The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath
Cambridge University Press, 5/2/2005
EAN 9780521848589, ISBN10: 052184858X
Hardcover, 380 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to, and critiques of, the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, 'bourgeois' form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical 'actuality' of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutional practices such as medicine, as well as in other contexts such as modernism in the visual arts and in the novels of Marcel Proust.
1. Introduction
'bourgeois philosophy' and the problem of the subject
Part I
2. The Kantian aftermath
reaction and revolution in modern German philosophy
Part II
3. Necessary conditions for the possibility of what isn't
Heidegger on failed meaning
4. Gadamer's Hegel
subjectivity and reflection
5. Negative ethics
Adorno on the falseness of bourgeois life
6. The unavailability of the ordinary
Strauss on the philosophical fate of modernity
7. Hannah Arendt and the bourgeois origins of totalitarian evil
8. On not being a neo-structuralist
remarks on Manfred Frank and romantic subjectivity
9. Leaving nature behind
or, two cheers for subjectivism
on John McDowell
Part III
10. The ethical status of civility
11. Medical practice and Social authority in modernity
Part IV. Expression
12. The force of felt necessity
literature, ethical knowledge, and the law
13. What was abstract art? (from the point of view of Hegel)
14. On becoming who one is
Proust's problematic selves.