The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures

If we were to nominalize a certain category by calling it the "theoretical 80s", there are two books I "elect" to represent this time for interested parties: Richard Rorty's *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* and Juergen Habermas' *Philosophical Discourse of Modernity*. Much as Rorty there offered a concise introduction to philosophers then "motivating" the bulk of contemporary discourse in the "discipline", Habermas here offers relatively quick rundowns of Continental thinkers against the backdrop of the reconstituted IfS's enduring concerns. In other words, this is as close to journalistic as responsible essays on postmodernisms early and late can be; Habermas could tell you who coined the term, but does not. The gamely accepted Anglo-American logical and metaethical work is blissfully absent from "historically informed" portraits of left-wing philosophers and social theorists relatively sanguine about the passing of fetishized "reasonings", with the unfortunate exception of a recasted Derrida/Searle debate: here staged outside the *Proposition's Progress* which is "intention-based semantics" for Stalnaker and Schiffer, but oh so much more once *realites* formerly banned from Berkeley get into the act. Also excepted is the "unfortunate norm", fellow sociologist Jean Baudrillard (who could easily benefit from a readily accessible longform periodization of his work) -- but instead we have a marvelously sanitized Bataille, a genuine argument for "inspirational" treatments of negative theodicies. The book to read if *Theory of Communicative Action* does not excite you; and if it does, the sundry works of Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Bourdieu are rather readily available after all, as is the German philosophical scholarship of which I imagine this was more-or-less a part domestically. But really, the only thing which impinges on this as a history of postmodernism (*After-Foucault* and all) is the *Wirkungsgeschichte* of intellectual life's influence upon culture during this period. If every band has a Shonen Knife that loves them, I'm not sure the widespread availability of Lacan in New York has nothing to do with it -- and this evaluation of postmodernism enables a serious assessment of its effective influence.

Though I am almost always disturbed by Habermas's borderline naivety concerning what he calls the "unfinished project of modernity," in this volume he rises to the heights I always thought him capable. In 400+ pages (a big book, but always just short enough on the essays to be concise and clear), Habermas shows his command of almost all post-Kantian philosophy. His criticisms are almost always on-target, and even though I do not follow his conclusions (has he read and dealt seriously with ALL of Heidegger? what does he do with metaphysics that are expressly anti-metaphysical, such as those of Bergson, Whitehead, and James?), I am always amazed at his insights and explanations. Interestingly enough, much of what Habermas is explicating (critique of foundations) has always been found in theoretical form in Gadamer, and in cosmological form in Whitehead. Habermas always seems to hold out hope that some sort of Rawlsian "original position" will be found (can Habermas really think that there could ever be such a thing as an "ideal speech situation," devoid of what Gadamer calls the Wirkungsgeschichte, or history which affects it?). For my part, I cannot accept this. Insofar as modernity wanted to find such a situation, it was guilty of what Whitehead called "misplaced concrescence." Habermas makes himself succeptible to the same criticisms. But even though I all too often find Habermas too optimistic in regards the quest of modernity, I am never disappointed when he writes about that quest. I believe this is one of Habermas's finest books, worth the time and effort required to read it.

This is truly a masterpiece. Especially if you're somebody schooled in the incredibly repetitive and tedious Anglo-Saxon tradition, this book will surely be a revelation. You'll need some philosophical training to understand a lot of this, but if you want a brilliant, sweeping evaluation of most of the most important thinkers in Europe post-Kant, with just the perfect balance of detail and summary, and of exegesis and polemic, then this book is essential.Habermas begins by showing how the discourse of modernity and postmodernity, the concepts that transmitted philosophy from the Humean/Kantian epistemologist's study to the real world, began with Hegel, and how it has been developed since then in different directions, but nobody has really risen to Marx's challenge successfully. Somebody who doesn't know Heidegger and Derrida too well may get the impression that they're not as important as they actually are, due to Habermas' necessarily selective treatment of their work, but other than that the way Habermas dissects the nature of modernity and postmodernity, and then shows how the future can still be hopeful with 'communicative rationality' rather than the solipsistic nature of pre-Habermasian philosophy which inevitably ends up in postmodern tangles, is brilliant.You can hardly expect any one text to be perfectly right, and I do have a few annoyances - mainly 1) his treatment of Searle's attack upon Derrida, which leaves the situation seeming a little more lopsided in favour of Searle than it really was (you get the impression Searle beat Derrida, when in fact Derrida really won the argument, he just failed to emphasise a few things) & 2) his treatment of Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism, which in many ways, though disheartening, is still a little more realistic than his own optimistic point of view (he could've said that, despite Adorno's pessimism, communicative rationality is the best way to go, rather than making it seem as if we're on a direct, quick road to his utopian 'ideal speech situation'), and finally 3) when he assumes that "metaphysical world views" are "outdated", he ignores the possibility of going right back to Hegel and revitalising him with the positive, rather than the negative-Nietzschean, insights of the last 200 years, especially that of Lévinas Heideggerean theology and the late Derrida's 1990s writings on religion. A possibility that's difficult but he dismisses a little too easily.Other than that, though, this is an astounding book of a quality immensely superior to the mass of over-rated rubbish you get these days, like Foucalt and Rorty.