Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 3 E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In the final volume of his history of philosophy, Jürgen Habermas offers a series of brilliant interpretations of the thinkers who set the agenda for contemporary philosophy.  Beginning with masterful readings of Hume and Kant, he traces the genealogy of their postmetaphysical thinking through the main currents of historicism and German Idealism, and the multifarious reactions to Hegel’s influential system, culminating in nuanced readings of Marx, Kierkegaard and Peirce.  Through his analysis of their work, Habermas demonstrates the interpretive fecundity of the central themes of his philosophical enterprise – his pragmatist theory of meaning, his communicative theories of subjectivity and sociality, and his discursive theory of normativity in its moral, juridical and political manifestations.

In contrast to the bland compendia of thinkers and positions generally presented in surveys of the history of philosophy, Habermas’s thematically focused interpretations are destined to provoke controversy and stimulate dialogue. With this work one of the indisputably great thinkers of our time presents a powerful vindication of his conception of philosophy as an inherently discursive – and not merely analytical or speculative – enterprise.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

VIII. At the Parting of Ways of Postmetaphysical Thinking: Hume and Kant

Notes

1. Hume’s Deconstruction of the Theological Heritage of Practical Philosophy

(1) Basic concepts of empiricist theory of knowledge

(2) Anthropology of religion and religious scepticism

(3) The psychological analysis of natural causality

(4) The deconstruction of the basic concepts of practical philosophy

Notes

2. The Anthropological Explanation of Law and Morality

(1) An emotivist explanation of the virtues

(2) The utility of social virtues

(3) The problematic transition from attractive values to obligatory norms

(4) The deflation of the normative and the denial of the problem of rational law

Notes

3. Kant’s Answer to Hume: The Practical Meaning of the Transcendental Turn and its Background in the Philosophy of Religion

(1) The transcendental ego and the reconstruction of its operations

(2) Critique and appropriating translation of the Lutheran heritage

Notes

4. The Postmetaphysical Justification of an Inherent Interest of Reason

(1) From theoretical to practical philosophy: concept of autonomy and mode of validity of moral obligation

(2) Rational faith and the motivational weakness of rational morality

(3) Critique of the doctrine of postulates and the idea of the ethical commonwealth

(4) The interest of reason in the cosmopolitan condition

(5) Preview of motifs of Kant criticism

Notes

IX. Linguistic Embodiment of Reason: From Subjective to ‘Objective’ Mind

Note

1. Political, Economic, Cultural and Scientific Impulses for a Paradigm Shift

(1) The two constitutional revolutions and the theory of human rights

(2) Industrial capitalism and political economy

(3) Historical consciousness, history and hermeneutics

(4) Herder’s appreciation of the individuality of historical phenomena

Notes

2. Motives for the Linguistic Turn in Herder, Schleiermacher and Humboldt

(1) Herder

(2) Schleiermacher

(3) Humboldt

Notes

3. Hegel’s Assimilation of Faith to Knowledge: The Renewal of Metaphysical Thinking after Kant

(1) Hegel’s critique of Schleiermacher’s noncognitivist understanding of religion

(2) Beyond metaphysics and Kant to the ‘third position of thought’

(3) God’s incarnation as a model for the self-mediation of the absolute

Notes

4. Reason in History: Autonomy versus Self-Movement of the Concept

(1) Historical progress in the collective consciousness of freedom

(2) Process of formation of free will in law, morality and ethical life

(3) Critical theory of society, conservative theory of the state

(4) The controversy over the relationship between morality and ethical life

(5) Preview of motifs of Hegel criticism

Notes

Third Intermediate Reflection: From Objective Mind to Communicative Socialization of Knowing and Acting Subjects

(1) A formal pragmatic analysis of Hegel’s concept of totality

(2) The paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language

(3) Problems generated by the disintegration of the Hegelian System

Notes

X. The Contemporaneity of the Young Hegelians and the Problems of Postmetaphysical Thinking

Notes

1. Ludwig Feuerbach’s Anthropological Turn: On the Form of Life of Organically Embodied and Communicatively Socialized Subjects

(1) Letter to Hegel and The Essence of Christianity

(2) Dependence on nature and communicative socialization of ‘passionate’ subjects

Notes

2. Karl Marx on the Historical Freedom of Productive and Politically Acting Subjects

(1) Sublation of the state in society?

(2) The historical-materialist concept of society

(3) The ambivalent meaning of the ‘naturalness’ of what exists

(4) Development of productive forces and political emancipation

(5) The capitalist system as the realm of necessity and the ‘realm of freedom’ as a false abstraction

Notes

3. Søren Kierkegaard: A Religious Author on the Ethical-Existential Freedom of the Biographically Individuated Subject

(1) The paradox of the content of faith and the authenticity of the lived faith

(2) The historicity of existence and the stages of life leading to ‘self-selection’

(3) The Kantian Socrates and the ethical way of life as an alternative to ethical-religious conversion?

