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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.502)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Robert Pippen, the Evelyn Steffensen Neff Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. And we are talking about his book today, The Culmination, Heidegger German Idealism and the Fate of Philosophy. Cool cover, enjoyed that. Dr. Pippen, wonderful to have you on again and thank you for coming on.
Robert Pippin (00:35.566)
Thank you for having me.
PJ (00:37.198)
So just kind of that starting question, what led you to write this book, The Culmination?
Robert Pippin (00:44.078)
Well, I worked on Heidegger a long time ago, 40 years ago or so, right out of graduate school and several intermittent times. But I spent a lot of time just trying to understand German idealism, Konthenhegel mostly, and hadn't been paying much attention to Heidegger. But I wrote a book four or five years ago on what is basically Heidegger's metaphysics, his most theoretical book called The Science of Logic. And I had a
I had a very unusual interpretation of that book. And it reminded me after I finished it that the only other person I knew of who had that interpretation was Heidegger. And then I remembered that Heidegger's use of that interpretation was to be critical of Hegel, not dismissively critical, but to say that something in philosophy had clearly come to an end in Hegel.
PJ (01:23.566)
Yeah.
Robert Pippin (01:38.894)
And in a certain kind of empirical sense, that's true. The last great systematic enterprise of philosophy, where philosophers regarded themselves as building a kind of project that would show the necessary interrelationships of various fields of intelligibility and action, moral theory, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, epistemology. Hegel was really the last.
great philosopher in that tradition. And then ever afterwards, it was Neo -Kantian philosophy of science. And then in the early 20th century, the rise of analytic philosophy. And then Heidegger as a very different kind of philosopher. So since I hadn't studied Hegel so extensively, and since Heidegger claimed that Hegel was the culmination, the full end of the entire Western philosophical tradition, that seemed to me extremely interesting, especially since Heidegger meant.
culmination not in the sense of fulfillment or success, but a kind of massive dead end that philosophy could do nothing more about this. The whole idea had started already in Kant who claimed that he had kind of finished the metaphysical tradition and turned philosophy into what he calls a critical philosophy. But Heidegger took that much farther and tried to culminate to bring to a kind of resolution the enterprise of philosophy.
to say of all that could be known that it was knowable and then in its being knowable it was the really real. So I started to spend a few years reading Heidegger's lectures on German idealism and his other lectures trying to figure out if that claim was true, if there's something missing in Hegel and if that something that was missing in Hegel was something that was missing in the entire post -Platonic, post -Earth, Attilian philosophical tradition that's been so massively influential in the West.
PJ (03:36.974)
Um,
You mentioned, and I think this might be a good way to kind of get started because to maybe start with Heidegger so then we can look at Hegel through Heidegger's eyes, you said it's really fascinating to watch someone like Heidegger. He had one guiding question really the entirety of his career. Can you talk about what that question is and how we should understand it?
Robert Pippin (04:02.318)
Yeah, I think that's part of the interpretive task of the book. It's the most mysterious question. And most people, most students, when they first come to Heider, they think he's asking a question like, what is being? And the answer is everything. It's pretty... Possibilities, hypotheses, unicorns, in some sense or another, everything exists.
PJ (04:20.876)
Right.
Robert Pippin (04:31.438)
But Heidegger doesn't mean to ask the question of what is really real. You know, the difference between, say, what is real or being and what is a mere appearance or seeming to be. That's not his question. He says his question is, in German, the Sinn des Seins, the meaning of being. And Heidegger started his career as a student of Edmund Husserl. So he started his career in phenomenology. And that links the question of the manifestation of anything.
as real to a subject with the subject's experience of it. And I think what Heidegger started to develop was a way of appreciating the question of how are beings available in our experience? How do they become salient in our experience and not? And so I think he meant by the kind of meaning of being question, the meaningful availability of anything in our experience and linked the way in which we comport ourselves towards the world with.
how things show up for us in the world. In other words, the idea is, although our perceptual and cognitive faculties have to be working for us to encounter a world, we don't encounter a world of solid objects reflecting light rays or colored patches, round colored patches on the sand at the beach. We encountered desks that we put things on, if we're all about putting things on desks at that moment, or we encounter beach balls.
that children play with on the beach. So Heidegger began to say that the question of the meaning of being had not been posed properly. It had been posed as simply a question of what's out there in the world, as if that's the first primordial manifestation of things to it, that's just out there in the world, and we have some sort of sensory uptake of it. But that's not how we experience the world. And so Heidegger tried to build an entire program around this issue, the meaningfulness.
of being. And he thought in his early years, in the years leading up to 1927 and the publication of Being in Time, he thought this was a particularly pressing question for the question of our own being. How is our own being at issue for us? Because while we're biological animals, what it is to be a human being is not to merely act out our biological species requirements, the way it is for wolves or bees or dogs. But we, we,
Robert Pippin (06:59.886)
have our own being, the meaning of our own being at issue for us. It's not fixed. There is no substantial path forward in life that this particular animal species, although it ages and it reproduces and it eats and that sort of thing, that's not what we think of as what does it mean to be me? What am I about? And that question means particularly what is significant to me? What am I willing to sacrifice for? What is indifferent to me? And so that. So.
