Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) FORUM ROBERT B. PIPPIN After the beautiful. Hegel and the philosophy of pictorial modernismChicago, The university of Chicago press, 2015Discussants:Mario FarinaFrancesco CampanaFrancesca IannelliTerry PinkardItalo TestaLuca CortiEd. by Mario Farina 2 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti MARIO FARINA(Università degli Studi di Firenze) INTRODUCTION 1. Hegel-renaissanceContemporary English-speaking philosophy, as is well known, hasnever been very keen on German idealism, especially, Hegel's1. Still in1945, Bertrand Russel – among the main actors of that foundationalmovement of analytic philosophy known as linguistic turn – mockedheavily Hegel's dialectics playing with the sentence «Absolute is an un-cle»2. The same year, Popper's famous work, The open society and its enemies, despite its clearly less humorous approach, radicalisedRussel's position and defined Hegel's retrieval of classical philosophyas a «perennial revolt against freedom and reason»3. In this regard,Hegel would be the heir, and somehow also the peak, of that traditionof metaphysical philosophy, which parasitically borrows the structureof religious ideas and mysticism, while simultaneously rejecting theirultramundane features. Liberal criticism, in brief, articulates the beliefthat, being the apex of the attempted conceptualization of the mysti-cism scheme, Hegel's strain of thought can be fruitfully employed inorder to justify whatever state of affairs, especially in the politicalrealm.This interpretation has actually spread significantly also amongthose keener on continental philosophy, as it can be easily proven byreading the words of positivist sociologist, Ernst Topitsch, who definesHegel's dialectics as «the drama of fall and redemption»4. As brightlypointed out by Claudio Cesa, the strong echo of the debate on seculari-zation clearly affects this kind of position. More precisely, the wholeissue of the reliability, within the scientific approach to the world, offorms of thought stemming out of mythical thinking is here heavily 1 Concerning the initial and troubled reception of Hegel's philosophy in America, see the«Introduction» to the recent work by L. Corti, Ritratti hegeliani. Un capitolo della filosofia americana contemporanea, Roma, Carocci, 2014, in particular pp. 15-172 B. Russell, History of western philosophy, London-New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 663.3 K.R. Popper, The open society and its enemies, London-New York, Routledge, 2011, p. 272.4 E. Topitsch, Die Sozialphilosophie Hegels als Heilslehre und Herrschaftsideologie, Neuwied-Berlin, Luchterhand, 1967, p. 19. 3 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) influential5. Walking on the thin thread connecting Hegel's philosophyand the beginning of the secularization process, Hegel's ultra-liberalinterpreter, Friedrich von Hayek, claims to have «little to add to themasterly analysis of this historicism by my friend Karl Popper»6, whileattempting to argue in favour of a strong affinity between Hegel's phi-losophy and Comte's positivism7. As the highest representative of thephilosophical attempt to make mystical, religious, and, generally spea-king, mythical inherited modes of thinking into a rational, hence rea-sonable stance, it is not surprising that the English-speaking analyticphilosophy, originally close to liberal thinking, has more or less ca-tegorically rejected Hegel.In Italy, to the contrary, Hegel has always been warmly welcome.This is so not only within the framework of Marxism, as obvious,within Gentile's idealism, Croce's historicism, and hermeneutics,which somehow owe something to Hegel, but also and more intere-stingly in the realm of liberal thinking. Norberto Bobbio's definition ofHegel's political philosophy as «dissolution and fulfilment» of naturallaw theories confirms this claim8. Differently, in 1940 England, Knoxand Carritt discussed on the journal pages of the British Institute ofPhilosophy the explicit connections between Hegel's thought and«Prussianism», as well as the implicit ones with «present-day Natio-nal-Socialism»9.One may then wonder what are the reasons behind the Hegelrenaissance in the English-speaking world? When exactly did it occur?In the research published in 2005, Frederick Beiser, importanthistorian of German idealism, connects the Marxist movement of the1960s and 1970s to the English-speaking retrieval of Hegel, and re-marks that «in the 1970s and 1980s Hegel became, at least in theAnglophone world, the rallying figure for the reaction against analyticphilosophy»10. It is certainly not surprising that the several streams of 5 C. Cesa, Introduzione, in C. Cesa (ed.), Il pensiero politico di Hegel, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1979,pp. XLII-XLIII.6 F.A. von Hayek, The counter-revolution of science. Studies on the abuse of reason, London,Collier-Macmillan, 1964, p. 199.7 Ibid., p. 200 ss.8 N. Bobbio, Hegel e il giusnaturalismo, in C. Cesa (ed.), Il pensiero politico di Hegel cit., p. 5.9 T.M. Knox, Hegel and Prussianism, «Philosophy» 16 (1940), p. 51; concerning the discussionwith Carritt, see in the same issue: pp. 190-196 and pp. 313-317.10 F. Beiser, Hegel, New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 2. 4 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti American Marxism, whose common ground is often a political andliterary reinterpretation of post-modernism, extensively employ Hegel-inspired concepts. In this respect, some authors, such as FredericJameson, are clearly keen on picking up Hegel's philosophy11. Moreinteresting, in my opinion, is instead the subsequent assimilation ofHegel's thinking, originated and developed within analytic philosophy,which is, at first sight, problematic in its outline. The analytic retrieval,for instance, of Kant's philosophy, as anticipated in the realm of ethicsby such authors as William David Ross, can be taken as somehowmore predictable, while Hegel's reception is remarkably less obvious.In brief, the analytic retrieval of Hegel takes place within somestreams of American pragmatism. The names of Sellars and Rorty areoften mentioned in this regard. To Rorty we arguably owe the myth of aHegelian Sellars, who is actually not particularly generous in quotes fromHegel12. Already, at the origins of the early American pragmatism, suchauthors as Dewey and James show at least some interest for, if not adhe-sion to, Hegel's principles13. And in the '90s of the last century, thanks toJohn McDowell's and Robert Brandom's work, Hegel's concepts are fullyaccepted within the American philosophical agenda, especially in itsanalytic sections. What is at stake, all in all, is an elaboration of pragma-tism favourably including categories such as that of holism. Such aconcise description is, however, better suited to Brandom's philosophicalproject, than to McDowell's questions, this latter rejecting all together the«Pittsburgh neo-Hegelian» label14. Notably, some key concepts of Wit-tgenstein's late philosophical elaborations are developed in this context.More specifically Wittgenstein's unpublished works have, possibly un-surprisingly, a greater echo than his Tractatus. Thus, the notion of rule, aspresented in the Philosophical investigations, is absorbed within thepragmatist perspective and eagerly applied to the problem of normativity. 11 See the early 1970s book by F. Jameson, Marxism and form. Twentieth-century dialectical theories of literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971.12 On this matter, see again L. Corti, op. cit., pp. 19-2113 R.J. Bernstein, Hegel in America. La tradizione del pragmatismo, in L. Ruggiu I. Testa (eds.), Hegel contemporaneo. La ricezione americana di Hegel a confronto con la tradizione europea,Milano, Guerini, 2003; in the same volume, concerning James' reserve judgement on Hegel,see: S. Poggi, Naturalismo e pluralismo vs. idealismo e monismo, ovvero William James vs. Hegel.14 As it is remarked by L. Corti, op. cit., p. 20, with direct quote from J. McDowell, The engaged intellect. Philosophical essays, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 279. 5 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) Our behaviour is now described as a practical attitude linked tothe habit of following rules, instead of as being based upon pre-esta-blished rightful norms. However, any normativity concept, as Hegelpoints out several times, always entails a major drawback, as it comesto the abstract nature of the authority bestowing its binding valueupon the rule itself. The abstract 'must', the rule for itself, normativityfor itself, require to be somehow legitimated. In one of the mostfamous pages of the Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein formu-lates this very issue and asks what exactly, for instance, in chessmakes a King a King. His answer is arguably ostensive, as he points tohow the piece can move, i.e. its rule15. In order to understand the be-haviour of a given element, then, it is necessary to observe it, to ob-serve how it behaves; in brief, it is necessary to follow the rule. Never-theless, an obstacle to the full equation of Wittgenstein's stance to afull-blown sceptical approach to the rule, as attempted for instance bySaul Kripke16, is the distinctive defiance when it comes to thematisa-tion of the rule itself. The sceptical applies scepticism to something,for instance the world, which is at least virtually the object of themati-sation. The rule, on the contrary, especially in Wittgenstein's theory isnever as such. What establishes the relation between customary beha-viours, the so-called games, is precisely the presence of the rule. Thislatter, however, is supposed to just emerge. What is at stake, alongWittgenstein's lines, are family resemblances. While drawing onWeber's metaphor – borrowed from Goethe – of elective affinities, asapplied to the relation between protestant ethics and the spirit ofcapitalism, Wittgenstein asks the reader to just 'watch' the games. Oneshould just watch what they have in common, that is to say the rule.The legitimation of the normative power of rules should not, then, beinvestigated outside rules themselves, but rather in their practicaldisplay, within the strict realm of their use. This is how concepts suchas Sellars' space of reasons have emerged, to describe the realm within 15 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953, 31, p. 15 (Eng. tr.by G.E.M. Anscombe, Philosophical investigations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953, 31, p. 15e).16 «The sceptical argument, then, remains unanswered. There can be no such thing asmeaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; anypresent intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do Sothere can be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in § 202» (S. Kripke, Wittgenstein or rules and private language. An elementary exposition, London, Blackwell, 1982,p. 55). 6 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti which – the reasons according to which – an actor gains (in Brandom'slanguage) entitlements in order to make some moves and, simultaneo-usly, displays commitments to the respect of the very normativityhe/she relies on in order to act17. The space of reasons, i.e. the norma-tivity of the rule, thus appears to perform that very action that isforbidden to logical thinking, and as Baron Münchhausen, it pulls itselfout of a swamp by its bootstraps (bootstrapping). The result is a closedsystem legitimised in its existence by the interrelation of its own ele-ments within a common, unitary, then also holistic, perspective. Itshould not be surprising, therefore, that a so articulated pragmatismlooks first at Kant's idea of reason, self-assigning to itself its own rules,and then to what is taken to be building up on this perspective, that isthe concept of Geist. Based on the concept of Geist, each element gainsits place and specific role according to the sustainability of its be-haviour. The Geist is progressively composed of figures, which, basedon the practical test of their sustainability, leave the place to otherfigures, whose action proves to be more conform. In rough terms, thisis precisely Hegel's outline of Geist. 