Topoi (2006) 25:85–90
DOI 10.1007/s11245-006-0013-2
‘Philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought’
Robert B. Pippin
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006
Abstract So much philosophy is so unavoidably gui-
ded by intuitions, and such intuitions are so formed by
examples, and such examples must of necessity present
so cropped and abstract a picture of an instance or
event or decision, that, left to its traditional methods,
philosophy might be ill-equipped on its own to answer
a question about the true content of an historical ideal
like ‘‘autonomy’’, or authenticity or ‘‘leading a free
life’’. One needs to bring so many factors into play at
once that one non-traditional but more promising path
might be through reflection on the modern novel—or
modern drama or poetry or film or even modern
painting.
Keywords intuitions Æ examples Æ novels Æ autonomy
I interest but of no real importance to any working
I am not at all sure ‘‘what needs to be done’’ now in
contemporary philosophy, although the source of the
phrase itself in Lenin suggests a Hegelian theme I
would like briefly to discuss: the historical location of
philosophy. That is, I am not sure what needs to be
done, but I do think there is something missing in much
contemporary discussion (this historical dimension),
and I would like to address that lacuna. A grander
thesis, only hinted at here, would be a claim about the
advantages of an essentially interdisciplinary concep-
tion of philosophy, but that discussion would far
exceed the bounds of this brief essay.
R. B. Pippin (&)
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
e-mail: r-pippin@uchicago.edu
I would be most often characterized by the profes-
sion as ‘‘a historian of philosophy,’’ especially as a
specialist in modern German philosophy from roughly
the end of the 18th century to the present. There are
some weighty, well-known names in this period—Kant,
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—weighty enough
and obscure enough to have inspired several hilarious
Monty Python bits. But it is a designation—‘‘histo-
rian’’—that many in the profession consider the aca-
demic equivalent of ‘‘librarian’’ of philosophy, or of
someone designated to take the notes at a meeting, or
at imagined past meetings, but not to participate. This
is because much of contemporary philosophy aspires
not to have a history or at least not to have a history
relevant in any philosophical sense. The aspiration is
that such a history should be as relevant as the history
of chemistry is to chemistry; perhaps of antiquarian
chemist today. Literature and art may have living his-
tories (no one would seriously claim that playwriting
has so ‘‘progressed’’ since Shakespeare that Ibsen
represents a better version of what Shakespeare was
trying in his somewhat backward way to do), but many
claim there has been real, indeed decisive progress in
philosophy,1 such that much of the past has been left
behind or if not must be creatively re-interpreted so as
to be made to address contemporary issues.
I don’t agree with the conventional view of what a
historian of philosophy is and want to raise here the
question of the historical location of philosophical
activity, especially recently, in the modern West. But I
1
Kant’s demonstration of the impossibility of traditional
metaphysics and Frege’s innovations in philosophical logic (the
‘‘invention of the quantifier’’) are often cited.
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note first that my daughter was headed in a good
direction on this issue, when she was about eight and I
overheard her being asked by a friend, ‘‘What does
your father do for a living,’’ and she responded, ‘‘Oh,
he steals ideas from dead people.’’ The friend naturally
enough asked, ‘‘Why doesn’t he think up any of his
own?’’ and my daughter defended a version of my own
answer: ‘‘He says all the best ones have already been
thought up, but we don’t yet really understand what
they mean, and have to think about them some more.’’
Her friend did not note that this is a somewhat para-
doxical response, much like the apocryphal restaurant
complaint: ‘‘The food is terrible there, and they don’t
give you enough of it.’’
This characterization is not altogether false, and it
does capture what I sometimes feel I am doing for a
living, but many of the German philosophers I am
interested in would answer somewhat differently be-
cause they believe that there is an essential relation
between philosophy and its historical time and that, to
understand that historical aspect of philosophy in our
own time, we need to say something about how that
relation manifested itself in the prior epochs out of
which ours developed. The idea is that, although there
are any number of what seem like straightforward
philosophical issues in our contemporary world, we
can be led astray if we simply charge ahead and start
trying to ‘‘solve’’ the problems. (Indeed, as Ian
Hacking has pointed out, the whole idea that philos-
ophy consists of ‘‘problems’’ is itself a relatively new
one, has a history, ‘‘...was canonized in English
around 1910 with titles by G. E. Moore, William
James, and Bertrand Russell...’’ (Hacking 2002, p. 72).)
