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Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures

Introduction: Habermas in 1960s, 1970s
Preface
I. Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance
p.7 new meanings of 18th century still valid as modernity: revolution, progress, emancipation,
development, crisis, Zeitgeist
def of modernity: creates normativity out of itself
p. 8 "The problem of grounding modernity out of itself first comes to consciousness
in...aesthetic criticism."
p.20 "The question now is whether one can obtain from subjectivity and selfconsciousness criteria that are taken from the modern world and are at the same time fit for
orienting oneself within it...fit for the critique of a modernity..."
p.22 Hegel had to deny this critical function
II. Hegel's Concept of Modernity
power of unification - Hegel gets it not from logic but from experience of his day
p.33 problem of modernity is that it posited as absolute something that was conditioned
p.37 modern society= media of power and money as differentiated
p.41 only source of normativity in modernity is "the principle of subjectivity"
Excursus on Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man"
art replaces religion as unifying power
III. Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche
Young Hegelians separate critique from Hegel's concept of reason
-p.55 "Because the subject has to relate itself constantly to objects both internally
and externally in its knowing and acting, it renders itself at once opaque and dependent in the
very acts that are supposed to secure self-knowledge and autonomy."
-this is puffed up reason, conceals domination
p. 67 critique of Marx - problems in the concept of labor that creep into the theory of praxis these are at bottom "...the fact that the normative foundations of praxis philosophy --particularly the potential of the concept of praxis for accomplishing the tasks of a critical social
theory --- have never been satisfactorily clarified."
Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm
p.76 "...the theory of communicative action establishes an internal relation between practice and
rationality. It studies the suppositions of rationality inherent in ordinary communicative practice
and conceptualizes the normative content of action oriented to mutual understanding in terms of
communicative rationality."
Marx has naturalist concept of practice; restricts practice to labor
**wants to recover for a philo of praxis "the notions of autonomy and self-realization that
were built into the conception of a self-formative process in the philosophy of reflection"

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p.82 the production paradigm can say nothing about the rationality of collectively
determined goals, attained through mutual understanding
IV. The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point
p.84 Prob of Modernity: need reason as equal to unifying power of religion- but
these efforts failed
pp.86-88 Nietzsche follows the early Hegel in wanting art to inform a new mythology as
a public institution that will unify the nation, like religion of the past and restore a lost solidarity
p.94 Nietzsche separates aesthetic experience from theoretical and practical reason and
connects it with loss of self
p.94 Nietzsche gives up project of emancipation but p.95 "the power to create meaning
constditutes the authentic core of the will to power - hence for Hab creating meaning is excluded
from emancipation process
p.96 Nietzsche's problem: separates Dionysian from reason but sees Dionysus as a
philosopher - wants to undermine metaphysics while still doing it [I don't think he's doing it]
p.97 Heidegger puts philosophy in the place that art occupied in Nietzsche
p.99 Heidegger's critique of reason moves away from autonomy toward self-surrender to
Being
pp.101-2 Heidegger's critiques the objectifying thought of the modern sciences; Bataille
critiques instrumental capitalist action and the bureaucratic state
V. The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer & Adorno
p.113 disagrees with their critique of Enlightenment because it forgets the benefits: 1
science goes beyond technicity 2 universalist law and morality incorporated into institutions and
3 aesthetics of subjectivity that is beyond instrumentality
p.125 Nietzsche has norm of active and reactive power, but cannot attribute truth to his
theory of power
p.127 Deleuze and Foucault: "...the embarrassment of acritique that attacks the
presuppositions of its own validity." "This regressive turn still places the forces of emancipation
at the service of counterentlightenment."
VI. The Undermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics: Heidegger
modernity forgets being because it places the subject as the underlying being
p.140 Heidegger wants "propositionally contentless speech about Being - but this has the
illocutionary force of demanding resignation to fate
VII. Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism
p. 163 Derrida starts with a systematic study of language, just where Heidegger left off;
grammatology opens a field of study impossible for Heidegger because it is not on the level of a
history of Being
p.163 writing "...is equiprimordial with metaphysical thought."
p.165-6 writing decontextualizes thought from author, audience and referent objects
p.166 Hab's thesis: Derrida does not escape the philosophy of the subject
p.171 Derrida connects intelligibility with writing but he does not go against Husserl by
moving toward the intersubjective constitution of meaning - he only contests the inner
subjectivity of meaning