2. From Hegel to HegelBesides Brandom and McDowell, the American retrieval of Hegel hastwo other representatives, who have attempted something different,Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard. Whereas the formers aim to employHegel's concepts to develop the internal positions of pragmatism, thelatter interpreters attempt to verify the consistency of that kind ofreadings from within Hegel's line of thought. The result is an endea-vour which allows a smother dialogue with the realm of Europeanstudies, in particular the Italian school, traditionally devoted to the hi-storical examination of texts. The discussion accounted for in thisForum belongs precisely to this attempted dialogue.Pippin's and Pinkard's main goal, already since the 1980s, is torestore Hegel's credentials face to the American scientific community. 17 «The fundamental normative concept required is the notion of commitment. Beingcommitted is a normative status – more specifically a deontic status. [...] Coordinated with thenotion of commitment is that of entitlement. Doing what one is committed to do is appropriatein one sense, while doing what one is entitled to do is appropriate in another» (R. Brandom, Making it explicit. Reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment, Cambridge (MA) -London, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 159). 7 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) Understandably, Hegel was and still is taken as a genuinely metaphysi-cal thinker, who philosophically would have made a step back fromKant's critique of metaphysics. Paradoxically, the American publicimage of Hegel is that of a pre-critical philosopher, to some extenteven that of a pre-Kantian one. The retrieval of Plato's notion of ideal,the close dialogue with Aristotle's metaphysics, the keen eye on Spino-za's substance – all elements clearly present in Hegel's texts – shapethe image of a reactionary Hegel. After the great leap forward of theEnlightenment and of Kant's critical philosophy, Hegel would have butpushed back the clock of the history of philosophy.Against this very image of Hegel, Pinkard and Pippin fight intheir works. The previous incorporation of the basic concepts ofSellars' and Rorty's pragmatism allows, to some extent, to cut thesharpest edges of Hegel's perspective and present an image of himwhich can be more favourably admitted within the context of theAmerican studies. The main idea is, to put it bluntly, to understandHegel's philosophy of Geist as a long-term project for the legitimationof global normativity. As a result, a non-metaphysical Hegel emerges,who does not aim at the restoration of pre-critical and pre-Kantianmetaphysics, but rather pursues the – technically understood –justification of reality. In more explicit terms, a form of thought isrequired which is able to account for the state of affairs, to legitimisethe world order, radicalising and drawing the strongest possibleconsequences from the premises laid down by Kant and his critiques.Thus, a new reading of the concept of Geist is provided. Both Pippinand Pinkard are reluctant to translate the term as ʽspiritʼ	and	prefer	to	leave it in German, or at best to use the English ʽmindednessʼ. As a	result, Sellars' space of reasons is envisaged, within which the movesof each actor are justified based on commitments and entitlements toaction. In this sense, the interpretation of Hegel's philosophy driftsnaturally towards social and political connotations.For the benefit of the Italian reader, little accustomed to thisapproach to Hegel, it could be useful to mention few factual examples.In the volume German philosophy (1760-1860), Pinkard introduces thequestions of German philosophy through an historical account. Thestill fragmented and politically underdeveloped Germany of the secondhalf of the eighteenth century is the background of the birth of thatvery philosophical line of thought to which we owe the previously 8 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti described concept of normativity. The educated youth of the time,grown under the wing of German Enlightenment, was perenniallydissatisfied. The surrounding world and its old and decadent institu-tions were unable to make display of the authority necessary to theirpreservation. Furthermore, from an intellectual point of view,the dominant philosophy of the time, Wolffianism as a codified and almostlegalistically organized form of Leibnizian thought, drove the message homethat the current order was not simply the way the ruling powers had decreedthings, but was itself the way the world in-itself necessarily had to be.18In this context, an approach was required that could account for auto-nomy claims and the need for «liv(ing) one's 'own' life»19. This line ofthinking was, as matter of fact, identified as Kant's, given its mottoaccording to which «'we' moderns have to depend on ourselves andour own critical powers to figure things out»20. It was thus initiatedthat line of thought whose development led to Hegel's concept of Geist,as normative justification within the space of reasons:answering that question in turn required a history of 'social space', that is, anaccount of how the history of the demands we have put on each other re-quired us to develop a determinate type of modern 'social space', such that themodern, Kantian interpretation of the claims of reason on us would come tobe seen not as merely contingent, and perhaps self-defeating, features ofEuropean history, but as something itself actually required by the history ofthat 'social space', or Geist.Moreover:what gives objectivity to a judgment about an object does not lie in any kindof one-on-one correspondence of judgments to objects, but in the way inwhich the judgment about the object is located within a pattern of reasoningthat is not itself determined by the object but by the way in which spirit, Geist,has socially and historically come to determine itself as necessarily taking theobject.21 18 T. Pinkard, German philosophy (1760-1860). The legacy of idealism, Cambridge-New York,Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 12.19 Ibid., p. 14.20 Ibid., p. 20.21 Ibid., respectively p. 233 and p. 258. 9 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) According to a similar direction, argues Pippin. The inheritance ofSellars' critique of the myth of the given, developed by Brandomconcerning the normative understanding of knowledge, is adopted byPippin in order to account for Hegel's both non-naturalistic and non-metaphysical theory of Geist. Being a rational actor, therefore, is notsomething resulting from the human DNA, nor from the human physi-cal form, nor from any other element that can be inferred regardlessof the actor's behaviour. Being rational stems from the so-to-speakartificial construction of a legitimate realm of justified actions. And thehistorical deduction of this construction of rules, according to Pippin,coincides with Hegel's Geist; while commenting a passage from Hegel'stexts, Pippin claims that «one is a free individual only as a 'result', anelement of a collectively achieved mindedness; or in being taken to beone in a certain way. [...] The notion functions as a normativeconstraint in Hegel's account of spirit, constructed and held to as asocial norm; it is not a metaphysical or natural kind»22.This is then the non-metaphysical image of Hegel, renderedthrough the interpretative lens manufactured by analytic philosophy.The following movement is then paradoxically displayed: Americanpragmatism, in order to justify its position, finds a useful support inthe revision of some Hegel-derived concepts. After that, the sameconcepts are again played against their source in order to test theirconsistency within Hegel's texts. The outcome is a movement From Hegel to Hegel, which, after exploiting it as a tool to an end, goes backto the original source to assess the overall consistency of its ownproject. 3. After the beautiful. What aesthetics?Here we come to the specific focus of this Forum. After the beautiful isa text published by Robert Pippin in 2014, which is the first genuinemonographic attempt to deal with the outcome of Hegel's aestheticsin the light of the normative interpretation. What is at stake, however,is not simply the investigation of Hegel's enquiries. Pippin's objectiveis to overcome Hegel through Hegel himself. As the book's subtitle, Hegel and the philosophy of pictorial modernism, suggests, the aim is to 22 R. Pippin, Hegel's practical philosophy. Rational agency as ethical life, Cambridge-New York,Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 198. 10 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti investigate the widely discussed movement of modernism through theconceptual apparatus of an author who died thirty years beforemodernism itself. While avoiding to give a summary of the book, I shallsimply say that the whole discussion revolves around Manet's figure,and in particular his famous paintings, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, painted between 1862 and 1863. The scandal features ofthese works are the focus of a great amount of studies, despite the factthat the main structure of Manet's revolutionary contribution is stillunder discussion. Pippin attempts an understanding of modernismbased upon Hegel's concepts, in particular the conceptual toolbox ofthe normative Hegel elaborated by the American debate.But how could Hegel – the theoretician of the end of art – beever useful to understand an artistic form that is posterior to suchalleged death? Pippin's answer is remarkably convincing. The death ofart, in Hegel's perspective, would be the offspring of a solid form ofphilosophical optimism, developed also on the basis of systemic requi-rements. In other words, given that art is that discipline which allowsa sensible and still incomplete knowledge of spirit, and given thatspirit has reached the recognized level of conciliation, then art has nomore reasons to exist. According to Pippin, this interpretation ofHegel's words moves from the premises of an achieved conciliationand thereby from some historical pacification accomplished by thespirit. Hence Hegel's optimism. What, instead, the modernist stylemakes clear is, precisely, that such a conciliation has never taken place.On the ground of the structural analogy between action and work ofart in their signifying action23, Pippin formulates his proposal. Socialaction, or better, the interpretation of social action by the observer isanalogous to the interpretation of the work of art. In both cases, it isthe sensible embodiment of a spiritual meaning, according again to theabove outlined understanding of Geist. In art, as in action, a path oflegitimation is undertaken, which claims its credentials of existence inthe concrete elaboration of meaning. Also in this case, the normativereading is arguably very efficient. As the action has to account for itscommitments within the realm of a regulated and legitimated space ofreasons, similarly the work of art is called to sensibly mirror therational whole from which it arises. In this regard, Hegel's theory of 23 Id., After the beautiful cit., in particular pp. 47-52. 