Introduction
Jürgen Habermas’ writings on postmodernism lack the subtle reasoning of his other works in philosophy and social theory. What is at stake for Habermas is more than a critical exchange. It is in this sense that his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity can be compared with Georg Lukac’s The Destruction of Reason. Neither work is simply a narrative history of Western philosophy.
Unlike Lukacs, Habermas has little to say about the role played by literature or the arts. For Habermas, modernity is both a historical period and a philosophical discourse which he traces to Kant and Hegel and the split between the Left and Right Hegelians. As in the case of Lukacs, Nietzsche is a pivotal figure in the development of anti-Hegelian critiques of reason. For Lukacs, the political dangers were clear to all: Fascism and the Cold War.
For readers of Habermas, the central problem represented by postmodernism is not immediately evident. He views postmodern social critics as neoconservatives. However, this does not mean that they are consciously aware of playing this role. Most postmodernists see themselves as rebels against the established order of bourgeois society. They are at war (at least in theory) with Western culture from antiquity to the 20th century. They are critics of the Enlightenment, progress, and the very concept of reason. This is precisely where Habermas parts company from Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault.
Habermas defends the Enlightenment and the concept of reason against its new critics. What he fears is the return to the kind of barbarism which was embodied in the Nazi movement. This is made clear from his debate with revisionist German historians like Ernst Nolte and Michael Sturmer (Habermas 1990, chap. 9). For Habermas, there is something more at stake in postmodernism than academic philosophy or cultural criticism. Hence his stand on the side of liberal democracy.
The theoretical question raised by Habermas’ own position is the power of ideas to transform history for good or evil. Unlike Lukacs, Habermas provides no analysis of class struggle or the crisis of capitalism. His own analysis has displaced capitalism to the margins of intellectual discourse. The central problematic of his social theory is modernity and the achievement of moral consensus through argument and discussion.
HABERMAS AND LUKACS
In Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Kellner 1989), Douglas Kellner criticized Habermas for failing to appreciate the cultural fabric of late capitalism. He situates Habermas’ critique of postmodernism within the tradition of Critical Theory and, in particular, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s analysis of reification, the consumer society and the administered life. Like many other commentators on Critical Theory, Kellner does not see the more obvious connection between Habermas and Lukacs.
In The Destruction of Reason, Lukacs traced the development of bourgeois thought in three fields: philosophy, sociology and racial theory. If we include his literary studies, the story is told yet a fourth time. This narrative is what self-conscious postmodernists, like Lyotard, would call a metanarrative as if it had no aim but that of regulating all discourses. Lukacs’ analysis of irrationalism was written in the name of progress and a common humanity.
The figure of Nietzsche plays a central role for both Lukacs and Habermas. For Lukacs, the turning point for the European bourgeoisie was the challenge of the revolutions of 1848, after which irrationalism came to dominate bourgeois discourse. Lukacs claimed that Nietzsche was the dominant figure of irrationalist philosophy during the imperialist period from 1870 through World War I, not merely for what he wrote but for the way he was read and interpreted. He represented the alternative in philosophical terms to socialism, democracy and fundamental human equality.
Habermas’ own historiography outlines two paths, both of which draw upon Nietzsche’s philosophy. The first goes from Heidegger to Derrida, and the second from Bataille to Foucault. Habermas’ narrative simultaneously constitutes a history of ideas and a critique of ideology. He traces the decline of reason from Nietzsche to postmodernism in terms of “modernism” and “postmodernism” which represent the dangers of irrational discourse and a politics of nihilism.
Lukacs’ writings provide more than a history of ideas; they place these ideas within a historical context. He discusses the decay of bourgeois intellectual and moral standards in terms of both epistemology and aesthetics and emphasizes the relationship between intellectual production and the reality of class struggle. In contrast, class struggle does not play an important role in Habermas’ analysis of postmodernism. Instead of emphasizing the political and economic crisis which characterizes late capitalism, Habermas emphasizes moral commitment to reason or the loss of faith in the project of Enlightenment.