Moreover, as opposed to many once standard prob-
lems that have pretty much died out—like proofs for
the existence of God or the immortality of the soul—,
these current problems continue ‘‘to have a historical
life,’’ we might say, because of complex and often
hidden links with non-philosophical issues, links that
become apparent only by locating the philosophy of a
time in the right historical narrative, something that is
not possible by attention to academic philosophical
issues alone.
Or so goes the kind of claim I am interested in.
There are scores of controversies about everything I’ve
just said, the key issue being what one might mean by
‘‘develop out of’’ the past and especially a distinction
that we all sometimes invoke but do not much explore:
what distinguishing a ‘‘living’’ notion or practice from a
‘‘dead’’ or ‘‘dying’’ one amounts to. But, for the sake of
context, we should also note that there are numerous
possible positions here about what it is for philosophy
to have a history, and it is easy to get lost quickly.
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R. B. Pippin
There is straight progressivism, especially for philos-
ophers who link modern philosophy to the discoveries of
modern natural science and regard past philosophy the
same way they regard past religion: as bad and now
superseded science. Indeed, many of the thinkers we
take to be the ‘‘founders’’ of a distinctly modern
philosophy (e.g., Hobbes, Descartes) clearly believed
that so much had changed that philosophy itself had to
simply begin all over again, from scratch. (This kind of
view—that past philosophers are bad versions of us—is
connected to a general philosophical temptation to-
wards an imperialism of a sort, manifest especially when
philosophers show up at colloquia of other depart-
ments—to wit, that everything else in the humanities and
much of the social sciences is simply a bad version of
philosophy, not a good version of what it is.)
There are also the perennialists, who think there is a
small, permanent core of philosophical problems—like
‘‘why should anyone care about justice if they can get
away with unjustly bettering their own lot?’’ or ‘‘what
is a number?’’—and each generation has its own go at
it, failing to make much progress, just like all other
generations, but captured by the problems nonetheless.
(This is of course the position, or perhaps one should
say, given its great success at the time, the marketing
strategy of the Great Books program, associated with
Mortimer Adler and the Hutchins era at my own uni-
versity, the University of Chicago.)
And there are the various kinds of relativists, who
see philosophical problems as so bound up with their
age that they should be thought of as games and puz-
zles or anxieties or obsessions that arise for a while in a
certain period, like literary or painting or musical
styles, and then change and fade away as times change.
Perhaps Wittgenstein’s phrase is apt here: philosophy
as conceptual music.
It is quite likely that all of these answers are correct,
some for certain sorts of problems, some for others.
