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The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

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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.

I'm an art history graduate student at Stony Brook, and I'm taking a course on Habermas and Aesthetics. We had to read the PDM, this review was written as a class assignment, and not specifically for amazon, so there are some references to the prof and one to a student who gave a presentation I quote.

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, hereafter referred to as the PDM, is based on a series of public lectures given by Jürgen Habermas during the summer of 1983 and the winter 1983-1984 at the University of Frankfurt. There are twelve chapters in the PDM, each of which contains Habermas's description of a particular philosopher's, or grouping of philosophers', discourse(s) in regards to Modernity. Out of the twelve chapters, ten are based on the lectures from those two semesters from nineteen-eighty-three to nineteen-eighty-four at the University of Frankfurt, and two of the chapters are later additions which were added to the PDM after the lectures. The later additions are the fifth chapter, The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and the last chapter, which is the twelfth chapter: The Normative Content of Modernity. The PDM was published in German in nineteen-eighty-five by Suhrkamp Verlag, and in English in nineteen-ninety by MIT Press.

In the first paragraph of the introduction to the PDM Thomas McCarthy writes that: "Habermas is concerned here to respond to the challenge of posed by the radical critique of reason... (Habermas's) strategy is to return to those historical "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche, and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome; his aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason by reason understood as communicative action." Here McCarthy is describing the method Habermas takes throughout the book, showing the moments when communicative reason might have emerged, but instead the idea of subject-centered reason persevered. Joe Benavides, in his class presentation Habermas, Heidegger, Derrida, explained why the Hegelian dialectic, which invented modernism, fails for Habermas, to detect the error of choosing subject-centered reason over communicative reason, writing: "Hegel's tools, then, as the conceptual flagstone of a modernity that understood itself as already completely self-understood, were never the kinds of tools that could reflect critically on modernity as an evolving process."

The way to read PDM is not as a textbook, or even an ordinary series of lectures meant to convey a body of knowledge. The PDM does not deliver information in a pedagogical manner until the last two chapters, where Habermas lays out his own theories of the normative content of modernity, and communicative reason. The first ten chapters are closer to an erudite detective story, where the original conviction (subject-centered reason) has been overturned based on DNA evidence, and a new detective (Habermas) is looking for the real criminal (the failure to offer an alternative form of reason), the one missed by the first detective.

The shortest version of this book would read that Descartes originated the idea of every human being is a subject, and that this subject thinks. For each of Descartes's subjects the world divides into subject and object. This type of thinking, where there is a subject (the person who experiences), and the object (everything in the world, up to and including other human beings) is one particular way of thinking that created a lot of enthusiasm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This type of thinking is called subject-centered or instrumental reason by Habermas, a subject-centered reason leads to strategic action. Strategic action is a form of behavior where the world and all the people in it are reduced to objects. Most of the PDM deals with different philosophers' attempts to dismantle or sidestep instrumental reason. In Occidental philosophy, Instrumental reason is considered bad for basically two historical reasons: the first is European Imperialism and secondly the historically unprecedented violence in the twentieth century. The major single event linked to the failure of instrumental reason is the Nazi's final solution, where human beings were exterminated based on reason. One other important way that Instrumental reason is considered immoral is because it transforms other people into objects, in the process stripping them of being and reducing them to either being tools or obstacles.

The PDM and the various bodies of work which Habermas analyzes all share an underlying theme. The most important theme is Modernity as it relates to reason. In the PDM the critique is against philosophers who attempt to take down the Enlightenment ideal of social progress through the destruction of subject-centered reason. It is not that Habermas disagrees with the philosophers he critiques about the premise that the world seen through the lens of subject-centered reason is a failure, it is that Habermas takes issue with what those critiques leave behind, and the method they employ. On November 22nd, 2011 Dr. Eduardo Mendieta explained Habermas's critique of the totalizing critique of reason this way: "The rhetorical excesses of the modern critiques of reason, there is an incongruity of what philosophers are allowed to claim and how they support the claims. We need to be suspect of it, if a philosopher is going to make a claim they need to be able to support the claim. Any critique of reason must be able to give an account of their own total critique."

Habermas spends four chapters critiquing his contemporaneous philosophers: Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. Heidegger gets a different treatment than Derrida and Foucault, because Heidegger's project is to rescue subject-centered reason from Nietzsche withering attacking on all reason. Habermas asserts that Heidegger makes the mistake of stripping subjectivity to the point where it allows for racism and nationalism, quoting Habermas: "No matter whether modern ideas make their entry in the name of reason or of the destruction of reason, the prism of the modern understanding of Being refracts all normative orientations into the power claims of a subjectivity crazed with self-aggrandizement." (134) Here, Habermas is saying that Heidegger does an amazing thing, where Heidegger is capable of stripping subjectivity down to some base layer where it exists below norms, and that Heidegger does this, whether he knows it or not, in bad faith to modern project of social progess.

