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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
This is the first volume of a ground-breaking new work by Jürgen Habermas on the history of philosophy. In this major new work, Habermas sets out the ideas that inform his systematic account of the history of Western philosophy as a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking. His account goes far beyond a vindication of the enduring relevance of philosophical reflection founded on communicative reason as a source of orientation in the modern world. He contrasts this conception with prominent diagnoses of the supposed crisis of Enlightenment reason and culture that seeks redemption in the affirmation of traditional religious authority (Schmitt), the timeless validity of Greek metaphysics (Strauss), a numinous conception of nature (Löwith), and an occurrence of being that speaks to us from beyond the mists of pre-Socratic thought (Heidegger). Habermas situates Western philosophy in relation to traditions of thought founded in the major worldviews (Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism) that continue to shape contemporary culture and civilization. At the same time, he lays the groundwork for his analysis in the later volumes of the constitutive role played by the discourse on faith and knowledge in the development of Western philosophy, which is the result of the unique symbiosis that Christianity entered into with Greek thought with the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Far from raising claims to exclusivity, completeness or closure, Habermas's history of philosophy, published in English in three volumes, opens up new lines of research and reflection that will influence the humanities and social sciences for decades to come.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Translator’s Note
Abbreviations
Preface
Notes
I. On The Question of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking
1. Crisis Scenarios and Narratives of Decline in Major Twentieth-Century Philosophical Theories
(1) Carl Schmitt
(2) Leo Strauss
(3) Karl Löwith
(4) Martin Heidegger
(5) The reconstruction of learning processes and the independent legitimacy of modernity
(6) A genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking
Notes
2. Religion as a ‘Contemporary’ Manifestation of Objective Mind?
(1) The sociological controversy over the secularization thesis
(2) John Rawls: political reason and religion
(3) Karl Jaspers: philosophical and religious ‘faith’
Notes
3. The Occidental Path of Development and the Claim to Universality of Postmetaphysical Thinking
(1) The analysis of the formative power of world religions in the theory of civilizations
(2) Intercultural understanding, secular mode of thought and concerns about the Eurocentric narrowing of perspective
Notes
4. Basic Assumptions of the Theory of Society and Programmatic Outlook
(1) The problem of social integration and the stages of social evolution
(2) Outline of the argument
(3) From worldviews to the lifeworld
Notes
II. The Sacred Roots of The Axial Traditions
1. Cognitive Breakthrough and Preservation of the Sacred Core
(1) The concept of the axial age
(2) The two elements of religion
(3) Excursus on the concept of ‘religion’
Notes
2. Myth and Ritual Practices
(1) Performance of rituals, representation and enactment of myths
(2) The meaning of ritual practices
(3) Excursus on the origins of language and the sociocultural form of life
Notes
3. The Meaning of the Sacred
(1) The self-referential character of ritual behaviour
(2) From symbolic to linguistic communication
(3) Myth as a response to the cognitive challenge of openness to the world
(4) The complementary dangers of exclusion and hyper-inclusion
(5) Ritual as a source of solidarity
(6) The explosive power of dissonant empirical knowledge
Notes
4. The Path to the Axial Transformation of Religious Consciousness
(1) Pantheon and religious practice in the early civilizations of the Near East
(2) Cult of the gods
(3) The differentiation of forms of knowledge as an impulse for the sublimation of salvation and misfortune
(4) Knowledge dynamics and worldview development
Notes
III. A Provisional Comparison of The Axial Worldviews
1. The Moralization of the Sacred and the Break with Mythical Thought
(1) The step of abstraction from the gods to the transcendent divine
(2) Essence and appearance
(3) Second-order thinking: discourse and dogmatics
Notes
2. The Repudiation of ‘Paganism’ by Jewish Monotheism
(1) From henotheism to the monotheistic creator, lawgiver and judge
(2) The universalistic meaning of the covenant with the transcendent God
(3) The overcoming of magical thinking and the disenchantment of ritual
(4) Excursus on the question of the singularity of monotheism
Notes
3. The Buddha’s Teaching and Practice
(1) Brahmanism, the Upanishads and meditative practice
(2) The Buddha’s life and teachings
(3) Aims and paths of salvation in Buddhism and Judaism
(4) Meditation
Notes
4. Confucianism and Taoism
(1) Emergence of Confucianism and the era of the ‘Warring States’
(2) Confucius’s life and teachings
(3) Confucianism as ethics and learned religion
(4) The Taoist doctrine of salvation as a counter-model
Notes
5. From the Greek ‘Natural Philosophers’ to Socrates
(1) The completely different originating context
(2) The Presocratics
(3) Socrates
Notes
6. Plato’s Theory of Ideas – in Comparison
(1) The structure of the Platonic system
(2) The decoupling of doctrine from cult
Notes
First Intermediate Reflection: The Conceptual Trajectories of the Axial Age
(1) Emergence, dynamics and structural transformation of worldviews
(2) Excursus on the concept of the lifeworld
(3) The structure of worldviews and the dogmatic form of thought
(4) The concept of the axial age
Notes
Bibliography
Overview: Volumes 1–3
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Translator’s Note
Abbreviations
Preface
Begin Reading
First Intermediate Reflection: The Conceptual Trajectories of The Axial Age
Bibliography
Overview: Volumes 1–3
Index
End User License Agreement
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Also a History of Philosophy
Volume 1:The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking
Jürgen Habermas
Translated by Ciaran Cronin
polity
Originally published in German as Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Band 1: Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen. The contents of the present volume correspond to pp. 1 – 480 of the German edition. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin 2019.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4390-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931489
