Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts by Robert B. Pippin (review)

Reviewed by: Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts by Robert B. Pippin Feng Dong Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts. By Robert B. Pippin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021. 304 pp. 30. ISBN 978–0–226–77080–2. Robert B. Pippin does more than offer another study on the unresolved relationship between philosophy and art; he means for his book to be 'a contribution to philosophy' (p. 3). Hence his ambition to lay the ground for a new kind of philosophical criticism. With a deep understanding of Hegel's and Heidegger's philosophy, Pippin reflects widely on questions of rationality, freedom, agency, and self-knowledge that are challengingly posed by modern art and literature. In the light of the Hegelian dialectic, Pippin can say this much about philosophy and art: each has its otherness in itself, and each becomes genuinely free in the other. The quarrel between philosophy and art (or literature) is a lovers' quarrel; instead of cancelling individuality, truth or the universal enkindles the appearances of art and literature by bringing inner life into social dynamics. In other words, artistic and literary truths are not empty ideals but 'worked out' (herausgearbeitet) or achieved actualities that make visible diverse forms of social dependence (p. 70). Pippin's task is twofold, as roughly shown in the book's two parts. First, he has to rethink and re-enliven Hegel's theory of art based on the externalization of the spirit, thus setting the stage for the modern theatre of the mind that welcomes free-playing faculties and fantasies (Chapters 1–5). Then he tackles, with characteristic subtlety and deliberation, the ontological and moral issues raised by the works of artists and writers such as Correggio, Raphael, Géricault, Courbet, Manet, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Thomas Demand, and J. M. Coetzee (Chapters 6–13). Intermittent interlocutors include Denis Diderot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lionel Trilling, Theodor W. Adorno, Stanley Cavell, and Michael Fried. Pippin is not uniting them all under the banner of Hegel; rather, he intends to explore what artworks and literature can tell us about the possibilities and modes of self-knowledge caught in diverse and often conflicting motivations, intentions, and authorities. What are the conditions for such knowledge to emerge? Artists and novelists, although sometimes challenging philosophical concepts and social norms, are especially interested in the drama (or melodrama) of embodying, fostering, and showing self-consciousness under the gaze of others. Pippin's book makes it clear that art and literature provide not only aesthetic satisfaction but also mental and psychological spaces to stage a quest for the authenticity of being. A recurrent word throughout the book is 'mindedness', by which Pippin means not 'mindfulness', as Buddhism would emphasize, but something like pure 'intendedness' in Thomas Demand's photography ('intendedness without a distinct intention'), a certain self-reflexiveness at the heart of philosophy, art, and literature, End Page 401 a 'to-be-seen-ness' (pp. 136, 128). Both visual art, e. g. Courbet's Sleep (1866) and Manet's Olympia (1865), and novels, e. g. James's What Maisie Knew (1897) and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), present tremendous opportunities for us to reconsider the theatrical role-playings in modern civil society. What Maisie Knew, for example, shows that 'having a mind of one's own' entails a 'thrust outward into the world, affecting and changing what others would otherwise have been able to think or to do' (p. 163). Maisie gains what Pippin calls a 'first-personal position' (p. 164) after a long process of learning to play the game with and against her own family. In Proust's novel, however, the problem of 'mindedness' is more intensified as the narrator (Marcel), continuously interpreting his past experiences, finds it increasingly hard merely to apprehend himself. Proust's novel, Pippin argues, is full of intentional and unintentional self-deceits, involuntary memories, and unknown dimensions of the self so that 'to achieve a consistent fidelity to oneself', to have a genuine relation 'between one's very being and one's deeds', again becomes an arduous process, something 'achievable only. . .