(4) History of the reception of the religious author and the open question of ritual

Notes

4. Interpretive Processes between Truth-Reference and Action- Reference: Peirce as Initiator of Pragmatism

(1) Critique of the philosophy of the subject and the consequences of the semiotic turn

(2) Rationality and freedom: the pragmatist conception of the problem-solving action of communicatively socialized subjects

Notes

5. On the Mode of Embodiment of Reason in Research and Political Practices

(1) The pragmatic enabling conditions of cooperative research

(2) The practices of rational morality and of the democratic constitutional state

Notes

Postscript

Notes

Acknowledgements

Afterword

Notes

Notes on the Translation

Notes

Bibliography

Overview: Volumes 1–3

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Begin Reading

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Afterword

Notes on the Translation

Bibliography

Overview: Volumes 1–3

Index

End User License Agreement

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Also a History of Philosophy

Volume 3:Rational Freedom. Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge

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 and Band 2: Vernünftige Freiheit. Spuren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen. The contents of the present volume correspond to pp. 211–809 of Band 2. © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2019. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

This English translation © Polity Press, 2025.

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).

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5866-7

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VIII.AT THE PARTING OF WAYS OF POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING: HUME AND KANT

The eighteenth century is clearly distinct from the ‘long’ Reformation era. Although the latter reached its political conclusion with the Peace of Westphalia, it included the processing of the ecclesiastical schism and the confessional wars of the English Glorious Revolution by philosophy in terms of rational natural law. Philosophically speaking, the eighteenth century begins with Pierre Bayle, who broke with Locke’s compromises on the question of toleration towards members of different faiths (towards Catholics in particular) and nonbelievers, and no longer shied away from the more radical consequences of the ‘Enlightenment’. Interestingly, the Age of Enlightenment saw itself as a new epoch and formation of consciousness. In a discerning contrast to the whole of previous history, it has secured its place in history under this title. From the perspective of a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking, however, it eludes straightforward periodization. On the one hand, the important philosophical developments up to and including Kant can be understood as a continuation – albeit in a radicalized form – of the seventeenth-century innovations in epistemology and rational natural law, hence not as a break with the philosophical orientations of the preceding era. Scientifically, too, the eighteenth century was overshadowed by the fame of Isaac Newton’s universally admired mechanics. On the other hand, it is the very physiognomy of the Age of Enlightenment, which retains its contemporaneity for us, that demarcates it from its own past and tends to efface its boundaries towards the future. In retrospect, it is clear that a constellation of philosophy, science and religion emerged at that time that remains familiar to us today – a constellation that was entirely in keeping with the selfconfident image that contemporary intellectuals had of their epoch.

In their thought and professional self-understanding, their conceptions of learned and empirical knowledge, Hume, Rousseau and Kant have remained our contemporaries in a very different way from Descartes, Hobbes or Spinoza, not to mention the humanist and late scholastic thinkers of the Renaissance. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, regardless of all the differences in content, this affinity in the philosophers’ background understanding could be taken for granted until the situation that provides the occasion for the present study arose. Today it is the scientistic retreat of philosophy into the science system and the narrowing of its professional profile that raise the ambivalent question: is it not the very contribution that methodologically atheistic philosophy has made since that time to promoting an enlightened understanding of self and the world in society as a whole that casts a problematic light on the militant dismissal and abstract rejection of the enduring stimulating potential of a fruitful discourse on faith and knowledge? For those who still see themselves as philosophical contemporaries of the Young Hegelians, ‘enlightenment’ refers to a long-running movement of thought that includes German Idealism and which, having experienced a first apogee with Kant and Hume, reached a second with Hegel and Marx. This twofold burgeoning of ‘enlightenment’ first radicalized the seventeenth-century beginnings of the philosophy of the subject in two opposing directions, and then overcame the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness by way of the hermeneutic disclosure of a form of the intersubjectively shared lifeworlds of linguistically socialized subjects that emerged from the ‘carapace’ of the transcendental subject. These most general structures can also be understood as the result of natural evolution: since the emergence of Homo sapiens, its dynamics have continued at an exponentially accelerating rate in the channels of sociocultural learning processes, among other things, in the development and disintegration of the axial age ‘worldviews’.

The physiognomy of the Enlightenment is marked above all by two guiding orientations: first, the self-confident position that philosophy assumed after its religion-critical switch of allegiance to methodologically independent science; second, the new social functions that it fulfilled with its role in educating the populations of the emerging bourgeois society, in criticizing power in the political public sphere, and in legitimizing the constitutional state.

The Enlightenment is an intellectual and social phenomenon that spread from France and England to the whole of Europe, although it took different forms in different nations – in Germany, for example, that of a rather apolitical literary movement with a strong Protestant character. The criticisms of the church by French intellectuals played a pioneering role in articulating the guiding ideas of the Enlightenment. The beginning was marked by the Philosophical Commentary of 1686/87 by the Calvinist-educated Pierre Bayle,1 whose Historical and Critical Dictionary, which was published shortly afterwards, became extremely influential during the eighteenth century due to its unprecedented circulation, even inspiring Ludwig Feuerbach to write a monograph on its author. Louis XIV, who depended on the support of the Catholic Church in the struggle of the central administration against the corporative resistance of the parlements, had revoked the Edict of Nantes and expelled the Huguenots. The continued repression of dissent by the French state fuelled anticlerical polemics against religious coercion and fanaticism. As a result, the intolerance of the church and the harmfulness of superstition became the themes around which journalism and public discourse crystallized in Paris and other European centres. Both the state and the church provided occasion for scandal. In the famous case of the Protestant Jean Calas, who was executed by being broken on the wheel, Voltaire was unable to prevent the death penalty from being carried out with his 1763 Treatise on Toleration, but he did succeed in having the sentence reviewed and in securing a posthumous rehabilitation. The intellectuals grouped around the Encyclopaedia were not ‘liberal’ in the political sense, however, but were essentially partisans of the modernizing power of an ‘enlightened’ monarchical state bureaucracy.

