Postmetaphysical Thinking

Between Metaphysics and the Critique of Reason

Jürgen Habermas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745614120
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

In this new collection of recent essays, Habermas takes up and pursues the line of analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. He begins by outlining the sources and central themes of twentieth-century philosophy, and the range of current debates. He then examines a number of key contributions to these debates, from the pragmatic philosophies of Mead, Perice and Rorty to the post-structuralism of Foucault.

Like most contemporary thinkers, Habermas is critical of the Western metaphysical tradition and its exaggerated conception of reason. But he cautions against the temptation to relinquish this conception altogether. In opposition to the radical critics of Western philosophy, Habermas argues that postmetaphysical thinking can remain critical only if it preserves the idea of reason while stripping it of its metaphysical trappings. Habermas contributes to this task by developing further his distinctive approach to problems of meaning, rationality and subjectivity.

This book will be of particular interest to students of philosophy, sociology and social and political theory, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the continuing development of Habermas's project.

III

Between Metaphysics and the Critique of Reason

6

The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices

“The One and the Many,” unity and plurality, designates the theme that has governed metaphysics from its inception. Metaphysics believes it can trace everything back to one. Since Plato, it has presented itself in its definitive forms as the doctrine of universal unity; theory is directed toward the one as the origin and ground of everything. Prior to Plotinus, this one was called the idea of the good or of the first mover; after him, it was called summum ens, the unconditioned, or absolute spirit. During the last decade this theme has taken on renewed relevance. One side bemoans the loss of the unitary thinking of metaphysics and is working either on a rehabilitation of pre-Kantian figures of thought or on a return to metaphysics that goes beyond Kant.¹ Conversely, the other side attributes responsibility for the crises of the present to the metaphysical legacy left by unitary thinking within the philosophy of the subject and the philosophy of history. This side invokes plural histories and forms of life in opposition to a singular world history and lifeworld, the alterity of language games and discourses in opposition to the identity of language and dialogue, and scintillating contexts in opposition to univocally fixed meanings. To be sure, this protest against unity made in the name of a suppressed plurality expresses itself in two opposed versions. In the radical contextualism of a Lyotard or a Rorty, the old intention behind the critique of metaphysics lives on: to rescue the moments that had been sacrificed to idealism—the non-identical and the nonintegrated, the deviant and the heterogeneous, the contradictory and the conflictual, the transitory and the accidental.² In other contexts, on the other hand, the apologetics of the accidental and the abandonment of the principled lose their subversive traits. In these contexts, all that is retained is the functional significance of shielding the powers of tradition, which are no longer rationally defensible, against unseemly critical claims; the point is to provide cultural protection for the flanks of a process of societal modernization that is spinning out of control.³

Thus, the nuanced debate surrounding the one and the many cannot be reduced to a simple for or against. The picture is made even more complex by latent elective affinities. The protest against the overpowering one that is made today in the name of an oppressed plurality allows itself at least a sympathetic detachment vis-a-vis the appearance of unitary thinking in renewed metaphysical form. For the fact is that radical contextualism itself thrives on a negative metaphysics, which ceaselessly circles around that which metaphysical idealism had always intended by the unconditioned but which it had always failed to achieve. But, from the functionalist perspective of a compensation for the burdens of societal modernization, the less radical form of contextualism can also get by with metaphysics, even though this contextualism itself no longer believes in the metaphysical claims to truth. The parties for and against the unitary thinking of metaphysics only form a clear constellation in relation to a third party, in which they detect a common opponent. I am referring to the humanism of those who continue the Kantian tradition by seeking to use the philosophy of language to save a concept of reason that is skeptical and postmetaphysical, yet not defeatist.⁴ As seen by the unitary thinking of metaphysics, the procedural concept of communicative reason is too weak because it discharges everything that has to do with content into the realm of the contingent and even allows one to think of reason itself as having contingently arisen. Yet, as seen by contextualism, this concept is too strong because even the borders of allegedly incommensurable worlds prove to be penetrable in the empirical medium of mutual understanding. The metaphysical priority of unity above plurality and the contextualistic priority of plurality above unity are secret accomplices. My reflections point toward the thesis that the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices—as the possibility in principle of passing from one language into another—a passage that, no matter how occasional, is still comprehensible. This possibility of mutual understanding, which is now guaranteed only procedurally and is realized only transitorily, forms the background for the existing diversity of those who encounter one another—even when they fail to understand each other.

