At the biggest of big-picture levels, Pippin needs to be able to narrate the genesis of the Ideal (as Spirit, subjectivity, thinking, mind, reasons, senses, etc.) out of the Real (as Nature, objectivity, being, world, causes, references, etc.). But, Pippin’s static dualism of reasons-versus-causes makes it such that he does not, will not, and cannot deliver such a narrative. Without it, Pippin remains a non-Hegelian subjective idealist at least by omission.
Hegel’s Realphilosophie delineates the real genesis of the spiritual out of the natural as a really knowable genesis with sharp, discernible moments and components.
At this point, Pippin can be seen to oscillate between two positions. I am inclined to designate these as weak mysterianism and strong mysterianism. Sometimes, he indicates that Spirit is known to emerge from Nature, albeit with the precise details of this emergence stubbornly remaining shrouded in mystery. This would be Pippin’s weak mysterianism. At other times, he simply denies that Geist arises from Natur, leaving the question of Spirit’s genetic origins unasked and unanswered. This would be Pippin’s strong mysterianism. If either form of mysterianism somehow still qualifies as compatibilism, they both nonetheless remain incompatible with Hegel. In Less Than Nothing, Žižek responds to this same material from the second chapter of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy. Although Pippin reviewed Žižek’s book, he still has not responded to some of Žižek’s critiques of him in Less Than Nothing. And, I am convinced Pippin cannot adequately respond unless and until the quite unlikely occurrence of him breaking with the position he has defended from 1989 onwards. That said, Žižek, at one point in his 2012 tome, observes:
If… in ontological terms, spirit naturally evolves as a capacity of natural beings, why not simply endorse materialist evolutionism? That is to say, if—to quote Pippin—‘at a certain level of complexity and organization, natural organisms come to be occupied with themselves and eventually to understand themselves,’ does this not mean that, precisely, in a certain sense nature itself does ‘develop into spirit?’ What one should render problematic is precisely Pippin’s fragile balance between ontological materialism and epistemological transcendental idealism: he rejects the direct idealist ontologization of the transcendental account of intelligibility, but he also rejects the epistemological consequences of the ontological evolutionary materialism. (In other words, he does not accept that the self-reflection of knowledge should construct a kind of bridge to materialist ontology, accounting for how the normative attitude of ‘accounting for’ itself could have emerged out of nature.)
What Žižek identifies as “Pippin’s fragile balance between ontological materialism and epistemological transcendental idealism” is reflected in Pippin’s symptomatic stigmatization of Schelling in relation to the tradition of German idealism. Both Schelling and Hegel—Hegel remained throughout his intellectual itinerary marked by Schelling’s philosophies of Identity and Nature—continually sought, in Žižek’s words, to “construct a kind of bridge to materialist ontology, accounting for how the normative attitude of ‘accounting for’ itself could have emerged out of nature.”170
I would suggest that both Pippin and Brandom need such a bridge. Yet, this Chicago-Pittsburgh pair have invested in stances that prevent them from building a structure that would span the gap they themselves sustain between the normative and the natural.
But, contra Pippin, Hegel’s Logic intends to demonstrate, among many
other things, that pure thinking de-purifies itself, driving itself outside itself into an extra-ideational Real. The initial incarnation of this Real is spatio-temporal nature, which is what the category of Being at the beginning of Logic turns out to be when seen with the benefit of the
hindsight built into Hegel’s circularly structured System.