Even their critique of religion generally did not venture beyond the boundaries of a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion.2 Voltaire certainly waged his battle against religious prejudice and narrow-minded intolerance in the name of reason, whose universal precepts were, he assumed, shared by all human beings. All religions were to be stripped of their positivity, purged of all ritual practices and all divisive ceremonial formalities, and returned to their common core ideas, purified of superstition. Interestingly, however, Voltaire understood this core of convergent beliefs as the content not of a morality of reason [Vernunftmoral], but of a rational faith [Vernunftglaube]. He clearly concludes from the seventeenth-century debates that the rational justification of moral principles cannot succeed unless they have a deistic underpinning. He thus advocates a form of rational theism that conceives of God as the ‘Lord of universal world reason’ and as such elevates him to the founder of pure religion. The only thing that rational religion retains from the sacred complex is the worldview component and a desacralized reference to God; this renders moral principles self-evident, so that they are not in need of a strict philosophical justification. Morality and natural law are authorized by the god from whom reason itself speaks, while all forms of worship are dismissed as misleading human inventions. The Encyclopaedists were not all in agreement that religious worship can be reduced to reverence for the divine moral legislation guided by reason. Diderot, for example, was more indulgent towards atheists than towards religious fanatics. And while Rousseau acknowledged the affective character of scriptural religions and did not go beyond asserting a tension between positive and ‘pure’ religion, his conception of a civil religion, in which the obedience of citizens to democratic law is ultimately grounded, is informed by the same intention of preserving the morally binding character of norms through an abstract reference to God.

Deism, which deems human reason to be capable of inferring the existence of a rational author of the world, is the background belief shared by most of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment; and the concept of rational religion claims as its content the shared core of moral beliefs in which all world religions are said to overlap. The moral content of a ‘rationally purified’ religion is not in any need of further justification because it is certified by the authority of God, who is assumed to be rational. But this moral core, achieved through abstraction, is stripped of the aura of a vague credit of trust borrowed from belief in God by the methodologically consistent atheist, who demands an independent justification of morality that is not biased in favour of theism from the outset. For only in this way can we do justice to the fallibility and limitations of human reason: even if we shared the deistic idea of God, the interpretive perspective from which a sophisticated comparison of religions can be undertaken, with the intention of extracting a common moral core from all religions, would be controversial. As Rainer Forst has shown,3 a universalistic concept of religious toleration that does not exclude any believer or atheist can only be justified if the competing parties can appeal to standards that they jointly accept on the same grounds, regardless of the respective religious convictions they accept as true. This requires both the recognition that there are relevant beliefs about which there is reasonable disagreement, and that moral principles can be rationally justified independently of religious or metaphysical convictions, which are and will remain controversial because of the finiteness of the human mind. Kant, who developed a convincing justification of morality under the premises of methodological atheism, was the first to satisfy this specific combination of conditions. But Pierre Bayle already combined the sceptical insight into the limits of human reason with a form of inclusive, reciprocal justification, according to which only those toleration laws are justified that believers, people of different faiths and atheists can agree are reasonable after adopting each other’s perspectives. What is remarkable about this discovery is that Bayle developed a procedural proposal for solving a moral problem specifically associated with the discourse on the secularization of state power – namely, the regulation of positive and negative religious freedom – that already leads to, and points beyond, the Kantian moral principle.4

Since the Encyclopaedists’ conceptions of rational religion did not take up Bayle’s suggestion and Kant had not yet developed his postmetaphysical justification of a morality of reason, the French materialists made the radical proposal to resolve religious disputes by abolishing religion as such. La Mettrie, d’Holbach and Helvetius were convinced that the spread of their materialist worldview could give rise to a ‘society of atheists’ that would eradicate religious delusion and fanaticism. Like David Hume, Baron d’Holbach sought to explain morality ‘scientifically’ in terms of the natural history of human beings; his System of Nature deals with the ‘physical and moral laws’ which are said to reflect the same relationships albeit under different aspects. In practical terms, this means that society can serve human well-being by combining the valuations and social conventions that have arisen naturally with enlightened education and positive legislation, both of which can be guided exclusively by ideas derived from experience and ‘based on nature’.

The philosophy of the Enlightenment not only intensified the criticism of religion initiated by Spinoza; as the position of the materialists conspicuously shows, it also radicalized and sealed its switch in allegiance from theology to the natural sciences. For these philosophers, the struggle against political power and the ‘spiritual tyranny’ of the church could only be staged as a public trial pitting science against the truths of revelation. The idea of improving the human race and society in this world had to be mobilized against the certainty of salvation. The eighteenth century provided impressive evidence for the Baconian programme of scientific progress and progressive technical mastery over nature in the service of improving oppressive living conditions, in a secularized version detached from the background of Calvinist notions of probation. Apart from the economic tailwind of a sustained economic upswing and a growth dynamic that also enabled a significant increase in population, optimism about progress and an orientation to the future were also fuelled by the rapid succession of ground-breaking technological inventions (e.g. the steam engine, iron smelting in coal blast furnaces, the thermometer, the sextant, the spinning machine and the mechanical loom), the extensive geographical discoveries (of Alaska and Australia, the North Pole and Hawaii), the interesting astronomical discoveries (Halley’s Comet, the Milky Way and the planet Uranus) and the scientific discoveries (from hydrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen and the galvanic current to Lavoisier’s theory of combustion and Linnaeus’s botanical taxonomy).

