The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
현대성의 철학적 담론
Twelve lectures by Jürgen Habermas, given in 1983–1984 at the Collège de France, Cornell University and Boston College and published by Suhrkamp in 1985. It reconstructs the history of the modern critique of reason from Hegel through the Young Hegelians and Nietzsche to Horkheimer and Adorno, Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille and Foucault, and calls Nietzsche the "turntable" at which the critique of reason passes into the "postmodern". It argues that the critique of reason that follows Nietzsche falls into the contradiction of undermining its own ground, and as the alternative it puts forward "communicative reason" in place of subject-centred reason. The Korean translation is titled 현대성의 철학적 담론.
In depth
Why does this book come at the end of the history of Nietzsche's reception?
In the 1970s and early 1980s the Nietzschean critique of reason that spread in France under the names of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze reached Germany and the United States as "postmodernism". Habermas, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School's second generation, set out to defend the legacy of the Enlightenment against this current. He had already stated his position in "Modernity: An Unfinished Project", his 1980 Adorno Prize speech, and had built his alternative into a system in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity takes on the other side of that alternative, the history of the critique of reason itself. As the German Wikipedia notes, Habermas concentrates here mostly on criticism and leaves his own model to The Theory of Communicative Action.
In this genealogy the book is the balance sheet in which one man sums up where the branches that started from Nietzsche had arrived. The Marxist lineage that began in German idealism and the Young Hegelians and the lineage of the critique of reason that began with Nietzsche meet again in this book.
How is it composed?
According to the German Wikipedia, the book collects lectures Habermas gave at the Collège de France in 1983 and at Cornell University and Boston College in 1984, with one previously published essay and a newly written final chapter added. According to the table of contents published by the German National Library, the twelve lectures are: 1 The Time-Consciousness of Modernity and Its Need for Self-Reassurance; 2 Hegel's Concept of Modernity (excursus on Schiller's letters on aesthetic education); 3 Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians and Nietzsche (excursus on the obsolescence of the production paradigm); 4 The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turntable; 5 The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno; 6 The Undermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics: Heidegger; 7 Beyond a Temporalised Philosophy of Origins: Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism (excursus on levelling the genre distinction between philosophy and literature); 8 Between Eroticism and General Economy: Bataille; 9 The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Foucault; 10 Aporias of a Theory of Power; 11 An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centred Reason (excursus on Castoriadis); 12 The Normative Content of Modernity (excursus on Luhmann).
What does it argue?
Habermas starts from the point that modernity can no longer borrow its standards from the models of the past and must create its normativity out of itself. Hegel was the first to grasp this as a philosophical problem, and his answer was the "principle of subjectivity", subject-centred reason. But subject-centred reason tends to absolutise purposive rationality, and when it tries to criticise itself it ends up attacking the concept of reason as such and falls into paradox. The German Wikipedia summarises that Habermas examines four ways of responding to this paradox. Neoconservatism wants to discard cultural modernity; Marx's philosophy of praxis gives priority to social labour but remains caught in the contradictions of the philosophy of the subject. The other two ways start not from Hegel but from Nietzsche.
Nietzsche on the one hand reduced reason to the will to power, and on the other held that a critique of reason was possible which digs out the roots of metaphysical thinking without passing itself off as philosophy. The first way leads to the theory of power of Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, the second to the critique of metaphysics of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Habermas argues that both fall into a "performative contradiction", undermining the very standards of reason on which they rely, and that Heidegger and Derrida, unable to overcome metaphysics, end in fatalism and level the difference between disclosing a world and solving problems. As the English Wikipedia summarises, Habermas holds that Nietzsche only appears to stand outside modernity in a Dionysian era of myth, while in fact he criticises modernity from a position within it, that of modern aesthetic experience.
Chapters 9 and 10 deal with Foucault's genealogy and became the central text of the so-called Foucault–Habermas debate. Habermas sides with Foucault in criticising the normalising tendencies of disciplinary societies, but finds their cause not in philosophical reason itself but in the "social pathologies" of late capitalist societies. He sees humanism not as the problem but as the standard needed to criticise dehumanisation.
What place does it take between Nietzsche and Marxism?
Habermas's alternative is "communicative reason". Reason is not the capacity of an isolated subject to master objects but is lodged in the process by which people who speak and act reach understanding by raising and answering validity claims. With this idea he distanced himself both from the post-Nietzschean critique of reason and from the Marxist tradition. The excursus to chapter 3, "The Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm", argues that Marx's philosophy of praxis, centred on labour and production, is also trapped within the framework of the philosophy of the subject.
The same criticism was turned on his teachers' generation. In chapter 5 Habermas wrote that in Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno had abandoned themselves to an unrestrained scepticism about reason and missed the rational achievements of enlightenment, such as the differentiation of law, morality and science and the institutionalisation of democracy. With this criticism the pessimistic critique of reason of the first generation and the communication theory of the second parted ways within the Frankfurt School.
Who answered, and how?
Translated into English in 1987 and into French in 1988, the book set off an international debate. Foucault died in June 1984 and could not answer the book directly, but his supporters replied that Habermas had misunderstood Foucault's concept of power. From Derrida's side came the complaint that Habermas had read Derrida not directly but through the deconstruction of American literary criticism. The English Wikipedia notes that the book is regarded as a critical, largely negative evaluation of the concept of world disclosure in modern philosophy. Critics such as Raymond Geuss, cited by the German Wikipedia, pointed out that Habermas leans towards criticism and defers the grounds of his own alternative to another book.
While placing Nietzsche at the "entry into postmodernity", the book differs from Lukács's road of branding Nietzsche a forerunner of Nazism. What Habermas questioned was not Nietzsche's politics but the logical structure of the critique of reason. The response of Marxism and critical theory to Nietzsche thus came full circle, from Lukács's verdict of "irrationalism" through the critical reception of Adorno and Horkheimer to Habermas's theory of communication.