I want to begin (I) by recalling the ambiguous significance of the unitary thinking of metaphysics, which, in emancipating itself from mythological thinking that focuses on origins, still remains tied to the latter. Along the way, I will touch on three topics that have sparked the critique of metaphysics within the very framework of metaphysics: the relationship of identity and difference, the problem of what is ineffably individual, and the discontent with affirmative thinking—above all with the merely privative determinations of matter and evil. Then I would like to retrace (II), in the case of Kant, the turn away from a rational unity derived from the objective order of the world and toward a concept of reason as the subjective faculty of idealizing synthesis; admittedly, the old problem of idealism, how mundus intelligibilis and mundus sensibilis are to be mediated, returns here in a new form. Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard attempt, each in his own way, to lay claim to the medium of history in order to conceive of the unity of a historicized world as process—whether it be the unity of the world as a whole, or of the human world, or of the life history of the individual. Positivism and historicism reply to this with a new turn (III), this time toward the theory of science. As we see today, this turn prepared the way for contextualism in one version or another. The objections to this position draw attention in turn to the impossibility of circumventing the symmetrical structure of perspectives built into every speech situation, a structure that makes possible the intersubjectivity of reaching understanding in language. Thus (IV), a weak and transitory unity of reason, which does not fall under the idealistic spell of a universality that triumphs over the particular and the singular, asserts itself in the medium of language. The theme of the one and the many arises in different ways in the ontological, the mentalistic, and the linguistic paradigms.

I

“The one and the many” is the central topic in the Enneads of Plotinus. That work recapitulates the movement of thought within philosophical idealism that began with Parmenides and that led beyond the cognitive limits of the mythological way of seeing the world. To hen panta does not mean that everything is absorbed into one but that the many can be traced back to the one and can thereby be conceived as a whole, as totality. Through this powerful abstraction, the human mind gains an extramundane point of reference, a distancing perspective, from which the agitated in-one-another and against-one-another of concrete events and phenomena are joined together in a stable whole that is itself freed from the mutability of occurrences. This distancing view is then able to differentiate between the totality of what is and individual entities, between the world and what occurs within it. In turn, this distinction makes possible a level of explanation that is remarkably different from mythological narratives. The world in the singular refers to one origin, and indeed to one that can no longer be of the same sort as the original powers of mythology, which appear in the plural and compete with one another. The latter remained interwoven with the chain of generations and had their beginning in time; but as presuppositionless beginning, the one is a first from which time and the temporal first emerge.

Because every phenomenon in need of explanation must now be related in the last instance to the one and the whole, the necessity of disambiguation asserts itself—everything innerworldly must be made univocal as a being that is identical with itself, i.e., as an object that is in each case particular. And the explanation for the phenomena that have become objects cannot be sought at the level of the phenomena themselves but only in something that underlies the phenomena—in essences, ideas, forms, or substances, which, like the one and the whole, are themselves of a conceptual nature or, in the manner of the archetype, at least occupy a middle ground between concepts and images. The one is therefore regarded as the first not only in the sense of the first beginning or origin but also as the first reason or ground, the primordial image, or the concept of the concept. Explanation by principles, which grasps the particular under the universal and derives it from a final axiom, this deductive mode of explanation modeled on geometry, breaks with the concretism of a worldview in which the particular is immediately enmeshed with the particular, one is mirrored in the other, and everything forms an extensive flat weave of oppositions and similarities. One could say, with Nietzsche, that mythology is familiar only with surface, only with appearance and not with essence. In opposition to that, metaphysics delves into the depths.

The world religions, especially the monotheistic ones and Buddhism, attained a conceptual level on a par with philosophical idealism. But when they put the world as a whole at a distance by means of a history of salvation or of a cosmology, the great prophets and founders of religions were led by questions posed ethically, whereas the Greek philosophers made the break with the immediacy of the narrative weave of concrete appearances theoretically. In this latter case, the advance from mythos to logos had more than socio-cognitive potential. Yet even the act of contemplation had an ethico-religious significance. A manner of living crystalized around the theoretical attitude of one who immerses himself in the intuition of the cosmos. This bios theoretikos was laden with expectations similar to those of the privileged paths to salvation of the wandering monk, of the eremite, or of the monastic brother. According to Plotinus, in the medium of thought the soul forms itself into a self, which becomes conscious of itself as a self in the recollective, reflexive intuition of the one. Henosis, the uniting of the philosopher with the one, for which discursive thinking prepares the way, is at once ecstatic self-transcendence and reflexive self-reassurance. The dematerializing and de-differentiating recognition of the one in the many, the concentration upon the one itself, and the identification with the source of the limitless light, with the circle of circles—all this does not extinguish the self but intensifies self-consciousness. Philosophy refers to the conscious life as its telos. The identity of the ego forms itself in the contemplative present-ation of the identity of the world. Thus, the thinking of the philosophy of origins did indeed have an emancipatory meaning.

