Heidegger and Philosophical Modernism

Abstract

Pippin's accusation that Heidegger's account of modernity and the History of Being are pre‐Critical or dogmatic can be rebutted by understanding Heidegger's later writings more thoroughly in terms of his earlier and by requiring Heidegger to modify the texture, though not the philosophy, of his narrative. Heidegger's thesis that epochal transitions in the History of Being are contingent and inexplicable can be rendered consistent with Critical epistemology, whose central thrust is to deny the Myth of the Given, by understanding the inexplicability involved to be rational inexplicability, not hermeneutic. To explain this suggestion, it is necessary to turn to some of the conceptual resources of Being and Time. The History of Being can thus be seen as both hermeneutically intelligible and contingent. For this to be possible, however, Heidegger's tendency to present that History as a series of monolithic shifts that cannot be bridged by any account of the motivations that drive history forward must be resisted. Heidegger's narrative of modernity is too abstract, but not pre‐Critical. Pippin's argument that it is dogmatic is based on an undefended, rationalist assumption.

Notes

Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991, 224 pp., paperback £13.99. ISBN 0–631–17657–8. Unprefixed page references are to this work.