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
During my active years as a university teacher and as co-director of a Max Planck institute, I enjoyed the extraordinary privilege of learning from intensive discussions with a comparatively large number of astute, critical, inventive and constructive collaborators, as well as from former students. The full realization of just what good fortune this mutual learning represented has only dawned on me since I have been deprived of it – as in writing this book. For each of these close cooperations, I would like to thank – in chronological order – above all:
Oskar Negt
Ulrich Oevermann (1940 – 2021)
Claus Offe
Gertrud Nunner-Winkler
Rainer Döbert
Klaus Eder
Günter Frankenberg
Axel Honneth
Lutz Wingert
Bernhard Peters (1949 – 2005)
Klaus Günther
Ingeborg Maus
Rainer Forst
Cristina Lafont
Peter Niesen
Thomas M. Schmidt
I learned the most in philosophical terms from the eldest member of this series. This book is dedicated to his memory:
Albrecht Wellmer (1933 – 2018)
Translator’s Note
A work of such extraordinary scope and complexity, ranging over virtually the entire history of (not just) Western philosophy, inevitably poses challenges for the translator. I have sought to resolve the associated problems at the textual level so that my contribution approximates as closely as possible to a layer of polished glass that provides the reader with a transparent window on the author’s meaning. However, the laborious process of drafting and revising – the grinding and polishing of the translator’s handiwork, as it were – has made it clear, once again, that the vanishing point of translatorial self-effacement is an unattainable ideal and that the glassy layer is in fact a potentially distorting lens, moreover one with flaws and impurities that threaten to produce diffractions and interference patterns. Since, at the time of writing, the translation of the work as a whole is in medias res, a discussion of issues of translation that goes beyond a somewhat laboured metaphor must await the ‘Notes on the Translation’ at the end of the third volume. In the meantime, I have employed the customary interpolations of German words or phrases to alert the reader to translations of key terminology where this seemed important and, occasionally, to semantic relations between German terms that would otherwise be lost in translation. In rare cases where a clarification seemed to be imperative, I have added a more detailed explanation in an endnote. Readers should be aware that the endnotes and other material in square brackets, with the exception of authorial interpolations in direct quotations, are translator’s interpolations or glosses.
My labours have been considerably lightened by expert assistance from a number of sources. First, I would like to acknowledge the support of the editorial staff at Polity, and in particular Elise Heslinga for her unfailing patience and professionalism and Sarah Dancy for her meticulous work in editing the manuscript. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the author, Jürgen Habermas, who gave generously of his time to address questions of comprehension and responded with characteristic open-mindedness to some minor suggestions for emendation. In addition, the translation has benefited greatly from the input of two scholars whose own translations of works by Habermas have set high standards for all others. Bill Rehg kindly read through a revised draft and made numerous constructive suggestions for revision. My greatest debt is to Tom McCarthy, who took on the daunting task of reading, correcting and commenting on an initial draft. His insightful comments alerted me to issues that might otherwise have escaped my notice and his generosity of spirit encouraged me to question assumptions and revise routines.
Notwithstanding this eminent assistance, or indeed because of it, I must accept full responsibility for any remaining infelicities.
Abbreviations
Plato’s Writings
Alc. I
Alcibiades I
Apol.
Apology
Charm.
Charmides
Ep.
Letters (Epistulae)
Euthyp.
Euthyphro
Hp. mai.
Hippias Major
Hp. min.
Hippias Minor
La.
Laches
Leg.
Laws
Ly.
Lysis
Men.
Meno
Phd.
Phaedo
Phdr.
Phaedrus
Pol.
Statesman (Politikos)
Prm.
Parmenides
Rep.
Republic
Augustine’s writings
beata v.
On the Happy Life (De beata vita)
civ.
The City of God against the Pagans (De civitate Dei)
conf.
Confessions
lib. arb.
On the Free Choice of the Will (De libero arbitrio)
trin.
The Trinity
vera rel.
Of True Religion (De vera religione)
Aristotle’s writings
Anal. post.
Posterior Analytics
EN
Nicomachean Ethics
Met.
Metaphysics
Phys.
Physics
Pol.
Politics
Thomas Aquinas’ writings
De ent. et ess.
De ente et essentia
De reg. princ.
De regimine principum ad regem Cypri
De ver.
De veritate
ScG
Summa contra Gentiles
Sent. Ethic.
Sententia libri Ethicorum
STh
Summa Theologica
Super Boeth. De trin.
Expositio super Boethii De trinitate
Spinoza’s writings
E
Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order
TpT
Theological-Political Treatise
Locke’s writings
EsHU
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
TTG
Two Treatises of Government
Hume’s writings
EqHU
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
EqPM
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
DR
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
NR
The Natural History of Religion
TN
A Treatise of Human Nature
Kant’s writings
CBH
Conjectural Beginning of Human History
CF
The Conflict of the Faculties
CJ
Critique of the Power of Judgment
CPrR
Critique of Practical Reason
CPuR
Critique of Pure Reason
DR
Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right
GMM
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
IUH
Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim
Log
Lectures on Logic
PM
What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?
PP
Toward Perpetual Peace
RBR
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
TP
On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, but it is of no Use in Practice
UTP
On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy
WOT
What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?
Herder’s writings
OPH
Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man
PHF
This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity
TOL
Treatise on the Origin of Language
Schleiermacher’s writings
CF
Christian Faith
Dial.
Dialectic
Herm.
