The Philosophical Discourse _ of Modernity Twelve Lectures Jargen Habermas translated by Frederick Lawrence Polity Press aeFist published in 1985 as Der philosophische Dislurs der Moderne: Zwolf Vorlesungen, © 1985 by Subekamp Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main ‘This translation copyright © 1987 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘This edition first published 1987 by Polity Press ir association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd First published in paperback 1990 Reprinted in 1992, 1994, 1995, 1998 Ealtorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UI Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 UF, UK, All rights reserved. Exeept forthe quotation of short passages forthe purposes of eitcism and review, no part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission ofthe publisher. [Except in the United States of America, this hook ic pld subject to the condition tet it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be Tent, resold, hired cu, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which i is published and {thout a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. ISBN 0-7456-0830-2, ‘ACIP catalogue record fo this book is available ftom the British Library: Printed in Great Britain by TY International, Padstow, Comvall Contents Introduction by Thomas McCarthy Preface 1 Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance II Hegel’s Concept of Modernity Excursus on Schiller's “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” IIL Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm IV The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point V The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno VI The Undermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger xix 83 106 131Contents VII Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida’s Critique of Phonocentrism Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction betwen Philosophy and Literature VIII Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille IX The Critique of Reason as an Unmaskirg of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault X Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again XI An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject- Centered Reason Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution XII_ The Normative Content of Modernity Excursus on Luhmann’s Appropriation of the Philosophy of the Subject through Systems Theory Notes Name Index Subject and Title Index 161 185 2 238 266 204 327 336 368 386 423 427 Introduction Thomas McCarthy “In the philosophical discourse of modernity,” writes Haber- mas, “we are still contemporaries of the Young Hegelians.” Distancing themselves from Hegel's attempt to replace the sub- ject-centered reason of the Enlightenment with Absolute Knowledge, Marx and the other Left Hegelians already an- nounced the “desublimation of the spirit” and a consequent “disempowering of philosophy.” Since that time, these tenden- cies have continued apace. The overwhelming “impurity” of reason, its unavoidable entanglement in history and tradition, society and power, practice and interest, body and desire, has prompted, among others, Niewsche’s heroic proclamation of the end of philosophy, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic farewell, and Heidegger's dramatic overcoming. The current end-of-philos- ophy debates are largely echoes of and variations upon themes developed in these earlier rounds. For French poststructural- ism, which serves as the point of departure for these lectures, it is above all Nietzsche and Heidegger who furnish the inspi- ration and set the agenda, Habermas is concerned here to respond to the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French thought by reexamining “the philo- sophical discourse of modernity” from which it issues. His strategy is to return to those historical “crossroads” at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche, and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome; his aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason by reason understood as communicative action.