There are likely historically novel ‘‘problems’’ abstract
enough that, however important and complicated, a
historical genealogy does not contribute much. There
are no doubt other sorts of issues that emerge and
disappear as if mere fashions of the moment.2 But this
2
But stated so broadly this sort of call to historical arms is
similar to one final position from which it should be distin-
guished. I mean the philosophical assumptions behind much
creative, valuable work in recent history and sociology of sci-
ence. The direction I am eventually going to take branches off
from much of this work in a couple of respects. The main result
of such recent historicizing philosophy has been to emphasize the
discreteness and uniqueness of new concepts and projects and
even ‘‘new objects’’ (i.e., that science is full of wholesale, vast,
radical ‘‘paradigm shifts,’’ not really development), and thus
to demonstrate the contingency of such origins. The narratives
Philosophy is its own time
general outline doesn’t tell us much. Most everyone is
willing to concede that the concepts by which we
explain and evaluate our experience are ‘‘historically
conditioned’’ in some sense. That ancient authors do
not seem to recognize what Christian metaphysicians
call the will, or that British philosophy of the 18th
century ties normative distinctions so much to the
influence of the passions, or that Kantian moral psy-
chology describes agency as paradigmatically the
Footnote 2 continued
often aim to be de-stabilizing, de-familiarizing, even de-
legitimating. ‘‘Things could have easily been much different than
they ended up being,’’ goes the story, and it should give us great
pause to note how quickly deep transformations in a practice can
become canonical and how little ‘‘reason’’ or ‘‘discovery’’ ex-
plain such transformations (the covering term for the absence of
such reason or discovery is often simply ‘‘power’’). The way in
which various concepts are linked up with others could have
been quite different as well. So when Ian Hacking or Ruth Leys
(2000) demonstrates the great historical novelty of concepts like
‘‘psychological trauma’’ (and the way in which the language of
trauma and traumatology has quickly replaced the language of
neurosis, and taken over a great deal of, almost all of, therapeutic
psychology), or when Hacking documents the enormous, anxious
importance to modern parents of the benchmarks drawn up by
new ‘‘childhood development specialists’’ (and so the great new
anxiety about measuring ‘‘normal’’ development—it wasn’t al-
ways true that the first question parents would ask about a new
baby was its length and weight, the first mark of normalizing
worries), or when Lorraine Daston investigates the distinct ori-
gins of concepts like fact or objectivity (Daston and Park 1998),
or Foucault goes after the norms inherent in the treatment of the
mentally ill (the invention of mental illness) or norms of pun-
ishment, their interest is not the normative status of these no-
tions themselves—whether they merit the hold they have on us,
whether a historical narrative can help illuminate and even
solidify this hold—as it is to explain, in the manner of an
empirical scientist, under what conditions people in fact com-
mitted themselves to such norms and practices. Said another
way, such work is relevant to the question of whether such norms
merit their authority, but only by way of showing, in all these
cases, that they probably do not, or at least that they cannot be
defended in the standard ways. The standard ways project a
myth; the reality is very different. The normative question itself
is regarded either as a separate one—leaving philosophical and
historical questions distinct—or, as just indicated, as a naı̈ve one,
since the legitimating argument is, as we have seen, itself likely to
have a historical site and distinct origins, as well as to be subject
to the same demonstration of utter contingency. The ambitious
ideas of a continuous or even self-correcting normative project
and so of a kind of holism, and of a kind of philosophical defense
of some norm that appeals to history and historical development,
all sound anachronistic and dogmatic nowadays. In fact they
sound like the epitome of bourgeois self-satisfaction and smug-
ness, and so many intellectuals in our age accordingly prefer the
deflationary and critical. But, while there are many ungrounded
claims to normative worth that ought to be exposed by this
demonstration of contingency, something is just going haywire if
that demonstration is totalized, and an inquiry into normative
authority as such is either re-quarantined off as in another
workshop, or unremittingly itself exposed as some historical
accident or other, explicable but not thereby affirmable.
87
capacity to obey the dictates of pure practical reason,
do not look either like mere changes in fashion or
eternally accessible problems, ‘‘discovered’’ by chance
at one time rather than another. It looks like such
changes will all have to be explained in a way that is
profoundly ‘‘historical.’’ But, as noted, it is not con-
troversial to concede something like this. As with
everything else, the devil is in the details.
II
Consider an example—the ideal of freedom, especially
an understanding of what it is to lead one’s own life in
such a way that it requires protection of basic entitle-
ments for individuals (like property rights) and
understands human agency as resulting in actions by
individuals for which they may be held individually
responsible.
