The Exteriority of Thinking: Hegel and Heidegger

In The Culmination, Robert Pippin offers a stunning reassessment of the achievements of absolute idealism. Having developed some of the most persuasive defenses of Hegel's absolute idealism to date, Pippin now argues that Heidegger's trenchant critique of Hegel has revealed a dogmatism at the very heart of absolute idealism: an unwarranted identification of what is with what is discursively knowable. This dogmatic identification leads to a distorted understanding of the meaning of Being, a reifying account of beings, and a neglect of our own finitude. In this article, I defend Hegel against these charges. The upshot of this discussion is twofold. Rather than evading the question of the exteriority of being, I argue, Hegel in fact aims to reveal that this exteriority is internal to thinking itself. And rather than identifying the meaning of being with discursive knowability, Hegel shows that the meaning of being resides in a form of freedom that goes beyond the self-transparency of knowing.