From Hegel to Heidegger . . . and Back

For decades, Robert Pippin was defending Hegel’s thought against the post-Hegelian attempts to undermine it, inclusive of Heidegger’s reading of Hegel as the culmination of Western metaphysics. However, his latest book Culmination, Pippin changes his position and basically endorses Heidegger’s reading of Hegel: in Hegel’s Absolute Knowing, the reduction of Being to discursive categories, i.e., to logical structures, reaches its highpoint. In my critical reading of Pippin (and Heidegger himself), I try to demonstrate two things. First, Hegel sustains his own version of the irreducible finitude and contingency of human existence. Second, not only is Hegel’s entire system based upon a notion of the “night of the world” which reaches deeper than Heidegger’s being-in-the-world; Hegel’s self-relating negativity also precludes the Nazi temptation to which Heidegger succumbed and opens up the space for radical emancipatory politics.