Once he had formulated this general question about the meaning of being and then explored it in what he called the Dasein analytic, an analytic of human being, he began to wonder how the history of philosophy had treated this question. And he noticed that really they didn't raise that question at all. They thought of the availability of being in a way that was decisive for the entire Western and eventually scientific tradition to be what he called just present at hand things out there.
But that was primordial. And that meant that everything else of significance was something we just subjectively projected onto them. And Heidegger said, no, that's not true. We don't have the two steps. We don't just first have a flat rectangular object that reflects light rays, and then we project onto it that it's a desk. There are those two moments. The world is immediately familiar to us in its meaningfulness. So the question expanded then to the question of the source of meaningfulness.
and especially at Heidegger, the potential failure of meaningfulness in a world. So that's the project in its two parts. The early part on the meaning of being insofar as it relates to the meaning of Dasein's being, and then later what he called the history of being, that is the history of philosophy, in which he tried to investigate how Plato, Aristotle, the scholastics, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant.
Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, he started lecturing on all these people, asking all of them, how are you going to answer the question of the meaningful availability of being? And he said, that question has been forgotten. And you can see the consequences of its forgetting in this great systematic enterprise of Hegel.
PJ (09:13.602)
And I think this is as we talked about Yes, no, I thank you that was I think an excellent introduction to what we're talking about I I love that you ended on Hegel there. How does Hegel miss finitude? And I think that's you know, that'll be high Heidegger's critique of Hegel that he misses man's limitations
Robert Pippin (09:14.126)
in very abstract topics, but that's about as clear as I think.
PJ (09:39.118)
How does Hegel believe that our thinking escapes our limitations?
Robert Pippin (09:39.502)
Right.
Robert Pippin (09:44.75)
Well, the premise that Heidegger thinks underlies all of Western philosophy is the one begun by ancient Greek philosophy that really inaugurated what we consider Western civilization culminating in the 17th and 18th century scientific revolutions. That the framework for understanding our relation to the world took as a matter of assumption that
For anything to be was for it to be knowably intelligible. To be was to be intelligible. There couldn't be anything that was in principle unintelligible. There's a bunch of stuff we don't know and may never know, but it's in principle. That's what it is to be. To be knowable as what it is. And that means that our own being must fit that assumption.
And so Plato and Aristotle started saying, well, what it is to be is to be, as in the Platonic theory of ideas, is to have an idea so that it could be the determinant thing it is as an instance of the idea. Or in Aristotle, you put the form into the thing and it was the thing becoming what it was to be as that thing. But the assumption is still to be is to be intelligible. Now, that means that everything from, and so the idea of Hegel,
as the culmination of that tradition is Hegel was the one who took most radically that assumption. He thought everything, human societies, human history, religion, could be fit into a systematic philosophical claim to know what these enterprises were, why they were significant, how they related to philosophy. So Hegel was the one who really took on the most ambitious challenge.
that if anything at all had to be intelligible, we couldn't figure out empirically what causes what or anything, but we could certainly figure out, he thought, the basic categories by virtue of which anything at all could be intelligible. And since those categories define what it could be to be, then there was what these idealists called an identity of thinking and being. If you could get the thoughts without which thought could have no content right, you were also saying,
Robert Pippin (12:05.966)
This is without which there cannot be anything at all. Because for anything to be a thing, it has to be determined. It has to be distinguishable from other things. And if there's no concept that helps you delimit it, it just can't be. But Heidegger thought, our being's not like that. And so there's something outside the realm of discursive knowability, which from the Greeks was basically predication.
saying what something was. Heidegger said, no, there's all sorts of ways in which being is available to us in ways that don't fit this, what Hegel called the infinity of thought, the fact that there's nothing outside of thought. Everything that could be could be thought discursively. And Heidegger wanted to say, well, there's another kind of thinking or availability.
It can't be systematized. It can't be treated as part of a system like Hegel did. And that aspect of our dependence on sources of meaning that we don't determine and cannot discursively articulate is the mark of human finitude for Heidegger. It emerges in our own relation to our own death in being in time in which there's no picture that makes sense of the fact.
that we have to die, that as soon as we're born, we're imminently faced with death at any moment. There's no logos, no account of that that makes sense to us. I mean, if you believe we're immortal, you don't need an account like that. But Heidegger is not one of those people. He thinks that's an evasion of this fundamental fact. So.