Hermeneutics and Criticism
Humboldt’s writings
CSL
On the Comparative Study of Language and its Relation to the Different Periods of Language Development
DF
On the Dual Form
DHL
On the Diversity of Human Language Construction
DHLI
On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species
NL
On the National Character of Languages
TS
On Thinking and Speaking
Hegel’s writings
DFS
The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy
E
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline
E I
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part 1: Logic
E III
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part 3: Philosophy of Mind
FS
Fragment of a System (1800)
IHP
Introduction to the History of Philosophy
LHP
Lectures on the History of Philosophy
LPH
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
LPR
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
NL
The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law
R
Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Feuerbach’s writings
CHP
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
EC
The Essence of Christianity
LH
Letter to Hegel, 22 November 1828
PPF
Principles of the Philosophy of the Future
TRP
Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy
Kierkegaard’s writings
CUP
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
EO
Either/Or
FT
Fear and Trembling
PF
Philosophical Fragments
SD
The Sickness Unto Death
Preface
I do not wish to conceal one of the motives that led me in my retirement to the otiose and quite protracted preoccupation with the history of philosophy. It was simply the pleasure in finally getting to read the many important texts I had previously neglected, and in rereading many other texts I had already consumed so often in different contexts – but this time from the perspective of an ageing philosophy professor looking back on his comparatively sheltered life. For the first time, I not only systematically processed and ‘used’ the works, but in many cases I now also read them with a certain biographical interest in the challenging conditions their authors faced in their lives.1 Of course, this does not justify such a daring and even frivolous undertaking whose every page was a reminder that my age would prevent me from consulting the libraries of secondary literature. Therefore, the most that this new traversal of the history of Western philosophy can aspire to is to render a certain reading plausible, specifically regarding what we would nowadays call a ‘meta-theoretical’ question: what can still count as an appropriate understanding of the task of philosophy today?
The book was originally supposed to be titled: ‘On the Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking: Also a History of Philosophy, Taking as its Guide the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge’. The publisher’s reservations concerning such a baroque title would not have dissuaded me, but before completing the manuscript I opted for the melancholy short version of the planned title, an allusion to a famous essay by Johann Gottfried Herder. For once I had completed the ‘Third Intermediate Reflection’, I realized that I would only be able to offer a rough sketch, in the line of tradition from Kant to Hegel, of the early stage of postmetaphysical thinking of the mid-nineteenth century. Presenting the ramified chains of argumentation that have become differentiated since then in the tradition of Hume and Bentham, on the one hand, and of Kant, Schelling and Hegel, on the other – and especially a renewed analytical examination of the discussions that central problems have ignited between these ‘camps’ – would have inevitably drawn me deeply into the debates of the second half of the twentieth century, and hence of my own lifetime. As a participant observer in these controversies, I was struck by the fact that the competing approaches always reflect the same differences in background assumptions – whether in theories of truth, rationality or language, in the logic and methodology of the social sciences, in ethical approaches or, and above all, in moral, legal and political theory. The one side takes the ideas and intentions, modes of behaviour and dispositions of individual subjects as its starting point, while the other, when addressing the same questions, starts from intersubjectively shared systems of symbols and rules, of languages, practices, forms of life and traditions, and only then goes on to examine, in terms of the corresponding types of discourse, the subjective conditions required to master these structures and acquire the corresponding competences.2 Presenting this competitive situation would have called for one further book at least, a task for which I no longer have the resources. In any case, I have already dealt with the most important and, in my view, decisive arguments in these paradigmatic controversies elsewhere.3
But this prompts the insistent question as to why we should be interested in the prehistory of this competition between paradigms, which has continued within twentieth-century philosophy of language:4 what purpose is an extravagant genealogy of the corresponding theoretical orientations supposed to serve? After all, the controversies themselves should be sufficient to clarify the systematic issues. The short answer is that I am concerned with a different topic – not with a series of controversial basic questions, but with the implicit understanding of philosophy that finds expression in the paradigmatic presuppositions for dealing with these questions. Reasons in the dispute over the professional self-understanding of philosophy are also reasons for and against a certain ‘reading’ of the history of philosophy. Of course, objections against the fruitfulness of such an enquiry immediately suggest themselves. Don’t conceptions of the true task of philosophical reflection sprout like shoots from the trunk of the philosophical investigations that have been carried out – only to be shed once again like desiccated branches? Doesn’t one professional self-understanding supplant the other? Do we even know what kind of arguments can count in such a dispute? Every convincing philosophical approach speaks for itself; every new approach shows what philosophy can accomplish and what form it should take. Kuhn’s picture of the contingent rise and fall of scientific paradigms fits well with this objection; and from the perspective of the middle-period Foucault, one can also find the dominant social powers hidden behind the mask of discourses, if one looks for them.
Against this speaks the fact that paradigm shifts in philosophy are also triggered by learning processes and that even Feyerabend’s false picture of the random rise and fall of paradigms still presupposes a certain continuity – namely, the very existence of theories that can be seen as a continuation of the past history of philosophy. Up to now, one could assume that serious attempts will continue to be made to answer Kant’s basic questions: ‘What can I know?’ ‘What should I do?’ ‘What may I hope for?’ and ‘What is the human being?’. But I have become doubtful whether philosophy as we know it still has a future – whether the very format of those questions has not become obsolete, so that all that will be left of philosophy as a discipline will be its expertise in conceptual analysis and the administration of its own history. Philosophy is succumbing to the same pressure towards ever-greater specialization as all other disciplines. In some places, its role is already reduced to providing conceptual analyses for the cognitive sciences; in others, the core of the discipline is disintegrating into offers on the expanding market for advice in the areas of business ethics, bioethics and environmental ethics.
