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Rationality, Modernity and Normativity.

Interview with Robert Pippin


By Luca Corti

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[This is an interview that Robert Pippin gave me in Rome in June 2010. The interview came out in Italian, with a short
introduction, as Razionalità, modernità e normatività: perché Hegel è ancora attuale? Intervista a Robert Pippin di
Corti L., in Estetica, Studi e Ricerche vol. 2, 2012, pp. 199-216]

***

L.C. On several occasions you have described your way of doing philosophy through a nice
quote of your daughter: “He steals ideas from dead people”. Which was the path – the
biographical and intellectual path – that led you to concern yourself with German philosophy, in
particular with Hegel?

R.P. Well, there is a personal answer to that question, and a professional answer to that question.
The personal answer is not very interesting, philosophically, but it is amusing. When I was in
graduate school I was preparing to write a dissertation about ancient philosophy, about Plato, and
probably Plato’s dialogue The Sophist. So I was spending most of my time studying Greek and
reading Plato, taking courses on Plato and Aristotle. But in my second year in graduate school, I
was taking a course on Kant, that was being given by the distinguished American Philosopher,
Wilfrid Sellars. He was at Pittsburgh, of course, but one of his former students was at Penn State,
where I was a graduate student, and persuaded him to fly from Pittsburgh to Penn State every
Thursday for one quarter, and he gave a seminar on Kant. This was the most powerful and
interesting seminar I had ever been in (at that time or since). I just thought it was astounding how
intelligent and learned Sellars was. And so happened that at the end of that seminar I got a call from
the chairman of the department saying that a two year fellowship, that was available to the
philosophy department (which they had won) instead of one, had gone vacant; empty, because the
person who had it, got very ill, and if I could come up with the dissertation proposal by the end of
the week – this was a Tuesday – I would have two years of Fellowship, and no teaching and much
more money than the usual fellowship. So I said “I don’t know if that’s possible, the only thing I’m
working intensively on right now is Kant.” Because I was so impressed with Sellars, I had been
working on Kant night and day to be prepared for the seminar, which was essentially about
Sellars’s Science and Metaphysics, a book of his that came out in the 60’s. So I stayed up, all night,
a couple of nights, and submitted a proposal on Kant’s Theory of Form, and I got the fellowship.
And then I thought: well, I’ll write the dissertation and then when I get to my first job I will start
doing Ancient Philosophy. But of course they hire you to do what you did your dissertation on, so I
had to teach German philosophy , and as I said after Sellars I found it much more interesting than I
had thought. Then I published my first book on Kant, and I had to get tenure and then I had to
become a full Professor, and then I had a lot of graduate students… so, I ended up a specialist in
Kant and Hegel.
More intellectually, I was interested not just in the “professional issues of philosophy”. A couple
of my teachers at Penn State had been students of Leo Strauss. I was not a Straussian, I did not find
the ancients\moderns contrast terribly helpful. But the problem of modernity, of a completely
different form of life in the West from the 15th , 16th century on, struck me as an extremely
interesting one. And the decisive work in modern philosophy, seemed to me, was not Descartes’s
Meditations, but Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and its aftermath. The German philosophers were
also, besides working on very technical and abstract issues in philosophy, relating those issues to
the significance of this new form of life and its deficiencies. The later German philosophers, of
course. Nietzsche and Heiddeger became very disillusioned, disenchanted with these deficiencies in
modern thought and modern life. So I got more involved, because for Hegel the philosophical
problem is the problem of modernity, this epochal new beginning for Hegel was also in some sense
the culmination of philosophy. So, natural interest, accident, intrinsic interest in the problem and
then this connection to wider issues. It also has interdisciplinary dimensions, since Hegel’s work
seemed to me a kind of model for how one could find interesting philosophy being done in visual
art, in literature, poetry, drama.

L.C. Which was the status of the research on Hegel in the U.S. when you started to study Hegel?
Could you sketch out the context at that time?