Metaphysics also belongs to the world-historical process described by Max Weber from the perspective of the sociology of religion as rationalization and by Karl Jaspers as the cognitive advance of the ‘axial period’ (extending from Buddha via Socrates and Jesus up to Mohammed).⁵ Of course, that was a process of “rationalization” in an entirely different sense as well. From Freud to Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectic inherent in metaphysical enlightenment has been retraced.⁶ The spell of mythological powers and the enchantment of demons, which were supposed to be broken by the abstraction of universal, eternal, and necessary being, still live on in the idealistic triumph of the one over the many. The fear of uncontrolled dangers that displayed itself in myths and magical practices now lodges within the controlling concepts of metaphysics itself. Negation, which opposed the many to the one as Parmenides opposed nonbeing to being, is also negation in the sense of a defense against deep-seated fears of death and frailty, of isolation and separation, of opposition and contradiction, of surprise and novelty.⁷ This same defensiveness still betrays itself in the idealist devaluation of the many to mere appearances. As mere images of the Ideas, the surging phenomena become univocal, the surveyable parts of a harmonic order.

The history of metaphysical thinking fuels the materialist suspicion that the power of mythological origins, from which no one can distance himself and go unpunished, is merely extended in idealism in a more sublime and less merciful way. Metaphysics labors in vain on certain key problems that seem to result from the rebellion of a disenfranchised plurality against a unity that is compulsory and, to that extent, illusory. From at least three perspectives, the same question is posed again and again: how are the one and the many, the infinite and the finite, related to each other?

First, How can the one, without endangering its unity, be everything (Alles), if the universe (das All) is indeed composed of many different things? The question of how the identity of identity and difference can be conceived, which was still the concern of Hegel’s Differenzschrift, emerges out of the problem of methexis in the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. Plotinus had already incisively stated this problem with a paradoxical formulation: “The one is everything and yet not even one (among all things).”⁸ The one is everything insofar as it resides in every individual being as its origin; yet, at the same time, insofar as it can preserve its unity only through its distinction from the otherness of each individual being, the one is also nothing among them all. In order to be everything, the one is thus in everything; at the same time, in order to remain the one itself, it is above everything—it both lies beyond and underlies everything innerworldly.

Metaphysics entangles itself in such paradoxical formulations because, thinking ontologically, it vainly tries to subsume the one itself under objectifying categories; but as the origin, ground, and totality of all beings, the one is what first constitutes the perspective that allows the many to be objectivated as the plurality of beings. For this reason, it was still necessary for Heidegger to insist upon the ontological difference between Being and beings, which is supposed to guard against the assimilation of the one to the other.

Plotinus transfers this paradox out of the one itself and into nous: only within the human faculty of cognition does the gap open up between discursively grasping the many and intuitively melting together with the one; the former process merely moves toward the latter. Of course, this negative ontological concept of the one as something effusive, which refuses all involvement with discursive reasoning, clears the way for a self-referential critique of reason that continues to hold the thinking of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida under the influence of metaphysics. Whenever the one is thought of as absolute negativity, as withdrawal and absence, as resistance against propositional speech in general, the ground (Grund) of rationality reveals itself as an abyss (Abgrund) of the irrational.

Second, there arises the question of whether idealism, which traces everything back to one and thereby devalues innerworldly beings to phenomena or images, can do justice to the integrity of the particular entity in its individuality and uniqueness. Metaphysics uses the concepts of genus and specific difference in order to break the universal down into the particular. Following the genealogical model, the family tree of the Ideas or generic concepts branches off from each level of generality into specific differences, each species of which can in turn constitute a genus proximum for further sp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Translator's Introduction
• I A Return to Metaphysics?
• II The Turn to Pragmatics
• III Between Metaphysics and the Critique of Reason
• Index