Modernism as Philosophical Problem - On Dissatisfactions of European High Culture

252 Pages·1999·18.499 MB·English

by  Robert B. Pippin

ModernaissP mha i losophical
Problem
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EuroHighp eCaunl ture
Second Edition
Robert B. Pippin
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BLACl<WELL
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19Q-dc21 99-17513
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Contents
Acknowledgments to the Second Edition vu
Acknowledgments to the First Edition Vlll
Introduction to the Second Edition xi
Introduction: The Modernity Problem l
I Sensing the .end
1
2 German Homesickness
8
2 Modernity and Modernism 16
I Modernity as a Historical Cau:gury
16
2 The Legi,timaq Problem
22
3 The "Culture efR upture"
29
4 Paradoxes and Problems
38
3 Idealism and Modernity 45
I The Kantian Enlightenment
45
2 The limits <if Transcendental Idealism
50
3 Hegel's Expen'ment
60
4 Hegelian Teleology
73
4 "Nihilism stands at the door": Nietzsche 78
I Ni.etzsche's Compwint
78
2 Modernity as "Twilight" Zone
85
3 Origins and Perspectives
91
4 The "Pathos efDis tance"
91
5 "The Age of Consummate Meaninglessness": Heidegger 114
I Failed Autonomy
114
2 Modernity as a "Metap1!Jsu:al" Problem
118
3 The "Vollendung" efM etap1!Jsu:s
127
4 The Tum, Turning Away, and Overturning
134
vi Contents
New chapter for the second edition
6 The Death of God and Modem Melancholy 144
l Nietzsche's "Insane" Prophet 144
2 Mourning or Melancholy? 149
3 Nietzschean Health 151
4 Nietzschean Therapy 154
7 Unending Modernity 160
l Modern Options
160
2 The Dialectic qf Modernity 163
3 Postmoderniry? 168
4 Modernity as Dialectic
176
Notes 180
Bibliography 218
Index 230
Acknowled ents to the
gm
Second Edition
Aside from a number of minor editorial changes and typographical correc­
tions, this edition difef rs from the first in the inclusion of a new Introduction
and a new chapter (chapter 6) on Nietzsche. In the former, I attempt to
restate the book's thesis in a way that takes account of and very briefly
responds to some challenging criticisms of that thesis. I am indebted es­
pecially to several discussions and correspondence with Fred Olafson and
Terry Pinkard over the last several years, and to a recent exchange with
Richard Rorty, for making much clearer what issues have to be addressed in
defense of the thesis and how complex those issues are. In the latter, I try to
extend and de en the issue of a Nietzschean "diagnosis" of the unusual
ep
melancholy of modem high culture. I am grateful to Jonathan Lear for
many discussions of this issue during a jointly taught seminar on this theme,
to the graduate students who made this such an adventurous and rewarding
seminar, and to my Chicago colleagues Eric Santncr and Homi Bhabha for
many helpful discussions about this and larger issues raised by the book. I
was fortunate enough to have been invited to present a German version of
an earlier draft of this chapter at several conferences and colloquia in
Germany and Europe, and I am especially grateful for those discussions.
My thanks to Gerhart von Graevenitz and Axel Honneth (who invited me
to, and will edit the proceedings of, the conference, Konzepte dcr Modemc,
where the paper was first presented); to David Wellbury for his questions
and suggestions at that conference; to Rudi r Bubner, Hans-Friderich
ge
Fulda, Glenn Most, and the discussants at the University of Heidelberg; to
Volker Gerhardt and the Philosophy D artment at the Humboldt Uni­
ep
versity in Berlin, for inviting me to give a "Master Course" on this topic in
Nietzsche, and to the students in that seminar for many hours of helpful
conversation; to Professor Gerhard Garn and the discussants at the Institut
for Philosophic at the Tcchnische Universitat at Darmstadt, and to the
discussants at the Institute for Philosophy at Charles University in Prague.
My thanks to the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the 'Theory and
Practice of Democracy for nerous editorial assistance.
ge
Acknowledgments to the
First Edition
Much of the work on this project owes a great deal to several institutions:
to the University of California, San Diego, for a sabbatical and other forms
of research assistance; to the University of California for a "President's
Research Fellowship in the Humanities," which made possible a year of
reading and writing free from administrative and teaching responsibilities;
and to the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a very
generous Research Fellowship.
I am also much indebted to several individuals, especially to Stephan
Chambers, my editor at Blackwell Publishers. Conversations with Mr
Chambers were instrumental in conceiving the general form of the book,
and I much appreciate his support and encouragement. My thanks too to
Ms Annita Christie at Blackwells for much patience and efficiency in the
last couple of years. For their kind support of various fellowship and grant
applications, I am grateful to Allen Wood, H. S. Harris, Henry Allison,
Fred Olafson, Stanley Rosen, Richard Kennington, Jerry Weinberger,
Charles Griswold, and Drew Hyland. I have benefited a great deal from
correspondence with Stanley Rosen about the issues discussed below, and
from comments on individual chapters by Charles Griswold and Drew
Hyland. I owe a very substantial debt to several people who generously
read and commented on earlier versions of the entire manuscript. These
include Jay Bernstein and an anonymous reader, both of whom made
several suggestions that led to quite substantial revisions in the last
three chapters, and Andrew Feenberg, with whom I have often discussed
these topics during very pleasant lunches in LaJ olla (where, overlooking the
