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Philosophical Problem (changes)

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A selective but careful lineage of modern philosophy arranged around fate of the idea of self-determination and self-creation: in reaction to religion and Scholasticism, rigorous program of rational skepticism; then it asks itself how reason is made possible; then becomes critique of self-consciousness and possible meaninglessness of world.

Preface

Poststructural critique largely a “repetition” of modernism’s doubt about normative claims of modernization (Nietzsche, Heidegger)
- Failed signifier, death of the subject, anti-humanism familiar, not new
Development of modern liberal democratic society and modern science and tech “slowly and inexorably enervating and spiritually destroying that very culture” (xii)
Modernity as “not what it claims to be” (xiii)
- But how much did it really fail? he asks, looking to re-tell the story of modernist philosophy to undo some of the distortions and bring out some “shadowy figures” into the light
Central theme: individual subjectivity, autonomy of the self, self-determination of identity
- Modernism’s urge to self-consciousness and will has not been appreciated properly or accurately investigated
- People have seen Marx, Freud, Nietzsche as showing limits on subjectivity
Subject must be…
- Self-reflective (“for itself”)
- Critical
How is this different from traditional claims of rationality?
- It isn’t seen as natural, part of human nature
- Not seen to advance the collective whole, human as in the right place
- Humans imposing the norms on themselves (not natural or dictated from above)
The distinctly modernist problem: how can a subject be determined and free? In the world and of the world? (xvi)
Pippin’s Method: looking at philosophy, rather than cultural context or economic context (ie, ignoring Marx, Adorno, Lukacs) b/c philosophers are an “economic” way to address modernism’s problems

Introduction

Modernity: “origination” during 16th/17th c
- Did it really determine itself, really novel, something really diff?
  - Novels show people trying but failing to self-originate, or political/social forms of origination “nowhere fully realized” (115), so we turn to art for a place where it could really happen (risking claims of its merely formal play, emptiness, sterility, exhaustion)
- Western European Christian tradition growing gradually (not immediate chronological start date) and even from the start being contested and debated
- When the word “modern” began to mean not just “this moment as distinct from others,” not just “now” instead of “then,” but instead more as a distinct novelty: a new beginning, a new way of life
- Early Renaissance and optimism over humanism and Western achievement
  - By end of 17th century, we have belief in superiority of modern over ancient
  - The claims of the early moderns are often fantastically overstated and exaggerated, impossibly utopian; often just secularized Christian narratives of progress, but that doesn’t hold true for all modernity
    - Such critiques are continued in later objections to modernity’s claims
- Descartes: his radical doubt is cornerstone argument against received knowledge, common sense, and authority: things are not what they seem, appearances are dream-like
  - As modern: reject all received notions and start anew, and rely on yourself only
  - His reliance on method is his salvation from doubt: we can reconnect with the real if you use method
  - The cogito puts self-awareness at base of all knowledge (self-reflection)
  - Relies on clarity and distinctness
  - Problem of Descartes: but is the knowledge you get from method what we really need to know?
- 18th c French Enlightenment philosophes (Diderot, Condorcet): master nature by math and science, chastened understanding of the powers of knowledge, progress and social benefit via knowledge, medicine, and politics
  - Because they compete with traditional and religious morals, especially the goals of those morals it becomes a Big Deal
  - Argument against this modernity from perspective of tradition/ancient wisdom: you’re being vulgarly materialistic, catering to the gross needs and desires of man, and you have too much faith in the power of tech: the “floating, sterile” world of Swift’s Laputa 21); hubristic and willful; ends up in society of sheep!
(Aesthetic) Modernism: a specific and very illustrative example of the general, growing recognition that the benefits of modern Western culture might not be so great after all
Modernity
- Benefits: wealth, cosmopolitanism, urban development, sophisticated science, liberty
- Drawbacks: pointless lives with naive, class-based, repressive tendencies
- Result: dissatisfaction, disbelief in progress
Autonomy: his main theme
- True self-determination: is it possible?
- Maybe it’s not possible or desirable
Key figures: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger
Modernity: its key features, which modernism will begin to doubt
- Nation-state (with expanding representation, common language and culture, end of local authorities)
- Ascendency of use of Reason, rather than Church or tradition
  - Authority of natural sciences
  - “Demystification” (no more magic, all science)
- Belief in individual rights
- Market economy
  - Wage labor
  - Urbanization
  - Private property
- Man as improvable (progress)
- Art: end of classical models
- Life is getting better.
- Control nature, don’t contemplate it (don’t moon about! Cartesian.)
- Enlightenment self-understanding
Caveat: of course, some tradish structures still maintain some actual authority
End of 19th century, people questioning value of these “achievements”
- “Ideology critiques, psychological unmaskings, ‘death of God’ theologies, aesthetic experimentation, and various dismantlings and revolutions” (6)
- Idea Group 1: Beginning with Baudelaire and up to Nietzsche, they present human limitations: can’t really know self, can’t really self-fashion
  - “Superficial optimism” (6) generated by political and scientific achievements is dangerous
  - Modern world “had not been modern enough” (6) and needed less morality from Kant and Christianity, and more novelty and experimentation
- Idea Group 2: Freud, Weber, Marcuse, Bellow: modernity is “spiritual disaster” of routinization that cannot be undone
To Philosophy
- Modern philosophers beginning to asses, doubt, reformulate, or even debunk claims of Enlightenment philosophers, esp their ideas about “rationality and subjectivity” (9)
  - Beginning w/German Idealism (Kant, Hegel) and going through to the big responders to it (Nietzsche, Heidegger)
Modernity itself was a break w/intellectual tradish
- And yet the moderns slowly understand that they too could be guilty of what they thought the pre-moderns were: bad science, prejudice, faulty thinking, etc

