The Difference Between the Pippinian and Houlgatian Interpretations of Hegel. A Hegelian Note

Often it is said that Robert Pippin’s Hegel is too Kantian or too Fichtean. By this is meant, not so much that it is wrong per se that Pippin emphasises the Kantian and Fichtean elements, but rather that something crucial is left out by his reading of Hegel. His is, supposedly, a deflationary reading of Hegel, a kind of bowdlerised version of Hegel the thoroughbred metaphysician in the Spinozan sense, say. Too much emphasis is put, by Pippin, on the fact that we can’t know Being without a dependence on the categories in virtue of which Being can first be determined in and through self-determining thought. Despite the fact that Pippin, certainly more recently, insists on a metaphysical reading, and points to the fact that it is Being’s own intelligibility that is at issue, not just our subjective perspective on it, his Hegelian detractors have often taken and still take Pippin’s Hegel to be unappealingly unhegelian in some important sense. So in what sense is Pippin’s Hegel then not sufficiently ‘metaphysical’ or ‘ontological’, not enough of a Hegel, as Pippin’s critics believe?