One should not read too much into such selective observations. More unsettling is the inevitability, indeed the desirability, of philosophy becoming increasingly specialized, in which it is also following the internal dynamic of every scientific division of labour and the normal path of scientific progress; for specialization poses a special kind of challenge for our discipline. Whereas it only brings progress for other sciences, for philosophy, which must not lose sight of the bigger picture, specialization also poses a challenge regarding those basic questions in terms of which it has defined itself until now. If philosophy is supposed to take its orientation ‘from the whole’, such a formulation can, of course, no longer be taken to mean that it should aim at a metaphysical worldview, nor at a so-called scientific worldview either. There are good reasons why the age of worldviews came to an end in the seventeenth century. The question that concerns me is what would be left of philosophy if it no longer tried to make a contribution to the rational clarification of our understanding of ourselves and the world: what is in danger of falling victim to specialization is the first part of this complex, namely our self-understanding.
Philosophy is also a scientific way of thinking,5 but it is not a science that strives to learn more and more about less and less – in other words, about more narrowly and precisely defined subject areas. It makes a distinction between science and enlightenment when it seeks to explain what our growing scientific knowledge of the world means for us – for us as human beings, as inhabitants of the modern world and as individuals. And it is this practical self-reference to how we live our lives that, in processing every advance in learning and every revisionist increase in knowledge of the world, first creates the reference to the whole of an ever more obscure cosmos of knowledge to which it must hold fast. Nevertheless, I believe that philosophy would betray its identity by renouncing the holistic reference to our need for orientation, even if it were to do so out of a well-founded awareness that this is an unreasonable demand. But a practice and conception of philosophy that dispenses with its enlightening role and succumbs to a false scientistic self-understanding enters this zone by aligning itself with the objectifying sciences and abandoning the reference to self of a contribution to a rational understanding of ourselves and the world.6 It must not capitulate from the outset in the face of the increasing complexity of our society and our ever more specialized knowledge of the world, if, like Kant in his time, it wants to continue to provide its contemporaries with justified encouragement to make autonomous use of their reason and shape their social existence in practical ways.7
However, this enlightening impulse, which manifests itself in the practical reference of philosophical thought to human beings’ need for orientation in the face of current challenges, is far from self-evident. For it lives off a mysterious impulse to use our rational freedom. This important topic has commanded, and even monopolized, the attention of philosophy from Kant to Marx, and it is also the connecting thread of my investigation. Today, by contrast, we are facing a revival of ancient necessitarianism in a modern scientistic guise, where the contradiction to performative practical consciousness is concealed, but not resolved, by the fig leaf of a compatibilist notion of freedom of will. This reflects a fatalism that is spreading as humanity becomes entangled in the complexity of the uncontrolled side effects of its self-generated economic and technological dynamics of growth. But the issue of the use of rational freedom returns in full force as soon as philosophy seeks assurance concerning its context of origin. Once it realizes that it does not have an absolute starting point and must abandon the assumption of a view from nowhere, philosophy can only secure its independence of judgement through a historical self-reference. However, this self-reference must go beyond a short-winded reflection on how current thinking is always tied to the historical context of its social references and political challenges. The historical self-assurance of philosophy must be wider in scope and include a reconstruction of both strands of the philosophical heritage. It is only in the light of the heritage from which philosophy in its postmetaphysical guise has detached itself that we can comprehend the heritage it has assumed: the emancipation to use one’s rational freedom means at once liberation and normative obligation. Only an understanding of the reasons that have compelled the philosophy of the subject since the Reformation to undertake an anthropocentric shift in perspective, and above all to embrace the postmetaphysical rejection of belief in a restitutive or ‘redemptive’ justice, will open our eyes to the degree of willingness to cooperate that communicatively socialized subjects must demand of the use of their rational freedom.
In its inception, philosophy was one among the handful of the meta-physical and religious worldviews of the axial age. That has had fateful consequences for philosophy. For since the emergence of Christian Platonism in the Roman Empire, the discourse about faith and knowledge has been constitutive for the further development of the Greek philosophical heritage. This is why this discourse serves as my guide for the genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking, which is intended to show how philosophy – in a complementary way to the elaboration of Christian dogmatics employing philosophical concepts – in turn assimilated essential contents from religious traditions and transformed them into justifiable knowledge.8 It is precisely to this semantic osmosis that secular thought following Kant and Hegel owes the theme of rational freedom and the basic concepts of practical philosophy that remain authoritative to the present day. While Greek cosmology has been uprooted, semantic contents of biblical origin have been transposed into the basic concepts of postmetaphysical thinking.9
Today, the question of what philosophy can and should still dare to achieve is decided, regardless of its frankly secular character, by that transformed religious heritage. This heritage, however, has found its way into just one of the two contemporary competing forms of postmetaphysical thinking. This is interpreted to mean that philosophy has only managed to make a consistent break with the religious heritage in the empiricist or naturalistic strand of postmetaphysical thinking. What speaks against this assumption is how profoundly the Young Hegelians’ radical historical and materialistic critique of religion broke with Hegel, despite their continuity with his thought – without, however, thereby renouncing the interest in detecting the traces of reason in history and, in general, an understanding of their philosophical work as oriented to fostering rational conditions of life. Such a professional self-understanding can be supported by a plausible reading of the history of philosophy, if this history can also be understood as a sporadic series of contingent learning processes reaching across abysses. In the course of the presentation, which is ‘genealogical’ in this sense, it should become clear not only what contingent challenges led to the respective learning processes, but also what speaks in favour of upholding a comprehensive notion of reason and a correspondingly ambitious self-understanding of philosophical thinking.
The work on a book and the concentration it demands leave little time for anything else in life. Thus, the preoccupation with the same topic for more than a decade in the solitude and freedom of an emeritus existence could easily have become a depressing exercise. I owe it to Ute that this did not happen – and I am not only thinking of the stimulation from our ongoing conversations about the themes of the works I had just read, but also of the simple but ineffable fact of her presence. No dedication could repay what this means to me.
Starnberg, December 2018
Notes
1.