One example, I mean that's the general point he wants to make about finitude, that we've forgotten the limitations of human intelligibility making. And secondly, that that is particularly prominent in our refusal to confront the fact of our own finitude, the most glaring manifestation of which is that we are mortal and we can't, there's no way of making any sense out of that.
Robert Pippin (14:28.462)
by putting it into a theory that the world must be such, such that there are mortal beings in it. There's no such account.
PJ (14:37.646)
I'm kind of curious if I'm on the right track here. Having read some of Hubert Dreyfus's work, he talks about life as a gift. And I wonder, you know, for Heidegger, the anxiety is what characterizes us. But if you think of life as a gift, which still has this very, like, this reduction, or not reduction, this limitation on autonomy,
Is gratitude another way that we experience or that we, the technical term is escaping me, but like when we talk about anxiety being the characteristic of Dasein, is gratitude another way that, another thing that can characterize Dasein? It's a different way.
Robert Pippin (15:28.238)
Not so much for Heidegger. There's some sense to that. I mean, because the question one wants to raise with Heidegger is, what are the sources of meaningfulness that lie outside the realm of the conceptually intelligible? So what Heidegger is saying is not just that the metaphysical tradition has ignored a question that ought to be answered. He's saying the way we actually approach the most important parts of
our enterprise with the world is what matters most to us is knowledge. But that's our way of reconciling ourselves. I mean, here we just show up seven or eight years old, we start realizing this is pretty crazy, this little rock with all these billions of little units on it that pop up in 80, 90 years and then go away. What sense does that make? It doesn't make any sense at all.
PJ (16:13.102)
Ha ha!
Robert Pippin (16:26.926)
But within that enterprise, within particular historical worlds, like the Greek world or the Christian world or the early modern world, the late technological world, there are sources of meaningfulness that both open up sources of meaning and close off sources of meaning. We can't live like a Greek aristocrat anymore. We can't live like a monk in the Middle Ages. We can't live like an aristocratic upper -class British person in the 19th century, although there are plenty of them.
Plenty of them are still around in Great Britain apparently. But both this limitation and this opening. So when Heidegger talks about the opening up of availability of something meaningful, I think we can consider that something like a gift. And he uses these German es gibt sein, es gibt sein. The German word for there is es gibt, it gives. And he's trying to emphasize that we don't.
create sources of meaning by our own projections, but they're given to us. We find ourselves, as he says, thrown into a historical world that's not of our own making, with possible avenues of things mattering to us or not mattering to us, either opened up or closed off. And we have to find our way in that without benefit of knowing, in some sense of know, what is objectively more important than what. We just find ourselves
enmeshed in a world of matterings. You know, things matter to you, they matter to me. And we don't really think that's the result of having sat down and reflected on what ought to matter. I mean, there's a lot of things that if I were to sit down and reflect on what ought to matter, I could come up with them. And I would know that I have a really good case that they ought to matter, but they don't. You know, I'm a little embarrassed by that. I wish they mattered.
PJ (18:17.934)
Yeah.
Robert Pippin (18:23.406)
And there are some things that matter to me that I really wish didn't matter to me. So I can refrain from acting on these things. But I know that the whole meaningful engagement with the world is not really up to me. And so in that sense, you could say it's delivered over to me. And I guess the question of whether it's a gift or some kind of fate I would rather not have depends on what avenues of meaningfulness you find in the world or not.
Heidegger thinks in the late modern world, the sources of a kind of meaningfulness that could sustain a futureally directed life are dwindling to the point of almost nonexistence. Well, I don't think he would think that the current world, the late Western world of technologified capitalism is a source of possible meaningfulness. It can't possibly be seen as a gift. It's more like an absence.
PJ (19:18.862)
Uh, my oldest girl, uh, this morning came out with a denim jacket on. Um, and I was like, that is a really nice jacket. Um, when did you get that? And she's like, I wore it three months ago to the father daughter dance. And, uh, and she was very upset with me that I didn't remember it. And, um, I was. Yeah.
Robert Pippin (19:39.47)
Well, they're the source of meaningfulness. People find their families, family sources of great meaning and significance in their life. But yet again, it's usually the bourgeois nuclear family, man, a woman and children who are educated to leave home rather than extend it. This source of mattering is all constrained by the historical character of the modern family and the sort of idealization of romantic love as the beginning of marriage.
the basic unit of marriage as the foundational institute of bourgeois society and education. So all of that is not up to you. There are people who have alternate kinds of families, but they still have to live in a world where this source of meaningfulness, what it means to have a family and why it's important, is not something one can just reflect on and come up with a reason and have it matter. We're talking about being pulled in various ways by areas of concern that one doesn't really have much control of.
