ThinkBlog

In the last chapter, entitled “Unending Modernity,” of his book Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, Pippin wraps up his thesis at length by critiquing the efforts of Nietzsche and Heidegger to define themselves over and against the modernist project (as it had been exemplified, in Pippin’s eyes, in the Phenomenology of Hegel) as a new way of understanding the world and the history of philosophy itself. Nietzsche and Heidegger both, in Pippin’s view, while extremely gifted and prolific thinkers, may have mis-read the Enlightenment project and modernism as a whole. It has become fashionable in late texts for philosophers to draw on both Nietzsche and Heidegger to criticize modernism, but Pippin believes that this may be a “misreading of a misreading” (p. 155, 1st Ed.)

It seems to Pippin that, in the same way that the modern movement takes for granted certain Christian absolutes and tries to form antitheses from them, so Nietzsche’s philosophy is absolutely critical, but he is unable to commit himself to anything new without taking certain modern premises for granted (“post-modernism,” then, becomes a kind of anti-modernism).

For Pippin, then, modernity is a dialectic, in which the crises represented by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s patterns of thought are the middle parts, not the end—thus, post-modernism becomes merely a label for modernist thought after the period from Nietzsche to Heidegger, but is nevertheless still a part of the modern dialectic.

In the last chapter, entitled “Unending Modernity,” of his book Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, Pippin wraps up his thesis at length by critiquing the efforts of Nietzsche and Heidegger to define themselves over and against the modernist project (as it had been exemplified, in Pippin’s eyes, in the Phenomenology of Hegel) as a new way of understanding the world and the history of philosophy itself. Nietzsche and Heidegger both, in Pippin’s view, while extremely gifted and prolific thinkers, may have mis-read the Enlightenment project and modernism as a whole. It has become fashionable in late texts for philosophers to draw on both Nietzsche and Heidegger to criticize modernism, but Pippin believes that this may be a “misreading of a misreading” (p. 155, 1st Ed.)

It seems to Pippin that, in the same way that the modern movement takes for granted certain Christian absolutes and tries to form antitheses from them, so Nietzsche’s philosophy is absolutely critical, but he is unable to commit himself to anything new without taking certain modern premises for granted (“post-modernism,” then, becomes a kind of anti-modernism).

For Pippin, then, modernity is a dialectic, in which the crises represented by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s patterns of thought are the middle parts, not the end—thus, post-modernism becomes merely a label for modernist thought after the period from Nietzsche to Heidegger, but is nevertheless still a part of the modern dialectic.