. The figures are double life-size. The
painting shows a crew of men aboard a raft half-submerged in dark waters. Some of
them appear dead or dying. The majority are depicted heaving themselves in a great
pyramid as they hail a passing ship barely visible in the distance. Waves rising behind
the raft bar a clear view of the horizon. Heavy clouds cover two thirds of the sky.
There is little color: the greenish black and brown of the waves, the brown hues for
the raft and the sail, the red in the head-cover of the old man in the middle ground,
a red waistband and headscarf worn by the figures on the right, a red cloth waived by
the man at the far right top of the painting. Touches of white render cloth, flesh, and
sea-foam. Diffuse light from an unseen source does not dispel the overall impression
of darkness. The composition leads the eye across the canvas as a series of triangles
compete for attention: a dominant triangle of lit figures with their backs turned to
the viewer is counterbalanced by a triangular dark cloth, perhaps part of a makeshift
shelter aboard the raft that casts its shadow over a cluster of figures at its base. The
exaggerated sinuosity of those who lift themselves against the stormy sea contrasts with
the abandon of the lifeless figures in the foreground.
The original title chosen by Géricault was Scene of a Shipwreck. When the paint-
ing was first exhibited, in the Salon of 1819, all who saw it recognized the source of
Géricault’s subject matter. In June 1816, a frigate, Medusa, sailed from France together
with three other smaller ships in the direction of Senegal. It was shipwrecked off the
coast of West Africa. Two of the survivors published an account of their ordeal in 1817
and Géricault started working on the painting the next year. His choice was careful and
methodical: this was a subject matter he considered suitable for an ambitious painting
with which he could win the Prix de Rome. His well-documented preparations for the
painting—his interviews with the survivors, the raft he reconstructed in his studio, his
sketches of different scenes from the shipwreck, his drawings and paintings of dead
and dying people in hospitals and morgues—record the steps in an ongoing process of
deliberation that concludes in the rendering we have in the final painting.13
Hegel says of the modern artist that “from the very beginning, before he embarks on
production, his great free soul must know and possess its own ground” (A, 606, II 236).
But what is the “ground” Géricault sought to possess? First let us note that he did not
choose to paint a classical or biblical subject—the only subjects traditionally deemed
suitable for ambitious painting. He depicted instead a shipwreck that was unavoidably
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

614 particular. What made it so was not just the events related in the survivors’ account.
The shipwreck had caused a political scandal. The majority of the ship’s passengers,
around 140 of them, were set adrift on an unnavigable raft. After thirteen days without
provisions, fifteen men were finally rescued by a passing ship. The account published
by the two survivors, which included tales of madness, murder, and cannibalism, was
immediately suppressed because of its indictment of the officers in charge who had
failed in their duties to the passengers. The officers were among those members of the
nobility who, upon the restoration of monarchy in France, were invited to occupy key
positions in government and administration, thus debarring from service experienced
imperial officers.14 If the immediate political context is that of the restoration of the
French monarchy, the broader political context is that of Western European colonial-
ism: Senegal had only fallen back into French hands the year before Medusa’s trip in
1815. Apart from the officers and crew, aboard the Medusa was a dispatch intended
to man the garrison of the newly acquired colony, engineers and topographers, doc-
tors and chemists for the hospital, scribes and administrators, and settlers attracted by
prospects of a better life. These are the people Géricault chooses to depict: ordinary,
unheroic men. His material is drawn from “the contingency of immediate existence,”
but there is nothing here of the quiet everydayness of Dutch painting. We do not see
doctors, chemists, scribes, administrators, or families of settlers: we see the survivors
and the dead. We see those who were not thrown overboard, those who perhaps killed
to survive, those whose strength and capacity for endurance kept them alive.15 But we
do not see grotesques either. We see the artist’s hand composing, arranging, idealizing,
using the idiom of historical painting to represent these men and so to show his audi-
ence that what he chose to depict is worth depicting. The scale is grand, the features
of the men ennobled, their musculature obeys classical proportions. Here again is
an artist occupying his ground, subjecting ideal configuration to the demands of his
subject matter, the depiction of ordinary men in circumstances turned awry. These
observations prompt the question: what exactly is Géricault’s subject matter? I want
to examine two different answers to this question: one given by Thomas Crow, the
other by Peter Weiss.
Crow draws our attention to what he calls the “paradox of the Raft,” that is, the way
its “colossal size both creates and demands a closeness of approach that is normally
the province of an easel painting” (EMA, 292). He begins by pointing out that what
we see is not emaciated, particular, identifiable individuals, but rather bodies “painted
with all the generality demanded by tradition” (EMA, 292). These classically formed
bodies unite to become a single body of humanity:

The chain of mingled bodies, uniting the races of Europe and Africa, becomes the equiva-
lent of one single body in a state of transformation; its internal quickening proceeds from
the group of moribund figures at the left across and upwards through rekindled alertness
at the center . . . to the ecstatic vitality of the frantic signaling at the pinnacle of the
group.16 (EMA, 292)
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
The intimacy we experience is born out of this egalitarian vision of humanity: clas- 615
sicist idealization is put to the service of depicting a “non-hierarchical vision of social
purpose” and of conveying a message of social transformation. Although Crow’s in-
terpretation skillfully weaves pictorial analysis with research in the political context
of the painting, it remains overly affirmative. Crow grounds the socio-political ideal
of equality in the pictorial conceit that the many figures form a chain that signifies a
single body of humanity. In order to discern this single body, however, too great an
emphasis must be placed on the compositional unity of the painting. This requires
that we ignore the demands of differentiation placed on us by the depicted “mingled
bodies” that represent the “races of Europe and Africa.”17 It also requires that we fail
to acknowledge the dynamic lines, made of touches of light, limbs and bodies, which
convey the impression of something broken or at best “urgently unified.”18 Finally, and
most importantly, the uplifting symbolism of the upward movement of a body “in a
state of transformation” places the Raft in an unconvincingly simplistic interpretative
framework: the unifying frame becomes a single movement from darkness to light,
from death to life, from despair to hope.
An alternative interpretation, which stresses the dark and fragmentary character of
the painting, is offered by Peter Weiss. Weiss, or more accurately, Weiss’s narrator in
The Aesthetic of Resistance, emphasizes the impression of gloom created by Géricault’s
subdued palette. He describes how the “intensely darkened, dull and patchy” colors
give the painting an almost abstract quality so that “yellowish, bluish, or greenish hues”
emerge out of a “seemingly monochrome pictorial surface.”19 The darkened tones and
pale limbs suggest pain and abandonment rather than hope and excitement. Weiss uses
the aesthetic experience of depicted pain to describe a crossing of boundaries between
painter, viewer and work of art:

Only pain and loss were discernible in the violently unified composition, it was as if coats
of colour, encrusted and scorified, peel away all that is documentary and graspable as such,
leaving in the end only the personal catastrophe of the artist. (DAW, 472).

Pigment is here presented as the medium through which the particular and the docu-
mentary is sloughed off, to leave only pain and loss represented on the canvas. This
striking account of the Raft forms part of a particular aesthetic which Weiss seeks to
develop through his first-person narrator and which depends on a process of recogni-
tion of suffering that leads to the experience of an aesthetic overcoming of “oppression
and loss” (DAW, 486): the depicted pain becomes a vehicle for the expression of the
painter’s own anguish and despair.20 The intimacy on which Crow remarked becomes
here the intimacy of an encounter between two subjects: artist and viewer. On Weiss’s
account, the unifying frame is the “artist’s soul,” and it is this in the end that we see as
subject matter. While it is deeply resonant, this interpretation goes too far in minimizing
the ostensible subject matter —“coats of colour . . . peel back all that was documen-
tary”—in order to give us a glimpse of Géricault’s soul. The depicted men adrift a raft
become a stepping stone into an inner world that artist and viewer share. This seems
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