Pacific, entertaining the idea of a "crisis" in modernity requires intense
and sustained concentration).
Special thanks too, to my son, Andrew Pippin, who kindly agreed to
various domestic arrangements that made my work day much easier, and
to my wife,joan, without whose support and understanding this work, and
much else, would have been impossible.
And worse I may be yet. The worst i.s not,
So long as we can s191, "1nis i.s the worst. "
Shakespeare, King Lear
Introduction to the second edition
Modernism as a Philosophical Problmz was originally written during a contro­
versial phase in a long, internal European debate about Western Enlight­
enment culture. At the time, that phase was widely referred to as
"postmodernism." I argued in Modernism as a Philcsophical Problmz that
such a widespread interest in such an epochal consciousness could partly
(in its most intellectual and philosophical manifestations) be understood as
a reanimation of relatively familiar, especially Nietzschean and Heidegger­
ean, dissatisfactions with the affirmative, normative claims essential to
European modernization. It was all differently expressed this time, in
post-war French philosophy, appropriated in Anglophone literary criti­
cism, anthropology and media criticism, and given a very strong cultural
emphasis, but still, I claimed, it was a phenomenon that should be under­
stood as largely repetitive. A culture of melancholy, profound skepticism and
intense self-criticism had become official high culture and the dominant
academic one in the European West, and, it appeared, had again begun to
repeat itself in new forms, forms now hostile, paradoxically, even to the
ideas of high culture, criticism, skepticism or enlightenment on which such
enterprises �eemed to depend. 1bat is, some aspect of this sort of mood
(the experience of modernization as a kind of spiritual failure, of modernity
as loss) has been quite prominent in much European high culture of the
late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are familiar
examples: Faust's failed bargain (o r the "failure of science" and especially
scientific power and knowledge, "for life"), Holderlin's elegiac sense of
modernity's profound loss, Hegel's claim in Gl,auben und Wissen that the
religion of modern times is: "God is dead," Balzac's, Stendhal's, Flaubert's
pictures of our new but not at all better bourgeois, competitive, phony,
low-minded world, constant prey to romantic fantasies of recovery and
restoration, Henry James's international theme and its ever fading (dying)
traditional Europe, its acquisitive, money-obsessed, new-age Americans,
Proust on the passing of (and exposure of) the Guermantes' world for the
Verdurin's, Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor speculations, Joyce's and
Eliot's ironic use of ancient myth, Rilke's elegiac metaphysics of absence,
Xll lntroductwn ltJ the second edition
Husserl on the "crisis" of the European sciences, Heidegger on the forget­
ting of Being, and the nightmare worlds of Beckett and Kafka, dominated
by mere pretensions to presence and authority. And we would now have to
add the new post-war world of absolute textuality, the end of metaph ics,
ys
failed si ifiers, the death of the subject, negative dialectics, the end of art,
gn
the death of the novel, the impossibility of poetry, absolute contingency,
anti-humanism, and on and on. Everywhere the fi res and images had
gu
been and are again the images of death and loss and failure, and the
language is the language of anxiety, unease, and mourning, or even, to
anticipate the added chapter below, of melancholia, a depressivc's attach­
ment to a loss that has not been worked through, perhaps cannot be; for
which there is no "mourning work," (Trauerarbeit). In sum, the widespread
nineteenth-century suspicions (at least on the European continent) that
(ar ably) the two greatest accomplishments of world civilization, modem
gu
natural science and technology, and a progressive, liberal democratic
culture, were also slowly and inexorably enervating and spiritually destroy­
ing that very culture, have been revived and restated in new complex
critical methodologies, many of which now seemed to promise some final,
decisive confrontation with the original aspirations of modem European
culture (hence the promise of a postmodern epoch).
Although only eight years have passed since that first edition was pub­
lished, it seems obvious enough that the renewed attention to the prophetic
elements in Nietzsche and Heidegger, and to the apocal tic "end of mod­
yp
ernity" tone associated with Lyotard and Vattimo, ·and the "death of man"
anti-humanism inspired by Foucault, and even the great public attention
once lavished on the culture wars and on the so-called "sixties politics" of
literature departments, have all subsided somewhat. But the emphasis now
on new methodologies and research programs ("new historicism," "cultural
studies," "post-colonialism") has not altered the nature or depth of the tone
noted in the book's subtitle nor made any less relevant the problem noted
there: a great, persistent dissatisfaction within European high culture with its
own ideals and results. At many universities, those charged with teaching the
humanities and history still often teach against or around what had been the
standard modem canon, and all in a still suspicious, wary tone, if now inspired
more by political suspicions about the role of power in aesthetic and philoso­
phical representations and expression (and the roles of gender and race in the
exercise of such power) than by theoretical doubts about identity thinking or
textuality and textual integrity. 1
The self-understanding of the modem culture founded on the scientific
world-view and the political ideals of individual rights protection, a mod-