However, it was only under industrial capitalism that the intimate intertwinement of science and technology led to the increased dependence of the forces of production on integrated scientific and technological progress. The fact that technical and scientific advances were still running in parallel may explain why the eighteenth-century consciousness of progress was so fascinated by technical inventions, on the one hand, and by geographical, astronomical and physical discoveries, on the other. In any case, the systemic networking of science, technology and the economy had not yet progressed so far that individual advances could have been accompanied, and possibly overshadowed, by the social consequences and side effects of their implementation without protracted delays. It was still possible to perceive progress ‘aesthetically’ as such. The perception of a dialectic of social progress did not emerge until the nineteenth century, and the awareness of a dialectic of enlightenment that promotes this progress did not take shape until the twentieth century. This is not to imply, of course, that there was no opposition to the Enlightenment programme. But even Rousseau transformed his culturally pessimistic protest against this belief in progress into a politically ‘progressive’ response. And the Enlightenment philosophers’ critique of religion found an echo in the religious renewal movements of the Jansenists, Methodists and Pietists and, on the Catholic side, in the Cistercian movement, which also took up other Enlightenment impulses on a par with the critique of the official church.

The authority of science remained undisputed, though it was no longer primarily based in the universities,5 and, as already in the seventeenth century, the leading philosophers and scientists were no longer university scholars. At any rate, the French term philosophe was tailored more to philosophizing writers, publicists and scholarly essayists, some of whom were wealthy and worked as private scholars, or pursued other professions such as medicine, business or law. Empirical research in the natural sciences was now organized in scientific societies operating outside the universities, following the early models of the Royal Society in London and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. These academies spread rapidly and in large numbers throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. States responded by founding reform universities, for example in Halle and Moscow. Here, too, an extended canon of subjects began to emerge intra muros together with the pattern of disciplines that would find its final form in the new faculties of philosophy, which evolved out of the arts faculties. Already in Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, a philosophy that defended the spirit of scientific autonomy against the ‘businesspeople of learning’ assembled in the higher faculties emerged as the champion of these ‘scientific’ disciplines in the strict sense. Philosophy’s switch in allegiance from theology to science provides the background for the self-confident mission of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose aim was not only to combat religious doctrines as superstition, but also to relieve religion and the church of their social functions. In early modern societies, which were still structured along hierarchical and, above all, occupational lines, the church remained the decisive force for social integration; through socialization and education, it influenced and shaped the mentality of the mass of the population – and not only in rural areas. Nevertheless, state-sponsored initiatives to promote popular enlightenment and literacy among the largely illiterate population changed the social climate and educational level of society as a whole. The influential Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, published in 1751, reveals this popular pedagogical intention; its articles extend beyond philosophy and natural science to include politics and economics, the arts, crafts and technical inventions. The popularization of scientific enlightenment aimed at bridging the stark educational gap was promoted not only by the academies themselves, but also by numerous scientific societies, such as the popular economic and patriotic societies, which attracted a mixed, in part also female, audience in the cities and small towns.

The explosive proliferation of books, periodicals and newspapers not only signalled the social diffusion of literature and journalism, which had previously been confined to the courts and universities and to state and church centres; the expanded sale of print media was accompanied by the emergence of lending libraries, reading societies and coffee houses – social spaces where a new audience and a new, egalitarian form of communication could develop.6 With the commercialization of art, the same audiences met in museums and art galleries, theatres and concert halls, art dealerships and auction houses, which were now open to the public. Driven by a growing demand for educational, cultural and news consumption products, the new media gave rise in these new social locations to a novel network of communication that was neutral as regards corporate ties and class boundaries. The public, which transcended corporative and professional legal boundaries, became the bearer of a communication network created by the printing press. This resulted in the formation of a new social sphere in the territorial states – the initially, in essence, bourgeois public sphere – whose only structurally analogous precedent was the Europe-wide communication of Latin-speaking scholars.7 Like the market, this sphere represented an opportunity structure: it enabled more or less fortuitous social contacts through a fundamentally egalitarian communication structure. Both the public sphere and the market now promoted the kind of individualized and self-chosen social relations that are constitutive of ‘modern society’ in the sociological sense.

In addition to the spread of literacy among the uneducated classes and the popularization of science, however superficial, the civilizing of morals and the dissemination of a secular social morality became another concern of the Enlightenment programme of popular education, as the success of the moral weeklies shows. In this role, philosophy made a certain, albeit relatively modest, contribution to social integration in the course of societal modernization. Only as the new spaces of a cultural public sphere were occupied and used by actors who, as citizens, increasingly engaged in political discussions and confronted the state with their interests and demands, could political philosophy take on a more important social function, not only in its role of criticizing a repressive ecclesiastical government, but also for the state and politics in general. The emergence of a socially bounded political public sphere was a necessary condition for the ideas of rational natural law to develop into a force for political mobilization among the bourgeoisie. It was in this political public sphere that the Enlightenment philosophers’ critique of power made itself felt. Since the two constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, philosophy can even claim to have filled the legitimacy gap left by the secularization of state power. It could not replace the socially integrative function of religion and the church; but it had to replace both forthwith in their function of legitimizing state rule. The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) already spoke of ‘inherent rights’ without any explicit reference to God. From a systematic point of view, however, it was Kant, ‘set straight’ by Rousseau, who first succeeded in rationally justifying the constitutional principles of the democratic rule of law on the basis of postmetaphysical thought.8