11 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) art as mode of knowledge is fully consistent. To put it bluntly, thescandal element of modernism would then be the demonstration of theunsustainability of a given way to make art, face to its historical andspiritual context. In the defying look Olympia sends to the observer, inher detached despise of the audience, one can see the need for a formof art which is able to account for a non-pacified and non-conciliatedreality: «if one can understand the persistence of the kind of con-flicting commitments in intellectual, cultural, and political life requiredby rapidly modernizing European societies, the kind Hegel thoughthad been overcome, one will be in a better position to begin to under-stand the aesthetic experimentation that seemed to begin with Ma-net»; the deal is, therefore, to understand on Hegel's basis what Hegelhimself could not understand due to a conciliated understanding ofmodernity. Thus Hegel «may be the theorist of modernism, malgré luiand avant la lettre»24. Along these lines, modernism, with its provokingand scandal-oriented approach, instead of being what Stendhal askedfrom the beautiful, that is to say a ʽpromise	of	happinessʼ,	is	transfor-med into something beyond the beautiful and becomes a «promise of meaning»25.In strictly normative terms, pictorial modernism shows in theclearest possible way the unsustainability of the traditional understan-ding of art. It is necessary to go after the beautiful precisely becausethe requirements, the commitments faced by modernity do not allowany longer a legitimation through harmony. The space of reasons im-pose new entitlements, which are able to account for the bewildermentof the industrial society.Anyone familiar with the great classics of twentieth centuryaesthetics may perceive, in these last remarks, a strong echo of Ador-no's and Lukács' theories. Notably the latter, thanks to the theory ofart's Wiederspiegelung (mirroring) of social dynamics, comes heremore or less immediately to mind. Adorno would be no less appropria-tely mentioned here, as he understands art as the explicit expressionof the unreconciled features of reality, as the expression of objectivecontradictions. It is not surprising, furthermore, that Pippin mentions 24 Ibid., p. 38.25 Ibid., p. 59. 12 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti two other authors, who he describes as «left-Hegelian»26, MichaelFried and Timothy Clark, and who have attempted an interpretation ofpictorial modernism based on the criticism of society. Clark's idea ofsocial test, and of the sustainability of the social test when it comes toworks of art, together with Fried's theory of modern art failure in itsattempt to avoid theatricality, are then clearly helpful for Pippin'selaboration of his position. In this regard, Pippin, finally, attempts anew incursion in contemporary philosophy and discusses Heidegger'sposition. In particular, his focus is on the relation between the momentof revelation and that of concealment which, according to Heidegger, isa key feature of any successful work of art. Also in this case, Hegel'sinspiration is consistent with the premises outlined at the beginningof the volume. The issue is to show some sort of persistency of theproblems outlined by Hegel also within more recent readings, whichHegel himself could not formulate due to his systemic optimism. Theamphibian nature of man, torn between a signifying and a sensiblecomponent, as well as the social conflicts, on which action andinstitutions are based, instead of being solved, still require that dis-tinctive form of aesthetic intelligibility made available by art. Halfnatural and half signifying, half voluntary and half unaware, half revea-ling and half concealing, art is still operational in the contemporaryera, and it is so in strictly Hegelian terms: Hegel'scharacterization of art as wedded to a sensible-affective mode of intelligibilitythat has been rendered superfluous by the achievements of speculativephilosophy was a claim at odds with the deeper insights of his own project, aswell as with the simple fact that we had not in modernity become somehowless the sensible, finite creatures we always have been, nor is moderncapitalist society the realization of human freedom.27The main aim of this Forum is to take up the challenge of Pippin'swork. The American interpretation of a non-metaphysical Hegel, onwhich still sometimes European continental scholars stick up theirnoses, undoubtedly presents a challenge. The weight of tradition hasbeen burdening, since a long time, the shoulders of continentalscholars. We are reluctant to accept interpretations which defy those 26 Ibid., p. 68.27 Ibid., p. 140. 13 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) decrees we have in the meanwhile internalized, despite the fact thatthe very project of a non-metaphysical Hegel comes originally fromthe continent, and precisely from the group of Left Hegelians, alreadyin the '40s of the nineteenth century. American philosophers such asPippin and Pinkard have shown to be eager to open a dialogue withEuropean interpreters, as the numerous quotes from Rüdiger Bubner,Dieter Henrich, Otto Pöggeler and Viellard-Baron in their texts are ableto prove. Pippin had a Humboldt scholarship already in 1977/78 andthen, twenty years later, for another year. The same applies to Pinkard,who was awarded scholarships by Humboldt and DAAD for severalyears. Clearly, also a discussion in the reverse direction may indeedyield interesting results.FRANCESCO CAMPANA(Università degli Studi di Padova)In his book After the beautiful, Robert Pippin brings to a renewedattention the long debated issue concerning how to understand someevents of the history of art after Hegel with a Hegelian perspective. Inparticular, throughout an interpretation of the Lectures on fine arts, heproposes a rereading of the Hegelian philosophy of art. He delineatesan approach that aims at explaining the radical turn in the history ofEuropean and American Visual Art, commonly recognized under thegeneral label of 'modernism'. Pippin's starting point is an analysis ofHegel's texts on art, especially from the version edited by Hotho in1835-38 and again in a second edition in 1842. He consequentlymoves on to the examination of the art world in the second part of thenineteen-century, looking for elements of the Hegelian thought stillrelevant for that period.In his interpretation, the Hegelian achievement regarding theunderstanding of the historicity of the meaning and normative statusof art is central. The historical dimension of the normative aspectappears clear with respect to the relation between the artwork andthe audience, the critic or the philosopher. After all, the connection tothe historic framework is, of course, one of the core points of theHegelian philosophy in general and of the constitution of his thought.Pippin often underlines this point, when he recalls that for Hegel,philosophy is 'its own time comprehended in thought'. Moving on from 14 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti this point, he identifies some elements – e.g. the image of theamphibian or that of the thousand-eyed Argus – which constitute thegeneral Hegelian approach. This approach is then compared to thecontemporary art-historical positions of T.J. Clark and M. Fried andconfronted with the later philosophy of art of M. Heidegger.Nevertheless, in Pippin's interpretation Hegel's diagnosis of thehistorical, social and political situation seems to be the most impor-tant resource of his approach. And it is also the place, where we canrun into a «blind spot»28 of his treatment of modernity, where Hegelwould have committed a «cardinal error» 29 in his narrative. The histo-ricity of the normative in Hegel's insight is the core of his approach,but right at this point he seems to fall into a misunderstanding of theconditions of the historical context. He seems to misinterpret his owntime, because he anticipates in an optimistic way what represents theleading thread at the heart of his thought: the achievement of humanfreedom. Indeed, this task would not even be realized during the laterdevelopment of the capitalistic society. And precisely Hegel's «greatestfailure»30 in comprehending the course of history, makes possible forPippin's reading to render the Hegelian thought fruitful to explain theuncertainty, the bewilderment and the disorienttation of the art of theImpressionists. For this reason, Pippin tries to elaborate an inter-pretation «all hopefully in a way true to the spirit of Hegel's basic po-sition»31. At the same time, he also states that we should «take intoaccount his project as a whole and appreciate the limitations of hisdiagnosis of the state of modern society»32.In this way, the profile of Hegel as theorist of an artistic eventthat takes place some decades after him, turns out to be modified andrevised or updated in some – even fundamental – features: «He may be– Pippin writes – the theorist of modernism, malgré lui and avant la letter»33.Pippin seems to be deeply conscious of the problems that suchan adaptation of the thought of a philosopher of the past can bring 28 Id., After the beautiful cit., p. 46.29 Ibid., p. 47.30 Ibid., p. 60.31 Ibid., p. 8.32 Ibid., p. 53.33 Ibid., p. 38. 15 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) about. He often highlights this kind of difficulties, particularly whentalking about Hegel, a thinker whose commitment to his era is sorooted and for whom philosophy – as one reads in the Philosophy of history – can not be conceived as prophecy (Pippin talks about «theadmittedly debatable value of such an attempt to time-travel with aphilosopher, especially one whose work is self-consciously tied to hisown age»34).In Chapter Three, «Politics and Ontology: Clark and Fried»,Pippin briefly refers to a contemporary author, Arthur C. Danto. Dantoaffirms several times with respect to his art theory to have drawninspiration from Hegel's Lecture on the fine arts, even to the point tocall himself «a born again Hegelian». Danto was not someone who canbe identified as a Hegelian scholar and he never dedicated a long andspecific work to Hegel. He took some notions from Hegel – primarily,the so-called 'end of art thesis' – and tried to apply this 'Hegelian'vision to the art phenomena after Hegel's life – in particular, the artafter Andy Warhol and the Sixties. Therefore, Danto aims atunderstanding his present throughout Hegelian arguments. He tries tobring the spirit of the Hegelian thought alive again.Several critics – among others, Stephen Houlgate in a recentessay entitled Hegel, Danto and the 'end of art' – have noticed, withgood reasons, the difficulties and the limits of Danto's recall to Hegel.Pippin himself remarks that it is «so hard to understand what he couldmean when he calls himself a 'born again Hegelian'» and underlines«how cautious and selfconsciously limited is his 'Hegelianism'»35.Admittedly, Pippin's project greatly diverges from Danto's one.The kind of rereading that Pippin conceives is completely different inhis formulation: he builds on a careful examination of the Hegelianwork and, identifying its internal limitations, states the relevance of a'Hegelian approach' for a later age, even at the cost of some relevantmodifications of the original account. Danto, instead, starts from theobservation of his contemporary art situation and finds in Hegel somegeneral attitudes he borrows for his own interpretation of the present.Both of them refer to Hegel and both, in a certain way, have a'Hegelian approach' to the art of the time after Hegel. Nevertheless, it 34 Ibid., p. 2.35 Ibid., p. 72 and note. 16 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti is possible to recognize a radical difference in the orientation of their'Hegelian' perspectives.Danto's view provides the occasion to ask which elements shouldbe part of a 'Hegelian approach', in order to be called such. Thisbecomes