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FROM ECLIPSE OF REASON TO THE AGE OF REASONS? HISTORICIZING HABERMAS AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

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MartinJay, Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016)
StefanMüller-Doohm, Habermas: A Biography, trans. DanielSteuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2016)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2017

MATTHEW SPECTER
MATTHEW SPECTER*
Affiliation:
Institute for European Studies, University of California, Berkeley E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Two new works historicize the human faculty of reason. The first, a biography of Jürgen Habermas, traces the evolution of his postmetaphysical theory of reason from its origins to its most recent iterations. The second offers a far broader genealogy of the concept of reason in modern thought, especially in Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt school. Both depict Habermas as one of the most important protagonists in contemporary philosophy, but offer differing accounts of his place in the history of the “Frankfurt school.” The two also contextualize Habermas very differently. While Müller-Doohm locates Habermas firmly within a postwar German, European, and to a lesser extent transatlantic frame, Jay opts for the longue durée of German Idealist thought and its critics from Kant to the first generation of the Frankfurt school. Both help us assess the merits of the procedural rationality that Habermas considers the only valid conception of reason available to us as moderns—Müller-Doohm by sketching its many facets and spheres of application, Jay by scrutinizing the arguments for and against Habermas's account of reason. As Jay puts it,

it is fair to say that a paradigm shift has occurred in our appreciation of the stakes involved in defending reason as a ground of critique against those who have reduced it to a tool in the service of some deeper purpose . . . put in a nutshell, it might be said—or at least plausibly hoped—that both the Enlightenment's Age of Reason and the Counter-Enlightenment's Age of Reason's Other have been left behind, and in their place is dawning a new Age of Reasons” (148, original emphasis).

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , April 2019 , pp. 321 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 For the original see Habermas, Jürgen, “Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative Validity in Moral Judgment and Norms,” in Habermas, Truth and Justification, trans. Fultner, Barbara (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 237–76, at 273.Google Scholar

2 For the original see Habermas, Jürgen, “Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking,” in Habermas, , Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 28–53, at 35.Google Scholar

3 For example, Jay writes, “insofar as communicative rationality involved a dialogic exchange rather than a conceptual subsumption, it did not efface non-identity in the service of a rational truth. Even an ideal consensus was not like a unified concept, which could be held in the mind of an individual consciousness, but was more an interactive exchange among participants whose individuality was not fully cancelled out by their agreement” (129–30).

4 Essential on the divisions caused by 1968 in Germany is Moses, A. D., German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Schnädelbach, Herbert, Philosophie in Deutschland: 1831–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1983.)Google Scholar

6 Jay cites Horkheimer, Max, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” (1937), in Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; and Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution (London, 1941) as exemplars of “vigorous celebration of the critical energy of universal reason” (98).

7 “For the “last ditch effort” see Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947): “This structure is accessible to him who takes upon himself the effort of dialectical thinking, or identically, who is capable of eros.” Quoted by Jay at 101.

8 Stuart Hughes, H., Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York, 1958).Google Scholar

9 Jürgen Habermas, “Wie ist nach dem Historismus noch Metaphysik möglich? Zum 100 Geburtstag Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 12–13 February 2000.

10 For the original see Jürgen Habermas, “The Dialectics of Rationalization” (1986), in Peter Dews, ed., Autonomy and Solidarity (London, 1986), 95–130, at 127.

11 For the original see Jürgen Habermas, “Public Space and Political Public Sphere,” in Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Ciarin Cronin (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 11–23, at 12.