From Hegel to Heidegger… And back

Robert Pippin was for decades among the most outspoken American Hegelians, defending Hegel’s idealist legacy not only against the post-Hegelian turn towards non-discursive or non-notional reality but also rejecting Heidegger’s treatment of Hegel. So it comes as a shock when,in his new book The Culmination (Pippin, 2024), he endorses Heidegger’s characterization of Hegel’s thought as the culmination of Western metaphysics, as the full deployment of its basic premise that being equals logos, i.e., that the truth of everything that exists (or that can exist) can be articulated in the form of discursive judgments, so that the full system of logic is at the same time a full ontology, the description of conditions that everything that exists should meet. In all probability, Heidegger’s answer would have been that capitalism is just one among ontic organizations of the technological disclosure of Being – as he put it, Soviet Union and the US are “metaphysically the same.” To this we should insist that capitalism is not simply an ontic phenomenon, one of the possible versions of technological attunement: capitalism is not just a social phenomenon, it also has a transcendental-ontological status. It is not modern science and technology as such which push us to continuous domination over and exploitation of nature – they function like this only within the frame of capitalism with its permanent propensity towards expanded self-reproduction. So, Pippin is right here: it is not enough to mention technological disponibility as the source of the disappearance of Meaningfulness – one should add the word “capitalism” never used by Heidegger. Here Marx surprisingly meets radical conservatives: Patrick Buisson, the French ultra-conservative, was right in claiming that “le grand deconstructeur, c’est le capitalisme.”