Because hitherto my academic work focused primarily on systematic questions, I was not able to draw on the preparatory work of lectures on the history of philosophy in elaborating this work. This was probably not only a disadvantage.
2.
See M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker,
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
3.
Jürgen Habermas,
Philosophische Texte: Studienausgabe in fünf Bänden
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). [English translation of the introductory essays to each of the five volumes: Jürgen Habermas,
Philosophical Introductions: Five Approaches to Communicative Reason
, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).]
4.
Charles Taylor,
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 110 – 28.
5.
[Note that when the author speaks of a ‘scientific’ way of thinking, he generally understands the corresponding German term ‘
wissenschaftlich
’ (also in other contexts) in a broad sense that refers to any systematic body of methodologically elaborated, discursive knowledge, hence also to the social and human sciences, not only (as is now customary in English) natural science.]
6.
I call a conception ‘scientistic’ if it requires that the standards of rationality binding for scientific thinking must take their orientation exclusively from the model of theory-formation and the procedures of nomological natural science.
7.
How this Kantian impulse was taken up by early Critical Theory is shown by Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, ‘Philosophie und kritische Theorie’, in
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
6/3 (1937): 625 – 47, here 636: ‘If reason means shaping one’s life in accordance with the free decision of human beings as knowing subjects, then reason henceforth demands the creation of a form of social organization in which individuals regulate their life together according to their needs.’
8.
Of course, the philosophical interest that guides me in this work leads to an asymmetrical attitude towards the discourse on faith and knowledge: I want to understand what philosophy has learned from this discourse. Until we have made a serious effort, we cannot know a priori whether this learning process has exhausted itself or whether it can be continued with the prospect of extending the universe of secular argument – for instance, in the face of categorically new challenges such as the abolition of the naturalness of the human organism. On the other hand, a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking conducted in the attitude of methodological atheism can also be understood as a recommendation that philosophy should be open to learning from this potential source of stimulation – however, not at the cost of compromising the autonomous use of reason. In the context of such a discourse
among participants
, of course, philosophers would also have to adopt a different – specifically, a dialogical – attitude towards second persons and be willing to engage in
reciprocal
perspective taking. For a critique of an obdurate secularistic mentality that blocks such an attitude, see Jürgen Habermas, ‘Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking: A Reply’, in
Postmetaphysical Thinking II: Essays and Replies
, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), pp. 77 – 121.
9.
In this sense, this genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking can be seen as an attempt to work out the implications of an idea that I developed a quarter of a century ago in a discussion with Johann Baptist Metz; see Jürgen Habermas, ‘Israel or Athens: Where Does Anamnestic Reason Belong? Johann Baptist Metz on Unity amidst Multicultural Plurality’, in
The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays
, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 78 – 89.
I.ON THE QUESTION OF A GENEALOGY OF POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING
The idea of a self-limiting secularization, reinstated as a regulative principle of modernity, would reopen and perpetuate the mutual interrogation of philosophy, science and religion.
Johann P. Arnason on Jan Patočka
Since late antiquity, Christian Europe has engaged in repeated bouts of self-examination. Until the modern era, this process exhibited a recurring pattern whereby the present was interpreted as a reflection of the past of Graeco-Roman antiquity. This process of forming a self-understanding involved taking stances on the works of literature and art, philosophy and science of the Greeks and Romans that counted as ‘classics’ and had survived the passage of time – and it also involved admiration for and imitation of the city and the republic as political formations. The classical eras of Athens and the Roman Republic provided the main points of reference. Since the Carolingian Renaissance, it was always the moderni who renewed their understanding of themselves through the appropriation of the classical models; from the High Middle Ages onwards, theologians and philosophers pursued this project of renewal by taking the via moderna. It was continued in the visual arts of the seventeenth century, which by then had become differentiated from the sacred sphere, in the famous ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’. And the responses of Winckelmann and Lessing, of Schlegel and Schiller and of Schelling and Hegel were so convincing that Marx would hesitate to subject the beauty of the ancient statues entirely to the sociological explanations of historical materialism.1 Because until then each era understood itself only as a reflection of a far-distant past, a completely new type of ‘modernity’ emerged when seventeenth-century science and philosophy set about taking a similar distance also from Christianity, from whose point of view antiquity had been repeatedly appropriated as the absolute point of reference. Reflection on the new mathematical natural sciences and the philosophical responses to the impulses emanating from the Reformation now also led to a distancing perspective on Christianity, notwithstanding its continuing presence as an ecclesiastical political force. But Christianity became remote from its present not only as far as its historical roots were concerned – for example, as the subject of Bible criticism – but also regarding its claim to be a universal church, so that as its ‘Catholic’ character was placed in question.
The reform movements that predated Luther’s Reformation, but whose impulses the church managed to absorb, were protest movements of an internalized faith and at the same time advances towards profanation, that is, towards a form of ‘secularization’. From the church’s perspective, the schismatic sects carried the faith ‘into the world’, that is, beyond the ecclesiastical communities.2 Protestantism is characterized by the same dialectic of the deepening and the social spread of religious currents. But with this movement, ‘secularization’ became an independent force with repercussions for the church and faith themselves. With a certain time lag, Hobbes and Spinoza duly responded to Luther’s decidedly theological decoupling of faith from knowledge with a philosophical distancing of science from a historicized faith. Until then, the various Western ‘renaissances’ had still referred as a matter of course to the Graeco-Roman past from within the horizon of the Old and New Testaments as their other. However, with those philosophers, who were perceived and denounced as atheists by their contemporaries, this faith, which had for so long constituted the self of self-reference a tergo, now also receded into the distance. From the seventeenth century onwards, the Christian world, which had long been the terminus a quo of a reflection of self in the other, became the terminus ad quem for philosophers – as an object of anthropological curiosity, historical research and political theory. Although at first only for a few intellectuals, the contemporary manifestations and the historical testimonies of Christianity (and now of ‘religion’ in general) became the other for a secular philosophy that – while claiming to be free from theological premises – took the methodology of the mathematical natural sciences as its model. Far from one of admiration, however, the relationship to this distanced and alienated portion of its identity – which now represented another component of the ancient world – was initially a wary, then an aggressively dismissive, indeed polemical, one. For, unlike Graeco-Roman antiquity, Christianity was not part of an already concluded past, but a contemporary power, moreover one experienced as repressive, from which the present first had to emancipate itself.