Habermas agrees with Derrida and Foucault, whom he critiques for their method and their failure to offer and alternative construction of reason, that instrumental reason is a bad form of thinking. However, he disagrees with both their critiques of reason, because all the critiques of reason are based in reason. My understanding of Habermas's argument is that the Postmodern critique of reason with reason creates the philosophical equivalent of a Mobius strip. A Mobius strip is a long thin strip of paper, wrapped once around its length-wise axis, so that the two ends of the paper touch. One side is twisted so that the top of one end of the strip can be connected to the bottom of the other end. It looks like a curving version of the infinity symbol, '. You can run your finger along the strip and touch all sides, making it a one sided three-dimensional shape, despite the fact that superficially it appears to have two sides. There's a joke that goes: "That's more one-sided than a Mobius strip." The point of my metaphor is that a Mobius strip is ostensibly a two sided form, but which can be traced back to a single origin. Habermas contends that other philosophers' critiques of reason with reason is like Derrida and Foucault saying that the Mobius trip is two sided, but in reality it is one sided. Foucault and Derrida, because the origin of their argument is embedded in what they are critiquing cannot account for the origin of their own reason. The fact that a critique of reason is based in reason means that the form of the critique is flawed, and that the critique critiques itself no matter how cleverly this critique is hidden in impartial objectivity like Foucault's view from nowhere, Derrida multiple viewpoints, or any other approach. Habermas makes the meta-point that reason cannot critique reason, and that is the end of it for him.

In the last two chapters of the PDM, Habermas explains that the way that reason can be salvaged is to reconsider it. Reason, and with it the project of Modern social progress, can be salvaged if we reconsider reason as communication. This allows reason to break from the subject/object model first asserted by Descartes, and transforms it into an activity which occurs between multiple people. Something about communication allows people to consider their thinking in a more objective way, and Habermas sees this as the way to preserve Modernity. Communication makes the speakers reflect on what they are communicating, and this is a good thing for Habermas, who believes that the path to social progress and rational thinking is through communication.

In the last two chapters of the PDM Habermas presents his theory of reason as communicative action and the normative content of modernity, which taken together redefine reason, taking it out of the hands of one individual and instead asserting that reason is formed in relationships, and through communication. Habermas thinks that the act of communication produces self-awareness as part of the communicative act. This self-awareness offers a way to avoid limiting the subject to subject-centered reason, and instead offers the alternative of communicative reason. According to my class notes from November 22nd, Dr. Mendieta described Habermas's thinking as: "The critics of modernity who don't pay attention to everyday practices devalue the everyday linguistic constitution of the world." Habermas thinks communicative reason is necessary to maintain social progress.

In conclusion, in the PDM, Habermas takes on the challenge of analyzing the various major thinkers of Modernity. The book is written chronologically, so that each philosopher is written into a narrative of discourse, where the subject of each chapter is in dialogue with the previous chapter. Habermas is interested in showing where and how subject-centered reason persevered as the major prism through which reason was viewed, and to offer a critique of this narrative and the philosophical methods that promoted, or attempted to destroy it, always with the subject-centered reason at the heart of their arguments. Habermas argues that subject-centered reason is deeply flawed, however, he also believes in modernity and social learning. Therefore, he wants to jettison subject-centered reason, but not all reason. This leads to his theories of the normative content of modernity and communicative action, which reframe reason into matrix of language and interdependence that causes self-awareness of the speakers. In this way reason, Habermas argues, reason can be preserved alongside the modern project of social progress.

If we were to nominalize a certain category by calling it the "theoretical 80s", there are two books I "elect" to represent this time for interested parties: Richard Rorty's *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* and Juergen Habermas' *Philosophical Discourse of Modernity*. Much as Rorty there offered a concise introduction to philosophers then "motivating" the bulk of contemporary discourse in the "discipline", Habermas here offers relatively quick rundowns of Continental thinkers against the backdrop of the reconstituted IfS's enduring concerns. In other words, this is as close to journalistic as responsible essays on postmodernisms early and late can be; Habermas could tell you who coined the term, but does not.

The gamely accepted Anglo-American logical and metaethical work is blissfully absent from "historically informed" portraits of left-wing philosophers and social theorists relatively sanguine about the passing of fetishized "reasonings", with the unfortunate exception of a recasted Derrida/Searle debate: here staged outside the *Proposition's Progress* which is "intention-based semantics" for Stalnaker and Schiffer, but oh so much more once *realites* formerly banned from Berkeley get into the act. Also excepted is the "unfortunate norm", fellow sociologist Jean Baudrillard (who could easily benefit from a readily accessible longform periodization of his work) -- but instead we have a marvelously sanitized Bataille, a genuine argument for "inspirational" treatments of negative theodicies.

The book to read if *Theory of Communicative Action* does not excite you; and if it does, the sundry works of Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Bourdieu are rather readily available after all, as is the German philosophical scholarship of which I imagine this was more-or-less a part domestically. But really, the only thing which impinges on this as a history of postmodernism (*After-Foucault* and all) is the *Wirkungsgeschichte* of intellectual life's influence upon culture during this period. If every band has a Shonen Knife that loves them, I'm not sure the widespread availability of Lacan in New York has nothing to do with it -- and this evaluation of postmodernism enables a serious assessment of its effective influence.