PJ (20:36.942)
I, one, I think that's a great takeaway from it. I'll be honest. My application was more minuscule. It was, uh, I was like, I, I'm sorry. I don't even feel bad that I didn't remember the denim jacket. I'm like, why does this matter? Like, I'm like, I'm annoyed that it matters, but it does matter. Like, it's like, I didn't have a choice. Like all of a this became part of my morning.
Robert Pippin (20:52.078)
Yeah, thanks. Bye.
Robert Pippin (20:59.758)
Yeah, yeah. Well, your daughter had a good point. It may not matter to you, Dad, but it matters to me.
PJ (21:02.994)
That's right. No, but oh yes. Yeah, like, okay, next time I will, you know, pay more attention to the pictures and try and remember what that outfit is. No, but yeah, I mean, it's the same thing with the family. And I actually, I think a good segue here, even as you're talking about it, how does Heidegger's conception of the world differ from say Kant or Wittgenstein's?
Robert Pippin (21:07.566)
Lesson learned, you know, sort of.
Robert Pippin (21:12.494)
Right.
PJ (21:32.074)
concept of the world. Obviously, historicity plays a big part in that.
Robert Pippin (21:36.494)
Yeah, we're just saying there are these historical epochs that delimit and open up sources of possible meaningfulness in ways that aren't engineered by humans, but are part of the finite contingencies of human history. So in Heidegger, the concept of develop the world means something like a horizon of possible meaningfulness. I mean, that's not an exactly.
correct image because horizon is where the sun meets, I mean, the sky meets the earth and there's a beyond and there's no, Heidegger's talking about what lies on this side of the horizon. It's a point that Thomas Sheehan makes in his recent book on Heidegger. It doesn't, this context, lived world context we find ourselves in is so always already presumed.
in our engagements that you can't ever make it an object of attentiveness itself. It's just the background texture of life, such that some things show up as significant and other things don't. In Kant, the world is a totality of all that is the case. It's just, you know, you could list all the true propositions and that would be the world. So Kant had influenced by Newtonian mechanics. I mean, he had a very scientific view of what the concept of world meant.
Now, it's also true that Kant thought we were also moral beings. And so he thought the totality of the world of what is the case has to include beings whose nature we cannot know, but which are practically unavoidable for us to postulate like morally responsible free beings. But nevertheless, his general view is he doesn't have any view of this kind of inherited context of meaningfulness. It's just everything that is the case either phenomenally or numerally.
In Wittgenstein, it depends. I mean, if you mean Wittgenstein 1 or Wittgenstein 2, if you mean Wittgenstein 1, then it's the totality of all that can be said. But Wittgenstein realizes that there is more than can be said, but that's thus mystisch, the mystical. That what we can't say, we should just pass over in silence. Whereas in Wittgenstein 2, the Wittgenstein of the investigations, you get something a little more similar to Heidegger.
Robert Pippin (24:00.302)
the concept of a life world, a form of life, which is a condition of intelligibility in the world, but not itself an object in the world. You get something a little similar to that in the late 50s.
PJ (24:14.862)
Okay, and that actually, I find that helpful because I read Fitchgenstein separately and I felt the similarities there. And so is there, there is quite a bit of crossover there, almost like they're arriving at it separately. I don't think Fitchgenstein was super aware of Heidegger.
Robert Pippin (24:30.446)
No, no, no, no, no, no. Wittgenstein didn't read much in philosophy. Yeah, he was sort of self -taught genius in a way, but I think the other similarity is that Wittgenstein thinks there's something wrong with just continuing with philosophy as normal, as if everything is fine with philosophy. He thinks everything is not fine with philosophy. The whole task of philosophy is to try to get people to stop trying to do philosophy.
And there's a little something similar to that. I if by philosophy we mean the philosophy as it's practiced in the West from Parmenides up until Hegel, at least, then we should stop doing that. Because that won't allow us to raise the question of the sources of meaningfulness of being. We'll turn that into an empirical question, a sociopsychological question.
a historical question, but no, we mean a deeply philosophical question. How do things come to manifest themselves to us as meaningful? Not intelligible in the perceptual or cognitive sense, like we can correctly classify them, but how do they show up for us in their significance so that things that we're not paying any attention to are still perceivable, but don't really rise to salience in our experience? How does that work?
is a question that traditional philosophy he thinks has forgotten to ask.
PJ (26:02.42)
Last time I had you on we were talking about film and philosophy and a lot of my own work is focused on philosophy of art so and I find a lot of What seems opaque, you know when you talk about the being of beings of beings, you know I still can't say the correct formulation. It's um, I read yeah, I read one of those sentences and I'm just like I okay I got to try that again and like each being means something different but
Robert Pippin (26:21.614)
Let's go watch your home.