R.P. This was in the early 1970’s, so it was prior to the time that Charles Taylor had published
his 1975 Hegel. At this time in Anglophone philosophy the status of Hegel’s Studies was
nonexistent. There was one interesting book, a kind of Wittgenstanian reading of Hegel by John
Findlay, there was the metaphysics done by the British idealists, and there was some interest in his
political philosophy: Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution had been published, and Solomon had
publish a book on Hegel, both of which had tried to deny the view of Hegel as an Prussian
conservative, whose political philosophy was only a justification for the Prussian State. And then
Charles Taylor’s Hegel came out, but that too, attributed to Hegel a very traditional metaphysical
account of Spirit monism. But Taylor rehabilitated Hegel’s political philosophy. He helped people
understand how Hegel’s political philosophy was a serious critique of liberalism that should be
entertained; liberalism was not just the necessary default position. It had weaknesses and Taylor had
made Hegel a credible critic pf those weaknesses. For many people any critique of liberalism is a
slippery slope to fascism, so, the situation in America was very prejudicial against this kind of
romantic criticism of liberal individualism. Taylor’s book helped a little bit, but there still was no
serious consideration of Hegel’s theoretical philosophy.

L.C. Wilfrid Sellars came once a week from Pittsburgh to Penn State to teach Kant. Could we
consider that moment as the beginning of a relationship with the so-called “neo-Hegelian school of
Pittsburgh”? In what terms would you characterize (and differentiate) your position by comparison
with the taking up of Hegel’s in Pittsburgh?
R.P. There are many issues involved. Both McDowell and Brandom are very influenced by
Sellars, of course, as they would admit. For me the most interesting issue was that Sellars focused
not so much on issues like the justification of synthetic a priori knowledge, the traditional issue of
the Critique, but on the form of mindedness in our relation to the world, which is in fact a Hegelian
problematic. Hegelians would say the subject-object problem, philosophy of consciousness. But
Science and Metaphysics and Kant’s theory of Experience, as well as many of Sellar’s articles
focused on a set of problems in Kant as a post-Cartesian, and that opened the way towards Hegel.
Sellars himself called Science and Metaphysics “meditations hégelienne”.
Later, Brandom’s Hegel is much more influenced by pragmatism than mine, I think there are
serious issues in philosophy of mind, in Hegel, that are not resolved by pragmatism; and
McDowell’s Hegel is a much more Wittgensteinian Hegel. I mean, both of those are just labels, but
I would say my Hegel is more post-Kantian, and more connected with the tradition of German
philosophy, with the work of Fichte and Schelling, and the whole environment of German
philosophy at the time. Brandom and McDowell are coming at Hegel from somewhat different
angles, and focusing on things that are extremely interesting but not quite the same thing I’m
focused on.

L.C. You put forward a “non-metaphysical” and idealist reading of Hegel’s position,
considering it as a completion of Kant’s transcendental project. This completion, however, involves
a revolution, that is the elaboration of a new, a social, collective and normative account of
subjectivity, mediated from the notion of recognition. What remains of the Kantian notion of
“transcendental” in this normative and social account of subjectivity?