especially complex with respect to a challenging field ofHegel's thought, such as the philosophy of art. The question of thereference to the textual editions and to the authentic Hegelian dictate,for example, is in and of itself problematic. Moreover, the analysis ofthe concrete artworks of Hegel's time plays a central role in thegeneral implications of his thought. It is hard to conceive an applica-tion of this to a different panorama. How far from Hegel can an inter-preter go in reading with Hegel a more recent episode of the artworld? In other words, which are the limitations and the boundarylines of the Pippinian expression «malgré lui and avant la lettre», inorder to call our approach still 'Hegelian'?FRANCESCA IANNELLI(Università degli Studi di Roma Tre)Der Versuch, durch die Brille Hegels, dessen Philosophie der Kunsteinige Jahrzehnte zuvor entstanden war, zu blicken, um die Neuerun-gen in der anti-idealisierenden und selbstreflexiven Malerei Manets,wie auch die leeren, fragenden Blicke seiner Frauen, insbesondereder Olympia zu begreifen, mag absonderlich und gewagt erscheinen.Es handelt sich dabei jedoch um eine mutige, faszinierende Zeitreise,die Robert Pippin in After the beautiful meisterhaft unternimmt. Erhat sich nämlich auf das unwegsame Gelände der ästhetischen Theo-rie, wo die Entthronung der Schönheit stattgefunden hat, gewagt undhat somit die der antiklassizistischen Ästhetik Hegels innewohnendelatente Deutungskraft, die sich mehrere Jahrzehnte nach dem 1831plötzlich erfolgten Tod des grossen Philosophen entfaltete, gezeigt.Diese Fähigkeit, sich in die Zukunft zu projizieren, liegt aber nachmeiner Ansicht nicht daran, dass die Hegelsche (Kunst) Philosophie -ungewollt orakelhafte Züge besessen hätte, noch daran, dass Hegelein Prophet gewesen wäre, der eine kulturelle Trauer vorhersagenkonnte, die sich über dem Westen ausbreiten sollte, sondern viel-mehr an den bedeutungsvollen perspektivischen Linien, Rissen gera17 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) dezu, die seine Philosophie durchziehen und die einen Blick auf zu-künftige Himmel freigeben, sogar auf den unsrigen.Sicher war Hegel nicht in der Lage, die Schwächen der Philoso-phie einer fortschreitenden Geschichte vorauszusehen36, noch hat erdie Verbreitung neuer Medien geahnt, die die Kunst des 20. Jahrhun-derts wiederbeleben sollten37, aber er hat mit grosser Klarheit wichti-ge »Auflösungen«38 und epochale Knotenpunkte mit jahrhunderte-langen Nachwirkungen erkannt: die einschneidenden Veränderungenin der Gestalt des Künstlers, der immer freier, individueller und anar-chistischer wurde (man denke an Hegels Reflexionen über Jean Paul);den Todeskampf der auf anachronistische Weise immer noch der Re-ligion unterstellten Kunst, die neue Rolle des Rezipienten, der nach-denklich und meditativ wurde39, sowie die zunehmende Ausgrenzungder Kunst in einer intellektbetonten Gesellschaft40, die aber kein ra-dikales Aussterben bedeutete41.Warum sollte man also nicht wagen, die Interpretationsmög-lichkeiten, die in der Hegelschen Ästhetik angelegt waren, auszudeh-nen und über die zeitlichen Grenzen des 19. Jahrhunderts, in demHegel lebte und wirkte, hinauszugehen, um bis zu unserer dissonan-ten Zeit zu vorzudringen: zum Beispiel zu den »Bildern in Bewegung«des Videokünstlers Bill Viola, im Sinne Hegels Kunst des »Huma-nus«42 in höchster Potenz, fliessende, unstabile Kunst, die sich vonjeglichem ästhetischen Imperativ befreit hat, in der die Flächigkeitdes Videos buchstäblich zu einem tausendäugigen Argus wird undder Blick des Betrachters nicht nur vorausgesetzt (wie bei Manet), 36 Id., After the beautiful cit., p. 136.37 Ibid., p. 36.38 Für einen weiteren Zusammenhang der verschiedenen »Auflösungen«, auf die Hegel in deneinzelnen Ästhetikvorlesungen Bezug nimmt, möchte ich aus verweisen auf F. Iannelli, Tod, Ende, Auflösung der Kunst? Überlegungen über Hegel und Danto, «Hegel-Jahrbuch» 2 (2015),forthcoming.39 G.W.G. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst. Berlin 1823, Nachgeschrieben vonHeinrich Gustav Hotho, hrsg. von A. Gethmann-Siefert, Hamburg, Meiner, 1998, p. 6.40 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik. Im Sommer 1826. Mitschrift von Kehler,hrsg. von A. Gethmann-Siefert B. Collenberg-Plotnikov, unter Mitwirkung von F. Iannelli K.Berr, München, Fink, 2004, p. 8.41 Aus Raumgründen kann hier auf die umstrittene These des Ende der Kunst nicht nähereingegangen werden. Es sei mir daher erlaubt auf den Band K. Vieweg F. Iannelli F.Vercellone, Das Ende der Kunst als Anfang freier Kunst, München, Fink, 2015, verweisen zu können.42 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst (1823) cit., p. 115. 18 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti sondern geradezu gefordert wird, wie es allgemein im Schaffen Violasder Fall ist, ganz besonders aber in Observance. In dieser mehrstim-migen Video installation aus dem Jahr 2002 wird die soziale Funktionder Kunst als kollektiver Versuch der Selbsterkenntnis angesichts derKatastrophen der Geschichte (mit grosser Wahrscheinlichkeit spieltViola auf den 11. September 2001 an) nachdrücklich betont. Es gehtaber auch um den »amphibischen« Status des Menschen, um seineZugehörigkeit zur sinnlichen Dimension, aber auch deren Überschrei-tung, um das labile Gleichgewicht, das weiterhin jedes Kunstwerk vonBedeutung charakterisiert.TERRY PINKARD(Georgetown University)1. In reviewing Constable's painting, The hay wrain in 1824, Stendhalpraised it for its beauty, claiming famously it indeed held up a mirrorto nature. In the same breath, Stendhal also took his praise back byalso saying that, all told, he still wished the mirror had reflected amore important and weighty subject. A delightful painting thus mightbe true to nature, and it might be beautiful, but still might be missingsomething. Pippin's book is in effect a reply about what might bemissing. However, he also rejects something Stendhal said in anothercontext, namely, that beauty is the promise of happiness. However,from Kant we are supposed to have learned that what gives agency itsdignity is not in fact happiness but freedom, which Kant identified(more or less and with lots of qualifications) with following the morallaw. Promising happiness is not enough, and, as Pippin puts it, «themodernist equivalent to beauty as the promise of happiness is thispromise of meaning»43. So Pippin argues, something like a Hegeliansocial and historical theory is best equipped to guide us through theups and downs of this promise.Once the problem is put in that way, then one of the issuesconfronting the moderns is therefore the one already foreshadowed byF. H. Jacobi in his critiques of all Enlightenment (and of Kant inparticular), namely, that modern thought runs the risk of 'nihilism' (aterm that Jacobi seems to have coined himself). Reason can destroy 43 R.B. Pippin, After the beautiful cit., p. 59. 19 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) the old edifices of thought and life, but it cannot build up any newedifices to take their place. Kant's three critiques tried to deliver thescaffolding for the new edifice, Hegel thought he had delivered thesense of what was up, and modernist art, on Pippin's view, steps intothis space to aesthetically investigate the promise of meaning.The «promise of meaning» wasn't kept, and in our recenthistory, we became more problematic to ourselves, and art correspon-dingly also became more problematic to itself. We had thought that artat its best imitated nature because we had thought that at our best weimitated nature. After Kant, we could no longer think that. We were, asit were, giving the law to ourselves, not reading it off the cosmos. Butwhere does that self-given law get its determinacy? In particular, whatof the indeterminacy that is present when the self-given laws are atodds with each other?Hegel had obviously thrown his lot in with the idea that modernrational institutions could resolve or at least tame those conflicts andresolve the indeterminacy problem, but he had also argued that thatsuch an activity was social and historical and always up for grabsabout its own putative success. Pippin argues that the stresses withinhis own views meant that part of what Hegel was after was bound tofall apart. Thus, «Hegel in his greatest failure was not concernedabout this potential instability in the modern world, about losing somuch common ground so that a general irresolvability in any of thesepossible conflicts becomes ever more apparent»44.However, there are problems of meaninglessness and problemsof conflict, and the two are not the same. One of the major features ofliberal thought since 1815 has been its deep commitment to the ideathat in social life, conflict is unavoidable and political institutions haveto be devised to deal with that modern but now inescapable fact. Anti-liberal thought has always looked at conflict as something to be over-come, either in some future where the final struggle is fought and fi-nally won, or in some authoritarian rule of some overall. But thatdoesn't mean that liberals think the whole is meaningless. (Or is thatthe conclusion to which they are committed, whether they think thator not?) 44 Ibid., p. 60. 20 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti 2. Manet is supposed to have gotten the post-Hegelian world right butnot as a 'mirror' of the life of his times but as... what? Manet does not«promise meaning» but what is he promising? The «promise ofmeaning» appeared in art, Michael Fried's terms, as «facingness,instantaneousness and strikingness, refusal of absorptive closure» –the achievement of aesthetic meaningfulness in a world of increasingmeaninglessness. In particular, the last one – absorptive closure –forms the strategy taken up by the new bourgeois in this disintegra-ting state of shared meaning. One simply 'refuses' to be so taken up,and the blank stares of Manet's subjects both display this and make ita topic of aesthetic criticism. Manet's paintings do not solve thatproblem – how could they? – but they exhibit the way in whichpainting in the 1860's could «compel conviction in the independenceand genuineness of the painting as a painting»45. Pippin replies thatin fact our «Hegelian problem is not a 'problem' of the sort that willever allow a 'solution' » and that «to face these issues, and, necessa-rily, to face them collectively, unavoidably, incessantly, is simply whatit is, what it has come to be, to be 'Geist'».Here are three questions, one about Hegel and Lukács, the otherabout Heidegger, the third more general. First, are we not thereforeback to Stendhal's original point? The paintings that express absor-ptive closure, instaneousness and the like are indeed what similar towhat Stendhal called the 'mirrors' of nature. They are not moralistictales telling us how far we have fallen but aesthetic achievementsthat express our unreconciled status in a powerful way. If so, thenperhaps we do not have the opposition between imitation and art'sachieving «some sort of achieved collective like-mindedness» suchthat it expresses Geist's «doubling itself»46. Is Pippin thus in effectresuscitating Lukács theory of the realist bourgeois novel – that itaccurately 'mirrored' the bourgeois society and its contradictions –for a theory of bourgeois painting? That Manet's art does in fact'imitate' its world? Second, if we are not making Lukács our model,then is Pippin in in effect conceding Hegel to Heidegger, even after hisdevastating critique of Heideggerian aesthetics? For Heidegger, welive in the age of consummate meaninglessness, there is a way in 45 Ibid., p. 94.46 Ibid., p. 32. 