PJ (26:32.526)
When I look at it from a perspective of art, I can see the clearer distinctions, at least in my own mind, between Hegel and Heidegger and Wittgenstein. I can't remember if he says the end of art or the death of art, but of course that's how Hegel introduces it. Can you talk a little bit about how their different views of art kind of expose the differences in their viewpoints? I mean, obviously, you talk about intelligibility.
There's a vast difference in how they view those things.
Robert Pippin (27:04.75)
Yeah, yeah, well, I spent many years working on literature and film under the shadow of Hegel. And it was, I thought, a brilliant idea that art was a certain form of philosophy that philosophy couldn't do. But the limitation of Hegel's position, I mean, his idea is, whereas philosophy tries to give a discursive, systematic account in logical language, art takes the same sort of content.
the relation of human beings to the world and to other human beings, for example, to their past, and presents it not in a discursive logical form, but in an affective, sensible form. It's sort of like how a philosophical thesis feels when you see it displayed in an artwork or something. But I became dissatisfied with that because it means that art is simply an inferior form of philosophy. It needs its translation into its logical form for us to be able to appreciate its truth.
It isn't an independent way of thinking that has a bearing on what we traditionally do in philosophy. And that's also what interested me about Heidegger. He does think that. He thinks it's an alternate way of what he calls disclosing things about human existence. Like those questions we were just talking about, relations to others, relations to oneself, meaningfulness, relations to the past. That...
discloses things that can't be put in discursive form. And then, of course, the question is, if art has this disclosive function, what does it disclose? Why can't you just say it? There's a famous criticism of Wittgenstein on Das Mystischem, What Can't Be Said With, by his colleague, Graham Ramsey, who said, if you can't say it, you can't say it, and you can't whistle it either. If you can't say what it is that's been disclosed,
PJ (28:44.046)
Right.
PJ (28:57.152)
Hehehehehe
Robert Pippin (29:02.062)
There's nothing been that's nothing that's been disclosed. So but the problem there, I mean, if you think of art as an alternate disclosive source of meaning, which is what Heidegger Heidegger does, and then you confront some skeptic who says, well, what is disclosed? That's like that's like trying to teach great poetry by paraphrasing it in sentences that students can understand. And the student just says, well, why didn't you just say that?
PJ (29:32.204)
Right, right.
Robert Pippin (29:32.832)
So there's something in the relation between the form and the matter of an artwork in which it's inseparably connected to the experience of the artwork. And your task as a teacher is not to translate it into prose, but by various ways to try to get the student to re -experience the actual artwork, not its content, but the actual artwork in a way that begins to open up areas of concern and meaning.
that you can't really precisely summarize, but you can talk around it and around it. And that's essentially what interpretation is. And one of Heidegger's tasks in philosophy is to encourage us to think of philosophy as more interpretive than analytic. So that the stuff I'm trying to do with film, for example, is a way of interpreting the film such that the film's own presentation of available meaningfulness becomes.
available in a different way without paraphrase.
PJ (30:35.598)
I mean, and that's where we see Gottemer as Heidegger's student really takes this up.
Robert Pippin (30:43.758)
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Although, Gautam are...
Well, there are several differences. I mean, Goddard does not agree that that Plato is the beginning of nihilism or he doesn't agree with Heidegger's history of being. He doesn't agree with the way he treated Hegel. He doesn't believe the destruction of the history of metaphysics is necessary. Goddard is a much friendlier guy. I mean, he doesn't have that atmosphere of crisis and revel. I mean, you know, Heidegger spent his whole life in an atmosphere of war, crisis, recovery from war, economic collapse.
PJ (31:03.278)
Yeah.
Robert Pippin (31:20.16)
Another war, the destruction of Germany. I mean, he was, you know, he made several catastrophic errors in reacting to all of that. But one has to remember that Heidegger lived in a time of almost unbelievable chaos. And he thought that the views he had about Flock were actually of relevance to
PJ (31:23.502)
Right.
Robert Pippin (31:48.)
what he saw as the decline of sources of significance in the West. So it became a kind of critique of the West as well as of the Western philosophical tradition. Because he saw the two things as connected, that our form of life is inherently tied to modern science and technology in a way that perfectly encapsulates this forgetting of the question of meaningfulness.
PJ (32:13.294)
If you don't mind my asking, because it's just one of those questions that come up about Heidegger, not to give like a full defense, or not even the defense, how do you, as you look at the biographical side of his life, how do you properly appropriate his work?