This rough sketch of the characteristics of the Age of Enlightenment explains the self-confidence and the new professional identity of philosophy. Turning its back on religion, it aligned itself with modern science, but it did not see its mission as consisting exclusively in its role as guardian of scientific rationality. It sought to promote the rationality of society as a whole and understood itself as a scientific discipline that aspired to be more than just one scientific discipline among others. This problematic ‘more’ can be understood as the self-reflexive claim of a self-confident ‘enlightenment’: philosophical knowledge is supposed to explain what the mundane knowledge accumulated by science means for us as human beings, for us in our personal and social, our historical and contemporary existence. In this – implicitly political – sense, David Hume and Immanuel Kant are outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment. They did little scientific research of their own, but they sought to explain how scientific knowledge is possible and what it tells us about ourselves and about human nature. This also suggests how we should understand the subtitle of Hume’s major work, the three-volume Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. Everything that Hume expounds in the first volume, the longest of the three, on the theoretical foundations of science and cognition, serves to introduce the ‘moral subjects’ that are to enlighten the reader about himself and his nature in the two volumes that follow. Hume achieved widespread public influence across Europe, not only as the author of a widely read History of England and as a philosopher, with his Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, but also as a committed and successful philosophical essayist who took critical stances on the major religious, economic and political controversies, such as on the role of political parties, on rational natural law, on parliament and on the separation of powers. Compared to the political views of his French colleagues, he was a staunchly conservative thinker, who did not believe in progress, but as a philosopher and publicist he fulfilled the typical role of an Enlightenment philosopher. He paid close attention to the public impact of his writings, and he published and revised the content of his academic studies in more accessible literary formats. In this respect he shares the normative intentions of the Enlightenment.

On a second reading of the subtitle of the Treatise, however, Hume’s intention to apply the same methodological approach to the study of moral subjects as the experimental sciences apply to the objects of nature may seem perplexing. It is reminiscent of Hobbes’s mechanistic ambition to disaggregate the state into its elementary components and then reassemble it according to a rational plan. This approach proved to be a dead end, because the concept of rationality available under empiricist premises was certainly too weak to justify the normative validity of natural or innate human rights. Hume abandons the approach of rational natural law and, in order to free practical philosophy from a burdensome and misleading religious heritage, takes as his model the natural scientist conducting experiments rather than the mechanic assembling a clockwork. From Hume’s point of view, practical philosophy can only develop into a science once the normative network of concepts that explains the prescriptive validity [Sollgeltung] of morality and law has been shown to be illusory, albeit an illusion that is functionally necessary for the natural human form of life. This deconstruction is based on a radicalized empiricist epistemology and philosophy of science, which I will first discuss briefly (1.). Hume then develops a practical philosophy in opposition to the normative thrust of rational natural law, which takes the form of an emotivist theory of virtue. He fails in his paradoxical attempt to simultaneously explain and justify the relevant phenomena of law and morality within the framework of a theory of human nature (2.). Kant shares with Hume the presuppositions of postmetaphysical thinking, but he subjects the philosophy of the subject to a transcendental philosophical turn in order to counter Hume’s anthropological explanation of morality and law based on natural history with a reconstructive appropriation of the universalistic conceptual potential of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (3.). Kant, however, refused to accept the postmetaphysical limits of reason. In the ‘interest of reason’ in ascertaining its own efficacy, he identifies a moment of apprehension concerning a deficit ultimately bequeathed by the uncompromising critique of reason and a meagre ‘religion within the limits of mere reason’ (4.).

Notes

1.

Pierre Bayle,

A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23: ‘Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full’

, ed. John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005).

2.

On what follows, see Rainer Forst,

Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 237–99; Forst, ‘“To Tolerate Means to Insult”: Toleration, Recognition, and Emancipation’, in Forst,

Justification and Critique

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 126–47.

3.

Forst,

Toleration in Conflict

, ch. 5, §18.

4.

Rainer Forst, ‘Religion and Toleration from the Enlightenment to the Post-Secular Era: Bayle, Kant, and Habermas’, in Forst,

Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 77–103.

5.

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger,

Die Aufklärung: Europa im 18. Jahrhundert

(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2011), ch. 7.

6.

Stollberg-Rilinger,

Die Aufklärung

, ch. 5.

7.

Jürgen Habermas,

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

8.

Ingeborg Maus,

Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie: Rechts- und demokratietheoretische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Kant

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).

1.Hume’s Deconstruction of the Theological Heritage of Practical Philosophy

Compared with other philosophers of the Enlightenment, David Hume (1711–76), who not only stands out among the illustrious ranks of Scottish moral philosophers for his unparalleled historical influence, but also enjoyed a formidable reputation among his contemporaries, is by no means unusual in his role as a private scholar and publicist without a public position as a university scholar. He did, however, aspire to an academic career, but his applications for professorships in Glasgow and Edinburgh remained unsuccessful. The youngest son of a family of modest means, he initially decided, after completing his studies and partly for economic reasons, to live in the French town of La Flèche, where he studied the writings of Pierre Bayle and Nicolas Malebranche, among others. There, at the age of twenty-three, he began work on the three-volume Treatise of Human Nature, which the young genius completed in just two years. This work contains the rare achievement of a fully mature system, the substance of which Hume would draw upon throughout his life as he varied and deepened his ideas in different literary forms. With the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason, no other work has had such a profound influence on modern European philosophy. Hume became the crucial historical point of reference, not only for those who nowadays distinguish themselves from so-called continental thought as ‘scientific’ philosophers, but even for some representatives of American pragmatism, who – like John Dewey or Richard Rorty – see Hegel as the successor of Scottish moral philosophy rather than as following in the footsteps of Kant.

