Modernity as autonomy

Abstract

In Modernism as a Philosophical Problem Robert Pippin offers an interpretation of post‐Kantian continental philosophy that locates the project of autonomy or self‐determination at the center of the modernity/postmodernity debate and presents Hegel as ‘a kind of radical, post‐Kantian modernist’ whose philosophical ‘experiment’ is preferable to more recent attempts to overcome or deconstruct metaphysics. I raise some questions about the adequacy of Pippin's interpretation of Hegel's notion of a rational justification, at least as it bears on his argument in the Philosophy of Right, and I express some reservations about Pippin's own attempt to view modernity in terms of the project of autonomy. I conclude with some reasons for preferring Habermas's account of modernity which, without abandoning the project of autonomy, relinquishes the idea of a self‐grounding of reason and proposes a more modest role for philosophy within the current division of intellectual labor.

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.