Robert Pippin (32:32.974)
Well, you're talking about Heidegger's decision to join the Nazi party and become the rector of the University of Freiburg for a few months in 1933. And his decision to stay in the Nazi party, even after he resigned as rector, and to continue to wear the swastika and his lapel, and until the end of the war, beginning every class with a Heil Hitler. So Heidegger has a lot to answer for. And there are several.
several ways of accounting for it. One of the most friendly is that, look, Heinegger was a poor kid from a small mess kirk, from a tiny little town. He was essentially a peasant, a bumpkin. He didn't understand anything about global politics or Russia or anything else like that. And he just, he had no idea what he was getting himself into. That's number one.
Number two, you have to remember that intellectuals in Germany, not just Heidegger, saw the coming war as essentially a war against communism. And they thought the only alternative was a kind of materialistic capitalism, and so we needed something else. So because of a kind of hysterical fear, especially among the religious conservatives in Germany, the Catholic Church especially, of Soviet communism,
some extreme position as a barrier. Given that, although Heidegger was personally anti -Semitic, he didn't seem to believe in any kind of biological anti -Semitism. And certainly there's no evidence that he condoned the Holocaust. He still did a kind of horrible thing in joining. He knew what they were doing. So that's the second one that you just got to understand it was all about communism. And if it hadn't all been about communism, he would have never done it.
Another one, the third one, and most really the most irrelevant, but perhaps true one, is it's all because of his wife, Elfrida. There wasn't any. Yeah. Well, there's a new French biography by Guillaume Perroux on Heidegger. And it's one of the best because Perroux is a historian. And so he really looks at everything, all the letters, everything. And there's really no evidence of Heidegger having any interest in anti -Semitism or fascist politics or anything else.
PJ (34:38.318)
I've never heard that one actually, sorry.
Robert Pippin (34:57.174)
until he married Elfrida, who was a Protestant from Berlin. Heidegger had been raised as a Catholic, although he had left the Catholic Church by then. But nevertheless, she was the one who kept encouraging him to join the party as a means of advancement and to get those Jews out of the university. And then finally, the one I find acceptable is, yeah, he was a swine, an arrogant,
a despicable man, and it has no real connection to his philosophy. I mean, one of the greatest logicians and most influential philosophers in the analytic tradition, Gottlob Frege, was also a raving anti -Semitic, anti -Semite. So, and I don't think that has anything to do with the invention of the quantifier by Frege or something like that. So the fourth position that...
This was a terribly stupid and evil thing that Heidegger did, but it doesn't reflect itself in the account of the history of metaphysics or the dasein analytic and being in time and so forth. It's just a personal flaw in the man's character. And he had many. He wasn't a very nice man. He wasn't somebody that anybody would want their children to emulate or anything like that. There's just no reason to try to excuse it. It was a horrific, worst crime committed by a philosopher in the history of philosophy.
PJ (36:24.078)
Yeah.
Robert Pippin (36:24.942)
No question. But the question is, should we read being in time and the lecture courses and the problem of metaphysics as if they're expressions of a Nazi sensibility? I don't see any evidence for that. There are people who try to say that. But it just seems to me ridiculous. I mean, I don't have any sympathy for it, although I do have a lot of sympathy for those who are put off by and insulted by or grieved.
as I am by this terrible thing that Heidegger did.
PJ (36:58.75)
Are you familiar with the, there's a book that has a dialogue between Gadamer, Derrida, and Labarth where they talk about using Heidegger's work.
Robert Pippin (37:12.206)
in the face of the fact that he was a Nazi. And what do they conclude?
PJ (37:15.118)
Yes. Well, I don't remember, I'm not going to say it exactly, but Derrida's response was, if we refuse to read his work, then that's literally a Nazi way to handle things. It's like the best way to handle this is to take him at his best and answer that. Which of course, I mean, you can see lots of work in Derrida, like a lot of Derrida.
is influenced by Heidegger. So that's, yeah. Yeah.
Robert Pippin (37:47.246)
Well, I should say one more thing. I mean, the people who do encourage us to think of there being some connection is after being in time, rather than talk about individual design and so forth, that is individual human being and their being at issue for themselves, he began to talk about das Volk, the people, that the real opening or sight of meaningfulness wasn't to an individual but to a people. And...
PJ (38:01.516)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (38:07.084)
Hmm.
Robert Pippin (38:15.15)
He began to actually accommodate some of his more public statements with his philosophical sense of how the West had lost any kind of rootedness in anything meaningful. And that was an invitation to what the Germans call Blut -Boden kind of politics, blood and earth. You know, that we had to accept in accepting our finitude, accept the fact that we come divided by nationalities and races and that we can find a true source of meaning in this kind of collectivity rather than in...
cosmopolitanism, which was always associated with Jews. So there were indications in Heidegger's public work that he wanted to adapt his worries about the rootlessness of the civilization created by modern scientism and technology and this alternative, radical alternative of thinking of ourself as bound by blood and nationality. And that, I think, was a mistake by Heidegger.
no particular reason to think that the implication of being in time and the work of the early 1930s is this kind of virulent Christian nationalism.