21 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) which our sense-making activities always resist completion, but thereis no dialectic driving us out of this, no deep contradiction pushing forreconciliation. Our world is both perfectly consistent and hollow.Does Pippin want either to accept Heidegger's description of our age– in which case «only a god can save us» – or to hold out the idea ofreconciliation as an «infinite task» driven not just by conflict but bycontradiction? Finally, how closely linked are social conflict andmeaninglessness? Hegel, liberal in his acceptance of conflict and non-liberal in his all too trusting faith in the modern bureaucratic state,nonetheless accepted a kind of deep pluralist conflict in social life. Infact, there was nothing particularly new about the theatricality ofmodern life. The problem of 'theatricality' had arisen not recentlyfrom capitalism but from the older wars of religion, where disclosingone's true religious opinions could land you in deep trouble. ForHegel, the problem of theatricality was its deeply contradictory na-ture. For the Heideggerian, we may simply have made ourselves com-fortable with being theatrical and now see it as part of the basicstructure of life in the modern world. What does art do in this state?Pop art continues to promise happiness, which may still be possiblein a flattened world. What does other art do? Just resist?ITALO TESTA(Università degli Studi di Parma)1. Robert Pippin's powerful and thought-provoking After the beautifultakes the negativist approach to artworks once developed by authorssuch as Adorno in relation to literary theory and modern music andextends it in an original way to pictorial modernism, reshaping it in amore Hegel-oriented fashion. According to Pippin, the founding fa-thers of modernist painting such as Manet not only negate previouspictorial conventions, but also put into question and address at a fun-damental level the very possibility and legitimacy of art, and especiallythe «credibility, conviction, and integrity» of easel painting47. Alongwith aesthetic negativism, it is not only the intelligibility of aestheticmeaning that is 'negated', but also social intelligibility itself, becausemodernism negates communication, that is, it addresses the possibility 47 Id., After the beautiful cit., pp. 1-2. 22 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti of the failure of «mutual interpretability»48 between social actors inthe modern, alienated world.The Hegelian principle of mutual recognition as a condition ofmodern social freedom sets, then, the normative context against whichthe philosophical import of modernist negativism can be framed. The'facingness' of Manet's paintings, i.e. the fact that (according to Mi-chael Fried's interpretation) they are turned toward the beholder witha sort of indifference to that beholder, as if they were invisible, or atleast irrelevant, is taken by Pippin to suggest an indifference to (if notthe impossibility of) mutual recognition49. And this reading is combi-ned in After the beautiful with an action-theoretical approach toaesthetic intelligibility. The sensible embodiment of aesthetic meaningis thus understood following the model of the embodiment of theagent's intention in its bodily movements, such that they count as thedeed I intend. This is a particular and original aspect of Pippin'sapproach and deserves a detailed analysis of its implications. Howeverhere I would like to focus on only one aspect which seems to me to putsome limits on the analogy between action-theoretical meaning andaesthetic meaning.According to Pippin's reconstruction of Hegel's social theory ofaction and expressive freedom, a free action is one that fully expressesme, that is, «such that I can fully recognize myself in the deeds I bringabout»50. But the deeds «are truly mine and so free» – that is, I canhave a «nonalienated» relation to myself – only if a crucial condition isfulfilled, that is, only if «the act description is one recognizable as suchin the community in which I express and realize myself». A conditionwhich cannot be satisfied by «any social arrangement of norms» butonly by one that «has achieved some mutuality of recognition ormutuality of recognitive social statuses»51. Hence, only where the so-cial community implements the norm of mutual recognition can indivi-dual and collective action be said to be 'truly' mine and thus free, thatis, it can be said to realize a normative identity. When this condition isnot met – and this is, according to Pippin, the case of the post-Hegelian world, which makes modernist art relevant – every action is 48 Ibid., p. 60.49 Ibid., p. 48.50 Ibid., p. 19.51 Ibid., p. 20. 23 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) somehow an alienated one. Of course agents can still identifypsychologically with their actions, but these are not truly (normati-vely) their own. As a consequence, they are alienated from themselvesand not free, or not fully free (depending on whether social freedom isunderstood as an all-or-nothing matter or as something that maycome in degrees). Here I do not want to go into the details of this verydemanding theory of freedom which, combining the social theoreticalnotion of alienation with a normative understanding of recognition,could lead to the consequence that freedom (or full freedom) maynever be possible until the norms of reciprocal recognition are succes-sfully institutionally realized; (which is nevertheless a conclusion that,under different premises, also 20th century dialectical negativism hascommitted itself to). My point is rather that here there is a manifestasymmetry with aesthetical experience. In fact, if the analogy betweenthe meaning of social action and the meaning of aesthetic works wereto be followed through to its logical conclusion, then one would expectthat all the while that the normative conditions of recognition aren'tinstitutionally satisfied, then not only social freedom but also aestheticexperience would not be 'truly' possible: that is, there could not beauthentic, true, full embodiment of sensible aesthetic meanings inartworks and this could not be experienced as such. But this contra-dicts the very understanding of aesthetic experience that Pippin, fol-lowing Hegel and Fried, attributes to modernism. The point is, thatcontrary to social freedom, aesthetic experience can be truly realized(in its most perfected form) even when such conditions aren't met.Moreover, modernist art, as Pippin himself argues, can be said toconsist exactly in the experience that such conditions aren't satisfied.The authentic modernist artwork is such that it manifests thealienated state of social action, the difference between mutuality ofrecognition and a social practice which does not implement it. If this isthe case, does it not reveal that such an understanding of artworkscannot be wholly captured within an action-theoretical framework?2. According to Pippin's interpretation, Hegel's misconceived thesis onthe end of art is heavily based on the overly optimistic expectationthat a mutual recognitive status could be historically achieved and 24 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti institutionally stabilized52. In such a reconciled social condition whereinstitutions are basically rational, a sensible aesthetic embodiment ofmeaning (which anticipates that reconciliation is lacking in socialreality), would cease to be world-historically necessary, and art wouldlose its crucial meaning for human experience. But the fact that thisexpectation has been defeated, is what (according to Pippin) liberatesthe potential of Hegel's understanding of the critical, negative role ofart from his limits, and makes him «the theorist of modernism, malgrè lui and avant la letter»53. But here a question arises: if this expectationhad been realized, or if it will at some point be realized, what shouldbecome of art according to Pippin? Should we then somehowsubscribe to the thesis of the end of art? If we answer affirmatively,then we are in some sense back to Hegel's position, and, while makingspace for the authentic experience of modernism, we have onlyhistorically postponed (maybe ad infinitum) Hegel's diagnosis on theforthcoming end of art. If we answer negatively to that question, thensome important modification of Hegel's original account has takenplace, but a bunch of further questions arises. As we'll see, some sortof ambivalence can be detected in Pippin's position, but I would guessthat he should be more inclined to answer negatively. If so, how comethat art would still be (world-historically) relevant? What could makeit a still-necessary experience?3. When one comes to the question of the ultimate grounds forPippin's criticism of Hegel's thesis of the end of art, and of whatjustifies the enduring relevance of modernist art for the contemporaryworld – in fact, an alienated world – two argumentative strategies canbe found. On the surface there is an historicist account, according towhich, if we subscribe to Hegel's anti-essentialist understanding ofspirit as social practice, then there are no reasons to exclude, as heseemed to do, that art practice could not change its meaning and adaptto different historical situations (where normative expectations couldhave gone wild, or even – why not? – been realized). But this line isalways connected with, and distinguishable from another, differentone. Pippin repeatedly criticizes here the idea he attributes to Hegel 52 Ibid., p. 60.53 Ibid., p. 2. 25 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) that in aesthetic experience at its peak we could somehow break freefrom the prison of our bodily naturalness, and that philosophy,radicalizing this tendency, could offer a form of the spirit'sreconciliation «of itself with itself» that would no longer need themedium of corporeal sensible embodiment54. Pippin qualifies thisexpectation of being «wholly liberated» from naturalness as a«nondialectical notion»55. Here seems to be found the ultimategrounds as to why, according to Pippin, Hegel's expectation that artwill be transcended is misconceived, and a form of sensible embodi-ment is still needed. But this argument seems, at least prima facie, tobe placed on a different level than the historicist one, because it relieson a structural, one may say metaphysical account of the relationbetween nature and spirit. But what about the enduring necessity ofsensible embodiment? This can be read in a weaker sense, compatiblewith a factual historicist account (and with the affirmative answer tothe question posed in paragraph one), according to which this holdsuntil a rational, reconciled modernity is finally implemented. But astronger reading is also possible, according to which sensibleembodiment is somehow a priori (even in an historical, retrospectivesense of a priori necessity) unavoidable (which could ultimatelyground the affirmative answer to the question of the previous para-graph, according to which art could still be relevant in a reconciledworld). Here there is again some ambivalence in Pippin's position, butit seems to me that the reading most consistent with the text is thesecond one. Otherwise, what would Pippin mean when, referring tothis «basic tension» between mindedness and naturalness, he usesterms such as «inevitability», «inherently or perennial character»56,labelling this tension as a «now-unending problem»57 – not a problem«of the sort that will ever allow a solution»58 – and such that we willhave to face such an issue 'unavoidably, incessantly'?4. These expressions all seem to address a sort of structural problemwhich finally is connected with what Pippin defines as the «una54 Ibid., p. 47.55 Ibid., p. 45.56 Ibid., p. 65.57 Ibid., p. 142.58 Ibid., p. 95. 