However, it was only during the Age of Enlightenment that this new reflecting surface presented by the Christian faith, which had been distanced from – now unbelieving – secular knowledge, acquired operative significance for European discourses of self-understanding. It was only with the secularization of ecclesiastical property by the state and the political disempowerment of the Catholic Church in the wake of the French Revolution that the original meaning of the expression ‘secular’ finally became inverted into the polemical contrasting concept to the Christian world. The role of church and religion, which from the point of view of the Enlightenment extends into the present as a foreign element, became problematic as a contemporary configuration of spirit. However, the displacement of religion out of the present of the new era was also a precondition for the Romantic relationship of reappropriation from a distance. Church and religion, as powers from the past reactualized by Romanticism, became the object of renaissances of a new kind – it was at this time that the Boisserée brothers provided the impetus for the restoration and completion of Cologne Cathedral, which had been lying neglected for centuries and had fallen into ruin. Since then, the term ‘secularization’ has been associated with the conflicting evaluations of the disputing parties. In Christian philosophy of history, the concept of the saeculum as an epoch is the result of the temporalization of the ‘world’ as a transitional stage, in the sense of ‘this life’, of the history of salvation. The negative connotation of ‘this’ world is now reinforced by the evaluation of the revolutionary act of expropriating ecclesiastical property as ‘unlawful’, whereas the positively connoted concept of secularization draws on the association with the by now established concept of the ‘New World’ and the dawn of a new saeculum, of the ‘New Age’. The history of the concept of ‘secularization’ has been extensively researched.3
I am interested in this caesura because the Age of Enlightenment ushered in by philosophy represents a parting of ways for secularized philosophy at which postmetaphysical thinking itself bifurcates. With Hume and Kant, postmetaphysical thinking divides into two separate paths. On the one side, it unfolds, bypassing as it were so-called German idealism, into varieties of philosophy that are ‘scientific’ in the narrower sense, while, on the other side – since Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard – it continues to wrestle with the movement of thought leading from Kant to Hegel. These tendencies can be related to the mental profiles of individual schools or to the main interests of influential philosophers until well into the twentieth century.4 It has only been since the middle of that century, however, that they have come to mark precise distinctions for the professional self-understanding of philosophy as such: does philosophy see itself as just one scientific discipline or subject among others, or even as an ancillary to the cognitive sciences? Or, in the face of advancing specialization, does it want and should it continue to pursue a comprehensive claim to promote the rational understanding of self and the world of contemporary generations? Both modes of thought are continuations of a secular way of thinking rooted in the seventeenth century, which, in the course of the eighteenth century, turned its back not only on religious worldview constructions but also on their metaphysical counterparts. In retrospect, however, it becomes apparent that two understandings of what philosophy is and should be emerged within this new horizon of postmetaphysical thinking. Today, the trend towards the assimilation of philosophy to science, which I myself welcomed unreservedly in 1971,5 no longer has only the clear methodological meaning of adherence to established standards of argumentation; rather, it now has the substantive meaning of a restriction to philosophical ‘research’. The systematic interest of this scientistic current is focused essentially on the conceptual analysis of the subjective conditions of cognitive processes, including those of scientific cognition itself. For this current, the history of philosophy from Plato to Wittgenstein is of interest only insofar as it forms part of the history of science or only for teaching purposes, as part of an educational canon whose significance has become etiolated because, together with the problem of achieving a self-understanding, the reflection of the self in the other has lost its existential importance. What we lose sight of as a result is a systematic interest in stages in the history of philosophy as a progressive process of solving distinctively philosophical problems.
In my view, what differentiates philosophical from scientific problems is not that they exhibit vague holism, nor that they reject the scientific method and way of thinking, nor that they make a less technical use of analytical means, nor even that they are necessarily less specialized. The key difference is rather their synthetic power to maintain two epistemically relevant references at the same time. The framework within which philosophical thought has evolved since its inception is distinguished, on the one hand, by its reference to the world as a whole – that is to say, to what we know about the world at a given historical moment – and, on the other, by the systematic self-reference of the researchers to themselves as human beings, both as individuals and as persons in general, and then to themselves as members of a social community and, finally, as contemporaries of a historical epoch. For many centuries, classical philosophy shared with religious worldviews the global question about the ‘position of human beings in the world’, and in this way, as we shall see, it also made a functional contribution to social integration. Therefore, the specificity of philosophical in contrast to scientific problems consists in the reference of what is known about the world at a particular time to one’s own person, to one’s society and culture or, more generally, to a referent captured by the term ‘human being’ or ‘humanity’. The relevant questions arise in the context of a generalized and rational, critically examined and rationally elaborated preliminary understanding that those who live at a certain time have of the world, albeit at different levels of intellectual articulation, as reflected in their lifeworld. New problems arise from the need to process cognitive dissonances that convulse an intersubjectively shared understanding of self and the world. Such dissonances spring from two different sources: on the one hand, from new knowledge about the objective world and, on the other, from social crises.
