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The Logic of Critical Theory

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The Logic of Critical Theory The Logic of Critical Theory Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 322pp., £34.00 hb., £24.00 pb., 978 0 22658 870 4 hb., 978 0 22670 341 1 pb. In one of Lenin’s most famous lines, he notes that ‘it century-long process of depoliticising Hegel, and thus is impossible to understand Marx’s Capital … without the polar opposite of Lenin’s Conspectus (1929), his com- having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of piled notes for a reading of the Logic in the service of Hegel’s Logic.’ This might seem an odd starting point for advancing Marx’s critique of capital. Yet, despite ap- a review of Robert Pippin’s most recent book, a highly pearances to the contrary, Pippin’s book is actually one technical treatise that might best be understood as an of the most important contributions to the tradition of explication of what Pippin regards as the Logic’s single- critical theory since he began publishing in the 1970s. most radical thesis: that logic and metaphysics ‘coincide’. Aside from its evident contributions to Hegel scholar- For Pippin, the Logic shows that an account of being or ship, engaging as it does with a host of contemporary ‘what is’ (metaphysics) cannot be successful or avoid beg- analytic idealists, from McDowell to Brandom to Houl- ging questions without also including an account of the gate to Longuenesse, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows is also intelligibility or ‘thinkability’ of such an account (logic). a crucial philosophical intervention in critical theory To make sense of things (the task of metaphysics accord- with radical implications for our understanding of social ing to Aristotle, one of the two heroes of the Logic), we critique. must make sense of the very idea of ‘sense-making’, the Pippin’s book is divided into two parts and comprises basic forms of thought. nine chapters. The first four chapters which make up Part To put this point in the terms of one of the book’s I establish the frame for the reading of each of the three key interlocutors, Wittgenstein: if ‘being’ is understood books of the Logic (the Logic of Being, the Logic of Es- as the most capacious language-game we play, then what sence and the Logic of the Concept) undertaken in Part II. Hegel is asking is what it would mean to give a coherent In the introductory chapter, Pippin argues for the general account of the rules of the game, as well as of the general significance of Hegel’s Logic by pointing to its status as notion of rule-governed games. For something to be, it the ‘science of “reasons”, of ways of giving reasons in must be intelligible, conceptually articulable. There are rendering anything genuinely or properly intelligible’. not unknowable things outside of the bounds of sense, Part of the revolution inaugurated by Kant – the other but no things at all, only sheer nonsense. key figure for the Logic – lay in his famous distinction Pippin’s book provides a tour de force reading of the between general and transcendental logic, between the Logic in terms of the ’logic-as-metaphysics’ thesis and rules of thought in abstraction from objects and the rules the related notion of the ‘apperceptive’ character of think- of thought that make the experience of objects possible. ing, a career-long preoccupation of Pippin’s. He also Famously, Kant provides a ‘transcendental deduction’ brings Hegel’s work – both the greater Logic, published meant to demonstrate the applicability of such rules – in its final form in 1832, and its ‘minor’ counterpart, the the pure categories of the understanding – to the dis- Encyclopedia Logic (1817) – to bear on a number of cur- tinctly human form of sensibility, space and time. What rent philosophical topics, including Frege’s distinction was supposed to be a general account of knowledge turns between the force and intelligibility of a proposition, Wit- out to amount to no more than a rather modest account of tgenstein on the limits of sense, the relationship between how things appear to ‘us’ humans, constrained as we hap- concept and intuition, and Aristotle and Kant on the pen to be by these spatial and temporal forms of intuition. mechanical inexplicability of living organisms. Given How things are ‘in themselves’ is unknowable, beyond Pippin’s rather esoteric set of concerns, the suspicion the bounds of (our) sense. Hegel radicalises Kant (to bor- might be that Hegel’s Realm of Shadows is the ultimate row a phrase from John McDowell) by rejecting the need exercise in analytic scholasticism, the culmination of a for such a demonstration of the world-directedness or RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.08 / Autumn 2020 97 ‘objective purport’ of the categories and by