What is the importance of philosophy in the 21st century as we enter a post-truth world? How can we reintroduce meaning and uphold moral principles in our world shaken by crises? And what does philosophy teach us about living in harmony with the natural world?
Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago where he teaches in the College, Committee on Social Thought, and Department of Philosophy. Pippin is widely acclaimed for his scholarship in German idealism as well as later German philosophy, including publications such as Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, and Hegel’s Idealism. In keeping with his interdisciplinary interests, Pippin’s book Henry James and Modern Moral Life explores the intersections between philosophy and literature. Pippin’s most recent published book is The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Before we get into your latest book, The Culmination, tell us a little bit about your academic journey, your early years and how that influenced your view of the world.
ROBERT PIPPIN
I grew up in the deep south in Jacksonville, Florida, with a lower working class family. No one had gone to college. My father, the son of a sharecropper, never went past the sixth grade. I was basically saved by a high school teacher who sent me to Trinity College where I was an English major. Though I started out wanting to be a fiction writer, I got really interested in philosophy thanks to some really charismatic and interesting teachers. At Pennsylvania State University, I graduated in 1974 with this dissertation on Kant’s theory of form. And in 1991, I got an offer from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. I became, after two years, Chair of the Committee on Social Thought for 26 years. It was at Chicago that I had been given an academic paradise. I became known in philosophy for the defense of the philosophy of Hegel, which in the Anglophone tradition had never been properly received because it was considered that his philosophy was too obscure. I realized that the only other philosopher who had the same interpretation of Hegel that I did was Heidegger. So wanting to understand why Heidegger thought that Hegel's position fundamentally didn't work, led me to a very serious engagement with Heidegger's major works. So that's what I'm doing now is trying to explain why I now think that there's something missing in Hegel.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
What for you is the importance of philosophy in the 21st century? So many things are being disrupted, particularly with AI and new technologies ushering in a post-truth era. How do you reorient your thinking to navigate this changing world?
PIPPIN
Philosophy is both an academic discipline and also something that everybody does. Everybody has to have reflective views about what's significant. They also have to justify to themselves why it's significant or important. The nature of justice itself, and the various opinions that have been written about in philosophy about justice, can get to a very high level. So there's this unusual connection between philosophy and human life. We've inherited from the Middle Ages, this incredible tradition that's now developed into a chance for young people to spend four or five years, in a way, released from the pressures of life. The idea to pursue your ideas a little further in these four years you have, exempt from the pressures of social life, allows philosophy to have a kind of position unique in the academy. In confronting what the best minds in the history of the world have had to say about these issues, the hope is that they provide for the people who are privileged enough to confront philosophy a better and more thoughtful approach to these fundamental questions that everybody has to confront.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Indeed, we all want to know how to lead a good life and find meaning in our lives. And it's just about finding that common vocabulary, but sometimes life is moving too fast for us to fully reflect upon these important questions. I wanted to go back to something that you had mentioned earlier—when you realized that Hegel was fundamentally problematic. At the end of your book, you write “For Heidegger, we can clear the ground for a new way of thinking by destroying the metaphysical tradition.” Do you think that Heidegger effectively destroyed this tradition? And is Hegel's Absolute irretrievable after Heidegger?
PIPPIN
The Greek Enlightenment introduced the idea of centrality and the priority of rationality in understanding ourselves and our relation to the world. Heidegger wants to move us away from what he thinks has culminated in a kind of dead end. We appear in this world without any instruction manual, we have these finite, corporeal lives that begin in ways- we have no control over and end in ways we often have no control over. The classical conception was that the cosmos was good, because it was open to human interrogation. It allowed itself to be interrogated, so the thing that mattered most of all was knowing, because knowing was the way in which we became at home in the world. Heidegger thought we had prioritized the question of knowledge to such a degree as the primordial relationship to all of reality. He connected this to the kind of predatory stance of contemporary technology, which is essentially destroying the world because it considers the world as just material stuff, which we can understand and manipulate for our own ends. He thinks there's a huge influence in the original understanding of being as intelligibility that eventually has cut us off from all sources of meaning in a possible life other than this successful control of the environment for our own satisfaction.
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In the search for meaning, once we name the world, we feel that we own it, and it leads to this extractivist relationship that we have with the planet, which we know will eventually terminate our viability on this planet. Given the crisis atmosphere that we tend to find ourselves in today, I was wondering if you still find that a crisis atmosphere surrounds philosophy writing today. And you also point to the fact we may be missing something in our educational models, which is like a grounding in moral philosophy. How can we reintroduce that into our educational models to give us a guiding light?
PIPPIN
The basic engine of wealth creation in the West is still the creation of surplus capital, and that requires the exploitation of workers. There isn't a coherent philosophical alternative to market economic capitalism. Heidegger is relevant here, because normally when we would ask ourselves what's responsible for the basic wrongness of the world, you'd think it's the basic steering mechanisms of society—the economy, national governments, religion. We have to ask ourselves a deeper question—why does the form of life that we live seem so inevitable, unopposable? He thinks that there are very much deeper presuppositions, behind the fixity of capitalism and consumerism. The growing dependence of technology is one of the things I'd agree with infects the meaning of our lives. The question of “what I ought to do” for Heidegger is a secondary question because morality reflects a conception of human individuality and autonomy that's packed with assumptions that we also want to think about. I think the implications of teaching things like literature, film, and the arts to awaken a kind of humility in students. Conversations among people in classrooms reading really interesting texts together can start to illuminate what we don't know and what we've taken for granted.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Of course, Heidegger said if you don’t care about things, they stay “hidden”—and, because there are limits to our care, to be alive is “to be surrounded by the hidden.” As we awaken to this environmental crisis, what are your reflections on climate change? And what are your reflections on the beauty and wonder of the natural world?
PIPPIN
We know we're facing the extermination of life on the planet. And we've not stopped doing it. Why can't we fix it? I don't really sense, except among a certain level of educated elites in the West, a really deep understanding of our commitment to economic prosperity as a superordinate value. Climate change restrictions so that we can have an end to the catastrophic effects of climate change don't often take into account inequalities it would require for the third world when the livelihood of so many of their citizens depend on the only energy resource they have. And I'm speaking to you now from upstate New York where we have a country home, a farm with 50 acres. We're very much in nature all around us. I had always been an urbanite. Kant said our ability to appreciate beauty means that we are not merely sensible creatures of pleasure. We don't treat the beauty of nature as something we want to own to amuse ourselves. The beauty of nature is an indication of a kind of purposiveness in nature that fits us at a level beyond our mere senses. Something about the significance of the beautiful in nature reassures us that we have a higher vocation than mere entertainment and enjoyment. Some solemnity, sublimity, in our ability to appreciate the beauty of nature is encouraging about our species.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As you think about the future and the kind of world we're leaving for the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
PIPPIN
It doesn't have to be like this.