R.P. It is an extremely complicated question. In Hegel’s terms it has to do with the relation
between the Science of logic and the Phenomenology, so there is no more disputed and complicated
and interesting question than the relation between the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology.
Let’s try to put it in an economical way.
Hegel’s central theoretical idea is der Begriff, he does not call it ein Begriff but der Begriff. So
it seems to be that he is talking about one thing, “the concept”, but actually what he says is: the
study of philosophy – he says this usually at the beginning of his Realphilosophy, in his lecture
courses – the study of philosophy is not merely the study of the Begriff, is the study of the Idee, and
“die Idee is der Begriff und seine Verwirklichung (concept and its actualization). So any serious
study in philosophy has to be two things, a kind of stereoscopic vision – to use a Sellarsian phrase –
that has to focus both on the actual conceptual and normative issues at stake, in themselves, isolate
them and understand what claim is being made, in a practice, in a form of life, in a form of art, and
then what that claim looks like, in its actual, historical actualization, in a social and historical world.
So the transcendental level is what Hegel would still identify as the necessity to understand “the
conceptuality of experience”. I mean, the conceptuality always has an historical dimension, but
nevertheless one can simply ask “what is ‘conceptuality’ such that it could have a historical
dimension?” and philosophy has to be able to answer; just as Hegel could write both the Science of
logic and the Phenomenology, and then later the Realphilosophy, the Philosophy of Spirit and the
Philosophy of Nature. Philosophy can also have these two moments within it, in which the theory of
what it is for human experience to have a conceptual structure is investigated at the same time as
one tries to understand the actual experience that this conceptual structure is of. If that makes any
sense. Very complicated question.

L.C. “Every transcendental constitution is a social institution”. I’m quoting Robert Brandom
(who quotes John Haugeland). Do you agree with this slogan? What is the difference between your
position and the position of Robert Brandom?

R.P. I would rather say, every social institution properly understood is a transcendental
constitution. Human beings sometimes in the 16h century invented opera, it is not really a
transcendental constitution. Of course, there are necessary conditions for something counting as
opera. Broadway musical is not opera, but it’s a highly variable and conventional norm, with much
less at stake than Rechtsstaat as a human institution that nevertheless establishes proprieties or that
are taken to be binding or obligatory. So that is really the general problem.
Brandom and I both agree (and McDowell very much opposed to the idea) that the source of
normative order and regulation is self-constituting subjectivity, social subjectivity but self-
constituting, that is self-legislated – taking one’s cue from a passage in Kant’s Grundlegung, where
he says that for any law we must be capable of being understood as its Urheber, its author, the
subject. So it is self-legislated norms that actually succeed in binding those who are subject to them,
that is the great problem that has to be understood. McDowell thinks of that as far too arbitrary
sounding, as if we just make up the rules. Well in a way we do make up the rules. There is nothing
in nature that says we have to live like this in Rome, but we did, and there are a number of rules –
from traffic regulation to very complicated social and political proprieties, that we insist on and
back up with the force of law. So, how to understand both the historicity and, in a way, the
“inauguration” of these practices in time, and the fact that they are not just conventions – like what
kind of clothes to wear and what to have for breakfast – but actually bind the people who are
subject to them, that is the great problem. So I would say the slogan is true but it also opens an
enormous problem. Which social institutions actually constitute the possibility of an enterprise we
can’t do without?

L.C. How would you define the relation between the single, individual subject and the collective
subjectivity, or institution, or normative practice that includes her? In particular, what kind of
capacity should the individual subject have in order to become conscious of the notional level
determined by the collective subjectivity? Should she necessarily read the Phenomenology of
Spirit?