26 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti voidably amphibian status of the human»59. Such an amphibian statusconsists in the fact that we are both corporeal and normative, naturaland spiritual beings, or, in the words of Robert Brandom (whichPippins alludes to), that «we have both natures and histories»60. Ofcourse, such a status can take different historical shapes in differentsocial contexts – and as such includes the tension between socialobjectivity and subjective freedom, social necessity and individualfreedom, causality and normativity – and there can be historicalpractices that, such as modernist art, better express it at a givenhistorical point. But still, the claim of the unavoidability of this status isset at a meta-level which cannot be reduced to its historical determina-tion. And even if we were to accept Pippin's interpretation of Hegel'spassage on this 'amphibian status' in his Lectures on fine arts,according to which this has to be understood as an historical pheno-menon of the «modern intellect»61, this would hardly be consistentwith Pippin's use of this notion as having a «perennial character».Here the question arises as to whether Pippin's insistence onthe amphibian status of human beings finally introduces somealteration to his previous «bootstrapping» account of spirit. Not onlydoes Pippin's approach in After the beautiful seem (more or lessimplicitly) to distance itself from inferentialist interpretations of Hegelsuch as Brandom's, vindicating aesthetic intelligibility as some sort ofnot inferential, and not assertoric access to conceptual content. But healso seems to distance himself from the strong bootstrapping accountof spirit he has previously defended, for instance in his disagreementwith McDowell. Pippin previously endorsed an account of the spirit'sself-constitution understood as a radical bootstrapping process62, andon this basis he disputed the idea that the spirit is bound to naturaldependency. But Pippin's current criticism of the supposedly Hegelianpretence that the spirit breaks free from naturalness seems to rely onaesthetic experience in order to put at least a limit to the self-constitu-tion thesis he has been supporting elsewhere. And this is reflected alsoin the way that Pippin in this book combines a phenomenological 59 Ibid., p. 142.60 Ibid., p. 92. See R.B. Brandom, Selbsbewusstsein und Selbst-Konstitution, in C. Halbig M.Quante L. Siep (eds.), Hegels Erbe, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 46-77.61 R.B. Pippin, After the beautiful cit., p. 46.62 Id., Hegel's practical philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 202. 27 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) approach – modelled on Fried –of aesthetic representation as self-constituting experience, with T.J. Clark's objectivist approach to thematerial conditions of art. It is worth noting here that Pippin's use ofthe radical bootstrapping model was connected with a criticism ofMcDowell's notion of 'second nature'. Now the adoption of the 'amphi-bian status' picture seems to reproduce at least some traits of a negati-vist model of second nature – what is this amphibian status if notanother word to address the phenomenon of second naturalness? –which, if we follow for instance Adorno's account of it63, is a notionwhose structure reflects the intrinsic tension, the ambivalent mirroringbetween our natures and histories, and hence is not identical to thenotion of 'spirit', and cannot be exhausted by an historicist account ofit. ROBERT B. PIPPIN(University of Chicago) RESPONSESI am very grateful to Mario Farina and to the journal Lebenswelt fororganizing this discussion, and especially grateful for the thoughtfuland challenging questions posed by the commentators. Each of theirremarks requires considerably more discussion than is here possible,so the following can only count as initial, preliminary responses.1. Dr. Campana expresses a reasonable skepticism that Hegel's under-standing of art, especially the historical situation of romantic ormodern art, can be used as any basis for extrapolating Hegel's analysisto future art. The suggestion is that Hegel's understanding of art itselfis essentially time-bound, and so any extrapolation is bound to bemuch more a complete re-invention or loose variation of a verygenerally Hegelian approach (one that locates aesthetic meaning inthe interchange between work and beholder/audience), rather thananything like an extension of Hegel's position. And Campana notes a 63 See T.W. Adorno, Die Idee der Naturgeschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 1, hrsg. v. R.Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1973 (Eng. tr. by R. Hullot-Kentor, «Telos 60»(1984), p. 111-124). 28 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti contrast with another use of Hegel, Arthur Danto's emphasis on the«the end of art» thesis. The implication seems to be that, at the level ofabstraction necessary to bring Hegel's position to bear on later art, allsorts of other, even very different, variations on Hegelian themes arepossible.It is true that the approach I argue for detaches Hegel'sposition, even though a strongly historicist one, from the specificanalysis of what was for him modern, that is romantic, art. (Notentirely, for Hegel says that in this historical phase, art transcendsitself, but as art; already a modernist credo.) But my use of Hegeldoes not seem to me nearly abstract enough to court comparisonwith Danto's only very faintly Hegelian interpretation. Hegel neversuggested that the art/non-art distinction would be transcended,and his famous thesis did not hold that art, or the art category wasover, defunct or irrelevant, and in that sense a thing of the past, ein Vergangenes. Rather the claim was that fine art could no longer be asignificant vehicle of human self-knowledge, or as significant as ithad been in the ancient and Renaissance world. (To some degree, Iaccept the latter claim, but argue that it should count as anindictment of the form of life coming into view in Hegel's time). Thefeatures of Hegel's account that do not tie his position essentially toromantic or modern art are (i) that art should be understood as adistinct form (a sensible-affective form) of intelligibility, especiallyof collective self-knowledge, achievable in no other way thanaesthetically (in simpler terms, that art is a form of truth), (ii) thatHegel has a general theory about how material objects and bodilymovements can be said to bear meaning, and that, especially, hisunderstanding of how bodily movements count as intentionalactions can be of great use in understanding his approach to artworks. That use stems from his understanding of the public, perfor-mative, and socially contestable character of such actions. And (iii)given the importance of sociality in (ii), the emergence of failedforms of sociality or the failure of attempts at complete mutuality ofrecognitive status in modern societies, will require, on Hegelianterms, art works responsive to this failure, made in the light of it. Iargue that this is going in in Manet and in Cézanne. This all seemsto me much more deeply Hegelian in spirit than Danto's superficialappropriation of the «the end of art» thesis, an appropriation that 29 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) has all the virtues of theft over hard work.2. In his remarks, Professor Iannelli takes up the spirit of the time-travel I attempt with Hegel and applies his own version to the videoart of Bill Viola, who, Iannelli suggests, embodies several key,aesthetic, historically responsive features, all in a Hegelian spirit. Theart work is free of aesthetic imperatives, self-defining, very clearly akind of thousand-eyed Argus, evokes our «amphibian» status, realizesthe Hegelian goal of considering art as a means of collective, historicalself-knowledge (now in the face of the catastrophe of history, after9/11 especially), an art which demands a thoughtful, meditative re-sponse, not mere sensual enjoyment.I am of course in sympathy with the goal of reflecting on con-temporary art with these Hegelian notions in mind, but the embo-diment of such broadly similar ideas alone does not establish an artistas a great artist (or even as an artist), and that is the question thatcomes to mind in considering an artist like Viola (or much conceptualart for that matter). If the aesthetic is to be a distinct mode ofintelligibility, and not a mere vehicle for 'ideas', then that sensuousmodality must involve a realization of intentionality that demands adistinctly aesthetic reaction. It must not serve as something like themere 'base' for a 'thought' to be expressed, or a mere occasion for abeholder's 'experience'. This is vague of course, but I find techniqueslike Viola's super slow motion, and fixation on dualities, obvious andtrite, an expression that does not provoke multiple interpretations, ora sustained, absorbed, distinct form of attentiveness. The effects alsoseem to me trite, bordering on the decorative and commercial (andgratingly self-important, pompous); something like a mere stimulusfor the viewer, not a work with the authority to compel attention to itand conviction in it. (These are notions of Michael Fried's that Idiscuss in the third chapter of After the beautiful). This is, I know,unfair to Iannelli (and to Viola), and could only be fair with a longerdiscussion of this distinctive aesthetic modality, the social meaning ofart works, and what could count in the post-Hegelian world as the'greatness' of art. Without such a discussion, these are just merecounter-assertions, but I hope they are enough to count as thebeginning of a possible dialogue and debate. 30 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti 3. Professor Pinkard presses on the question of the status ofmodernity and its relation to modern art works in my account. Heasks: Is the claim for the 'doubling' of ourselves in art works all thatdifferent from a claim like Lukács's about how art works can 'mirror'their age? And: what does the critique of Heidegger in the fourthchapter imply about his claim of «consummate meaninglessness» inmodernity? Does a Hegelian account still hold out some hope forreconciliation, even if as an infinitely postponed but still meaningfulgoal? And what is the relation between a society in such chaos that itcounts as 'meaningless', and a more typical picture of modernity asinvolving endless, unavoidable conflict and compromise.The idea of modernism in the arts (let us stipulate for the sake ofargument; there are many ways of posing his problem) assumes thatthe form of life coming into view as the realization of early enlighten-ment ideas – the supreme cognitive authority of modern naturalscience, a new market economy based on the accumulation of privatecapital, rapid urbanization and industrialization, the privatization ofreligion and so the secularization of the public sphere – was so unpre-cedented in human history that art's very purpose or rationale, itsmode of address to an audience, had to be fundamentally rethought.These conditions were so extreme in their uniqueness that a self-conscious art, in any way tied to past assumptions, would now have toexist under some threat to its very possibility. A response to such adevelopment was taken to require a novelty, experimentation andformal radicality so extreme as to seem unintelligible to its 'firstresponders' (as such works almost always were).It is in this context that Pinkard's questions must be addressed.First, I identify a specific problem in such a social world – thepossibility of some successful circulation of meaning in the putativelyshared act descriptions and appraisals of human agency, and a similarkind of issue in the production and reception of material art works.Nothing about this sharability being under and new and intensepressure, though, entails any complete 'meaninglessness'. By and largethat is not a Hegelian or my term. It is Heidegger's and, I tried to show,is subject to a Hegelian