The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures [Hardcover]

 

 

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The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity concentrates on the work of others. It includes chapters on Hegel, Nietzsche, Horkheimer-Adorno, Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, and two on Foucault. In addition, there are substantial discussions of Benjamin, Luhmann and Castoriadis. A chapter on philosophy and literature discusses Rorty, De Man, Hartman and Culler. This is all intellegent, penetrating discussion, yet occasionally weak reading. I found the discussion of Hegel the most interesting, that of Heidegger the most convincingly damaging. Sadly though, when Habermas looks at Derrida he sees "an orthodox Heideggerian," whatever that is. The skepticism, nominalism, irony and argumentative wiliness that distinguish Derrida's work disappear in this indiscerning assimilation. A predominant but invariably unconvincing strategy is to clobber Nietzsche's scholarly-skeptics with a "self-referential paradox," while unmasking the initiate-critics' secret complicity with the philosophy of subjectivity they would deconstruct.

Habermas regards 'postmodernism' as a new bottle for the old and bitter wine of Counter-Enlightenment. Disdaining its fashionable seductions, he would renew Hegel's project of grounding modern ideals. Two final chapters outline his approach. Philosophy must cease to idealize the knowing subject in its analysis of rationality and look instead to the rationality characteristic of communication. The hope is that a "theory of communicative action can reconstruct Hegel's concept of the ethical context of life independently of the premisses of the philosophy of consciousness." With Hegel, Habermas represents political subjects as "the products of the traditions in which they stand, of the solidary groups to which they belong, and of the socialization processes within which they grow up." But against the idealism Hegel shares with Descartes and Kant, Habermas acknowledges that philosophy "cannot make transparent the totality," that "it can never completely illuminate the implicit, the prepredicative, the not focally present background of the lifeworld."

I'm unsure whether "postmodernism" is Counter-Enlightenment with a différance or just a novelity to give otherwise heterogeneous intellectuals a word in common. But amid this burgeoning discourse there can be no doubt that The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a basic text. Habermas's intelligence, learning and commitment make this book indispensible.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Philosophical Reviews 8 (1988).

Though I am almost always disturbed by Habermas's borderline naivety concerning what he calls the "unfinished project of modernity," in this volume he rises to the heights I always thought him capable. In 400+ pages (a big book, but always just short enough on the essays to be concise and clear), Habermas shows his command of almost all post-Kantian philosophy. His criticisms are almost always on-target, and even though I do not follow his conclusions (has he read and dealt seriously with ALL of Heidegger? what does he do with metaphysics that are expressly anti-metaphysical, such as those of Bergson, Whitehead, and James?), I am always amazed at his insights and explanations. Interestingly enough, much of what Habermas is explicating (critique of foundations) has always been found in theoretical form in Gadamer, and in cosmological form in Whitehead. Habermas always seems to hold out hope that some sort of Rawlsian "original position" will be found (can Habermas really think that there could ever be such a thing as an "ideal speech situation," devoid of what Gadamer calls the Wirkungsgeschichte, or history which affects it?). For my part, I cannot accept this. Insofar as modernity wanted to find such a situation, it was guilty of what Whitehead called "misplaced concrescence." Habermas makes himself succeptible to the same criticisms. But even though I all too often find Habermas too optimistic in regards the quest of modernity, I am never disappointed when he writes about that quest. I believe this is one of Habermas's finest books, worth the time and effort required to read it.

This is truly a masterpiece. Especially if you're somebody schooled in the incredibly repetitive and tedious Anglo-Saxon tradition, this book will surely be a revelation. You'll need some philosophical training to understand a lot of this, but if you want a brilliant, sweeping evaluation of most of the most important thinkers in Europe post-Kant, with just the perfect balance of detail and summary, and of exegesis and polemic, then this book is essential.

Habermas begins by showing how the discourse of modernity and postmodernity, the concepts that transmitted philosophy from the Humean/Kantian epistemologist's study to the real world, began with Hegel, and how it has been developed since then in different directions, but nobody has really risen to Marx's challenge successfully. Somebody who doesn't know Heidegger and Derrida too well may get the impression that they're not as important as they actually are, due to Habermas' necessarily selective treatment of their work, but other than that the way Habermas dissects the nature of modernity and postmodernity, and then shows how the future can still be hopeful with 'communicative rationality' rather than the solipsistic nature of pre-Habermasian philosophy which inevitably ends up in postmodern tangles, is brilliant.

You can hardly expect any one text to be perfectly right, and I do have a few annoyances - mainly 1) his treatment of Searle's attack upon Derrida, which leaves the situation seeming a little more lopsided in favour of Searle than it really was (you get the impression Searle beat Derrida, when in fact Derrida really won the argument, he just failed to emphasise a few things) & 2) his treatment of Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism, which in many ways, though disheartening, is still a little more realistic than his own optimistic point of view (he could've said that, despite Adorno's pessimism, communicative rationality is the best way to go, rather than making it seem as if we're on a direct, quick road to his utopian 'ideal speech situation'), and finally 3) when he assumes that "metaphysical world views" are "outdated", he ignores the possibility of going right back to Hegel and revitalising him with the positive, rather than the negative-Nietzschean, insights of the last 200 years, especially that of Lévinas Heideggerean theology and the late Derrida's 1990s writings on religion. A possibility that's difficult but he dismisses a little too easily.

Other than that, though, this is an astounding book of a quality immensely superior to the mass of over-rated rubbish you get these days, like Foucalt and Rorty.

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Published on Feb 23 2004 by Jeffrey Rubard

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