616 too restrictive and subjective a unifying frame for a painting that was so meticulously
documented and composed, so deliberately prepared and displayed to the public.
Crow recognizes something that Weiss does not: idealization signals that what we
see is not just these particular men on this particular shipwreck. The painting is histori-
cally rooted but not merely illustrative of historical incident. And Weiss sees something
that Crow does not: the unity of the painting is precarious, pulled apart by shards of lit
limbs. Chromatically and compositionally, the life-affirming elements of the painting
are in constant battle with darkness and violence.
Out of these conflicting interpretations we can construct a more dynamic inter-
pretation of the Raft. On one side, we see the dully lit pyramid of men, culminating
with a man lifting a black sailor, who waves at the distant ship. At the opposite end,
we see a motionless figure, mainly in the shadow, holding the dead body of his young
companion. Behind him looms the dark triangle of the makeshift refuge, and, beyond
this, to his left a huge wave menacing to engulf the raft. The man is shown absorbed
in contemplation, unstirred by the commotion among the rest of his companions as if
unmoved by the prospect of rescue. In his stillness he is as dead to his surroundings.
When we look at the Raft, we see the living and the hopeful turning away from the dead
and the dying and in the same pictorial and thematic space a living figure who looks
away from those who call for help and hope for rescue. His indifference to survival can
be interpreted as showing grief, or despair, at the brutal necessities of the struggle to
stay alive.21 Structurally though, in terms of the conceptual articulation of the paint-
ing, this inert but living presence who holds the dead but is himself, in his stillness, as
dead to his surroundings, forms a counterweight to the raised, vital figure signaling to
the distant ship. In piecing these elements together, we can say that Géricault depicts
the struggle for survival of ordinary men and the uncertainties of the outcome (the
ship they hail is far enough in the distance and the sea menacing enough to withhold
from us, the viewers, the satisfaction that rescue is imminent). But more than this,
he is able to show us something that is part of, and yet in important ways outside, the
compositional whole; he gives us a picture of death in life.

3. Holding the dead—Hegel after Géricault

From the vantage point of Hegel’s remarks on modern art it is possible to see in
the Raft of the Medusa the “strivings, deeds, and fates” of Humanus. But we also see
uncertainty and possibly also indifference about the outcome in the struggle for sur-
vival. While the contained complexity of the painting gives shape to the idea of artistic
freedom, its dark vision of the withdrawal to the self compels us to look further into
this process, to discover the character and circumstances of modern freedom.
A useful starting point is the relation to artistic tradition that underpins Hegel’s con-
cept of artistic freedom. Unbound by inherited choices, the modern artist is compelled
(or free) to make his own. In doing so, he can turn to and appropriate elements of his
artistic inheritance. This act of appropriation indicates that the relation to tradition is
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
not one of unproblematic belonging. There is an interesting parallel between this and 617
the relation to nature described in Pippin’s Hegelian defence of aesthetic modernism.
Pippin interprets Hegel’s remarks on art in terms of a broader thesis concerning mod-
ern “independence from natural determination” which, he argues, is in turn reflected
in the “self-images manifested in art” (“HHA,” 214).22 Pippin’s broader thesis has a
philosophical as well as a social dimension: “the decisive modern event was the end of
the authority of nature as such” (“HHA,” 227). This is the lesson of modernity:

Normative claims to knowledge, rectitude, spiritual life, or even claims to be making art,
or that that was good, are now made with the self-consciousness that the authority of
such claims can always be challenged and defeated . . . . To put it in a different way: an
enduring continuous human life is not an event or occurrence, a happening, like others.
Lives don’t just happen; must be actively led, steered, guided, we now for the first time
fully appreciate. (“HHA,” 221)