critique. Being under pressure or threat is onlysalient if things haven't completely broken down. (It would be hard toknow what «completely broken down» could mean.) Manet andCézanne are not treated as avatars of meaninglessness. Even the 31 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) mystery and opacity of The great bathers is determinate, even ifdeterminately disturbing. And there is a specific Hegelian issue atstake – the achievability of genuine mutuality of recognitive status. Theincompleteness of such a collective project does not mean that all thesuccesses of liberal democratic society are called into question; justtheir sufficiency. What it would be for art to be made and appreciatedin such a context – incomplete or depressingly 'stalled' ethical moder-nization – is the question being raised with a Hegelian framework.So the prospect of reconciliation is just the promise of full socialjustice, something Hegel understands as the realization of a collectiveform of rationality, or mutual justifiability. This notion of 'realization' isalso an answer to Pinkard on 'imitation'. The presuppositions of thatnotion are rejected by Hegel. I treat as one of the most important pas-sages in Hegel's art lectures the following: «And it was not as if theseideas and doctrines were already there, in advance of poetry... on thecontrary, the mode of artistic production was such that what fermen-ted in these poets they could work out only in this form of art».64 Sothe very notion of «what there is to imitate» is in the process of beco-ming what it is; and in part becomes what it is also in the realizationof 'worked out' art works.On the issue of endless conflict: it is true that modern, liberaldemocratic societies presume what has been called the plurality ofdifferent and incommensurable concepts of the good; they promote atoleration of this condition, and so they accept the inevitability ofconflict, and, accordingly, hope for a politics of fair debate and even-tual compromise. But the situation I describe, in Hegel's name, re-mains far 'below' the level of such a liberal-democratic picture. That i-deal presumes some sort of equal democratic citizenship and its attain-ment and we are far, far away from anything remotely resemblingthat. We have not reached the level where the notions of conflict ofthis sort could apply. The influence of power and money, not reason,have prevented the attainment of such a condition. Hierarchical rela-tions are sustained by domination, often disguised, veiled, as forms ofreason, but those veils are pretty thin. The radicality of that situation is 64 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Bd. 13, Frankfurtam Main, Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 141 (Eng. tr. by T.M. Knox, Aesthetics. Lessons on fine art, vol. 1,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 102). 32 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti manifest in several forms of modernist art.4. Professor Testa very helpfully focuses on the link established in thebook between Hegel's 'action-theoretic' account of meaning (under-standing deeds, mine or others) and aesthetic meaning, and he posesseveral difficult questions about the implications of insisting on thislink. He rightly notes that this general account of how material being,bodily movements and painted canvases, could bear meaning is not itself a moment in some historical development that will likely besuperseded in some future moment. Its status seems metaphysical, oftrans-historical significance. This relation between the a priori orphilosophical level and the historicism of Hegel's accounts of art,religion and political life, is the source of the possible tensions henotices in the position I ascribe to Hegel.The first tension is derived from what Testa sees as an impli-cation of my claim that Hegel's optimism about the implicit, full ratio-nality of modern institutions is misplaced. If such putative claims torational sufficiency are actually breaking down, then our mutual intel-ligibility to each other would seem to be under some threat. But if Iwant to explain modernist art in terms of such breakdowns, how is itthat a form of aesthetic intelligibility is possible, in a world wheresomething fundamental in social intelligibility (defined as it is by the'action-theoretical' theory) is supposed under great pressure?The first thing to notice is that social intelligibility being underthreat (because of unequal recognitive social positions) is not at all aclaim about utter unintelligibility or complete alienation. (See Testa'sremark, which I was not at all trying to defend, that in the positionsketched, «every action is somehow an alienated one»). He notes thequalification I will insist on, but he does not pursue it in raising hisquestion. Recognitive mutuality comes in possible degrees, and thelack of full mutuality of recognitive status in bourgeois civil and po-litical society is intelligible as precisely that. Bourgeois society exists incontradiction to itself (it systematically violates its own norms) butthat fact regularly manifests itself as such a fact, properly understood.Correspondingly, art works can both illuminate this 'threat' and itselfmanifest its characteristic implications. That manifestation is of apiece with the social manifestations of normative dissonance, compre-hensible as such. The aesthetic expression will have to avoid falling 33 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) into the ideologically distorted self-representation of a 'wrong life', andthat can put great pressure on possible modes of expression, requiringextreme innovation. But, after all, one of the responses most madeabout modernist art is that it is 'difficult', its possible audience seemsever more restricted to those willing to work out such novel, difficultforms. In short, the situation is hardly one of a complete breakdown insocial intelligibility, and a contrasting pocket of meaningfulness inmodernist art.Second, another good question: Testa asks about the implica-tions of my linking Hegel's precipitous declaration about «the end ofart» with his precipitous declaration of the implicit full rationality ofmodern institutions. Quite rightly, Testa asks: do I mean to suggest thatthe full realization of a rational form of life in some ideal future would,on Hegel's terms, still mean «the end of art»? He thinks I appearcommitted to this, and notes what he thinks is an overall tension inmy position between a radically historicist conception of the 'subject'of art, Geist, and the ahistorical picture of a naturally embodied«amphibian», living permanently in the world of both nature andspirit. (It is this duality which in principle would always require asensible-affective modality of intelligibility).However, Testa also appears to acknowledge that my criticism ofHegel here is double-edged. Hegel's assessment of the institutional lifeof modern societies was clearly hasty. But his assumption that there could in principle be the sort of resolution and reconciliation assumedby that assessment is also rejected in After the beautiful. Testa citesthe passages where this revision of Hegel is suggested65. Under-standing the implications of such a post-Hegelian insistence on, basi-cally, human finitude, would require a lengthy, independent discussion,but it is a feature of the proper assessment of modernity that I haveinsisted on since my 1991 book, Modernism as a philosophical problem(«unending modernity», «the end of epochality», etc.)66.According, when I characterized Hegel's «amphibian» metaphoras characteristic of a specific modern self-understanding, I meant to bereferring to his notion of such a being 'wandering' between twoworlds, divided against itself in an irreconcilable way in such a self65 R.B. Pippin, After the beautiful cit., pp. 65, 95, 142.66 Id., Modernism as a philosophical problem, Cambridge (MA), Blackwell, 1991. 34 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti understanding. That sense of our «amphibian» character is histo-rically distinctive and not one that follows necessarily from noting theunavoidably «natural» and «geistig» character of human being, acharacterization that I agree is a philosophical claim, or even, to use aword that must be used cautiously in Hegel, 'metaphysical' (I pointedout that there are, after all, amphibians, animals who do live in bothworlds).Is this inconsistent with the radically historical character ofGeist that I insist on in, for example, the several exchanges withMcDowell? I don't think so. In those exchanges a major point ofcontention is the appropriateness of the McDowellian notion of«second nature» as a gloss on Hegelian Geist. The point was not that itis not appropriate, but that the shape of any such collectively self-formed set of dispositional and habitual traits is far more open-endedthan McDowell seems to allow, and requires us, if we are attemptingto understand what has become of us, a far more ambitious attempt ata narrative of how we got to be 'us', than McDowell wants to allow.That will ultimately involved a historical account of rationality thatMcDowell resists. But this discussion of the «self-constituting» (or«bootstrapping») nature of Geist is independent of the question ofwhether any complete 'liberation' from natural bonds is possible ornot, or what the content of a collective self-understanding, especiallyin the era of highly developed natural sciences, should now look like.These are not necessarily two different questions, but two distinctaspects of the same question. LUCA CORTI(Università degli Studi di Padova – Universität Bochum) AFTERWORD SOME OPEN QUESTIONS«The art of painting is an art of thinking». This quote, although fromMagritte, serves well (taken with a different spirit) as a starting pointto understand the Hegelian views presented in Pippin's book, After the beautiful. 35 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) In the book, Pippin distinctly shows what it means, for a Hege-lian philosopher, to say that figurative art is a way of, if not properly'thinking', at least making certain features of ourselves intelligiblyavailable to us. But the book offers the reader much more: Pippin notonly provides an interesting reconstruction of the Hegelian approachto aesthetic intelligibility – both in its connection with Kant and in re-lation to other competing approaches.67 He also makes clear why weshould still care about such a Hegelian approach: it helps us to under-stand much of the fate of visual art after Hegel, firstly modernist fi-gurative art but also more contemporary forms of visual art68. In aninteresting philosophical «back to the future» attempt, Pippinprojects Hegel's account forward about half a century, in order tolook at modernism painting sub specie Hegelii. In order to do so, hedraws on the views of M. Fried and J. Clark, fleshing out a possibleHegelian view of what happened in pictorial art after 1860.In this book, Pippin puts to work many of the conceptual and in-terpretative Hegelian tools he has been developing over the course ofhis career. This makes the book extremely rich and inspiring, and itwould be desperate to attempt to do justice to all its details here69. Iwill therefore focus on just the question of aesthetic intelligibility,and, more particularly, the distinctive historical turn that Hegel givesto the possibility of aesthetic intelligibility itself. Stressing this pointrequires a small tour the force of the basic elements of Pippin's read-ing70. 