After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernity by Robert B. Pippin (review)

A felicitous conjunction of Hegel and Manet in the philosopher Robert Pippin's book After the Beautiful has confirmed my belief that chance determines the order in which objects, categories, and constructs receive our critical attention. Nothing necessitates the choice of Manet as primary modernist other than a fait accompli. As Pippin would have it, this is "the usual way." Just as the status of Hegel is our intellectual inheritance, our historical chance and fate, so is the status of Manet on the sensory side. If art, philosophy, culture, and the social order have a history (singular or multiple), we can only hope that things are going somewhere better than here and now. And even if it were a turn for the better, the route from our present unease to our future satisfaction can be neither predicted nor logically reconstituted, yet Pippin refers to "the trajectory of modernist art" as if the course were set. Chance events lead to contradiction if we insist on sorting them out. Luckily (ironically), we have a concept of chance at hand, as well as allied concepts of tragedy and comedy; these rational notions dissuade us from applying reasoned analysis to chance itself. Those who accept chance leave explanation aside and get on with life as best they can.

After the Beautiful is a beautiful—that is, an artfully elaborated—thought experiment, a grand hypothetical. Without fulfilling the aim, Pippin argues for the value of applying Hegelian discourse to the morass of our "conflicting commitments in intellectual, cultural, and political life." He notes that analogous conflict marks the "aesthetic experimentation that seemed to begin with Manet," which critics have labeled "modernist painting." Manet's experiment in painting (and its aftermath in Picasso, Pollock, and others) is Pippin's would-be target of, and partner in, his experiment in critical philosophy. I say that Pippin does not actually do what he proposes because he remains on a theoretical plane, never identifying the particularity or historicity of our conditions of moral conflict or laying claim to a specific definition of "modernism." He is nearly mute on such matters, yet inconsistently so. At the start of his introductory chapter, he states that the characterization or periodization known as "modernist" is "highly contested"; at the end of the same chapter, he refers to "the usual way in which all modernist art is characterized." Which is it? Both statements are passive, leaving the reader in want of sources to check. On the topic of modernism, Pippin implies that a broad consensus as well as its utter lack constitutes our situation—a fine Hegelian contradiction.

According to Pippin, a Hegelian sense of the inherent contradiction in all identities—the tension, say, between the body-self in itself (perceived as sensation, emotion, feeling, existence) and the mind-self for itself (perceived as intellection, conceptualization, discourse, meaning)—has the potential to ameliorate, or at least alter, the vexed situation of modernism. "What is the meaning of existence?" a modernist asks, with little expectation of a definitive answer. Pippin asserts what few would dispute: whatever else it may be, modernism is a process of change. He prefers to use Hegelian discourse in a process-oriented way, rather than directing it to a "triumphalist" end. Hegelian discourse may not change the world of modernity any more than it terminated conflict in the philosopher's own era, but it will affect the way we negotiate our course through modernity, and the resulting habits of thought may well amount to historical change. Our thinking alters our art, if not our existence, just as our art affects our thought. Neither changes chance.

Pippin has selected painting, a concrete rhetoric, as the primary modernist art. For the same role, he could have chosen philosophy, an abstract rhetoric, but he did not. Beyond or beneath the discursive thought associated with it, a painting is a material thing. So when critical thinking uses pictorial art as its medium, it...