The fact that Hume’s work could represent such a caesura is at first sight surprising, given the many theoretical approaches and concepts that he adopted from the Scottish tradition, especially from Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Francis Hutcheson (1674–1746). The stimuli that these two colleagues, who were one or two generations older than him, provided Hume in the field of moral philosophy are obvious:

First, he shares their broad conception of a moral sense of the good, which touches on and overlaps with aesthetic taste, i.e. the sense of beauty. The approbation of a virtuous character is as much an expression of a judgement of taste as the aesthetic judgement of a successful work of literature or art. Both express feelings of pleasure and approval or of displeasure and rejection.

These emotionally motivated evaluations are generally not concerned with the egoistic satisfaction or impairment of one’s own interests, or, if they are, then only to the extent that the object of evaluation also contributes to the well-being and satisfaction of other, in principle of all, human beings.

While Hume’s moral philosophy shares a universalistic trait with that of his predecessors, the vivid examples of the older Scottish moral philosophers read like the literary expression of an educational ideal befitting the social status of the contemporary British gentleman. For the ‘good taste’ that is

instilled

cultivates an

innate

sense of right and wrong based on ‘

natural

’ feelings of recognition and sympathy.

Hume also follows his teachers in his fundamental hostility to Hobbes’s rationalism and to rational natural law as such: it is the

feelings

expressed in moral judgements and corresponding motives for action, and not the understanding, that guide the will to make rational decisions in the light of one’s own preferences after weighing the appropriate means.

Finally, Hutcheson’s approach acquired methodological importance for Hume. Hutcheson developed the ‘value’ of an action

from the perspective of another person

and differentiated Shaftesbury’s moral sense into three components: the

public sense

directly expresses satisfaction with the happiness and well-being of others or discomfort with their misfortune and misery; the

moral sense

enables us to perceive the virtues or faults that we discover in the actions of others or in our own behaviour, and which in turn stimulate a corresponding sense of well-being or discomfort in us; finally, the

sense of honour

determines the acts of approval or disapproval with which we react to our own or others’ actions that are perceived as virtuous or immoral.

Given these fundamental similarities, many observers have been puzzled by Hutcheson’s emphatic rejection of Hume’s moral philosophy and by the fact that he even prevented Hume’s appointment to the University of Edinburgh. Later, younger colleagues such as Adam Smith and Thomas Reid also saw significant differences between the two authors’ theories. The reason for this assessment lies not in the empiricist approach per se, but perhaps in a consequence that Hume, like George Turnbull (1698–1748), drew from it. These two authors were pursuing the project of a natural history of morality around the same time. As early as the 1720s, Turnbull was convinced that the moral nature of human beings must be understood as part of natural history and, as such, had to be studied on the basis of ‘experiment and observation’, following the model of modern natural science.1 Hume was so confident in his handling of this objectifying procedure, and so unflinching in following it through to its logical conclusions, that Hutcheson probably thought that Hume’s natural-philosophical approach to moral philosophy contradicted his own intention, which was emphatically to improve the welfare of mankind. Hume wanted to subject the mental processes revealed by introspection to the same rigorous causal analysis that Newton applied to the objects of nature. In fact, he took the decisive step from the logical-epistemological investigations of his predecessors to the scientific psychology of cognitive operations; and he also understood the feelings, desires and attitudes underlying action, which are crucial to practical philosophy, as reflective impressions and reactions to ideas of something in the world, and subjected them to the same psychological analysis. The consistently objectifying attitude of this anatomy of the mind allows the observer to understand the subjective phenomena as part of a natural psychic process, so that the normative sense of morality and law must be understood as a subjectively necessary (because socially functional) appearance – that is, in a sense, as a superstructural phenomenon.

This should not be confused with strict naturalism, however, for Hume was far from reducing subjective experience to natural processes in the world. On the one hand, mental processes, like natural events, are lawful, so that ‘the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect’ (TN I, 170).2 On the other hand, as we shall see, this lawfulness, interpreted causally according to the model of the natural sciences, is itself based on the habitualization [Eingewöhnung] brought about by the repeated experiences of the cognizing subject. In the context of a consistent adherence to the conceptual framework of the philosophy of the subject, ‘nature’ as the totality of potential objects of experience in the world is not a first; rather, it appears as a phenomenon mediated by ideas: it remains a nature given ‘for us’. The first science is psychology, so that scepticism is mandatory in all ontological questions. However, this psychology of cognition is itself so objectivist in its orientation that Hume became the forerunner of a naturalistic conception of the mind (1). Hume’s epistemological scepticism becomes apparent in his critical attitude to religion. He examines religion both empirically, as part of human nature, and systematically, in the form of contemporary deism, as a speculative interpretation of the world as a whole that goes beyond science. While subjecting it to a resounding critique, at the same time he concedes that it can be considered as a possible position within philosophy in a version limited to cosmology (2). The perplexing meaning of a metaphysics reduced to a rational core becomes intelligible to an extent when, taking Hume’s epistemic interpretation of causality and law-governed natural processes as an example, one realizes that the projective transformation of a habit into a necessity can also have a constructive meaning (3). Pursuing the same approach of analysing inner perceptions, Hume discovers other projections, to which he attaches a very different meaning, namely that of illusions. Thus, he deconstructs the hitherto authoritative basic concepts of practical philosophy, such as the ‘self’ or the ‘person’, ‘free will’, and the moral opposition between acting from reason and acting from inclination, in order to critically expose the true incentives of morality and law (4).

