Lecture 1 Modernity and Postmodernity
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| Praxis, understood not as labor (Marx) but as communicative action (“das kommunikative Handeln”), requires constant testing, not only of validity and efficiency, but also of truthfulness, rightness, and sincerity of all knowledge. This is not just a technical test but is evaluative and normative and includes the background knowledge of the lifeworld (this is not strictly speaking “knowledge” but more like unconscious know-how). So for Habermas the world-disclosing language system as a concrete a priori is subject to revision in light of innerworldly praxis. It is no longer merely handed down as divine from above. [Still, Habermas must not define the realm of the modern and secular as exclusive of religious revelation. Of course, whatever is recieved as divine revelation is always expressed in humanly and socially mediated terms. This is where we can discuss and debate. If Habermas excludes the possibility of religious revelation a priori he can never enter into dialogue with believing Muslims, for example—or rather, they cannot accept his premises, which seem rather to presuppose a Marxist, secularist dogma This would be fatal to Habermas’s idea of an inclusive, non-violent, Enlightenment society that in his view must be modern and secular.]
Habermas then asks (sec. V) whether communicative action, with its claims to universal validity, falls back into idealism. His answer is no, that it integrates material life processes and production of the lifeworld. A moment of unconditionality is built into factual processes of seeking mutual agreement. There is a claim to validity that transcends the de facto consensus it produces. Intersubjective agreement is pursued through communication in local contexts, but the claims adduced for agreement transcend the particular times and places of such communication. Still, such claims must be recognized here and now by actual agreement of others and not merely as abstract, transcendent truths. There is a moment of reflection in this process, reflection of the speaker’s discourse in the addressees reception of it. This entails self-reflection without objectification. It is rather an intersubjective mediation of the speaker through addressees. There is here a necessary supposition of an ideally purified discourse (disinterested, sincere, rather than only manipulative) on the part of those involved in it. Though discourse hardly ever is so purely motivated, this supposition operates nevertheless as a regulatory ideal. It is presupposed whenever we generally attempt to get others to agree with us and not simply to overpower them by persuasive means other than reason. It must, nevertheless, be admitted that the justification of a discourse and its genesis are intertwined and inseparable. They are its ideal justification and its material genesis, respectively. The force of materialism, with its critique of ideologies operative in a discourse, and the ideal communicative situation are dialectically related. Both are necessary to the binding force of intersubjective understanding and reciprocal recognition in the bond of reason. They form a totality geared to the seeking of a reasonable life together. The lifeworld as resource for reason is intuitively certain, holistic “knowledge” that cannot be discarded or doubted. But the universal structures of the lifeworld occur only in particular forms and realizations of a lifeworld. Based on these resources of the lifeworld, there is a release of rational potential in communicative action as action oriented to mutual understanding. This progressive release in history of rational energy demonstrates the normative content of modernity, which is in our own (postmodern) times threatened with self-destruction. Habermas is reviving Kant’s Enlightenment ideal of critique without the postulate of the self-reflexive subject. This postulate has tended to produce the closures that postmodern thinking has attempted to overcome. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightement?’” Kant argues for an original destiny (“ursprüngliche Bestimmung”) of human nature to enlightenment.35 It cannot for long be repressed, no more than children can be kept indefinitely from growing up into adults. The permanent renunciation by individuals of enlightenment is an offense against the holy rights of humanity to self-determination (“heiligen Rechte der Menscheit”). Monarchs therefore must not interfere with scientific or cultural writings. In the natural course of history, enlightenment comes first in matters of religion. State politics, too, can then admit of enlightened critique. Civic freedom is, in fact, necessary to intellectual freedom, yet paradoxically also limits it. Free thought leads to free action and thence to free government. By virtue of this divine capacity for enlightenment, the free man is more than any machine can be. One cannot help noticing the tendency to displace divinity into humanity understood in its sacred, innate capability of self-determination. The same secularized religious rhetoric can be found writ large, for example, in the Constitution of the United States of America and even in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag (“one nation under God, indivisible”). It is a note characteristic of the republican aspirations of the 18th century Enlightenment. Nature is appealed to as supreme and even divine authority. 1 Disfiguring, p. 181; Taylor quotes Baudrillard’s “Pop: An Art of Consumption?,’ in Post-Pop Art, ed. Paul Taylor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p. 35. 3 Graham Ward, The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 4 Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979), p. 8. 5 La faiblesse de croire (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 6 Cf. David Ray Griffin’s The Reenchantment of Science (Albany: SUNY, 1988). 7 “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire”(1971), Dits et ëcrits 1954-1988) ed. Daniel Defert et François Ewald (Paris: Ballimard, 1974). 8 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la géneálogie, l’histoire,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988 II 1970-1975 (Paris: Gallimar, 1994), p. 142. 9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p. 437. 10 My translation from Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique,” Communication faite au XVIe Congrès de psychanalyse, à Zürich, July 17, 1949. 11 René Girard, La route antique des homes pervers (Paris: Bernard Grasset, ). 12 See Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence 13 Luce Irigary, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977). 14 See also the volume Ideology of the Natural Sciences, edited by Hilary and Steven Rose (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1976). 15 Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodoogy and Philosophy of Science, eds. S. Harding and M. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983). 16 This is essentially Derrida’s theory of writing, but Cixous’s and Irigaray’s are akin. 17 Derrida, “L’éthique du don,” following the thought of Jan Patocka, provides an acute analysis of the emergence of subjectivity from religious matrices. 18 From Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism excerpt of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 19 Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) focuses especially on these religious connotations of money, starting from the derivation of the word “pecuniary” from pecunia, wealth in cattle, or sheep (Latin: pecus), the sacrificial victim, as well as of the word “salary” from sal, Latin for salt. He does not point out that salus in Latin means salvation. He traces the history of the banking system through Florentine hegemeny based on the gold florentine (fiorino) in the 13th century to the Genoan paper monetary system in the 14th century. See, further, Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (1900). 20 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848)” in Studienausgabe in 4 Bänden, ed. Iring Fetscher, vol. III (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1966), pp. 59-69. 21 Marx is quoted from The Communist Manifesto 22 Taylor, The Confidence Game, p. 46, credits F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1989) with this insight into Adam Smith’s relevance to current economic issues and his anticipation of very recent conceptual models. 24 Heidegger, “Brief über den Humanismus” in Wegmerken (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1976), p. 352. 25 Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919,” Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol 17, eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1992), p. 87. 26 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenshcaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemal (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), p.6. 27 Mark C. Taylor, “terminal faith,” in Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 16. 28 Don Cupitt, “Post-Christianity,” Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 216. 29 Oeuvres completes IV: Livres Textes, Entretiens 1972-76 30 John Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics,” The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 31 Graham Ward, Introduction to The Postmodern God, p. xxxiv. 32 Levinas, “Dieu et la philosophie,” in Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: Vrin, 1982). 33 Jean-Luc Marion, “Métaphysique et phénoménologie: une relève pour la théologie,” Bulletin de literature ecclésiastique XCIV/3 (1993): 189-206. 34 Jürgen Habermas, “Ein anderer Ausweg aus der Subjektphilosophie—kommunikative vs. subjektzentierte Vernunft,” chapter XI, in Die philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt a.M., 1985) 35 Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (5 December 1783). (c) Prometheus Online 2000. Download 0.65 Mb. Share with your friends:
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