Kant

First tried to “determine, without appeal to foundations or origins or institutions, the conditions for the very possibility of knowledge and self-determining agency” (116) to see the limits and its possibilities of autonomy
First “thoroughgoing” philosophical modernist
- Positioned against theological, empirical, and rationalistic philosophy
- Critical philosophy: self-conscious, sees itself, accounts for itself
- Dogmatism bad
His own hesitance: reason will never fully overcome self-interest, so he substitutes legality for morality
Autonomy:
- Not the autonomy of naturalists (ie, freedom to satisfy your needs)
- Not the autonomy of Romantics (ie, personal authenticity)
- Self-rule by controlling all urges that are not rational: control yourself, take out all the passions
  - The condition: act as if you are imposing universal rule when you decide your behavior
- This is the main point of contention: is autonomy about controlling yourself for the sake of Reason?
Reason
- Legislative, rule-making
Critique of Pure Reason
- Neither metaphysics nor empiricism
  - Against Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, Locke, Hume
- Instead, knowledge judged by self alone
  - Nature, religion, tradish, not the beginning of knowledge: the thinker is
  - This is Kant’s modernism
- Rationality is the only way to know, via criticism (self-consciousness)
- Admits it’s limited: will never know actual nature of reality
- Replaces old philosophical topics with a new one: the self-determining subject
Why care about independence all of the sudden?
- “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)
- Main points
  - Dares you to have courage to think for yourself
  - Social conditions of freedom, esp. of thought, create preconditions for people to become enlightened
  - It is man’s “sacred right” and duty to do this
- You must have freedom of thought before you can claim, discover, or create anything
  - Even though you can never with 100% confidence say you’re free
  - Even though we will never know things-in-themselves
Transcendental philosophy
- His kind of philosophy
- Humans already act with self-determination, so you must first realize that you have already been self-determining
Not allowed to refer to authority like metaphys or religion to back up claims (that’s dogma)
- This will be a strand in the rest of modern philosophy: “spontaneity” of subject, not determined nature
Empirical knowledge through senses and experiences, plus the a priori concepts that alone account for the creation of a continuously experiencing subject (time, space, substance, causality).
- These “subjective conditions” make impossible knowledge of things-in-themselves
- The knowable is only via science, empirical knowledge
Beyond the knowable: Non-empirical knowledge also possible
- It shows how the “knowable” is even possible, which science can’t explain
- Philosophy is the domain of this activity: not finding out the nature of things, but the conditions of understanding nature of things
  - Called the “Copernican turn”
  - Destroys Cartesian subject-object duality problem b/c we are only trying to understand the rules of “reliable representation” (53), that is the rules of how the mind works, showing that the object only is an object because of the activities of the subject thinking: we only want to know about those mental conditions
Subjective conditions of mind show that mind is already self-determining, not passive
- Actively shapes what “passes into” the mind
- Mind determines what counts as evidence
Critical
- Must be able to justify your claims, to criticize any claim to knowledge
Understanding
- “discriminating, synthesis, and classification of the directly apprehended sensory manifold” (55)
Reason
- “faculty responsible for the large-scale integration of discriminated or synthesized experiences into some interconnected system” (55)
- The faculty that “commands nature,” legislating it, not “begging” nature (55)
- “pure self-activity,” says Kant (qtd. 55), not just “sensibility,” (ie, not dependent on the sensed) and what separates man from the animals
- Reason = seat of autonomy
Philosophy
- Concerned not w/nature of things, but rules and principles by which mind organizes sense data, creates experiences, and judges (the “subjective conditions” of knowledge)
Problems with Kant
- Doesn’t that mean the self is groundless, rather than self-grounded?
  - Fichte tried to solve that problem while staying within idealism, but couldn’t
- You can’t prove or defend those “subjective conditions”
- Claim that all subjects use same subjective conditions could be dogmatism
- But how do you decide between the conditions your mind already had and the ones that you actively chose for yourself?
  - How could it be called free to act in the ways you are compelled to by the subjective conditions of your mind?
- If you’re truly free, why would you necessarily come to the conclusion that you should be rational? Doesn’t really sound free, but sounds like another law to follow
Freedom
- Not in following and satisfying your desires/passions (the common modern idea of individuality
- Not in finding your unique, authentic self (romantic idea of individuality)
- Not in finding your role in the world (classic idea of individuality)
- But instead, in being free to choose your behavior and knowledge according to rational law, not bound to anything else
Significance for modernity
- Need to justify yourself, not hide behind authority
- Refusal to be deceived, attitude of finding out for yourself
- Demanded full self-determination yet realized the limitations of doing so
- Thematic link between Kant’s self-grounding mind and modernism’s self-referentiality
- Can’t base reason on “nature, substance, or Being” (59), just as artists begin to refuse modeling art on nature (ie, “representational ideals”)
- Introduces the theme, can we truly create ourselves?
  - “Emergence of counter-ideal of artistic, rather than philosophic or rational, autonomy” (60)