The project of developing a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking is intended to answer the question of whether – and, if so, how – the philosophical treatment of such overwhelmingly complex problems has also been continued under conditions of postmetaphysical thinking. I should warn in advance against equating the distinction between the two types of postmetaphysical thinking mentioned with the distinction between ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy. With this ‘territorialization’ of two styles of thinking, the British and American philosophy departments sought, initially for good reasons, to prevent the weakening of methodological standards by a style of argumentation based on ‘worldviews’. But national references are of very limited value when it comes to differentiating philosophical traditions. Conceptual analysis is everywhere the royal road of philosophy, and the implementation of theoretical approaches must always be measured against standards of analytical clarity and argumentative rigour. The key question in terms of which a more conclusive distinction can be made between the two traditions that became differentiated following Hume and Kant respectively, and whose professional self-understandings are currently drifting apart, is the following: do we still see ourselves today as contemporaries of the seventeenth century or instead as contemporaries of the Young Hegelians? If we sharpen the question in this way into one about the continuation of alternative traditions, the enduring influence of American pragmatism teaches us that geographical indicators of origin such as ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘Continental’ have no application. Instead, prima facie four orientations suggest themselves for clarifying the distinction between the two variants of post-metaphysical thinking. The relevant differences can be demonstrated in terms of their attitudes to religion and theology (a); their cognitivist versus noncognitivist conceptions of practical reason (b); their stances on the philosophical relevance of the human sciences – or, in Hegelian terms, of ‘objective mind’ (c); and, finally, their respective positions on reflection on the historical location of philosophical thinking (d).
(a) After the great seventeenth-century thinkers had developed their systems more or less avowedly under secular methodological premises, two contrary stances towards religious traditions and theology took shape among philosophers. Hobbes can be regarded as representative of the one stance, Spinoza of the other. Hobbes takes into account the fact that his readers were for the most part professing Christians, and for tactical reasons he takes pains to demonstrate that his own teaching is compatible with that of the Bible. However, he bases his political theory on rigorous materialist premises and adopts a consistently objectifying scientific attitude towards religious phenomena. In contrast, the declared atheist Spinoza adopts a more complex attitude. In his Theological-Political Treatise, he considers ancient Judaism from the sober objectifying point of view of a historian and explains religious phenomena in functionalist terms from the perspective of a social scientist; but at the same time he places the idea of deus sive natura, which he develops in a systematic way, in an objective relationship to the Mosaic teaching of the Hebrew Bible. This expresses the systematic intention to qualify his own teaching as a reconstruction of the – according to his standards – rational content of biblical teaching. In this respect, Kant follows Spinoza and not Hume, who, like Hobbes, explains religion primarily in psychological terms.
Kant adopts a dialogical stance towards religion in general and towards the traditional Lutheran two-kingdoms doctrine in particular, with the systematic intention of combining his unequivocal critique of religion with the appropriation of the rational contents of the religious tradition translated into philosophical terms. For Kant, the biblical truths of ecclesiastical faith, communicated in narrative form and inculcated through ceremonies, henceforth only have the pedagogical task of imprinting on untrained minds the moral law, which philosophy justifies within the bounds of reason. At the same time, he reinterprets Luther’s regnum Christi as an intelligible realm. He makes use of Luther’s distinction between the two epistemic attitudes of the believer – towards God (coram Deo) and towards the world (coram mundo) – by laying claim to the former attitude for the transcendental study of the theoretical and practical self-legislation of reason and equating the latter with the objectifying attitude of the human mind towards the world. He transposes the existentially important attitude of the sinner striving for his salvation in his inner being, but under the eyes of God, into the self-reflective attitude of a reason which assures itself of its own operations and laws.
(b) The opposing attitudes to religion explain the completely different consequences that Hume and Kant draw from the orientation to the philosophy of the subject adopted in the seventeenth century for conceptualizing reason and the practical philosophy affected by this. At first, they both share the same approach to basic concepts. This had taken shape through reflection on the new objectifying attitude of the mathematical natural sciences in their experimental examination of propositions about astronomical and physical laws. Of course, metaphysics had already focused on objects that it envisaged in contemplation and represented in true propositions. But metaphysics had ‘objectivized’ [vergegenständlicht] beings, and above all being as such, not only from the point of view of existence and truth; rather, it had always also conceived and represented them in the light of the associated aspects of the beautiful and the good. The restriction of the knowledge of the understanding to law-governed connections between physical phenomena marked the dissolution of this fusion of descriptive, evaluative and normative aspects of validity. The physicist’s objectifying attitude towards the observation of measurable objects in a certain sense narrows the focus of objectivization to the existence or nonexistence of objects or states of affairs. For the epistemologist reflecting on this act of objectivization, the categorial framework within which he himself operates shifts. His direction of gaze shifts from being as a whole to the relationships between the representing subject and the world as the totality of representable objects; and it is directed inwards: the epistemologist observes from the ‘first person’ point of view his own representations as part of his subjectivity. This introspective self-objectification acquires conceptual precision through the sharp contrast between the two equally objectivizing directions of gaze – the one outwards to the representable objects in the world and the other inwards to the apparently immediately given subjective experiences. The evident self-giveness of these experiences is regarded as a criterion of truth, now understood as certainty.