(1) Basic concepts of empiricist theory of knowledge. For Hume, ‘modern’ is distinguished from ‘ancient’ philosophy by the fact that it restrains the ‘imagination’ through the systematic reference to experience. As an introspective observer of his consciousness, he adopts the ‘view from nowhere’ that he copies from modern science. Hitherto, empiricism had more or less taken for granted that the reality existing independently of the subject is the world of representable objects that causally affect the representing subject via sensory stimuli. But Hume, assuming the primacy of the psychology of cognition over other sciences, is aware that this ontological assumption is premature: in intuitively certain experience, the self-observing subject encounters only its own impressions, from which ideas are formed as images of impressions. These represent objects or facts in the world and – in the form of memories, passions and feelings – our reactions to our relationship to the represented objects or facts. However, as far as the existence of the represented objects is concerned, the representing subject remains entirely self-enclosed [bei sich] and within the sphere of entities accessible to introspection. The representing subject cannot reach back behind its relations to the impressions that are given ‘for it’ to the origin of the impressions in the world, i.e. to the reflected objects themselves: ‘As to those impressions, which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and ’twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc’d by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv’d from the author of our being’ (TN I, 59).

This epistemologically grounded scepticism, however, does not unsettle the realist epistemological assumptions of common sense; the sceptical attitude merely necessitates an explanation of the sense in which the basic concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ can be used under the presuppositions of a radicalized philosophy of consciousness. Like other philosophers of the subject, Hume distinguishes the self-evidence of immediate ‘impressions’ as the criterion of truth. But if it is in principle uncertain that subjectively certain impressions refer to reality, this criterion carries a burden that is, in itself, too heavy to convince us of the existence of the objects reflected in the impressions. This is why Hume treats the question of truth as one concerning the mode of certainty with which the existence of the external world encroaches on a self-enclosed sphere of inwardness. All true ideas are copies of impressions, so that if there is any doubt as to their genuineness, they must be traced back to impressions. Doubts about the truth of complex ideas or judgements, however, cannot be resolved solely by breaking them down into individual impressions; the ideas can also be tested indirectly by integrating them into a causally interpreted context of concurrent or successive impressions. And since we encounter nature as a causally ordered nexus of phenomena, we can also ‘convince’ ourselves of the existence of an object by specifying the cause that explains the fact: ‘We can never be induc’d to believe any matter of fact, except where its cause, or its effect, direct or collateral, is present to us’ (TN III, 396).

When it comes to the truth of an idea, i.e. the existence of a represented object or state of affairs, Hume speaks of ‘belief’. The belief ‘that p’ is produced by an explanation, i.e. a cognitive operation of the understanding; it is not identical with the content of a corresponding idea ‘p’, but it invests the idea with a special intensity. This differentiation is necessary because the belief ‘that p’, which is discursively mediated by a causal explanation, is in tension with the complex idea ‘p’, which in turn is a copy of immediate impressions. Hume attempts to resolve this tension by arguing that the act of believing adds nothing more to the content of complex ideas, which alone are capable of truth, than a feeling, which in turn has the self-evidence of an immediate impression: ‘belief consists merely in a certain feeling or sentiment; in something … different from our mere conception’ (TN III, 396). This feeling, which does not characterize the content of the idea, but rather the mode, that is, ‘the firmness and strength of the conception’, shares with the immediately present impressions the self-evidence of something that is, as it were, given ‘of itself’.3

The concept of truth, which is underpinned by a heightened experience of certainty, corresponds to a concept of existence or reality that has been stripped of all connotations of substance. Hume certainly recognizes that ‘modern’ philosophy differs from ‘ancient’ philosophy in its use of a concept of substance that is free from all teleological references and is determined solely by the moment of self-preservation. But even this Spinozist definition, according to which a substance is ‘something which may exist by itself’ (TN I, 153), is still too speculative for Hume. His predecessors had substantialized both the representing subject into ‘mind’ and the totality of represented objects into the material world of bodies. By consistently maintaining that our only contact with the world is through our impressions, Hume makes short shrift of the concept of these two substances – mind and matter. In doing so, he must first address a prima facie plausible conclusion that the defenders of the existence of a material substance draw from the distinction between primary and secondary sensory qualities: ‘For upon the removal of sounds, colours, heat, cold, and other sensible qualities, from the rank of continu’d independent existences, we are reduc’d merely to what are call’d primary qualities, as the only real ones, of which we have any adequate notion’ (TN I, 150). By contrast, Hume uses subtle arguments to show that, under empiricist premises, the primary qualities ascribed to bodies in space and time as objective – i.e. the properties of motion, extension or weight – can also be traced back to subjective sensations. And just as there is no material substance, so there is no mental substance. If all that is evidently given to us are ephemeral sensory impressions, and if all individual contingent impressions, which are in turn suppressed by other perceptions, are different both from each other and from the objects reflected in them, how can such an impression represent a substance? Hume challenges philosophers ‘who pretend that we have an idea of the substance of our minds’ to ‘point out the impression that produces it … Is it an impression of sensation or of reflection? Is it pleasant, or painful, or indifferent? Does it attend us at all times, or does it only return at intervals?’ (TN I, 153). The idea of the mind as an immaterial substance explodes, as it were, the format of a single impression to which such an idea could be traced.