Hegel

Habermas: “the first philosopher…for whom modernity became a problem” (176)

Thematizes self-consciousness
Critique of Kant
- Reason can no longer justify itself, so it is actually not grounded after all
- Leads to pure belief in empirical, nothing else
- Instead of ditching Kant, he “radicalizes” Kant even further by showing how self is grounded in itself
- Showed how autonomy is actually grounded in history and collectivity
Absolute Freedom
- This is Hegel’s principle of modernity
- “the world is the product of the freedom of the intelligence” (64) (in 1801 essay Difference)
- “absolute” = not just subjective, not imported from the outside
Absolute Spirit
- The “infinitely self-determining Absolute Subject…progressively becoming more self-conscious and so more adequately self-determining in time, all in a way somehow connected with the development of human cultural and political history” (65)
- Also points to fact that we are less talking about a particular person than about human collectivity over time (historical unfolding)
  - Shared collectivity! Cool (67), a leftover from his early interest in the folk religions of Greece, which he thought were nifty b/c seemed self-determined by each community
  - Communities are defined by these views, their self-understanding and knowledge of their own values (67)
- Over time: not exactly Kant’s spontaneity
  - Organizing concepts are not a given (as w/Kant), but instead a process over time of trial and error: they are produced over time, in historical context
  - When explanations break down, new ones are made
  - MY QUESTION: Can we make a parallel between the mistakes of social Darwinists (ie, takes a neutral causal line of change and turns it into one of progress) and the mistaken understanding of Hegel, or even Hegel’s misunderstanding of his own process (ie, the actual process doesn’t guarantee true progress, just change)?
Pippin’s Summary
- “collective, progressive, historical self-determination” (68)
- Means that there are no rules! no “basic argument” or “evaluative criterion,” but must be dialectical, not logical
- Not just about intellectual thought, but politics and economics too are a part of the progress of the Spirit
Significance for Modernity
- Hegel doesn’t see progress of Spirit as a new thing, ie, modernity is not a radical break
  - Modernity is just the beginning of the dawn of final self-consciousness
- Shares with the modernist novel a recognition that self-determination occurs within “complex collective and historical setting” (71)
- His claim that institutions of society have been progressively developed (and getting better) is hard to swallow for modernists, as well as the obligation to see them as the product of thought
- Moves away from metaphysics and gets to method
Hegel’s History
- It gives Kant’s transcendence an historical base (not subject base)
- “dialectically and progressively self-transforming” (73): teleology
  - Used to defend “bourgeois family, civil society, the modern nation state, idealist philosophy, Protestant Christianity, romantic art” (74)
- Objections: it’s not progressive; it’s not continuous or whole (must admit contingent, the purposeless)
  - Pippin’s rebuttals: Hegel never guaranteed actual progress (Science of Logic, he called it “the illusory show of purposeless mutability” 75; the telos is actually self-awareness of this process, not any concrete “goal” that process will supposedly lead to) or said that everything is related to this process (only the “basic structure of reality” is involved here, not the entire collection of human events 74); plus, you forgot the role of the negative in Hegel’s system
Negation
- Only way to reach “repose” is “in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes that opposition, in it meeting with itself” (75)
- You need self-consciousness to defend ideas rationally, so you must go through the negative to do so (Hegel solves all problems by saying, you need more self-consciousness 76-7)
What Hegel is Really Interested In
- Not any one interpretive framework (ie, economic, biologic, utilitarian), but instead interested in the historical process of changing standards for judgment (ie, what categories are we cutting the world up by?)