R.P. I hope not. This certainly is the case that the person needs to have some aspect of a
Hegelian theory in mind, and even our ordinary reflection, as it occurs in our ordinary life, is not
particularly or necessarily philosophical. Sometimes in – let’s use a Brandom term – in the game of
giving and asking for reasons something breaks down, some insufficiency occurs, in which what
one had proffered as a reason is not accepted as one. Both of the issues you ask about come to the
fore. One’s individuality is no longer covered by the practice, something in effect forces back on the
individual some new approach, that is to be determined collectively ultimately, but in the moment
of its instability requires a far greater level of reflection, and a far greater emphasis on the lack of
social unity and thus allows the emergence of some new form of individual subjectivity.
But I don’t think these are a particularly philosophical problems. You know, for many years,
prior to 1970, people were able to offer to a woman a reason like: “you can’t do that, because
you’re a woman”. And around 1970, mysteriously enough, gender-based division of labor began to
lose its credibility. An enormous number of individual voices came, people insisting you had to
think of things this way rather than that way, but nobody “did philosophy.” I mean they did, but
they were doing it in the context of a political struggle that had a very specific location in time and
in a cultural community. So, mostly, I think the participants who play the game of giving and
asking for reasons, play it, even in a reflective level, simply as participants. But it is possible, for
someone, in a way, “outside” – a kind of ‘transcendental anthropologist’ – trying to figure out what
is going on “inside”. Not so much to come to the right answer, but to try to understand what the
actual practice is, that is what interests philosophers: not the rules of this or that practice, but the
rules of practice qua practice, such that this can actually be a rational game, that these reasons that
are putative reasons actually count as reasons. So, the traditional assumption since Plato (and
Socrates’s questions in the Dialogues) had been that “philosophy does better, purely, what
individuals are trying to do, in their daily life”. And I think the reaction of Aristotle was “no, people
are doing in their daily life what they do, some do it very well, some do it very poorly, but
philosophy is not involved. Philosophy is something else”. So, Aristotle in that sense was the first
Hegelian, and his rejection of the idea that if a person cannot define courage to a philosopher, he
doesn’t know what courage is. He knows what courage is without being able to give a rule, he
knows how it applies to all the cases, if he is a phronimos, a wise man, who understand the virtues.
It does not mean that he is ignorant, because he can’t provide for what the philosopher wants as a
justifiable answer, some universal and necessary truth.

L.C. If every normative conceptual framework has to be seen as tied to a determinate social
constitution, how can I get back to conceptual frameworks of the past, whose institutions have
disappeared long time ago (say, Greek theater)? More generally: how would you define the relation
between the normative approach and the questions raised by “historicism”?

R.P. I think it’s a problem. But one would not want to come to say late 19th century German
historicism, and consider oneself just sort of closed in, in a world one can’t get out of. I think
Gadamer really showed us how to think our way out of that problem; that the other point of view is
foreign and different, but it is not in principle inaccessible— there can be a Horizontverschmelzung.
I think that was a very sound way, a very interesting way for Gadamer to address the problem, and
partly it has to do just with the power of human imagination. Take Hegel’s lectures on what was
going on in Greek tragedy for example. You could say “well, Hegel’s notion of determinate
negation and incompatible options in a practice as we see it in Antigone for example. This way of
thinking about it is of course not part of the Greek form of self-understanding”. But perhaps Hegel’s
approach os a way of understanding them better than they understood themselves.
Brandom has a nice distinction between interpretation de dicto and interpretation de re.
Interpretation de dicto is: you find out what the philosopher as a historical person would have been
committed to, which propositions he would have agreed with and which ones he would have
disagreed with. Interpretation de re – to go to your question – is: you can also speculate on what a
philosopher, giving what he was committed to, ought to be committed to when some expression in a
new language and a new form of thought is introduced. So, while it is not possible for somebody in
antiquity to approach a question formulated in Hegelian terms, it is perfectly possible to try to
imagine, give what they were committed to, what they would say, should say, in a context that is
expressed in terms that they don’t recognize.

L.C. Is there something like this process at work in the Phenomenology of Spirits (especially
from Chapter 6 on, as you conceive it)?

R.P. Yes, I think for sure. People often overinterpret Hegel on this point. I don’t think he is
saying that the main, chief principle or actual historical motor of change is conceptual difficulties in
exchanges of reasons, but he is trying to show that in some cases, some phenomena can best
interpreted – that is just inference to the best explanation – by appeal to the breakdown of a certain
kind of practice of mutual justification. One can only do that retrospectively, and in the sort of
careful way we have just been talking about, sensitive to the peculiar preset position of the age one
is thinking of, and one can’t do it prospectively, it is not a predictive science, it’s just that
reflectively we can try to figure out why after about 5000 years of human civilization, gender-
based division of labor finally became less credible.

L.C. Hegel speaks (notably at the end of the Phenomenology) of Erinnerung in this context, a
term you mention only occasionally.