Pippin’s historical thesis about the occurrence of the “modern event” has its correla-
tive in a emancipatory teleology: “we have broken free of dependence on such sensible
images not so much because of their inadequacy as because of our having made our-
selves independent of them” (“HHA,” 214).23 Pippin’s bold reading of modernism in
terms of a Hegelian-inspired view of modernity takes in its stride the familiar topoi of a
number of post-Enlightenment, post-Kantian philosophical projects. But if we want to
discover what exactly is involved in what Pippin calls “the modern event,” we need to
look beyond the bare assertion of cognitive and moral independence and consider the
activity that is involved in “making ourselves independent.” Central to his account is the
idea that human lives are actively led, rather than suffered. This leads him to interpret
strongly the notion of “self-legislation” as “self-authorship.” From this also follows the
second element of emancipation from external authority, the idea that the choices that
make up these active lives are only provisionally justifiable, because the reasons that
guide them are always defeasible. Coming to see that one’s compass is only good until
further notice is a consequence of the identification of the source of normative authority
with an intramundane subject, a historical, contingently located “we.”24 So the content
of “making ourselves independent” is good, bad, or indifferent according to whatever
local criteria apply. The only norm that matters is the principle of self-authorship itself,
which is what makes the boast and pride of modern individuals.
There are clearly elements in Pippin’s picture of modernity that resonate with Hegel’s
account, or, at least, a plausibly Hegelian one. The key problem is Pippin’s over-em-
phatic endorsement of subjective legislation; in order to guarantee its autonomy, its
independence from nature, he presents it as an act of self-creation ex nihilo. A further
question concerns the assurance that “more and more gradually” we know what we
are doing. This suggests that we make substantive gains. However, as we saw, while
we may be in position to choose one local bit of self-legislation over another, we do so
only by relying on whatever local criteria “we” have to hand. This is not sufficient to
sustain a substantive progressive teleology. So we are left with a formal gain, namely
a gradual realization that there is no other source of normativity but an intramundane
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

618 “we.” Reflective self-awareness sums up our gains in knowledge and freedom. Nothing
further is said, or promised, or can be said or promised, about the ways we treat each
other. We may then want to shift our focus away from the progressivist story, which
is ambiguous at the very least, and on the idea of self-authorship. I want to propose
an alternative reading that takes seriously the idea of “withdrawal to self” but makes
better sense of the materials Hegel presents us with.
To start with, let us articulate more fully the standpoint of emancipation from ex-
ternal authority. As we saw earlier, erasing the markings of tradition leaves us not just
without tradition but with nothing. Hegel’s image of the modern artist as a tabula rasa
suggests that in order to realize his freedom, the artist must submit to some end that
presents itself, and can be retrospectively “read,” as pressing, as necessitating. In the
moral context, we may say of an end that is necessitating in the requisite fashion that
it is good without qualification. The question is can such an idea, an idea that captures
the force of normative necessitation, be reconcilable with what Hegel says of freedom?
Let us look again at the puzzling description of the modern predicament in the Lectures
on Fine Art. The art that depicts the “withdrawal of man into himself,” Hegel writes,
does not just strip away from itself “all fixed restriction to a specific range of content and
treatment,” but, significantly, it “makes Humanus its new holy of holies” (see above, p.
612). Kant’s discussion of holiness in the Critique of Practical Reason offers us one way
of thinking about the extra-artistic transformation to which Hegel alludes here: “Man
is certainly unholy enough, but humanity in his person must be holy to him . . . he is
the subject of the moral law which is holy, because of the autonomy of his freedom.”25
Here the idea of the holiness of humanity, which appears already as a command, is
predicated on the idea that human beings are subject to the moral law. It is true that
we are subject to the law only insofar as we are free, but it is also true that we are free,
in the sense of autonomous, insofar as we are subject to the law. What I want to show
now is how this double aspect of human freedom informs Hegel’s account of modernity,
creating a morally and epistemically ambiguous landscape.
In a passage in the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel paints a striking image of freedom:
“This feeling that we are all our own is characteristic of free thought—of that voyage
into the open, where nothing is below us or above us, and we stand in solitude with
ourselves alone” (E, 52, 98).26 The context is a discussion of the historical fate of different
metaphysical systems. Hegel argues that historically thought has sought to find “a firm
and fast footing” (E, 51, 97) in concepts such as “God,” “the Soul,” or “the World.” In
a few very densely packed sentences, he suggests that these foundational efforts fail.
In the appended note, in which the quoted remark occurs, he elaborates the point
by comparing the degree to which different schools of thought rely on unexamined
givens as their foundations. His examples are from ancient, scholastic, and modern
thought. Scholasticism, he claims, accepts “its facts” as “dogma from the authority of
the Church” (E, 51, 97). Greek philosophy is, by comparison, freer because it rejects
“mythology and its fancies” and presupposes “nothing but the heaven above and the
earth around” (E, 52, 98). The contrast here is presumably between medieval theism
and ancient naturalism—or between “God” and “the World.” The moderns, Hegel
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
claims, have a chance fully to free themselves from such foundational supports and to 619
become “thoroughly at home.” It is at this point that he seeks to convey how it feels to
achieve such freedom with an image of being “all on our own,” where “nothing is below
us or above us, and we stand in solitude with ourselves alone” (E, 52, 98). There is a
parallel here with his description of modern artistic freedom. The artist is no longer
bound by tradition—he has no firm footing in it, we might say. The thinker is no longer
bound by things above and below—not even the “heaven above and the earth around”
of the ancients. The image of the tabula rasa is replaced here by the image of a void, of
“nothing above and nothing below.” But, how can thought be “at home” in this solitary
encounter with the unknown? This picture of homeliness is neither comfortable nor
comforting. But perhaps this is precisely its point: namely to alert us moderns to the
power of fantasies about a world that is tamed and familiar and made up of a prosaic,
unbeautiful everyday. This too might be a fanciful myth, Hegel suggests, one of those
ideas “we moderns . . . find extremely difficult to overstep” (E, 51, 98). The clues he
gives us about homeliness further in the book render yet more remote the prospect
of peaceful inhabiting:

The “I” is as it were the crucible and the fire which consumes the loose plurality of sense
and reduces it to unity. This is the process which Kant calls pure apperception . . . . This
view has at least the merit of giving a correct expression to the nature of all conscious-
ness. The tendency of all man’s endeavours is to understand the world, to appropriate and
subdue it to himself: and to this end the positive reality of the world must be as it were
crushed and pounded, in other words, idealised. (E, 69, 118)

The void of “nothing below us or above us” is an image of a world that withdraws from
us as a given reality in the process of becoming “idealized,” that is, in the process of
becoming known in relation to a consciousness. The violence of Hegel’s description
of the loss of the world as given and the gain of the world as known should give us at
least some pause when we consider the promised gains in freedom and self-knowledge
that are placed within our (modern) reach.
What is the relevance of these images of solitude and of destruction to the Hegelian
view of modernity? Central to the self-understanding of modernity is emancipation
from those external sources of authority—for instance “God” or “the World”—that are
judged, from the modern point of view, to be essential ingredients of points of view
outgrown by modernity. This opens a way of conceiving modern freedom in positive
terms as making ourselves at home in the world. To be “at home” is to be among rec-
ognizable, familiar surroundings. Accordingly, the normative aspiration captured by the
idea of being at home creates, not unreasonably, the expectation that we can gradually
come to see the world to be in our image, shaped in accordance to our rules. Hegel’s
depiction of full freedom as an encounter with a void hints at the emptiness of this
element of modern self-understanding. This is not to deny that we give shape to our
world, quite the contrary, on Hegel’s account, any cognitive encounter is a metaphori-
cal crushing and pounding of the world to fit the shapes of our consciousness. But this
is not a prerogative of the moderns, rather it is a feature of “all man’s endeavours” to
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

620 understand the world. The modern twist to this story is that understanding the world
is, or must be, also a self-understanding. The reason why modern narratives that take
us from emancipation from external authority to the requirements of self-authorship
end with a void, a blank tablet, is because they pass in silence, or, in Pippin’s telling,
merely instrumentalize the crushing and pounding of modern self-understanding.
To recover what is missing, we may once again look to the creative burdens of
the modern artist. As we saw, the artist faces a demand, which is issued from and is
distinctive to his culture, namely to elevate Humanus, the universal humanity, into
subject matter. He can only realize his freedom by taking on this task. Extrapolating
from this, we can say that modern freedom has similarly a double aspect: the internal
aspect, which allows the agent to see his will as his own and therefore as expressive of
his freedom, and an aspect of subjection to the norm that gives shape to this will and
which appears, for this purpose, as externally necessitating. The fantasy of home-mak-
ing elides precisely this external aspect. Hegel’s word for this last is “death.” In the
Phenomenology, Hegel argues that the work of the understanding is the dissolution of
the non-actual (PS, 18, 36). He continues:

Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful,
and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength . . . But the life of Spirit is
not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather
life that endures it and maintains itself in it. (PS, 19, 36)