Nietzsche

Keywords: diagnosis, genealogy (“a way of showing how such ideals actually arose as a response to a specific social situation,” hence “local” and “contingent,” not of any inherent worth but growth of history 83), greatest thoughts, beyond good and evil, the possibility of value, self-overcoming, age of the last men (no one looking beyond “man,” in TSZ no arrow shot beyond man), noble (decide for themselves what is good and who they should be; seizing rights rather than waiting for them)
Rejects the previous philosophers
- Hegel’s main opponent
- Refuses Kant’s idealism (self-determination)
- They are naive and dogmatic themselves
- Idealism still dogmatic, Nietzsche claims, quite “atavistic” (77)
Herd society = failure of independence of modern subjects
- “Slavish pity,” “abject dependence on one another,” lost in “routinizing mass society” (105)
- Caring about others’ opinions
Modernity as Historical Period
- “No radical, modern origination” (79) (modernity was no radical break) (anti Descartes)
- Modernity does not represent successful telos of earlier periods or a progression from them (anti Hegel)
  - Modernity: Western culture, long-brewing, about to collapse, become “herd society,” yield to nihilism
Nihilism
- Result of having lost faith in cultural values, losing sight of goals and losing confidence
- “Existence has no goal or end” (The Will to Power)
- No unity of events
- “the character of existence is false” (86), no belief that the world is true, real
- Valuelessness
- “the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability,” with “failure of desire” because the highest values “have devalued themselves” (81): ideals now worthless (ie, death of God, “twilight of the idols”)
- “nihilism stands at the door” (The Will to Power)
  - symptoms: a general cultural pessimism, incl. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, himself, l’art pour l’art, Schopenhauer, phenomenology, Buddhism, “the religion of pity” (86)
- Real identity of nihilists and atheists: they are just idealists, too, still ascetics b/c “they still have faith in truth” (Genealogy of Morals)
- Instead, try “active nihilism:” “an expression of the uselessness of the modern world – not of the world of existence” (102)
  - Thus, modern nihilism could also be a sign of progress, that we are coming closer to active nihilism
What’s Wrong with the Western Tradition?
- Nietz not just mad at modernity, but also tradish of the Greeks and Christianity, b/c their “pursuit of the ideal” is false and has “disastrous consequences” (95)
- What’s so bad about Plato?
  - Ideal forms say that the real world is somewhere else, not here
- What’s so bad about being like Christianity?
  - ressentiment
  - slave mentality
  - asceticism
  - self-denial
  - weakness (79)
  - Makes you ignore life now
  - Good Side: it did give you a reason for life: “to redeem it, justify living to ourselves” and find purpose (94)
What’s Wrong with Modernity?
- General Characteristics
  - too content with itself, “conformist, timid” and settles for inferior values like peace and security (87)
  - permanently asleep, “lazy,” “thoughtless” (87)
  - don’t have any goals or plans for creation (88)
- Lost touch with its own good roots, esp the social/communitarian ones
  - No longer care about values that themselves prompted the creation of modern institutions (Twilight of the Idols)
  - “One lives for today, one lives very fast – one lives very irresponsible: it is precisely this which one calls ‘freedom’.” (ibid)
  - “All of us are no longer material for a society.” (The Gay Science) (88)
  - Modern ideals weakening: “liberty, equality, moral duty, selflessness,” etc (89), as well as “natural right, the state, humanity, science, reason” (89)
- Nietzsche’s “great distaste with modern banality, vulgarity, and kitsch” (82)
- The modern is “physiological self-contradiction” (81)
  - We have been trained to look for certain ideals, but we don’t see them anywhere, and no one seems to value them anymore (89)
  - You still will and act, but you can’t affirm it: sick, enervated, weak, skeptical
- Modernity’s morality
  - Prompted by need to “revenge” against time (transitoriness of life)
  - It’s about to collapse: “morality will gradually perish now” (GM)
    - Why? B/c we’re becoming conscious of our “will to truth,” realizing that everything is only an interpretation, not real truth: only what will be “formulable and calculable for us” (Will to Power) (“we cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’” 95)
  - It’s the herd morality: does whatever everyone else does
  - Looks just for the safe bets that won’t rock the boat
  - Can’t abide anyone “above” them (resents the “strong or independent creators of value” (90)
  - In wake of losing faith in God to justify morals, creates vacuum (how should we determine our morality?) and seeks refuge in lowest common denominator (90)
- All its institutions really just Christianity (or Platonism) in a new outfit (79): “the vast metaphysical and moral-psychological system that had to be created to justify the moral point of the view favorable to the slave” (94)
  - Examples
    - modern science
    - liberal democratic politics
    - Romanticism
    - humanism
    - socialism
    - “free thinking”
    - the inviolable soul (Pippin: “untouchable by the master’s power” 94)
    - conscience
    - “life-denying” practices (94) (that is, they make you think of some goal beyond or above, transcending life, rather than thinking about life now)
    - Wagner
  - The claims to universality and reason are just Christian slave mentality (no one can be better than me): does not really “represent the universal interests of mankind,” but instead a contingent strategy by which the weak herd ward off the power of the strong
  - The results are grave: “self-denying, repressive conformism, again providing social harmony at the price of stultification, anomie, and tedium” (90)
    - anomie: social restlessness because personal values have eroded (Durkheim phrase for normlessness, used by Pippin here)
  - Even “ever growing authority of natural sciences” (90) are a part of this reversion b/c they appeal to universal laws applicable to all
Modern “Independence”
- Really is a disguised version of dependence
- Really just shows a fear of independence
True Independence (ie, N believes we need better independence, not a new goal entirely)
- Active
- Affirmation
- Self-overcoming
- Perspectivism
- Creating your own values (and your own names for them), not accepting them
Says N is hermeneutic