claiming that to thinking something entirely indeterminate, and hence an examination of the forms of thought themselves, prop- to thinking ‘nothing’ at all. Such indeterminacy is not erly executed, will just thereby yield knowledge of the just an indifferent fact about pure being, but a failure forms of things. (Pippin provides multiple discussions of of thought that it must resolve, if it is to truly think be- how Hegel fully prosecutes what Kant merely sketches, a ing as it ought to be thought. What Brandom fails to ‘metaphysical deduction’, throughout the book.) General grasp, on Pippin’s account, is the a priori openness of logic will no longer be separable from transcendental thought to its own possible negation, just by virtue of logic, and logic and metaphysics will ‘coincide’. the norm-governed character of any act or belief. Pippin begins to explain what such an examination of pure thought involves in the second and third chapters (‘Logic and Metaphysics’ and ‘The Significance of Self- Consciousness’), by turning to the deep influence exer- cised on the Logic by the Kantian notion of the unity of apperception. According to Pippin, Hegel inherits Kant’s claim that the basic unit of thought is not the concept but rather the judgement, of which concepts are possible predicates. The meaning of concepts is determined by use – by how they are used in practical and theoretical judgements. To master the concept of ‘blue’ is to know how to use it, to know to which sorts of things one can apply it (to cubes and flowers but not to gravity or love) and to know what other concepts its application excludes (red, green) or entails (coloured). All thought is apper- ceptive, for Kant as for Hegel, in that it is not a mere registering of perceptions, desires, beliefs, and so on, but an attentiveness to what one has reason to desire or believe. The Logic, on Pippin’s account, is the record of thought’s apperceptive attempt to think the thought of itself, to ask the question what it means to think. The fourth chapter prepares us for the exemplification of this dialectic in Part II through an account of the self- negating, self-correcting character of any thinking – in- Throughout the first five chapters, especially inthe cluding thought’s thinking of itself (‘thinking thinking notes, Pippin takes great pains to correct common mis- thinking’, in the Aristotelean phrase quoted several times understandings prompted by infelicitous formulations by Pippin). In an important discussion in the penultimate in his first path-breaking work on Hegel (Hegel’s Idealism section of the chapter, Pippin contrasts his own reading (1989)), while also working to distinguish his clarified of Hegel with that of Robert Brandom, whose own under- position from the ‘ontological’ reading of the Logic pop- standing of ‘determinate negation’ in terms of ‘material ularised by Stephen Houlgate. In brief, if for Houlgate incompatibility’ (something’s being reptilian specifically one can infer directly from the categories of the Logic to excludes its being mammalian) is criticised by Pippin as how things in themselves are, then, for Pippin, the Logic appropriate only to the first of the three books ofthe Lo- articulates how being must be thought for things to be gic and as insufficient to grasp the form of self-negation intelligible as what they are. This is a difficult thought that functions as the moving principle of the work as a and one could be forgiven for thinking that Pippin is whole. As chapter five demonstrates, in trying to think just splitting hairs, as early reviews of the book have of- the thought of pure being, thought has committed itself 98 ten suggested. But in actuality, how one comes down render the world intelligible. It is this ‘logic’ of historical on this issue is a matter of absolute importance: if one and social self-actualisation that completes the Science does not frame Hegel’s ‘science of pure thinking’ in terms of Logic, as Pippin shows us in his daring final chapter. of thought’s reason-responsive attempt to think being Pippin’s book gives new meaning and urgency to rightly, as it ought to be thought, one risks assimilating Lenin’s old chestnut about Hegel’s Logic and Capital. As Hegel to the pre-Kantian rationalist tradition – represen- Pippin writes, ‘Hegel’s diagnosis of the fix we have got- ted by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Wolff – he himself ten ourselves into consists in the claim that we have criticised and will thereby miss what is truly distinctive not properly understood how to understand ourselves about the Hegelian option. and the social and natural world in which we dwell’. As Pippin’s book culminates, as the Logic does, in an ac- he has also suggested in a recent article, written during count of the categories of Life and the True and the Good.
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