PJ (39:24.078)
Yeah, even as you were talking about, he made that choice against communism and against materialistic capitalism. I do think there's a lot of value in looking at some of what we consider our worst enemies. They often have the best critiques because they see what's worse than us. And it's interesting because you kind of, in a lot of ways, you end the book that way with, you see Heidegger's critique of
Hegel, if I read it correctly, as it gives us a really solid reading of a good perspective on global capitalism. Can you speak about how the Heidegger's critique of Hegel could better inform our view of global capitalism?
Robert Pippin (40:11.502)
Yeah, kind of personal remark. When I was working so much on Hegel back in the 90s, in 1991, I published a book called Modernism as a Philosophical Problem on the dissatisfactions of European high culture. This was after the 80s and all the heyday of postmodernism, that there was nothing worth saving in Western bourgeois civilization, that that's all ended. And I thought that was extreme.
protection of natural rights, higher living standards, lower infant mortality, general dispersion of equality around the world. Oh yeah, they're pretty good things. But since 2008 and the sort of triumph, the granting of most favorite nation -states to China and the exporting of American industry to China and the sort of ruthlessness of finance capitalism and the power.
PJ (40:45.774)
Yeah.
Robert Pippin (41:09.006)
now of the billionaire capitalist. It occurred to me that the situation ought to be put this way. Heidegger, I mean Hegel, well Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, they all wrote in the shadow of the French Revolution. And that must have seemed like the most exciting thing in history. The end of feudalism, the establishment of individual rights, rationalization of the state and most democratic institutions and so forth. They could see it coming. They could see this was just.
This was going to be a fantastic way to live. And most of what they foresaw as coming into being did come into being. But what I think I was convinced by was not that they were wrong, but that the form of life they created was so thin in its rationality that it wasn't enough. It couldn't create enough allegiance to inspire a kind of commitment to its core values in a way that, um,
would allow sacrifice and political will formation. In fact, it attracted so little allegiance that it's kind of crumbling in front of our eyes. And so it seemed to me that by having not addressed the question of the sources of possible meaningfulness in this much more rational, individual -protecting, rights -based societies, they had bet that that would be enough. In other words, there wouldn't be...
widespread opioid addiction, deaths of despair, growing inequality, indifference to each other, the outbreak of wars across the world again, that we wouldn't be able to look ourselves in the face, given how much we had accomplished. That turned out that was wrong. We've created a form of life that since the early 20th century, most sensible people, especially modernists,
artists have come to hate. And I don't think it's possible to do philosophy without confronting that fact. It's not that it, I mean, yeah, there's problems of justice, inequality, massive concentrations of wealth, ruthlessness of global capitalism, the lack of power of nation states to correct it. All that's true. But we don't like living this way with routinized jobs and...
Robert Pippin (43:31.822)
hierarchical organizations at work that have more power than any government ever had over any individual. The simplification of labor, stultification of daily life, the penetration of our minds by social media, the destruction of collective will formation by social media, the distractedness of American, especially American attentiveness. Something has gone wrong.
PJ (44:00.782)
Right.
Robert Pippin (44:01.816)
You know, and if you're looking for what went wrong, you can look at, you know, critiques of capitalism, critiques of commodification, the problems of a mass commercial society built on the constant stimulation of consumption. You can look at all that. But Heidegger wants to know why were we attracted to all of that in the first place? Why? How did that get a grip on us? And is it possible that the way we started to think about fundamental matters had something to do with why we thought all of this was inevitable?
And that's kind of far -fetched, frankly. We tend to think of the steering mechanisms of society as the economy, the government, public opinion, religion. But Heidegger is saying, well, there's something beneath all that, some way in which we've come to consider ourselves that has forgotten something essential since the time of the early pre -Socratics. It's been forgotten for a long time and is only called to mind occasionally by great artists.
like Kerdelin or Rilke or van Gogh, the people that Heidegger singled out as being able to remind us of what we need to understand about ourselves to live a first, you know, directed life.
PJ (45:19.15)
And I'm gonna try and make a connection here to see if I'm tracking. Would one way be to think about this critique? I talked to someone about kind of the modernist idea of freedom and that freedom is defined negatively. And so would part of the problem that we are in claiming that everyone's rational, right? Like it's like, oh, we're gonna give rationality to everyone.
And the only thing that matters about them is that they're rational. And you can see this in things like, we say we give everyone the right to the pursuit of happiness, but we don't talk about what the pursuit of happiness is. We assume people will just find it. Is that kind of the end of the falling out of the way that this mechanism works?