- Focuses on meaning, interpretation, significance
- Doesn’t really have a formal method; no general theory applied
- Will remain a dispute; can’t be decisively proven one way or another; can’t prove it w/evidence like w/science: issue stays open
  - “it ought to be read as having such a meaning” (84)
- Your conclusions don’t shut the door to other possible ones (not exhaustive)
- Uses etymology, texts, and art to prove argument
- “Not for any fact” but for “some compelling and persuasive re-description” (84)
- N called it his “perspectivism”
- Interpreting: all sense-making structures are contingent, self-made, not anchored in any moral good or in the “truth;” but that’s okay because you demolish the possibility of the “true” world once you also kill the sting of the word “apparent” (103): it is only flux
His genealogy is a way of accounting for the conditions behind the making of meaning
- His concerns thus overlap with Kant, Hegel
Is it just regressive elitism, nostalgia for aristocracy, Pippin asks (91)?
To what extent can you self-create?
- Nietzsche shows “interplay” between need for autonomy and the recognition of its limits (93)
“Pathos of distance”
- Noble distance from herd
Not an idealist
- Doesn’t believe that there is some real out there that we’re barred from (Kant)
- Believing in the “real” world beyond us is just a strategy invented by people to control you
Still, he has firm ideas
- Not just a tolerant pluralist
Will to Power
- Sometimes implies: In the world, the only “efficient force” is this, and we should recognize it as such
- But everywhere else, Nietz denies and scoffs at possibility of seeing only one force, of pretending to see the world clearly
- Will to power for Pippin assoc with interpretation
  - Things are because we have made them such, not because we found them that way (98)
  - “interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something” (98) (Will to Power)
  - Remember, interpretation is not a methodology
Pippin: don’t see Nietzsche as just an artist or aesthete
- Nehamas wrote the book on it
- Sure, Nietzsche said “artistic metaphysics” and “aesthetic justification of existence” (100), but that’s not the whole story, or else we wouldn’t have any standard of judgment by which to appreciate role of aesthetic interp in life
Autonomy and social
- Nietzsche realizes need for “form of substantive social unity” or “reconciliation” (103) that will still allow autonomy
- Do the independent rule? Yes, but because of who they are: it’s not that you are “entitled” (Pippin 106) by your personality, but that what makes that personality makes you rule already
  - This seems to accord with Gerald Crich in Women in Love, perhaps as distinct from Thornton in North and South (“strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form,” making people “incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds, seriously for very long” 107; the indifference to others, “desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction” that does seem like Thornton; all from GM)
- Yet, Pippin notes how the noble person is dependent upon others b/c requires them to be a negative of them and requires them to recognize you as such (eg Hegel’s self-consciousnesses seeking mutual recognition)
  - Nietzsche wants autonomy, but sometimes slips and shows the barriers to doing so, shows how it often results in self-deception
    - TSZ shows cycle of going up to mountain (independence) and down to the town (social): he has to have both
- Shows possibility of “a much more direct and unmediated sociality” not dependent on universal truths or repression of the human (111): but won’t say it could happen or how, just points to the option
Affirmation
- Despite our rejection of Christianity, Nietzsche says, “The hidden yes in you is stronger than all the no’s and perhaps from which you and your age are sick; and if you have to sail the seas, you wanderer, something also compels you to do so – a faith” (Gay Science 159)
Eternal Return of the Same
- “senseless, non-progressive cycle…itself of no intrinsic or historical significance” (109)
- affirmation: the standard, as asked in TSZ: if everything you did, said, thought, and felt would be repeated forever and ever, would you be happy? * Pippin shows that being able to be happy about it suggests a way out of negative modernity, a “consolation” wherein modernity isn’t just loss (154): “purposiveness” regained where you can be content with “infinite repetition” (156)
  - Yet he also shows that Nietzsche doesn’t actually show you how to do that….sigh
- TSZ: Once the soothsayer tells Zarathustra about it, Z gets sick, stops talking about the Overman completely and stops trying to attract disciples
Style: to avoid being dogmatic: it’s a “style” not a truth (112)
- Irony
- Masks: creation of multiple Nietzsches
- Inconsistency
- Obscurity
- Playfulness
- Self-referentiality
- Despite this style, argues Pippin, you can’t retreat into the idea that Nietzsche himself is showing the “always-changing modern era itself” (112)
Nietzsche’s failure: use of metaphors of “civilizational failure” (like the “gravedigger” episode in the Gay Science pronouncing the death of God) (which say that modernization is loss) “shadow and finally undermine his affirmative project” (145)
- “God is dead:” Nietzsche said to read it as “that the belief in the CHristian God has become unworthy of belief” (148)
  - Pippin says that N doesn’t want to say, “God is dead,” or say that the death of God is modernity; but instead it’s the fact that you state that God is dead is the problem, the symptom (so that N is actually demonstrating with the madman gravedigger character the “melancholic pathology” Freud talks about in “Mourning and Melancholy,” where narcissistically, it is the self that is mourned and where you have a sense of guilt that you killed the person, in this case God)
- Thus, Pippin says N is not the go-to person to describe the general feeling of fin-de-siecle b/c N wants a ”’non-melancholic’ reaction to the death of God” (154) so you can be happy and lighthearted about it
- “his theory of the past…still reflects an agonistic, oppositional sense of present possibilities” (157) (only talks about defeating something, nothing continuing)
- Overall, N sounds like “false or hollow bravado, a whistling in the dark” (157)
  - Note the inherent contradiction of saying that you can create something new, yet saying that you have been cured of Enlightenment folly (ie, that folly was just the mistake of thinking you could self-create): creating something new was just what the Enlightenment wanted

