Abstract

According to Robert Pippin, the standpoint of philosophical modernism claims that, with the coming of modernity—with the emergence of a disenchanted natural world as projected by modern science, a political language of rights and equality, a secular morality, a burgeoning sense of subjective consciousness, and autonomous art—the task of philosophy becomes that of providing a wholly critical and radically self-reflexive conception of reason and rationality that will demonstrate the immanent ground for our allegiance to these new ways of being in the world. Or better, what these distinctly modern forms of practice evince is an ideal of human freedom or autonomy in which the worth of our pursuits is dependent upon their being self-legislated or self-authorized; only these distinctly modern forms of practice can be self-legislated without a dogmatic residue, and only what can be so authorized is rationally deserving of our allegiance. What makes philosophical modernism a form of idealism is its radical self-reflexivity; nothing can “count as” a reason unless we so count it, unless we normatively authorize it. And what makes this version of idealism “Hegelian” is that, in place of Kant’s “I think,” which must accompany all my representations, there is a “we think” that must accompany all our fundamental practices; and in place of a transcendental deduction of the categories necessary for the possibility of experience, we are offered an historical narrative of the self-defeating character of the antecedents to modernity’s self-authorizing institutional forms.