EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

Iain Macdonald suggests that, in spite of their differences, Adorno and Heidegger are alike in advancing what he calls critiques of actuality and “models of redemptive possibility.” I argue that that similarity is superficial in light of the difference between their conceptions of actuality and possibility. For Adorno, as for the metaphysical tradition since Aristotle, possibility and necessity are defined in terms of actuality. The privileging of actuality, Heidegger maintains, foregrounds entities and obscures the question of being.

In his book The Culmination, Pippin leaves no doubt that he still thinks that German Idealism has achieved a level of understanding and radicality that makes its proponents the best conversational partners to develop an understanding of what philosophy is about. It is the question of the very possibility of understanding that comes to be at the center of their writings and informs every page. Yet this radicality is now seen in a different light. It is now conceived as a culmination, not of an understanding that comes to itself but of a misunderstanding that informs, unavoidably, Western philosophical tradition as a whole. The resources for the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong in the conception of what it is to be a being that is able to know anything at all Pippin finds most vividly and forcefully articulated in Heidegger. I will argue that there is something profoundly true about Pippin's idea that, at the bottom of any knowledge we have of ourselves and the world, there is something that Heidegger calls Stimmung, which is essentially non-discursive. However, I will argue that to defend the latter thought, one has to read Heidegger's notion of Stimmung in a more radical way than Pippin seems to be willing to.

Robert Pippin has long defended the Hegelian ‘satisfactions of self-consciousness’ against virtually all attacks, including Heidegger's. He now concedes in a striking reversal that ‘Heidegger is right’. Pippin diagnoses his past allegiance to the Western rationalist tradition culminating in Hegel as resting on ‘a misplaced confidence in the inescapably self-reflective character of any orientation or attunement to the meaningfulness of Being’. What were once the satisfactions of self-consciousness have become its dissatisfactions. But does Pippin's presentation of the rationalist position ultimately make it too easy for Heidegger to topple it? Will the rationalist impulse, interpreted more charitably, rest undisturbed by Pippin's Heideggerian challenge? I identify three assumptions Pippin's Heidegger makes about the role of reason in our orientation towards the world. If these assumptions are considered not only optional but falsifying by any sound rationalist, this will damage the power of Pippin's Heidegerrian critique. For it is only against the background of a credible picture of the presence of reason in human life that the dissatisfactions of self-consciousness can emerge to reveal a genuine alternative.

In The Culmination, Robert Pippin offers a stunning reassessment of the achievements of absolute idealism. Having developed some of the most persuasive defenses of Hegel's absolute idealism to date, Pippin now argues that Heidegger's trenchant critique of Hegel has revealed a dogmatism at the very heart of absolute idealism: an unwarranted identification of what is with what is discursively knowable. This dogmatic identification leads to a distorted understanding of the meaning of Being, a reifying account of beings, and a neglect of our own finitude. In this article, I defend Hegel against these charges. The upshot of this discussion is twofold. Rather than evading the question of the exteriority of being, I argue, Hegel in fact aims to reveal that this exteriority is internal to thinking itself. And rather than identifying the meaning of being with discursive knowability, Hegel shows that the meaning of being resides in a form of freedom that goes beyond the self-transparency of knowing.

In what follows, I present my replies to Nicholas Walker, Taylor Carman, and Peter Gordon's reflections on my What Would Be Different? Figures of Possibility in Adorno. I begin by summarizing what is at stake in the book. My reply to Nicholas Walker and Taylor Carman focusses on Adorno's criticisms of Heidegger, who claims that the history of metaphysics has blocked our access to an “other beginning” for thinking. This prepares the ground for a comparison of Adorno's and Heidegger's notions of what I call “blocked possibility.” My reply to Peter Gordon clarifies the relation of “blocked possibility” to actuality and, more specifically, to the actuality of happiness in Adorno's writings.