Heidegger

“formulated the most profound, disturbing, and influential criticism of such a modern spirit” (118)
- By critiquing Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Nietzsche (the last of whom is actually the best example of nihilism and who hasn’t gone far enough in his formulations of how to escape nihilism)
What Heidegger is known for
- critiques theories of representation
- emphasis on engagement: “practical absorption” in real world (142)
- use of hermeneutics
- dubious attitude towards language
Refuses Kant’s idealism (self-determination)
- All these folks, incl. Nietzsche, are deluded by their subjectivism
- They have forgotten Being
  - Except Nietzsche’s “To impose upon becoming the character of being – that is the supreme will to power.” (98) (Will to Power)
Technology
- “transformation of nature into mere ‘material’ for use by self-defining human agents” (119)
Heidegger Characterizes Modernity
- Science
- Machine technology
- Art as aesthetics
- Concept of “culture”
- “Loss of gods”
- Method: “the security of a repeatable means of achieving reliable results” (119)
World Picture: the most significant feature of modernity, showing modernity’s metaphysical significance
- What is it?
  - Being as representation
  - Knowledge is seen to require representation, so “being” is seen s the result of representation
  - “transforms that which is into object” (reification?) (in H’s essay “The Word of Nietzsche”)
- What does it do?
  - Makes modernity “the age of consummate meaninglessness” (119)
  - It makes you forget huge swaths of Being or completely break up the structure of being
Pippin’s Conclusion
- Like Nietzsche, Heigedder failed to get beyond modernity

Self-Determination

Two Main Problems: It might be impossible, or undesirable
Impossible
- Reveals how we are contingent, affected by circumstances and by others: mediated, not autonomous
Undesirable
- If you have spontaneous self-determination, you can no longer turn to nature or the natural, and you are unrooted
  - Modernism: desire seen as contingent
  - Thus, liberation is kind of scary: the unstable (b/c not rooted in authority)
  - What are your goals?
  - The Trial shows how heart-rending it is to search for the authorities and never find them
Could lead you to other people
- Hegel and Nietzsche both show how you often start to rely on others once you realize you’re all by yourself
- Nietz: herd mentality
- Hegel: your consciousness has to be accepted, reflected, by another consciousness

Post-Kant, autonomy never meant pure self-sufficiency

Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all admitted to a certain dependence, a dialectical movement between independence and dependence (“reconciliation” with others)
- Hegel: self-consciousness needs to be accepted, recognized within another self-consciousness
- Nietzsche: Zarathustra always going up and down the mountain/cave