This passage contains the tough core of Hegel’s emancipatory message: the life of Spirit
depends on acknowledging precisely that which appears external or alien. In other
words, modern freedom—the “human spirit actually self-determining”—does not
come with a lighter normative burden than, say, self-conceptions that are grounded in
God or the World. Insofar as they are ours, the normative structures that express such
freedom, make up a home for us, but insofar as they are normative, they determine the
rules to which we must submit. Hegel’s account of how we become modern invites us
to consider our post-Enlightenment, post-Kantian legacy not only in terms of cognitive
and moral independence, but also in terms of the hard work of holding the dead.

Notes
1. The “end of art” thesis was famously developed by Croce who argued that Hegel’s aesthetic
is a “funeral oration: he passes in review the successive forms of art and lays the whole in its grave.”
Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, transl. D. Ainsley (New York: Noonday Press, 1953), 302. See also
Jacques D’Hondt, “La Mort de l’Art,” in Bulletin International d’Esthètique 17 (1972), 4–24. Israel
Knox summarizes the position thus: “there is no message for us in Hegel’s philosophy or art. Indeed,
his philosophy of art is a long, eloquent epitaph upon art.” In The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel,
and Schopenhauer (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 103. A more recent example can be found in
Beat Wyss, Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity, transl. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). An important alternative interpretation argues
that Hegel’s remarks are about the changing role of art in modern life; see K. Harries, “Hegel on
the Future of Art,” in Review of Metaphysics 27 (1974), 677–96 and S. Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A
Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 76–89. Modified versions of this
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
interpretation can be found in Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to 621
Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), a revised expanded version of which is An Introduc-
tion to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), and in Terry Pinkard, German
Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002).
Henceforth abbreviated GP. I discuss Houlgate’s and Pinkard’s views in section 1.
2. “To be at home” is a translation for a range of terms Hegel uses, including “bei sich sein,” “zu
Hause sein,” “heimisch,” and others; see for example: “Der Mensch muss zu Hause in der Welt sein,
frei in ihr haushalten, heimisch zu finden.” Hotho, 105, also A, 607, II 238, and A, 46, I 70, and “Mit
dem Selbstbewusstsein sind wir also nun in das einheimische Reich der Wahrheit,” PS, 104, 138.
Note on the texts used: A: Hegel’s Aesthetics. Reference to the T. M. Knox translation, Volume I
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), is followed by reference to Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Volumes I and
II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1986). Hotho: Hotho’s 1823 notes edited by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert,
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2003). Pfordten: Pfordten’s
1826 notes edited by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Jeong-Im Kwon, and Karsten Berr, Philosophie
der Kunst (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). E: Encyclopaedia Part I, Logic. Reference to the William
Wallace translation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) is followed by reference to Enzyklopädie der philoso-
phischen Wissenshaften Volume I (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt 1986). PS: Phenomenology of Spirit. Refer-
ence to the A.V. Miller translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) is followed by reference
to Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). Because the artists Hegel discusses are
male—and the example used in this essay happens to be also of a male artist—the male pronoun is
used in the relevant contexts.
3. An early account of this basic narrative of Hegelian modernity can be found in Edward Caird,
Hegel (William Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London, 1883), although probably the most
familiar version is found in Marx, who adapts it to his own project; see for instance the discussion of
“alienated labor” in the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in R. C. Tucker ed., The
Marx-Engels Reader (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co, 1978), 70–81. Max Horkheimer’s
“The Revolt of Nature” can also be seen to build on this basic narrative; see Eclipse of Reason (New
York: The Seabury Press, 1974), 92–127. More explicitly Hegelian reconstructions that have been
influential in the field of Hegel studies include Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and also The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, transl.
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) and Postmetaphysical Thinking, William Mark,
transl. Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Important attempts to establish the social and
political implications of this Hegelian vision of modernity can be found in Michael O. Hardimon,
Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994) and Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Pinkard’s
German Philosophy and George Di Giovanni’s Freedom and Religion in Kant and his Immediate
Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
offer a historical elaboration of this Hegelian theme. Powerful advocacy for this Hegelian narrative of
modernity can be found in Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997). I discuss Pippin’s views in section 3.
4. Robert Pippin, “The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophical Fate of
Modernity,” in Political Theory 31:3 (2003), 352–53. In this essay, Pippin claims that Hegel offers a
way to avoid “such dimensions of experience” by learning to make sense of this “breaking down and
rebuilding” (352).
5. See Pippin, Idealism as Modernism, 15. For a thumbnail sketch of the philosophical implications
of this narrative see Robert B. Brandom’s “Introduction,” in Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002). See also in this context GP, 356–67.
6. A full account of the arguments surrounding Hotho’s editorship and the philosophical implica-
tions of the newly published lecture notes, especially for the end of art thesis, can be found in Jason
Gaiger, “Catching Up with History,” in Katerina Deligiorgi ed., Hegel: New Directions (Chesham:
Acumen 2006), 159–76.
 M O D ER N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