R.P. I think it is a metaphor. Literally, memory, historical memory, right now, of the Greeks,
would mean we had experienced the Greeks and they were in our memory. So it is a metaphor. The
idea of Geist as having a memory is a metaphor. There is no person, who lives through the Greek
period and then is leaving through our period; Hegel says “let’s think it as if there were a person”,
and let’s think of it as if it had an actual memory of what it used to do. So it does not seem me a
helpful metaphor, because it can be very confusing. So I just preferred to talk about “reflective
justification”.

L.C. Through which procedures do we determine the content of our particular norms?

R.P. Let’s take an example Hegel did not talk about, that interest me quite a lot, because I have
to give next February [2011] tha Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt and I am working on this problem.
Hegel died in 1831, so he died before the eruption in visual art, in painting, of modernism.
Now, Manet, given his dept to people like Velasquez and painters of prior generations, did not
just arbitrarily say: “let’s paint with the paint more visible, and let’s evaluate paintings on criteria
other than their similitude, likeness to the original”. But when he painted his Exécution de
Maximilien by the firing squad, when he was finished, he took the brush, and he dipped it in some
red paint, and between the legs of one of the shooters, he just put a red slash, on the painting. Now,
he didn’t say : “by this act, alone, I want to create a new norm in painting”. But in the response to
Manet – with the emergence of impressionism, the emergence of post-impressionism and cubism,
abstract-art – a new form of normative authority for paintings was created, not based on beauty, or
on veresimilitude. And it might be that it has nothing to with the invention of photography or the
need, as if painting just had to sell-itself because it needed a new marketing tactic. So if we take that
as example of a new norm being created, one cannot really identify a process of actual negotiation,
deliberation and choice. One has to be able to trace back various usually very small and at the time
unnoticed alterations, deficiencies, dissatisfactions, some tensions in some practice in a way. I know
that I am very influenced by Michael Fried on this: the crisis of pictorial credibility centering
around the notion of absorption, that Diderot first identified. Well, you cannot really understand, if
you are Hegelian, what emerges with Manet and afterwards without going all the way back to the
18th century, to Diderot and the problem within painting that Diderot first tried to identify, with
gallery painting in the Salons of the 18th century. So it is not possible see things as if you and I were
sitting here thinking what norms should we have, that’s not the way it happens. The way it does
happen is intensely complicated.
The French Revolution was in this sense an historical accident. They had no idea they were
starting the French revolution, they just said: “let’s go over there to the tennis court and write up
something about this”. So the French Revolution, this Monumental World historical event was, so
to speak, a mistake; things simply got out of hand. But what we made of the mistake (and perhaps
what we made of the tragic catastrophe for the first fifty years of it) made a new political world. But
there was not a legislated assembly that said: “let’s make the modern political world”. So this only
occurs in situ, in the time and the place and under the pressure of some particular crisis, problem,
tension. It is under the pressure of that, that various options emerge and some of them actually have
a historical actuality at a time. The other option is to say something like “modern paining is just a
kind, it is nothing but a kind of arbitrary veer in history”, some people invented a new way of doing
things, that caught on, and it has no significance beyond that. That would be a possible position, it
could be a kind of historical positivism: it is just a fact, people became attracted to a fad in the way
they become attractive to wearing a certain style of pants; there’s no deep significance to it
whatsoever. But if you believe that about painting, and music, you might believe it about politics,
about religion, about the Reformation.
I cannot give you a transcendental argument for the necessity of meaning in history, but that
seems to me too simple. To decide not to try to make sense out of how we’ve become who we’ve
become, and just chock all up to a kind of accident one speaks of when one speaks of droughts or
floods or earthquakes or natural disasters or one damn thing after another, saying that there is no
meaning in any of that. One could say the same thing about these new moments of new legislative
authority, in history, but I just do not think that is right. I think, the proof is in the details, and Hegel
seems to me to make more sense out of (say) the history of painting, than anybody has ever made.
And in a way the proof of it is, he inaugurated the way we study art, we study art now as art-history,
thanks to Hegel.