HABERMAS VS HORKHEIMER AND ADORNO
In the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas devotes a chapter to the discussion of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The importance of this chapter is that it clearly separates his own understanding of the Enlightenment from that of Horkheimer and Adorno. He argues that theirs is a one-sided view of modernity that over-emphasizes the role of instrumental reason and the domination over nature. He does not deny this feature of the Enlightenment but argues that it does not exhaust the concept of modernity.
Habermas argues that in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno characterized the Enlightenment’s process of self-development in such a way that their analysis made it no longer possible to place any hope in the liberating force of modernity. What was left unexamined was their elision of the achievements of Occidental Rationalism. Horkheimer and Adorno failed to appreciate the rational content of cultural modernity. All they could see was the relationship of purposive rationalism to domination:
The critical capacity to take up a “Yes” or “No” stance and to distinguish between valid and invalid propositions is undermined as power and validity claims enter into a turbid fashion (Habermas 1987, 112).
In Habermas’ view, The Dialectic of Enlightenment did not do justice to the rational content of modernity that was expressed in bourgeois ideals.
Habermas argues that the methods of analysis and presentation in The Dialectic of Enlightenment are similar to those of Nietzsche. As he puts it:
Point-for-point correspondence with Nietzsche are found in the construction by which Horkheimer and Adorno underpin their “primal history of subjectivity" (Habermas 1987, 121).
Moreover, Habermas believes that Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s methods reduce philosophical argument to a literary criticism in which historical analysis gets lost in a poetics of history. Reason is divorced from its central role in the philosophical discourse of modernity whose origin Habermas locates in Kant’s 1784 essay, "What is Enlightenment? (Kant 1963, 3-10)"
Habermas’ own conception of modernity is drawn from his reading of European philosophy and sociology, from Kant and Hegel to Max Weber. Weber, rather than Marx, plays a central role, along with Kant, in Habermas’ conception of modernity.
In 1980 Habermas was awarded the Adorno prize. In his acceptance speech, he asserted his own commitment to the project of modernity and argues that rather than giving up on the Enlightenment as a lost cause, we should learn from its excesses. In his view, the philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted to utilize their intellectual powers for the enrichment of everyday life and the rational organization of society.
The Enlightenment project of modernity was to develop an objective science, a universal morality, and an autonomous sphere of art. In Habermas’ view, Weber’s characterization of cultural modernity as the separation of substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into the three autonomous spheres of science, morality and art was consistent with this project. The unified conception of ontology and epistemology collapsed (Habermas 1981, 8) as religion and metaphysics became the central targets of philosophical criticism during the 18th century.
It was in this context that Kant attempted to provide a transcendental justification for science, morality and art in The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason and The Critique of Judgment. This was also the context of Kant’s political writings, of which his essay “What is Enlightenment?” is particularly important. When Habermas speaks of the Enlightenment, he is usually referring to the German rather than the French or English Enlightenment - to Kant rather than Rousseau, Diderot or Francis Bacon.
Kant's central argument in "What is Enlightenment?" has to do with the significance of intellectual freedom. He opposed any form of government censorship which would interfere with the freedom of intellectuals to debate the important issues of the day. What Kant was essentially defending was the freedom of intellectuals and the possibility of an argument rather than the authority of tradition. This conception of rational discourse forms the basis for Habermas' own identification and analysis of communicative reason. His advance beyond Kant's original formulation consists in going beyond the abstract and idealized conception of rational consciousness in favor of an alternative conception of intersubjective rational dialogue.
REFERENCES
Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
____. 1990. Moral Consciousness and the Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1975. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum.
Kant, Immanuel. 1963. Kant on History. New York; Macmillan.
Kellner, Douglas. 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity. Baltimore: John Hopkins.
Lukacs, Georg. 1981. The Destruction of Reason. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