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p.178 writing makes for intelligibility by its temporalizing and spacing, these deferrals
are necessary for the function of representing but this takes the sign out of "pragmatic contexts of
communication, [makes it] independent of speaking and listening
p.179 Derrida therefore places the subject in an endless and limitless intertextuality;
writing is always prior to what is thought so the whole corpus of old texts is necessary for any
current thought
p.181 Derrida mystifies "palpable social pathologies" -- "degrades politics and
contemporary history to the status of the ontic and the foreground, so as to romp all the more
freely, and with a greater wealth of associations, in the sphere of the ontological and the
archewriting."
Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature
p.185 Adorno and Derrida criticize the same "performative contradiction" of "the
totalizing self-critique of reason which is subject-centered and hence authoritarian since it relies
only on itself
p.186 Adorno relies on art to identify the problem with discourse
p.189 Derrida proceeds by a critique of style, finding a "rhetorical surplus" of meaning in
non-literary texts, which are shown p.190 to be literary in fact
p. 198 participants can act communicatively only so long as they have "intersubjectively
identical ascriptions of meaning."
p.200 "...reference to an object, infomrational content and truth value---conditions of
validity in general--- are extrinsic to poetic speech" since these utterances can be directed to the
linguistic medium itself
p.201 but this must bracket illocutionary force hence no "pressure to decide proper to
everyday communicative practice" and "empowers...the playful creation of new worlds..."
p.204 Habermas says literature and philo cannot be merged because poetic language is
primarily "world-disclosing" and escapes "the structural constrains and commun icative
functions of everyday life." - lit. suspends illocutionary binding forces and "the use of language
oriented otward mutual understanding..."
p.205 "Derrida neglects teh potential for negation inherent in the validity basis of action
oriented toward reaching understanding..."
p.210 "Whoever transposes the radical critique of reason into the domain of rhetoric in
order to blunt the paradox of self-referentiality, also dulls the sword of the critique of reason
itself."

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VIII. Between Eroticism and General Economics: Bataille

p.212 heterogeneous: resists bourgeois form of life; opened only in "explosive moments
of fascinated shock" [the irrational?] - fascist leaders are heterogeneous - moral critique of
rationalism - heteregeneous as outlawed part is non-dialectical (p.215)
the auratic power of sovereignty is authentic for Bataille
p.224 sovreignty is useless consumption [like Mauss]; purest is ritual sacrifice; opposite
of sovereign power is reification and reason p.229
p.235 when surplus is not squandered generously it takes on catastrophic forms
p.235ff Habermas' critique: if sacred power is completely beyond reason, there can be no
analysis of it --same as problem with Nietzsche
IX. The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault
p.242 wants to show continuity in his works: connects discourse and practice; interest in
human sciences -- focus p.247 on Foucault's radical critique of reason in the form of a history of
the human sciences
p.248 for F. truth is a mechanism of exclusion that functions only when the will to
truth within it is hidden; p.254 makes "power" a transcendental source of historical criticism of
reason and "empirical self assertion"
excludes reconciliation (redemption)
doesn't say what constitutes the world of discourse
archaeologist brackets the self-understanding of individuals as autonomous
subjects
p.256 paradoxes in Foucault's position: power as transcendent and historical; 3
more paradoxes that are not clear to me
p.260 for Foucault - representation in classical period is too limited to permit the
representation of the act of representation -- so before the end of the 18th century, man did not
exist
Kant begins modernity: language has a problem in representing the world relation to self of subject doing the representing is the single foundation of certainty- man has to
estab. the order of things
p.265 problem with human sciences for Foucault is they do not see the will to
power/truth behind the self-constitution of man as knower of the world
X. Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again
problem of structuralist nature of the episteme
notion of discourse as regularities which regulate themselves (p.268) - but this
problem is overcome when he moves from archaeology to genealogy and puts discourse within
power technologies- this also helps with structuralism and Heidegger problems
but the p.270 will to truth is for all times and places and thus there is a "concealed
derivation of the concept of power from the concept of the will to knowledge" power retained the
innocence of a concept for empirical analysis but it preserves its meaning as a basic concept
within a theory of constitution - this is a "systematic ambiguity" links a positivist attitude with a
critical claim
[it seems to me that Habermas is attempting to show that Foucault work does not have an
adequate foundation - but this is the point of what F. is trying to do]