Robert Pippin (46:17.55)
Yeah, I think there's something to that, that the ways in which we're influenced by commercial culture, especially, I mean, with the advent of television, television advertising, print advertising, mass media, and then now social media, the idea that people find their own way to what's of significance to them on their own by thinking is ludicrous. I mean, they're...
PJ (46:41.902)
Yeah.
Robert Pippin (46:45.422)
None of us do, and it takes some effort to break free of those assumptions. And again, in the early Heidegger, that's one of the sort of crying out calls for redemption, because his early work is all focused on the problem of authenticity. So where freedom means not being unrestricted, unconstrained by others in doing what you want, but in finding...
when you pursue what you want, that it actually reflects who you think you are. That there's an objective correlate to your own subjective self -assessment that you find in the world and in other people, reflections of what you think ought to be significant. You can be free in a limited sense because nobody's constraining you to work this way or live this way or something like that. But if the constraint is so great that any other alternative...
is just hopeless. You can't be a hermit. I mean, some people are lucky enough, like university professors, they're lucky enough to avoid the hierarchical domination for profit of the work world that the rest of human beings have to live in. But that's an enormous privilege. It's not like what it is to live in the work world for most people, which is miserable. A few of them find satisfaction in it. But
but they're very lucky. So I think, yeah, the idea of there being kind of openness to every kind of different life, that everybody ought to be experimenting with their different life and that they're capable of finding their, no, they live in an intensely commercialized, directed cultural environment that makes that very unlikely. I mean, I think the first thing we could do is just start legislating against the invasion of social media in our lives, but it doesn't look like that's ever gonna happen.
PJ (48:38.45)
Can you give an example of, and I think, if I'm tracking with you, I think this is a relevant question, we'll see. But how do we see standing presence or even present at hand in the way that Westerners think about everyday life?
Robert Pippin (48:58.638)
Well, I mean, the most spectacular example is nature. And such things as industrial farming, industrial ranching, the idea of everything being just stuff for us to manipulate for our own benefit is by far the most spectacular example of that. The abuse of the environment, the indifference to the future of the planet, the greed, which makes it impossible.
to constrain our destruction of the environment, the cruelty with which we produce, kill, and distribute animals, the technology and chemicals necessary for there to be vast industrial farming that's polluting waterways and ruining natural environments, the unrestrained logging going on in the Amazon without any concern for global warming.
They rely on some, you know, enough.
PJ (50:01.07)
Yeah.
Yeah, is there a way that we would see in everyday life for somebody? Because part of what makes this easy for people, I mean, when we think chicken, I remember having this conversation with my kids at the store. It's like, well, this used to be, you have chicken, which is a chicken, beef is a cow, and that used to, you know, but.
Is there, obviously, I mean, those are great examples and like great examples of like how that's really problematic. Is there something that the average person does? Is there a mistake that they make with that kind of presence at hand or standing present?
Robert Pippin (50:52.43)
It's hard to say. I mean, there are all kinds of ways of addressing it that people have tried. But I think there's one thing that Heidegger's student, Hannah Arendt, came up with as a kind of summary of the problem of the late modern age. It's her concept of thoughtlessness. Marcuse also in the same way when he wrote One Dimensional Man. There aren't any longer any reflective things that call us out of our everyday lives to...
call us to account about what they're doing. It's just all too easy to be submerged or to be constrained by the silo of the echo chambers we live in. So this, a kind of call to thoughtfulness that philosophy professors try to encourage in their classes, you gotta think about this. Can't just do it, you gotta think about it. Why do we act this way? Why are hospitals such an inhumane?
sort of factory -like environments. Why do you only get to spend 15 minutes with your doctor and he's typing on the computer the whole time? Why did insurance companies take over the medical profession? Why is that the secret truth of Obamacare that we've sort of ceded control of all of medicine to the insurance companies by letting them write that bill? Wake up. That's what Heidegger even says. The point of doing philosophy is to awaken people.
PJ (52:10.478)
Ha ha.
Robert Pippin (52:18.69)
That's about all you can say is think, think more.
PJ (52:19.17)
Yeah, yes. You know, I was going to ask you for, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. I was going to ask you for a good takeaway for our audience, but that's, that's I think a perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Robert Pippin (52:33.922)
Well, you know, I'll give you one. I Heidegger was asked that and he said, Nurheim Godkundertjess, only a God can save us now. I'll sign off with that one. Only a God could save us now, P .J.
PJ (52:43.726)
Hahaha!
PJ (52:50.21)
Oh man. Well, on that note, Dr. Pippin, it's been a joy. Thank you, sir.
Robert Pippin (52:56.526)
Thank you for having me. Take care.