The philosophy of the subject is thus the result of a change in perspective that turns the gaze of metaphysics, which is primarily focused on existing things, back onto the knowing subject itself; it reflects on the subjective conditions of emergence of the objectifying knowledge of nature purged of all nondescriptive connotations. However, it understands introspection as a matter of observing internal episodes and states, and thereby aligns the reflective attitude of the first person, who – turned inwards – registers subjective experiences, with the epistemic attitude of a third person who observes the things in the objective world. In this way, the reflecting epistemologist not only adopts the objectivizing gaze of the physicist, but also the assumption of a view from nowhere connected with this epistemic attitude. This dethematization of the location of one’s own cognitive activity is at the root of the peculiar objectivism that emerges with the paradigm shift to the philosophy of the subject. Compared to this empiricist objectivist attitude, however, a different line of development of the paradigm shift to the philosophy of the subject took shape leading from Duns Scotus via Descartes to Kant. Here, the epistemologist’s first-person perspective on one’s own subjectivity as the source of spontaneous accomplishments supersedes the third-person perspective on one’s own subjectivity as a container of evident facts. The first person, turned back upon itself, is not envisaged as an observer, but as an active mind that must understand and reconstruct its operations in order to be able to describe them. It is only by means of a rational reconstruction of the achievements of the subject that the philosopher can grasp the knowing subject’s performative knowledge.
Kant focuses on the performative character of an active subjectivity. The theological reconstruction of the experiences of the believer from Augustine to Luther had already taken into account two further epistemic attitudes over and above that of the observer: as a practising member of a universal religious community, the believer regards himself from the we-perspective of the first-person plural, whereas in his interactions with God and fellow human beings he adopts the attitude towards a second person. Kant was able to make these two perspectives fruitful for the justification and observance of binding norms and thus to develop a cognitivist conception of practical reason, because the appropriation of the religious tradition prompted him to understand subjectivity as the site of an ‘acting’ operative reason. He no longer understood the acts performed by this reason as episodes or states that are self-evidently given, but as intelligible operations. In the same way, having criticized the metaphysical objectivization of the good and the beautiful as inadmissible, Kant extended the domain of performatively mastered knowledge from descriptive to moral and aesthetic judgements. In contrast, empiricism arrives at a noncognitivist conception of practical reason. Because empiricism can only understand subjectivity from the first-person perspective as a psychological object domain of subjective experiences, Hume takes as his starting point motives for action and attitudes that others may value as more or less pleasant, prosocial or advantageous and useful, but can no longer judge from the moral point of view to be more or less rational.
(c) Kant bases his cognitivist conception of morality on a notion of reason as both transcendentally world-generating and practically legislative. However, the conception of the transcendental is weighed down with the baggage that a priori rational knowledge is insulated against the objections of empirical knowledge that flows in through the senses. Kantian apriorism has triggered an extended discussion in which neither the empiricist assumption that the human mind is a tabula rasa nor the rationalist insistence that the mind possesses innate a priori knowledge has prevailed. The human sciences, which emerged at the time, played an important role in this discussion by stimulating a paradigm shift from the philosophy of the subject to the philosophy of language, thereby inaugurating a detranscendentalizing embedding of the Kantian world-constituting subjectivity in history, culture and society. The network of categories, which is now understood as embodied in language, continues to fulfil the – in a weak sense – ‘transcendental’ role of world disclosure ‘for us’, the subjects of knowledge and action; however, as a component of a particular cultural understanding of the world, this network itself has a historical location in the world and is open to revisions in the light of cooperative learning processes. For Kant himself, history, culture and society did not as yet constitute a new scientific object domain alongside that of nature, since, as he saw it, empirical knowledge adopts the same objectivizing attitude to both spheres. The power of judgement can discover a philosophical meaning in historical developments in politics, law and culture at best under the proviso of a merely heuristic project undertaken for practical purposes.
It was only after the Scottish moral philosophers discovered the economy and society as fields of knowledge in their own right, and after Herder, Schleiermacher and Humboldt made a closer study of the hermeneutic approach to history, that philosophy began to perceive the rise of the human sciences as an intellectual revolution on a par with the rise of the modern natural sciences. Hegel reflected on the distinctive symbolic and linguistic constitution of culture and society as ‘second nature’, for which he developed the concept of ‘objective mind’. The subjective mind has a certain affinity with objective mind: inasmuch as the objects of the latter are symbolically structured, subjective mind has hermeneutic access to them, so that it does not stand in the same external relationship to them as it does to the physical objects of scientifically objectified nature. However, Hegel interpreted this new differentiation vis-à-vis transcendental philosophy in turn within the categorial framework of the philosophy of the subject and integrated nature, together with subjective and objective mind, into the self-movement of an absolute mind. But after Kant’s incontrovertible critique of reason, Hegel’s disciples could not fail to understand their teacher’s reversion to a Plotinian objective-idealistic figure of thought as a re-enchanting return to metaphysics. Inspired by Schelling’s later work, the Young Hegelian countermovement, taken in the broadest sense, broke open the basic concepts of the philosophy of the subject encapsulated in absolute mind and brought about a further paradigm shift by deciphering the – now homeless – ‘objective mind’ in terms of the philosophy of communication and language. This detranscendentalization of reason deprived Kant’s world-constituting subjectivity of the armour of a priori knowledge, but without stripping finite reason, now conceived as embodied in language and organic nature and as situated in history and society, entirely of its world-projecting spontaneity.
From this perspective, subjective reason withdraws into acting and learning subjects who stand in social relationships to each other in their respective lifeworld contexts. Thus, the reason of these socialized subjects is interconnected with a form of communicative reason that henceforth can generate unity in the historical diversity of overlapping social lifeworlds only in a procedural manner. Communicatively socialized subjects are located within the horizon of a particular historically, culturally and socially situated lifeworld and reproduce their lives by referring – in cooperation and conflict – interpersonally to one another and, at the same time, intentionally to something in the objective world. In the process, communicative action and the lifeworld background are interlinked through the dynamism of a circular process: the symbolically structured lifeworld is reproduced through communicative action, which is sustained in turn by the intuitively known ‘prefigurements’ [Vorschüsse