Even though these questions—what is the real con-
tent of this ideal (what would it be to lead a free life)
and why has it become so important to us, what is its
importance to us—are obviously pretty vague, it al-
ready does not look like a strictly philosophical answer
to those questions could get us very far, at least it
doesn’t seem likely to me. It is after all only relatively
recently in Western history that we began to think of
human beings as something like individuals directing
and guiding the course of their own lives, in some sense
independent and self-determining centers of a causal
agency; only relatively recently that one’s entitlement
to such a self-determining, self-directed life seemed not
just valuable but absolutely valuable, for the most part
more important even than any consideration of secu-
rity, well-being, and peace that would make the
attainment of such an ideal more difficult, so important
that it was even worth the risk of life in its defense. At
least, this moral, quasi-religious insistence on the value
of individual liberty has attained this level of impor-
tance in the United States (as distinct from Continental
Europe). Its legitimacy is not so much defended by
appeals to self-interest but by appeals to a kind of
absolute moral entitlement. That is one of the reasons
why the great American political philosopher, John
Rawls, found such a large American audience for his
Kantian defense of freedom, of an entitlement to
pursue one’s own life plan, as an essential element in
justice. The claim for importance actually has a lot to
do with a claim by Rousseau that has also found gen-
erations of passionate American adherents: that there
is a condition necessary for a life to have any value for
me—that it be my life, that nothing can be a good for
me unless it is a good to me, recognized as such by me,
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under conditions that allow the recognition and eval-
uation to be truly mine. It seems unlikely in the ex-
treme that this notion of freedom and its most
important political implication—the idea of a human
or natural right—should have been sitting in history
unnoticed, waiting for Locke and Rousseau to discover
it.
We can try to quarantine, as it were, the philo-
sophical issues—arguing that, however such an ideal
got on our agenda is of no importance to philosophy,
that we just investigate its rational credentials once
history hands it to us. But that seems quite disingenu-
ous since the notion has a kind of historical and social
authority and priority in normative discussions and a
dense, complex ‘‘lived’’ meaning to those committed to
it that philosophy also needs to understand if it is to
understand what the ideal entails and what actual
authority it has merited. We could also try to argue
that the contexts wherein a claim for the complete
autonomy of philosophy looks prima facie implausible
are actually quite restricted, few in number, limited
perhaps to a few very broad ethical issues, and that the
claim is not relevant to more formal issues in episte-
mology or semantics or philosophy of mind. It would
admittedly be harder to show the relevance of this
‘‘historical location’’ issue for some such contexts, but
the point would be that any such discussion begins with
assumptions about the significance of the problem
being addressed, the centrality or marginality of vari-
ous issues, and criteria for what counts as an explana-
tion or solution where such a claim for relevance would
look more natural.
Moreover, if it is plausible to consider the origin and
even the authority of such normative commitments as
unintelligible apart from their place in a changing,
historical social organization, it is also highly plausible
that any particular mode of ‘‘investigating the rational
credentials’’ of such commitments is itself necessarily
attached to the same historical story. Argument forms
determining what counts as a legitimating case also
come attached to complex and developing histories
and need the same sort of proper location in order to
be understood and properly assessed. For example, the
idea of appealing to what form of authority ‘‘pre-social
rational individuals would hypothetically choose to
submit to’’ is not something that would have made
much sense, say, to Aristotle, just as refraining from
appealing to the proper natural role of men and wo-
men, to natural law, would have greatly puzzled
Aquinas.
However such an ideal of autonomy or self-
realization got a grip on the imagination of intellectuals
and then the whole culture of the West, it is not likely
123
R. B. Pippin
that it was because of the beauty of the arguments of
Rousseau. And, one would grant immediately, how-
ever much one might want to concede something like
such a claim, one also has to be careful about turning
any discussion of a philosophical issue into some ver-
sion of historical sociology or sociology of knowledge.
One still wants some way of assessing the normative
status of what originated, even conceding the full his-
torical texture of the ideal itself.
This is just as true of the rapidly growing dissatis-
faction with the ideal throughout the last half of the
19th century. For by this point the view that modern
Western civilization itself represents a kind of failure
or is historically exhausted is much more widespread
and goes much deeper than any assessment of the
philosophical credentials of the idea could account for.
