This is a great week, Mel got a job and starts tomorrow. Clinical research coordinator! She will also be doing some of the core STEM classes to try and break into the neuroscience field. She will be hybrid, which is great because it is a long commute. It is really awesome to see her start towards her dream of being a scientist. Shoutout to all the women in STEM.
This week I started and finished an early work by Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. The subtitle is the dissatisfactions of high European culture. This is the second to last book I think I need to read to start writing my essay on Pippin. The last is Emerson.
I don't know exactly how I am approaching this essay. It will be broadly about three things. Modernism, Pippin and his relation to it, and my relation to Pippin and his relation to it... Modernism as a philosophic project, as a way of life, as a fundamental value, has been the driving force of my studies. Just like Pippin, it circles around Kant/Hegel vs Nietzsche/Heidegger. There are a lot of similar stories about modernism and people that tend to either of these sides.
Kant/Hegel represent a type of pro-modernism, and we see that trend before them and after them. There are naive and nuanced defenders of modernism. Pippin, I think, has been the arch-defender of modernism as a philosophical project. However, he has moved on from defending it, at least in some regard, finally moving to the Nietszche/Heidegger team.
I am looking to get this published, and would love to see him respond. He is a sort of philosophical role model for me. He is inside academia yet outside of the mainstream. He is not dogmatic in his approach. He does bracket the social and political problems, but is aware of the downsides of that approach, it just is not his thing. The problem with Heidegger is the way in which Heidegger's relation to social and political problems, as Wolin and Lilla and Girard (nuanced defenders of modernity) have shown, is that his biographical life seems integral to his philosophy, unlike say, Frege or Kant or Hegel, although some parts of the latters can be fair critiques. Heidegger's experience as the war generation, the top-down democratic change in Germany, and his anti-Semitism and Nazism and naive political skills all infected his philosophy in a deep way.
I think a lot of the irrationalists and unreason can be explained by sociial, political, and economic decay, people moving to that philosophy out of an intellectual despair amidst social despair. A lot of these problems of anti-modernism and unreason seem to be distinctly European as well. Pippin's move from "apperceptive" to "poetic" thinking via Heidegger is also questionable. What does it entail, if anything? Pippin ends The Culmination with a Nietzsche quote. It is a different way of seeing, or seeing what apperceptive thinking does not allow or throws away. I get that, but, as Pippin knows, there are different ways of relating to life poetically. There is E.M. Cioran. There is Walt Whitman. Pippin knew this before I did, Pippin taught me this. Nietzsche was inspired in intellect by Montaigne, but could not live in the world like Montaigne. Romantics could not live in Europe, Whitman could live in America. Emerson influenced Nietzsche greatly, but their temperament and affect are different.
There is something in the water in Europe that we should not be drinking.