Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life by Robert Pippin

At first glance, Robert Pippin’s new Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life is a rather unassuming book, one by an academic philosopher written for other academic philosophers. It is that, of course, and as a work of scholarship it is nothing short of excellent. Pippin demonstrates his thesis?about how Hegel’s idiosyncratic account of human freedom in modern life is grounded in his idiosyncratic theory of human subjectivity?with clarity and breadth.

But first, a little bit of background. Academic philosophy in the 20th century was more or less split into Analytic and Continental camps. To make a long story short, the split was over Hegel?with the Analytics obsessively ignoring him, and the Continentals obsessively repudiating him. There has been, however, an alternative tradition centered loosely around American Pragmatism, which claims Hegel as an intellectual forbear. That tradition has always made it a point of pride to write for any intelligent reader?the readers of this review, for instance.

Hegel is, of course, notoriously opaque. Every philosophically meaningful term is either untranslatable into English (such as aufhebung) or used in some idiosyncratic way (just about anything) or both (such as geist). It is almost as if he is playing some sort of philosophical language game totally unconnected with reality, or, for that matter, any other kind of philosophy. The task of reconnecting Hegel’s philosophy with the world is quite a daunting task. But like all good philosophy, what was familiar in the world looks altogether different after the attempt.

Pippin reconstructs Hegel as attempting to build every aspect of his philosophy from Kant’s central claim that the only form of authority we can be take as binding upon us has to be self legislated. Not only is this the claim in Kant’s moral philosophy, where the only thing that can count as morally binding is law that we give ourselves, but in his speculative philosophy as well, in which reason is said to give law to nature. Where Hegel begins to differ from Kant is how he construes the role of human sociality. Kant focuses on the individual exclusively. What is all-important for Kant is that any individual should, at least in theory, be able to find all the precepts of self-legislation on one’s own. Hence, the deductive approach to reason in the Critique of Pure Reason, or his formalist account of freedom in The Groundwork, where freedom turns out to be equivalent to following the moral law, which is also presented in formal terms. The problem Hegel sees isn’t how Kant’s account of morality leads to some rather outlandish conclusions (although there are a few howlers) but that it is so void of content that it doesn’t describe freedom at all.

Hegel’s account of freedom?told in terms of norms we hold ourselves responsible for and developed historically?would seem rather implausible at first. It is easy to see how Hegel’s detractors take him to be stridently anti-individual, with his claim that subjecthood is an achieved status, dependent on the recognition of others, like “chess player” or “English speaker.” One isn’t said to be playing chess merely by moving certain pieces around a board, but by playing by the rules recognized by other chess players. In the same way, one isn’t a human subject by virtue of being a featherless biped endowed with certain chemical and electrical impulses, but rather by playing the subjecthood game, as recognized by others.

That is, Hegel’s talk of reasons as “the essence” of spirit must, as we have seen in detail, be read in a careful way. He is in effect treating spirit itself as a kind of norm; or collective institution whereby we (remaining the biological beings we ontologically are) hold each other to a responsiveness to and directedness by reason, and thereby realize spirit as freedom.”

While this sounds rather suspect, it does have broader explanatory power than methodological individualism. For example, one doesn’t speak of Oedipus taking the blame for having killed his father and bedding his mother by claiming that he (and those around him) have made a mistake about what a subject could possibly be held responsible for, but that Oedipus simply wasn’t a subject because they didn’t have a notion of a subject.

As odd as a historical, developmental account of freedom seems to those of us brought up with a belief in “self evident” truths about the priority of individual freedom, those very rights and freedoms which were only poorly and incompletely understood at the time of that writing. This is how philosophically dubious claims like “spirit is a product of itself” make sense. Freedom would be altogether hollow if we didn’t hold ourselves and each other responsible for its protection. Hegel’s claim is simply that this is what freedom is made of, the holding each other responsible for it.

All said, this is a very rewarding book. With wit and grace, Pippin leads the reader through tough philosophical ideas without any hand holding, always leaving the difficulty of the ideas intact. There is, of course, a great deal more philosophical territory covered in the book than I’ve touched upon here. While human freedom is the theme of the book, early chapters set the background?how Hegel’s idea of freedom arises from his account of action, which is itself grounded on his theory of recognition. This is a book about Hegel, after all, and everything is connected to everything else. Though sometimes difficult going, it is always the ideas that are difficult, and Pippin’s book is in every way worthwhile.

Reviewed by James Liu

Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life by Robert Pippin
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Paper, 308 pp., $29.99.
ISBN-10: 052172872X