At just the moment in the 19th century when Western
European societies, for all of their visible flaws, seemed
to start paying off the Enlightenment’s promissory
notes, reducing human misery by the application of their
new science and technology, increasing the authority of
appeals to reason in life, reducing the divisive public
role of religion, extending the revolutionary claim of
individual natural right to an ever wider class of sub-
jects, accelerating the extension of natural scientific
explanation, and more and more actually gaining what
Descartes so boldly promised, the mastery of nature, it
also seemed that many of the best, most creative minds
produced within and as products of such societies rose
up in protest, even despair at the social organization
and norms that also made all of this possible. In
painting, literature, and music, as well as philosophy,
bourgeois modernity as a whole became not only a
great problem but also a very confusing, largely dis-
tasteful fate. All this eventually came to be reflected in
what the profession classifies as continental philoso-
phy—the end of metaphysics, the end of philosophy,
the impotence of reason, failed signifiers, the death of
the subject, the end of man, negative dialectics, the
impossibility of poetry, the end of the novel, absolute
contingency, anti-humanism, and on and on.
III
What sort of a philosophical problem is all this? How
adequate is a philosophical response that simply says:
these complainants were wrong? Or that we just need a
more extensive realization of the ideal? How are we to
begin a philosophical assessment of the ideal when it is
so hard to state clearly the conceptual content of this,
the deepest and most important animating ideal of the
modern West? Here another extra-philosophical
Philosophy is its own time
dimension besides social and cultural history seems
relevant. So much philosophy is so unavoidably guided
by intuitions, and such intuitions are so formed by
examples, and such examples must of necessity present
so cropped and abstract a picture of an instance or
event or decision, that, left to its traditional methods,
philosophy might be ill-equipped on its own to answer
a question like one about the true content of an
historical ideal like ‘‘autonomy,’’ or authenticity or
‘‘leading a free life.’’ One needs to bring so many
factors into play at once that one non-traditional but
more promising path might be through reflection on
the modern novel (or modern drama or poetry or film
or even modern painting).
In the space available I hope that a few concluding
examples can help clarify what I am trying to get at,
and bring together the relevance of historical and lit-
erary elements to philosophy. The bearing of such
extra-philosophical elements is particularly appropri-
ate with regard to the freedom issue, since the histor-
ical problem emerging in much modern literature
concerns the very confusing experience of extensive
social dependencies within a kind of life guided by ever
more extreme demands for reflective and social inde-
pendence.
Consider how a particular unresolved complexity
manifests itself, given that all the notions we have
discussed as relevant to a free life (justifiability, reason-
giving, and identification) presuppose some way of
having already settled in common a number of the very
simplest preliminary issues—what it is that you are
actually doing, something that can itself be quite con-
testable and that requires some way of understanding
such act descriptions as involving profound social
dependencies. I know it sounds vague and too literary
to suggest that we find in these documents extended
attempts to ‘‘work through’’ in some way this unre-
solved legacy of the bourgeois turn in history, but
perhaps examples will help.
In one of the novels of Henry James, The Wings of
the Dove, an extraordinarily intelligent woman, Kate
Croy, befriends an American heiress, Milly Theale,
who is dying. Kate sees that Milly has fallen in love
with Merton Densher, with whom Kate herself is se-
cretly engaged. Kate and Merton have not married and
kept everything secret because for them, given their
tastes and ambitions, a marriage with no money would
be miserable and they have hopes a solution may come
along. Kate’s solution is to have Merton make love to
Milly, the rich heiress, marry her, and then, after her
89
inevitable death, Kate and Merton can live happily
ever after on Merton’s inheritance. One of the great
achievements of the novel is how good Kate is in
convincing Merton (and us) that what they are doing is
not ‘‘deceiving a dying heiress’’; they are actually
‘‘allowing a friend, Milly, to experience romantic love
once before she dies.’’ I can do no justice here to just
how good Kate is at this, and how different it all would
seem if they had been successful and Milly had died
unknowing and blissfully happy. One might want to
attribute Kate’s eventual inability to somehow make
this description stick to the social conventions, which in
fact override her attempted re-description, or one
might want to say somehow that both descriptions are
true in their own way. But Kate is good enough at what
she does to make it profoundly unclear just how such
an issue should be settled, how our dependence on the
way a putative description like this would enter and
circulate in a real social world can be squared with our
sense of the relative independence we want to assert
about what we sincerely intended to do and what role
that should play in some determination of what was
done.