Relation to Artistic Modernism

Why care about philosophy for art?
- Modernist art seems to appeal to philosophical concepts b/c artists are pretty self-conscious philosophers themselves
- Without bigger background, talking about modernism or modernity might sound like a “fad” or “driven by aesthetic issues alone” (115)
(Aesthetic) Modernism: a specific and very illustrative example of the general, growing recognition that the benefits of modern Western culture might not be so great after all, esp the negative social effects
- Art seems to be most obvious and urgent example of the larger skepticism over promises of modernity, “most visible and dramatic” (29), esp because during that period, art is seen as a real leader and authority in culture, more so than religion or science or philosophy
  - “Crisis mentality” (39) over state of modernity
    - Problems of modernity seen as inherent in modernity, not an exception, but part of modernity’s full expression (his example, H of D, where Kurtz not an exception but instead efficient example of what all of Europe truly is)
- Modernism as “final attempt to be truly modern,” to create a new way of life that is consistent w/revolutionary aspects of modernity (29), despite their recognition (“dashed hopes”) that the efforts of early moderns had not brought about the good life, the better world (30)
Two Arguments against Existing Modernities
- Human nature not wholly rational (Freud), thus not fully amenable to progress; or other arguments that Enlightenment project is impossible
  - Leads to advocating wholesale rejection and revolution, hence all the Marinetti talk
  - The paradox here, warns Pippin, is that this failed bourgeois world is what makes possible these artistic positions (40): it’s a “grotesquely self-serving illusion” (41) to believe that art has independent perspective (he’s damning Adorno here)
- Modern culture still too pre-modern, to wrapped up in religion and other outdated traditions/moralities instead of fully embracing its superficial secularism
  - Thus, art must regain the best of modernity: novelty, creativity, lack of restraints
Modernism and Self-Determination
- Modernism’s connection with modernity’s self-determination: modernism thinks it’s self-determining, just as modernity thought itself a rupture with classical or ancient cultures
  - Modernism’s attitude reflects modernity’s beliefs about itself (I extrapolated this from pp 40; he doesn’t directly say that)
- “a radical act of imagination, or a complete, aesthetic self-definition, would fully realize the otherwise discredited notion of a ‘free life.’” (30)
  - You can’t be autonomous in real life (either in your thoughts like Kant demanded or in your social life), but you can in art
  - And it’s not a Romantic claim that it would’ve worked in real life if you’d just been a better person, but instead recognition of fundamental impossibility of autonomy in life, and the recognition that even the partial freedoms you might secure have great costs (usually alienation, but on occasion even death) (39)
- Modernist characters consistently become disappointed when they realize they weren’t self-determining (my example: Portrait of Lady)
- Modernism in art seems appealing b/c art is truly autonomous, not like life which pretends to be autonomous but can’t be
Effect of Self-Determination of Art is Crisis
- Loses criteria of evaluating art: why does art matter?
- Creates a “crisis” in which people “affirm its significance by a kind of aestheticization of all perceptual or cognitive issues” (41) so that art will be the best expression of human reality
- Ends in doubt, irony, recognition of contingency of expression/human life
Different Strands of Artistic Modernism (31)
- Literary: emerges from late 18th / early 19th c Romanticism
  - Although it doesn’t follow Romanticism’s Christian redemption narrative or its glorification of nature or see artistic imagination as medium (I think it does, but that’s what Pippin says)
- Visual arts: develops later, w/Manet and Post-Imp
- Music: develops late 19th c (Wagner)
- Architecture: mostly 20th c
Doubt Doesn’t Begin in the Artists Themselves
- Artists pick up on the broader trend within bourgeois culture of doubting the promises of modernity (“enlightened, liberal, progressive, humanistic” 31)
- Pippin says the artists weren’t really a special breed of their own who alone had the vision to see the problems
- It’s only that art is seen as the privileged realm, has “integrity and autonomy” not found in “bourgeois life” (32)
Style/Characteristics
- Disappointed w/smug promises of a self satisfied culture—naturally will turn to satire, irony
- Outrageous, obscure
- “Resistant to commercialization” (32)
- Self-conscious
- Commitment to new, but understood within “a common view of their historical inheritence” and legacy (44)
- “Motivated by an idea of what modernity had become” (32)
- Recognizes “contingency and mutability of human ideals” (32)
- Characters are aimless, don’t know what to desire or what goal to reach for (35) because of collapse of authority and insistence on autonomy
  - Must supply reason to live and method to live all by yourself
- “Fascination…with the radical particularity of existence” (36) that modernism has
  - It’s a denial of the universal, the eternal as a category by which to evaluate the human, he says (“universal categories” no longer very persuasive): instead, the “momentary and trivial” are really the source of humanity and meaning (36)
  - He calls it “radical nominalism”
  - The problems with radical nominalism: “dead materiality of the object” or the focus on perception only (object is only a moment of perception 37), so that that’s all that is…nothing more, perhaps “unredeemable particularity” and “sheer materiality”
  - Me: this is a way to talk about commodities!! Objects are particular, and the new addition of mass production makes it necessary to re-investigate the source of the particularity (Andrew: “flicker between general and particular”); and sometimes the human mind is seen as the source of that particularity (idealism), the source of the inward turn
As a new realism
- On Manet’s Olympia
- “an implicit assertion of the wholly transient, fragmented and perspectival nature of the real, a reality accessible only in contingent, individual moments of representation” (36)