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e.g. "Foucault cannot do away with all the aporias he attributes to the philosophy of the
subject by means of a concept of power borrowed from the philosophy of the subject itself." 274
p.276 Foucault gets into trouble when he has to explain what the genealogist does and
how what he does is to be understood -- "the arbitrary partisanship of a criticism that cannot
account for its normative foundations" [but these are political, hence wills to power that cannot
be foundations, but they are normative - Hab wants unity of norms and reason]
Foucault is guilty of relativism and presentism -- his truth claims are illusory so that the
critique of the human sciences is pointless - 279 - Foucault can't show why the validity claims of
counter-discourse should count more than that of human sciences 281
p.284 why resist? Foucault needs norms to explain this
p.290 Foucault doesn't give credit to law as a liberal advance, nor to the process of
individuation and interiorization as gain in freedom and expressiveness
XI. An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus SubjectCentered Reason
[note change of tone: Foucault provided good critique of human sciences p.294]
but cannot account for normative foundations
p. 295 wants to shift paradigms to that of mutual understanding; agrees that philo of cs is
exhausted p.297 mutual understanding is based on language mediated interaction and avoids
objectifying attitude with its transcendental-empirical doubling (either dominating the world or
appearing in it)
p.298 Habermas doesn't go beyond appearances so ontological separation is not a
problem
p.301 the "purism of reason" is not reasserted by Habermas
p.308 Foucault wants to operated outside the horizon of reason without being
utterly irrational
Habermas appropriates the poststructuralist critique of reason but turns it
into a defense of his own position which is figured as a true rationality p.310 ***** when
communicative action is accepted "Only then does the critique of the domineering thought of
subject-centered reason emerge in a determinate form - namely, as a critique of Western
"logocentrism", which is diagnosed not as an excess but as a deficit of rationality." the Nietzsche
critique is "destructive" "not master in its own house" "depedendent on something prior"
p.310 [these are logocentric criteria of autonomy]
p.312 argues for communicative use of propositionally differentiated language that is
proper to our society
pp.312ff summarizes speech acts in communicative action
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT - CLASS MUST UNDERSTAND THIS -314 validity claims
geared to intersubjective recognition - communicative reason is p.315 DECENTERED
understanding of the world; explains "subject-centered reason" as assuming the place of the
whole [but doesn't his form of communicative reason do the same since it is a normative
foundation] IRONY - reason first had to be released in lifeworld before the systems could react
on it and "promote the cognitive-instrumental dimension to domination over the suppressed
moments of practical reason."**************
p.323 claims of validity are always raised here and now but they "blot out time and
space" - to argue participants must assume THE IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION exists -

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p.326 history is the successive release of the rational potential contained in

communicative action
EXCURSUS ON CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS: the Imaginary Institution
XII. The Normative Content of Modernity
ANOTHER REVERSAL: ADORNO IS NOW ONE OF THEM: "negative dialectics, genealogy
and deconstruction" "give no account of their own position"p.336 - p.327 an undialectical
rejection of subjectivity; throw out p.328 self-consciousness, self-determination, self-realization
HERE A DISTINCTION IS MADE AMONG THE ENEMIES -but favors
Adorno and Foucault over Heidegger and Derrida
p.354 "...processes of monetarization and bureaucratization penetrate the core domains
of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization. Forms of interaction shaped by
these media cannot encroach upon relams of life that by their function are dependent on action
oriented to mutual understanidng without the dappearance of pathological side effects."[what the
hell is pathological and by what standard]- what he seems to mean is that conflicts arise between
the state and theeconomy that are manifest in ecology and war spending and these cannot be
solved within the existing media of power and money
p.357 sees new social movements oriented to "the _ _ __processes at the boundaries_ bewteen
system and lifeworld.
+p.359-60 "Technologies of communication --- such as book publishing and the press, first of
all, and then radio and television --- make utterances available forpractically any context, and
make possible a highly differentiated neetwork of public spheres... Within these public spheres,
processes of opinion and consensus formation, which depend upon diffusion and mutual
interprenetration no matter how specialized they are, get institutionalized." [me- H assumes that
these media are pure tools of representing information]++
p.364 "...impulses from the lifeworld must be able to enter into the self-steering of functional
systems....Centers of concentrated communication that arise spontaneously out of microdomains
of everyday practice can develop into autonomous public spheres and consolidate as selfsupporting higher-level intersubjectivities only to the degree that the lifeworld potential for selforganization and for the self-organized use of the means of communication are utilized."+++
utopia thru mode of inf.
p.365 "Self-organized publics spheres must develop theprudent combintation of power and
intelligent self-restraint that is needed to sensitize the self-steering mechanisms of the state and
the economy to the goal-oriented outcomes of radical democratic will formation."
EXCURSUS ON LUHMANN'S APPROPRIATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SUBJECT THROUGH SYSTEMS THEORY
p.371 Luhmann - changes self-consciousness to "meaning processing systems"
p.374 "...the relation-to-self as conceived by the philosophy of the subject presupposes
the identity of the self-knowing subject as the supreme point of reference..." the old "reason" or
philosophy of reflection
p.376 "Public spheres can be conceived of as higher-level intersubjectivities. Identityforming self-ascriptions can be articulated within them."

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p.377 "Society's knowledge of itself is concentrated neither in philosophy nor in social

theory." - Here is where Habermas projects HIS position [communicative action] as the position
of the whole