622 7. “The great artist today,” Hegel says, “needs in particular the free development of the spirit;
in that development all superstition, and all faith which remains restricted to determinate forms of
vision and presentation, is degraded to mere aspects and features” (A, 606, II 236). There are differ-
ent “modes of treatment” of his material that the modern artist may choose to adopt form the past,
he “may associate himself with the classical age and with still more ancient times; to be a follower of
Homer, even if the last one, is fine, and productions reflecting the medieval veering to romantic art
will have their merits too” (A, 607–8, II 238).
8. Hegel makes the further point that the rise of the individual signifies the fall of the hero; discussing
the dramas of Goethe and Schiller he argues that the portrayal of heroic individuality is possible only
if the heroic individual is shown to rebel against civil society and “prosaic actuality” (A, 195, I 255).
9. David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 268.
Kolb describes the modern condition as one of “disunified multiplicity” and argues that it does not
prevent us “from trying for various kinds of unity or totalisation as long as we realise that the results
will be another element in the multiplicity. We should not confuse efforts at totalisation with achieved
totality” (249).
10. Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History, 141.
11. Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History, 137.
12. Robert B. Pippin, “Hegel on the Historicity of Art: Abstract Art and the Hegelian Narrative,”
in Geschichtsphilosophie und Kulturkritik. Historische und systematische Studien, eds. Johannes Ro-
hbeck and Herta Nagl-Docekal (Wissentschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 2003), 202–27; the
article is a revised version of “What was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” in Critical
Inquiry 29:1 (2002), 1–24. Henceforth abbreviated “HHA.” Criticism of Pippin’s account can be found
in Gaiger, “Catching Up with History”; see also his “Art as Made and Sensuous: Hegel, Danto and the
‘End of Art’,” in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 41/42 (2000), 104–19.
13. A detailed and clear account of Géricault’s choices and preparation for the painting of the Raft
can be found in Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 279–99. Henceforth abbreviated EMA. Against the
accepted view that Géricault’s paintings of severed heads and limbs were merely preparatory paint-
ings for the Raft of the Medusa, Nina Athanassoglou-Killmyer argues that these works can be seen as
autonomous and self-sufficient. See Nina Athanassoglou-Killmyer, “Géricault’s Severed Heads and
Limbs: The politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold,” in The Art Bulletin LXXIV:4 (1992), 599–618; I
owe this reference to Emma Barker. A record of Géricault’s preparations for the Raft of the Medusa
can be found in P. Courthion, ed., Géricault raconté par lui-même et par ses amis (Vésenz-Genève:
Pierre Cailler, 1947).
14. Crow, in ETA, offers a carefully nuanced account of the political context of the painting showing
that what was originally a sensitive subject matter had ceased to be so at the time of the first exhibition
of the Raft of the Medusa. Crow records that those held responsible were punished and the errors
that led to the appointment of the officers of the Medusa were recognized by the king himself who
visited the salon and commented favorably on Géricault’s painting (“Monsieur votre naufrage n’est
pas un desastre”).
15. Among Géricault’s early studies for what eventually became the Raft of the Medusa, one was
entitled Despair and Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa.
16. Crow goes on to draw out the democratic, egalitarian implication of his reading, which he sees
as part of Géricault’s postrevolutionary, artistic inheritance.
17. In this context, we should note the limits to racial differentiation explored by Linda Nochlin.
Nochlin points out that in a preliminary study depicting a different scene, entitled Scene of a Mutiny,
Géricault gave prominent position to a family group including women and children, which are absent
from the final painting. Nochlin suggests that racial difference compensates, within the economy of
the picture, for this “occlusion of the feminine.” See Linda Nochlin, “Géricault, or the Absence of
Women,” in October 68 (1994), 45–59.