Last Chapter: “Unending Modernity”

Enlightenment on nature
- First mechanistic, then materialistic
Critique of modernity
- Arranged around questions of autonomy, where autonomy is contested as it is formulated and then “breaks down” around turn of century
  - Kant: early modern thinkers (rationalists, empiricists) not autonomous enough; their ideas can’t take account of themselves, so still dogmatic
    - Rational self-rule is needed: using his moral imperative and by only referring to your reason (“spontaneous,” not predetermined)
    - But Kant critiqued for assuming universality, for depending on the 12 a priori categories, which you can’t prove are spontaneous
  - Hegel: “collective, developmental view of human subjectivity” is where autonomy develops (162) and doesn’t rely on a suspect “methodology” borrowed from science, but one coming from the mind itself
    - Optimism that the problems along the way (negation) will lead to a better expression of Geist
    - But Hegel relies on Geist and mutual dependence
  - Nietzsche tries to find a radical independence, but can’t voice it clearly
  - Heidegger relies on “mythic invocation of human dependence and finitude” (162) and thus is “pre-modern”
On Adorno and Horkheimer
- Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Enlightenment actually re-creates the irrational, unfounded, mythical world that it was trying to fix because it can’t account for why everything should be subjected to instrumental reason. It self-destructs because its “destructive criticism” destroys everything, even itself in the end
- Pippin’s response: They don’t respond to every strand in the Enlightenment, ignoring the urges to follow one’s spontaneity; and they assume that every act of mind is supposed to exert power over something or someone. Plus, your ability to critique this way is dependent on the basic spirit of Enlightenment (self-criticism).
- Pippin admits that Adorno would have a good counterargument: Pippin is just “nostalgic” for an earlier time, where capitalism wasn’t so tight and didn’t require submission
- And Pippin’s rebuttal to that: Capitalism isn’t that well-integrated, and you do have some forms of autonomy, even if they’re small (ie, diffuse, smaller practices like fashion)
Modernity as Dialectic
- Modernity never was “a hubristic, autochthonous will to autonomy and self-sufficiency…but is itself irresistibly provoked by the growing, ever more plausible possibility that what had been taken to be absolute and transcendent was contingent and finite, since always self-determined, a contingent product of a human positing. Or, the mother ethos is always as self-deflating as self-inflating, and is always both at the same time.” (177)
  - Translation: Self-determination is quite limited and contingent because it relies on little old me, we realize, not boundless. Sure, you can be self-determined, but that also means limited.
- Pippin says that while many say that Hegel over-shot way past the problems w/Kant that he was trying to solve (he “over-corrected” by “devouring” contingency 177), what they don’t get is that Hegel was less trying to make a water-tight system than he was to show that “the world must be conceived to be intelligible, but must also always be re-conceived” due to the absence of any transcendent category of measure (ie, religion, wisdom, etc 178)
  - Translation: You need to have a conception of the world, but because there’s no way to judge the right one, you always have to keep adjusting and changing that conception
  - Why do we need such an idea? Because self-consciousness is kind of painful: it makes you ask yourself WHY, and it’s difficult to answer

Random Quotes

“Almost all desire in the modern novel is an imitation of desire, a desire for an object or a state of being, or a goal, which is routed through another’s or many other’s desires.” (34)
- Then talks about Girard on modernist lit showing people who don’t know what to desire b/c collapse of religion leaves them without assurance about the right kind of desire (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel)
Contingency v necessity
- Nietzsche’s next move after rejecting “Christian view of aesthetic autonomy…led inevitably both to a claim for the essential contingency of our central perspectives, or sense-making practices, and an extremely elusive attempt to characterize and affirm that contingency, to render it intelligible, without reliance on a theory that would deny that (and our very own) contingency, that would see it as the inevitable outcome of perennial psychological or social ‘forces.’” (101)
- He says this problem is central to 20th c European thought, yet “very notion of a ‘resolution’ seems not only impossible but inappropriate.” (101)
- Related phrases: immediacy v mediation

Things to Read

Baudelaire’s essays
- “The Salon of 1846”
  - Includes discussion of “Heroism of Modern Life”
- “The Painter of Modern Life”
  - Redeem modern life by showing people the beauty in modern life
    - Pippin uses Madame Bovary to show that it’s the artist who makes the beauty, as Flaubert makes something lovely out of the tawdry, sees the imagination working against the background of the boring bourgeois
  - Beauty is specific, not eternal, but locked in the ephemeral moment
  - Rejects nature, promotes dandy
Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990)
Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971), esp “nostalgia for disaster” (Steiner 20)

Note

I have to ask, are some modernists empiricists who don’t really know what empiricism actually entailed but who rejected the rationalist use of it? Empiricism as style….

Revised on September 23, 2008 19:08:08 by Shawna? (71.58.78.59)

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