The rejection of the substantialization of mind and body is a consequence of Hume’s epistemologically grounded scepticism concerning ontological statements about the constitution of the world, which is a necessary implication of the radicalized interpretation of the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject. This scepticism, however, by no means implies that Hume rejects epistemological realism tout court. The role of natural science as a model and the suggestive power of a self-forgetting, objectifying observer perspective, which he claims for both the philosopher of the subject and common sense, are too strong. Hume shares the common-sense notion of a world that exists independently of consciousness, but concerning the intrinsic constitution of which we can only speculate. Scepticism about cognitive access to nature as it is in itself does not forbid us from assuming the existence of nature in everyday life. The empiricist interpretation of the conceptual framework of the philosophy of the subject and the fact of natural science, which the philosophy of the subject sets out to explain, already suggest the assumption of the existence of a world of possible objects independent of description.4 The task of philosophy is to explain how the experimental knowledge of natural laws of the kind produced by the mathematical natural sciences is possible. For Hume, however, and this is crucial for all that follows, Newtonian physics is not only an example of the explanandum, but also serves as a model for the explanans itself: Hume aligns the psychology of cognition, which is supposed to explain the subjective conditions of possible knowledge of causal relations – and the meaning of causality itself – with the model of modern empirical science.

As the ‘Newton’ of representing and experiencing consciousness, Hume examines the introspectively accessible flow of simple and reflective impressions and copies of impressions as if they were natural events. This involves the observer directing his attention from a third-person perspective to his own consciousness; epistemologically speaking, however, this precedes the sequence of experimentally observed natural events. For example, Hume’s laws of association, according to which impressions are causally linked and evoke other impressions that are neighbouring in space or time, govern psychic events in the same way as laws of nature. In his investigation of causality, Hume cautions the reader against assuming that the causal relations conceived as necessary, which our minds habitually ascribe to the repeatedly observed covariances of perceived objects, apply only to objects in the world: ‘Passions are [necessarily] connected with their objects and with one another; no less than external bodies are [necessarily] connected together’ (TN I, 55). It is not entirely clear how Hume understands the comparative activity of the imagination in establishing relations (of resemblance, identity, quantity, etc.) between two ideas: ‘Presumably he meant that the comparative acts of the mind would take place as arbitrary interventions for the one who compares (but who is that?), but in reality they too would be under the spell of the universal powers of association … The supposed cogito is therefore in reality a cogitat and a cogitatur – says Hume, as the authorial ego who ascertains its empirical reality as that of an “it thinks”.’5 Transferring the objectivizing epistemic stance from the natural sciences to the self-exploration of subjectivity deprives consciousness of its ego-reference and spontaneity, leading to a decentred concept of consciousness to which self-acting operations are ascribed. Thus, any notion of an operating or controlling entity that could ‘shape’ the material of sensation falls victim to this desubstantialization of the mind. Although Locke makes only passing reference to the ‘work’ of thinking,6 Hume is the first radical empiricist to erase any hint of agency from the concept of subjectivity. He refuses to define thinking as an activity, insisting that ‘the word, action, … can never justly be apply’d to any perception, as deriv’d from a mind or thinking substance’ (TN I, 160).

Although Hume assimilates processes of consciousness to natural events from the perspective of objectifying self-observation, his scepticism prevents him from taking the step towards naturalism, in the sense of a monopoly of knowledge by natural science. But he becomes a methodological forerunner of scientism by eliminating the reference to self from the self-observation of both the philosopher and the layman. By committing the psychology of cognition to the third-person perspective, he universalizes the view from nowhere that the scientific observer must adopt in order to be able to concentrate on the basic concepts and methodology of his particular object domain. There are as many scientific observers as there are disciplines and properly circumscribed object domains. While for these observers the ‘view from nowhere’ amounts to an authorization to abstract from everything that would distract them from their object, for the fundamentally ‘undetermined’ thinking of the philosopher, the same view means putting a halt to reflection – in other words, it amounts to a prohibition on relating what we know about the world back to ourselves as subjects capable of speech and action in need of orientation, who are situated in the world via the lifeworld. Of course, this is at odds with the intention of someone who is committed to the pedagogical spirit of the Enlightenment. But the later so-called positivist self-limitation of rigorous objectivism results from Hume’s approach as the most historically influential consequence of his work.

(2) Anthropology of religion and religious scepticism. Hume was brought up in the ethos of Scottish Calvinism, but although he consistently repudiated the label ‘atheist’ in public, he seems to have rejected any kind of positive religious belief from an early age. In any case, it is clear from the first book of the Treatise that he must have regarded himself as a freethinker. The fifth section on the ‘immateriality of the soul’ (TN I, 152–64) explodes all notions of life after death, along with the belief in the soul as an immortal substance. The essay ‘On the Immortality of the Soul’ follows directly from this early critique. Together with the essay ‘Of Suicide’, this is the publication in which he is most openly critical of religion.7