18. Nochlin, “Géricault, or the Absence of Women,” 49, emphasis added.
19. Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (Suhrhamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 471.
Henceforth abbreviated DAW.
 Deligiorgi / modernity with pictures: hegel and géricault
20. Peter Bürger argues that the “elimination of the lines of demarcation between different do- 623
mains of reality” in Weiss’s work is indicative of a new anti-idealist aesthetic. This would suggest that
the way in which Weiss’s first-person narrator “institutes a relationship between the sufferings of the
painter expressed in the picture . . . and the troubled experience of the narrator’s own generation” is
not an expressivist fallacy, but rather an attempt to ground the work of art within the actual processes
of creation and of contemplation. See Peter Bürger, “On the Actuality of Art: The Aesthetic in Peter
Weiss’s Aesthetic of Resistance,” in The Decline of Modernism, transl. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge:
Polity 1992), 137–46. Athanassoglou-Killmyer convincingly argues against the view of Géricault as
“morbid and violent” and interprets his delight “in the sadistic, the gruesome, the ambiguous, and the
macabre” not as singular traits of a person but as a response to “the larger context of period fascination
with morbid terror, a response the artist shared with several of his literary and artistic contemporaries”;
Athanassoglou-Killmyer, “Géricault’s Severed Heads and Limbs,” 614.
21. It has been suggested that the figure of the old man holding the dead body is to be interpreted
as an indirect reference to Ugolino, who in Dante’s Commedia is condemned for eating his children.
This would then be an allusion to reported cannibalism onboard the raft. Another interesting parallel
is with the theme of filial piety, usually represented with the figure of Aeneas carrying his father An-
chisses on his back after the sacking of Troy. The theme is used in Girodet’s Scene from a Deluge and
also in Regnaut’s Deluge. In Géricault’s painting, the young man does not carry the old but the other
way round. Géricault depicts an inverted world where the old survive and the young die, where the
links of familial or traditional loyalty are severed and old and young are cast adrift a threatening sea.
22. Pippin’s gloss belongs with a broad range of contemporary philosophical projects, not always
Hegelian, but always emphatically modern in their thematization of normative authority as a funda-
mentally human project; see especially, Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), “Motivation, Metaphysics, and the Value of Self: A Reply to
Ginsborg, Guyer, and Schneewind,” in Ethics 109 (1998) 49–66, and “Internalism and the Sources of
Normativity” in H. Pauer-Studer ed., in Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and
Political Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
23. In other essays, Pippin makes more explicit these progressivist commitments in “The Unavail-
ability of the Ordinary” and “Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualized Agency in Hegel’s Jena
Phenomenology,” in Deligiorgi., Hegel: New Directions, 125–42.
24. Pippin’s position is made clearest in his discussion of McDowell. See “Leaving Nature Behind:
Or Two Cheers for ‘Subjectivism’,” in Nicholas H. Smith ed., Reading McDowell On Mind and World
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 58–75 and in his “Postscript: On McDowell’s response to ‘Leaving Na-
ture Behind’,” in R. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 211–16.
25. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, transl. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956),
90 and in the Prussian Academy edition, Vol. V, 87.
26. “Voyage into the open” is Wallace’s translation for ins Freie Ausschiffen. Voyage into the open
conveys a powerful image of travel in unfamiliar, previously unnavigated waters, an image of explora-
tion that has many philosophical resonances, such as, for instance, the image Hume chooses for his
philosophical investigations of setting to explore the globe aboard a “leaky weather-beaten vessel,”
Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), 263–64. An alternative and more common
translation for the verb ausschiffen is “to unload” or “disembark,” which, if transported in the context
of Hegel’s remark, would suggest a landing on a terra incognita.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.