67 Schiller, for instance, as well as Heidegger, to which Pippin devotes the last chapter of thebook.68 See R.B. Pippin, What was abstract art? (From the point of view of Hegel), «Critical Inquiry»29 (2002), for a sketch of a Hegelian take on abstract art.69 One could even see the book as fulfilling part a 'Hegelian' project Pippin sketches at the endof his 2008 book Hegel's practical philosophy, where he looks with favor to an possibleHegelian retrospective philosophical consideration of modernity, taking into account «thenineteenth-century and modernist novel, modernism in the visual arts, the emergence ofpowerful new technologies and growing technological dependence in social and political life,the development of unimaginably influential new media, especially film and television» (R.B.Pippin, Hegel's practical philosophy: rational agency as ethical life, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008, p. 280).70 In order to get a grip on Hegel's views, as Pippin himself writes, «we need some big picture[...] of the Hegelian project» (R.B. Pippin, After the beautiful cit., p. 19). 36 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti Hegel's overarching notion of Geist is, no surprise, Pippin'sstarting point. For Pippin, «Geist is understood as a collective subject,a communal or common like-mindedness inheriting the aspirations ofa distinct artistic, religious, and philosophical tradition»71. Visual art,for Hegel, is a peculiar kind of practice belonging to a Geist's activities.As any norm governed practice, it confers a certain significance to theelements involved in it. Norms concerning figurative art are numer-ous and various in kind72: they regard both the production, fruition,and assessment of artworks73. Art, however, is a particular kind ofpractice, in that it is a reflective practice: there is something about artthat makes Geist reflective of itself, bringing to light features of a par-ticular society at a certain time. We learn from art something aboutwhat it means to be member of a particular community.Although very controversial, these are not difficult to recognizeas basic Hegelian claims, and are at the core of Pippin's approach.The idea is to follow Hegel in seeing artworks as elements in such a collec-tive attempt at self-knowledge across historical time, and to see such self-knowledge as essential element in the struggle for the realization of free-dom.74 71 Ibid., p. 7.72 In order to appreciate fine arts, we still go to museums, pay a ticket we, are entitled to have astroll among artworks and look at Manets, Courbets or Magrittes. As beholders, we have certainexpectations, depending on many factors: the tradition we have been educated in, past pictorialnorms in that tradition, etc., including some basic overarching features of the social context welive in. That makes us able to recognize and understand certain features of the object, for instance, as certain actions (represented on a canvas) or as a particular style, or finally, the object itself asan artwork.73 Pippin has something distinctive to say about the peculiar kind of «intelligibility» proper toartworks. To explain it, he puts in play his previous reflection on Hegel's theory of action andrational agency, that we have no space to follow here in detail. The basic structure of aestheticintelligibility is for him «parasitic» to the structure of the intelligibility of intentional content (R.B.Pippin, After the beautiful cit., p. 137). Under some relevant points of view, artworks are like deeds:deeds are not only human bodily movements, but are acts with a meaning, which is dependent onthe larger social and historical normative context in which acts are performed. That very contextplays a relevant role in making the deed the kind of deed it is. In a very similar way, artworks arenot simply material objects, but have e distinct kind of intelligibility, aesthetic intelligibility anon-discursive yet conceptual (or better, conceptualizable) mode of sense-making – largelydependent on features regarding communal Geist. Art is «embodied meaning», reflecting whatHegel would call the dialectic between inner and outer (R.B. Pippin, After the beautiful cit., p. 20).For Pippin's ideas about Hegel's expressive theory of rational agency, see R.B. Pippin, Hegel's practical philosophy cit.74 Id., After the beautiful cit., p. 25, see also p. 7. 37 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) However, linking the conditions of aesthetic intelligibility to a biggersocial and normative context evolving in time, broadens the scope ofone's considerations. In order to fully appreciate the significance ofart (and certain artworks), one has to look to into shifts and break-downs in normative contexts or self-conceptions of a community. In aword: one has essentially to look at history. This, for Pippin, is amongthe «most important innovation[s] in his [Hegel's] treatment of art».According to HegelThe meaning and the normative status of any of the fine arts [...] were neces-sarily historical, [...] no aspect of whatever it was that fine arts rendered in-telligible could be made out properly without a correct appreciation of thataspect then, both in the course of art history itself and, even more ambitious-ly, within some proper understanding of the long historical struggle of Geistto understand itself .75The possibility of a historical take on aesthetic significance is linkedwith the possibility of having a «narrative» available, and Pippin'sdiscourse seems to acknowledge it: «we need some narrative oranother»76. The question, then, becomes: what kind of historical narr-ative do we need and why should we prefer it to others? Pippin takessome effort to specify what a Hegelian kind of narrative is not: it isnot a purely vulgar Marxist narrative that makes artworks just epi-phenomenal nor a merely sociological, psychological or simply de-scriptive narrative. An authentic Hegelian view must not take into ac-count art as the expression of some contingent needs – for instance,as the response to the emergence of new competitors, like photogra-phy or motion-picture, or to the discovery of new, non-figurative art,like the Japanese print77.There is another notion of «historical narrative» that Pippinseems to have in mind, which defines a distinctive Hegelian approach.We need a broad, historically sensitive, inclusive story that pays at-tention not only to the material conditions underlying the life of acertain community but is also capable of focusing on social roles andhow these roles are lived in that community. We need to pay atten75 Ibid., p. 17.76 Ibid., p. 18, see also pp. 70-71, 79 ss., 134-135.77 Ibid., p. 71. 38 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti tion to the ways people both materially organize their lives and makesense of themselves.All this is very demanding, but Pippin – by carefully relying onFried's and Clark's approach – works to show the concrete possibilityof such an account, at least for the emergence of modernist painting.The idea of a narrative that is not «causal» or does not appeal toany «contingent» fact, however, as Pippin describes it, seems per senot to exclude the possibility of having other narratives available thatare similar in kind. The reader might then be tempted to ask: howmany narratives of this kind can we have? Not causal-sociologicalnarratives, but rather alternative attempts to take into account self-conceptions and basic beliefs, as well as social organization of labor,etc. (some «philosophical art history», we can imagine, making use ofelements, for instance, both from the history of economics and histoire des mentalités).In his book, Pippin often seems to reduce the problem to a two-fold choice: either we have a descriptive narrative, which sends usback to a contingent or chance approach to art history (as a conse-quence, «all changes in art practice might ultimately have to look likeshifts in fashion, of no more significance of hemline or tie widths»78),or we try to develop a Hegelian narrative, which will put us on trackfor understanding necessary breakdowns and tensions in our concep-tion of ourselves, the way we organize our collective life, and finally,our art-practices.The importance of having just one correct narrative concerningthe realization of freedom is certainly essential for Hegel, and it ispart of his project. It is not clear, however, how important this aspectis for Pippin's Hegelian approach, and whether Pippin's explanationwould allow for multiple narratives concerning the realization offreedom (and a fortiori the status of modernist art). Pippin some-times gives the impression that there is only one narrative explanation open to us, which is a continuation of the Hegelian one. Some-times he writes as he accepts «the common Hegelian narrative», ex-cept for the «prematurely optimistic» conclusion that Hegel draws 78 Ibid., p. 133. 39 Lebenswelt, 7 (2015) from it79. Hegel simply made a «bad bet»80, or drew the wrong con-clusion from a good historical argument81.On the other hand, however, Pippin tends to underscore thatany Hegelian story about how we came to be us -and to developsuch artistic forms as modernist painting -is not only «retrospective»but also «provisional» and «highly controversial». This might be un-derstood to open up the possibility for different narratives to be toldas alternatives to Hegel's. This is something Hegel certainly wouldhave some difficulty accepting. The simple possibility of multiple narratives – not the concurrence of other causal, descriptive, sociolog-ical or vulgar Marxist approaches – might be a potential threat for theexplanatory potential of our Hegelian story (one could say «it's just anarrative among the others, after all»). And this might open up a fur-ther question: what would then be the grounds for accepting Pippin'sHegelian narrative instead of another? What makes one narrativemore «compelling» than another?82. An Hegelian approach, Pippintells us, is «more fruitful than competing accounts of the philosophi-cal significance of pictorial art»83, but its fruitfulness depends largelyon how we understand the status of the narrative upon which the He-gelian account is based.That being said, Pippin's attempt to demonstrate that the Hege-lian approach is still provocative and helpful for us today remainssuccessful, despite the 'weak' reading of the historical argument he isproposing. Though Hegel's opinion about non-figurative art wouldhave been closer to Magritte's (according to whom «l'art dit non figuratif n'a pas plus de sens que l'école non enseignante, que la cuisine non alimentaire») than Pippin's account allows, Pippin's Hegel give us the 79 Ibid., p. 132, and p. 61.80 Id., What was abstract art? cit., p. 15.81 In this case, I am not sure again to what extent, according to Pippin, we have to agree withHegel's analysis of figurative art, and in particular whether we have to follow him in hisappreciation of his contemporaries. For instance, do we have to agree when he says in his notesthat a good «modern portrait» should be worked out in detail, so that the face of the subject mustlook as reflecting, i.e. carry the sing of a «thinking, active, differentiated life»? (G.W.F. Hegel, Schrifte und Entwürfe I, in Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 15, hrsg. v. F. Hogemann C. Jamme, Hamburg,Meiner, 1990, pp. 204-205).82 Pippin's story that has Manet playing the role of the protagonist, and Cezanne the role ofdeuteragonist, as some reviewers have underlines, would have to be defended against alternativestories of the same kind, locating the appearance of modernism somewhere else.83 R.B. Pippin, After the beautiful cit., p. 26. 40 R. Pippin, M. Farina, F. Campana, F. Iannelli, T. Pinkard, I. Testa, L. Corti resources for rendering more complex phenomena, like abstract andcontemporary art, intelligible. In this way, his is a reading that ex-tends beyond the expectations of the historical Hegel, bringing whatPippin elsewhere calls "the eternal Hegel" to bear on the complex andrich body of things and practices that the modern world knows as "art".