JURGEN HABERMAS, THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY

BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Modernity's consciousness of time and its need for self-reassurance, 1.

II. Hegel's concept of modernity, 23.

Excursus on Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 45.

III. Three perspectives: left Hegelians, right Hegelians, and Nietzsche, 51.

Excursus on the obsolescence of the production paradigm, 75.

IV. The entry into postmodernity: Nietzsche as a turning point, 83.

V. The entwinement of myth and enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, 106.

VI. The undermining of western rationalism through the critique of metaphysics: Martin Heidegger, 131.

VII. Beyond a temporalized philosophy of origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phoncentrism, 161.

Excursus on leveling the genre distinction between philosophy and literature,185.

VIII.Between eroticism and general economics: Georges Bataille, 211.

IX. The critique of reason as an unmasking of the human sciences: Michel Foucault, 238.

X. Some questions concerning the theory of power: Foucault again, 266.

XI. An alternative way out of the philosophy of the subject: communicative versus subject-centered reason, 294.

Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: the imaginary institution, 327.

XII. The normative content of modernity, 336.

Excursus on Luhmann's appropriation of the philosophy of the subject through systems theory, 368.

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT

McCarthy gives an excellent summation of the entire book. We follow his summary as follows:

Habermas starts with the reaction to Hegel's attempt to "replace the subject-centered reason of the Enlightenment with Absolute Knowledge." Ever since then, Habermas finds philosophers trying to find an answer to the problem of reason's "impurity." His point of departure is French poststructuralism, which was inspired by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Habermas attempts to show that they failed to follow "a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason by reason understood as communicative action." (p.viii)

McCarthy follows Habermas through the lectures as he shows the shortcomings of the critique of subjectivistic rationalism. H. acknowledges that this critique is a critique of western culture itself. This radical critique has successfully decentered the "epistemological and moral subject" and desublimated "the conception of reason linked to it." (p.ix)

H. agrees with the postructuralist notion that reason is a "'thing of this world'". But he argues that the major voices, in one way or the other, in their attack on reason have overshot the mark. Bataille, Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, Horkeimer, Adorno, Nietzsche himself, all based their critique on anti-Enlightenment conceptions that leave modernity powerless to think. That leaves modern culture powerless to function.

Habermas's answer to this philosophical dilemma is to accept the criticism of Enlightenment subject-centered reason but to find a basis for reason in "communicative action." McCarthy sums up: "The key to Habermas's approach is his rejection of the 'paradigm of consciousness' and its associated 'philosophy of the subject' in favor of the through-and-through intersubjectivist paradigm of 'communicative action.'"(x)

He finds this paradigm in the "counterdiscourse of modernity" which was neglected by Nietzsche and his followers. Habermas says that the Enlightenment always allowed for a critical "counterreckoning." There he locates "the construal of reason in terms of a noncoercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition." (xvi) Habermas returns to Hegel to reconfirm the idea of reason as a healing power; he returns to Marx to indicate that philosophy should be practical ("its rational content has to be mobilized in practice"[xvi]).

"If communicative action is our paradigm, the decentered subject remains as a participant in social interaction mediated by language." (xvi)

McCarthy sums it all up as follows: "H. agrees with the radical critics of enlightenment that the paradigm of consciousness is exhausted. Like them, he views reason as inescapably situated, as concretized in history, society, body, and language. Unlike them, however, he holds that the defects of the Enlightenment can only be made good by further enlightenment....modernization bears developments as well as distortions of reason....[e.g.,] the 'unthawing' and 'reflective refraction' of cultural traditions, the universalization of norms and generalization of values, and the growing individuation of personal identities--all prerequisites for that effectively democratic organization of society through which alone reason can, in the end, become practical." (xvii)

III: LEFT HEGELIANS, RIGHT HEGELIANS, AND NIETZSCHE

Habermas gives us a wonderfully concise summation of the fundamental charge leveled against the Enlightenment by everyone from Hegel and Marx on down to the French poststructuralists. The accusation is against "a reason grounded in the principle of subjectivity." He says that this reason "undermines all unconcealed forms of suppression and exploitation, of degradation and alienation, only to set up in their place the unassailable domination of [a falsely absolute] rationality," which creates immunity for itself "in the form of a thoroughly concealed domination." (56)

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