L.C. Richard Rorty wrote, reviewing one of your books: “Robert Pippin is engaged in an
ambitious project. He hopes to convince us that we have not yet gotten to the bottom of Hegel”. 20
years after the publication of Hegel’s idealism this challenge seems to have been quite successful.
How do you see the future of philosophy (both Anglophone and not), and of his interest in Hegel?
You know Hegelians never look to the future, always look to the past. So, I am much happier
talking about the past. But it is extremely encouraging. I know from refereeing some books that are
going to appear in the next two years that there are some extremely good books about to appear on
topics like Hegel’s philosophy of mind and Hegel’s philosophy of action. I think particularly in the
area of Hegel’s philosophy of action (our mode of mindedness in an action), Hegel’s opposition to
causal theory of action – to a Davidsonian theory of action, to a Cartesian theory or to a Kantian
theory of action – all gives him a unique position in the contemporary discussion on what is human
agency, what distinguishes between something we do and something that happens to us, a very
powerful modern problem. I think there are some works coming out now that are going to be very
good, like Christopher Yeoman’s new book. I think there are some people in Germany who are
working with a kind of Hegelian eyes on a Kantian approach to the problem of thought and action,
like Sebastian Rödl in Leipzig. So this connection with Neo-Aristotelianism, coming out of people
like Anscombe and Michael Thompson, as well as the German reaction to and development of that,
by people like Rödl, is going to be very important in the next 20 years, for that generation of
philosophers. And in America, the number of dissertations and very good books being written that
are not, if I can put it this way, the old school of historical interpretation of historical figures like
Hegel – trying to paraphrase, to repeat: “Hegel believed this, believed that, he believed this he
believes that” and the terminology is very closed to Hegel’s, so people talk about concepts popping
out of other concepts, and turning themselves into another concepts, because Hegel sometimes talks
that way – is increasing. There are a lot of people now trying to make something philosophically out
of Hegel, without distorting him or anachronising him, or something like this. This drives the
traditional scholars crazy, because they do not recognize that terminology in the actual Hegel, and
they say “how can you find this here, it doesn’t say anything about that”. But that wave of a more
philosophical-historical interpretation, asking what can we make out of this, what we can use, has
now gained a very solid foothold, and there will be more work on that regard, so I am optimistic
about that. Mind you, I should say, the study of German philosophy, even as a live philosophical
option, in the United States is a very very tiny part of the large powerful schools of thought that are
predominant in the top 15 research universities, the top graduate programs. That is true not just of
Hegel but of Kant scholarship as well. I don’t want to start naming universities but there are lot of
places where there are no Kant scholars, or Hegel scholars or German Idealism scholars or
Heidegger people. In effect most of them. Chicago is a huge exception, Pittsburgh is a big
exception, most of the big graduate program do not have anybody working in this tradition of
German philosophy. I mean on the East-coat there are a lot of people who pay no attention to
McDowell or Brandom. So people sometime think because these books on Hegel are coming out in
English the situation in America must be very different. It is not. It is not very different.
Contemporary American philosophy has at its more prestigious peak philosophy of mind – largely
influenced by contemporary neuroscience – and very complicated issues in metaphysics and
philosophy of language, heavily indebted to people like David Lewis. So, what I think has changed,
is that the work that is being done on German philosophy is much better work, but it is still a tiny
little sliver of the top echelon work. Most graduate students in the top five programs aside from
Chicago and Pittsburgh wouldn’t study any Kant or Hegel. Much less Nietzsche or Heidegger.

L.C. In Europe people have a different impression.


R.P. Yes I know. One hears things like “Everybody is reading Hegel in America”. It is not true.
I mean, one must remember that Richard Rorty was in the Comparative Literature Department in
Stanford, he was not accepted by the Department of Philosophy, was not even extended a courtesy
appointment.

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