Abstract

Robert Pippin's difficult but engrossing study of the genesis of Hegel's idealism gives rise to the following speculation. Suppose that we regard the history of Western thought as an extensive illustration of Hegel's dialectic of master and slave. Poetry, having been banished from the philosophical city by Socrates, with the attendant subordination of the imagination to the intellect, returns to power in the nineteenth century after a series of gradually expanding dialectical insurrections, and restores the imagination to mastery over the intellect. The key event in this reversal is the transformation of Kant's "Copernican revolution" from a doctrine of transcendental order issuing from the world-constructing subject into a doctrine of transcendental history. The penultimate step is then the decay of the transcendental into its more vigorous historical component, with the subsequent triumph of historicism, perspectivalism, and radical individualism, in which even mathematics, logic, and scientific theories, for all their technical rigor, become artifacts of the local linguistic customs of the historical subject. Even positivism reveals its true colors in the oddly Nietzschean or Proustian celebration of "ways of worldmaking." The intellect is unmasked as the productive imagination.