But James goes the other way too, does not just
throw doubt on the independence of agents’ descrip-
tions in favor of the more standard or socially
authoritative ones. In The Ambassadors, the conven-
tional or socially authoritative view of the relationship
between a young heir dawdling years too long in Paris
and the married Parisian woman with whom he daw-
dles, is that it is not serious, a mere bagatelle, poten-
tially corrupting, and that the boy should come home.
The ambassador sent there to bring him home,
Lambert Strether, ends up disputing this description,
seeing instead a world of subtlety, great sensitivity and
complexity that it is good for Chad, the heir, to expe-
rience. This divergence from the norm ends up costing
Strether everything he has (the boy’s mother is Stre-
ther’s employer and benefactor) and James here
manages to persuade us that Strether’s independence is
correct, although it remains mysterious how we know
he is right. (This is especially so because we keep faith
with Strether and his independence even after we and
he learn that the conventional view had been largely
right, that Chad is a thoughtless playboy and has not
been helped much by his so-called education.)
Novels testify in many ways to the great limitations
of any notion of freedom that exaggerates this claim of
independence—an exaggerated pretence of indepen-
dence that, I am suggesting, is the chief bourgeois
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90 R. B. Pippin

temptation.3 Perhaps the most prominent and well
known are the dilemmas about romantic love and
marriage. Three of the greatest of the 19th century
novels, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, and Fontane’s Effie Briest, are about adul-
tery and just thereby already raise a number of issues
about the perceived unfreedom of the institution of
marriage and so what it might mean to re-establish that
connection between my sense of my own agency and
my own deeds, as when Emma Bovary can say to
herself in what amounts to a triumph of pathos: ‘‘I am
having an affair!’’ (This sympathy is even true of the
author (in spite of himself) who is clearly out to write
an anti-adultery novel, Tolstoy.)4
The claim that this sort of historical and literary
evidence is essential for philosophy and that this sort
of appreciation of historical content is not available to
one simply qua philosopher requires a much longer
discussion than is possible here. (The claim that such
an appreciation is essential, rather than merely
exemplary, usefully illustrative, is particularly con-
troversial and not supported by anything said here.)
But this sort of approach is important not just with
respect to methodological issues in philosophy. The
modest suggestion is that the sort of sweeping claims
discussed above concerning the loss of authority
among some segments of European high culture of
this core liberal notion, the claims about dead ends,
false consciousness, historical exhaustion, ideological
distortion, and so forth are quite premature. Surely
we need to know first, in a great deal more detail, and
in a way not traditionally thought of as purely
philosophical, what a kind of life organized around
such a commitment actually amounts to, what con-
flicts and even social pathologies it is heir to, for the
real, historically situated participants in such a nor-
mative community. And the question of the adequacy
of such an ideal might then be discussed in a way
informed as much by an appreciation of the sustain-
ability of such an ideal as it is lived out and experi-
enced over time as by the ability of the ideal to
withstand rational challenge and criticism in the tra-
ditional sense.
References
Adorno T (1974) Minima moralia: reflections from damaged life,
translated by Jephcott EFN. Verso, London
Daston L, Park K (1998) Wonders and the order of nature. MIT
Press, Cambridge (MA)
Hacking I (2002) Historical ontology. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA
Leys R (2000) Trauma. A genealogy. University of Chicago
Press, Chicago

3
An important question here is what difference it makes that
these examples are fictional, from a work of art; what would
change if they were real-life examples? A very long answer
would be necessary to answer this question but one essential
reason for having to rely on fiction is the possibility opened up of
knowing quite a bit more about the state of and changes in the
inner experience of characters than would ever be possible in
‘‘real life.’’ It is false that we could ever know what James claims
to be able to know, but within that false or ‘‘mind-reading’’
assumption, there is a also a restriction the observation of which
distinguishes great from mediocre fiction, all in a way that cannot
be formalized or thematized: the ‘‘ring of truth.’’
4
Cf. Adorno (1974), pp. 30–33.

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