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Crisis Scenarios and Narratives of Decline in Major Twentieth-Century Philosophical Theories

This chapter outlines four major figures who thought that modernity and the history of philosophy were in crisis, decline, and that there needs to be some return to some previous lifeworld. The philosophers who did have an adequate response, according to Habermas, to the crisis of modernity were those who Habermas takes as his precursors.

Only left Hegelians such as George Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and the exponents of the Frankfurt School did not seek salvation from the universal pull of capitalist reification by returning to the Roman roots of Catholicism or the origins of Greek philosophy. Salvation was to be found, rather, in the revolutionary release of the temporarily deformed emancipatory potentials of modernity. However, they also conceived of the socialist future as a matter of reappropriating the dimensions of reason suppressed by the maelstrom of capitalist rationalization.
There is also a third position, that between the narrative of decline and progress. This is that of Niklas Luhmann. Habermas writes:
Modernity is the crisis—from here it is only a short step to Niklas Luhmann, who declares crisis to be the normal mode in which modern society reproduces itself (and hence does not see any need for therapy).
The other major position that Habermas takes note of is that of Hans Blumenberg, who wrote the large The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, who also defends the modern age from narratives of "Spenglerian decline".

Habermas is a bit schematic in this chapter as well, which makes for easier summarization of parts. Habermas writes that each of these four figures select one of the many traits of modernity as the reason for their crisis and that leads them to propose their particular solution in response to that trait.

The authors attribute corresponding crisis tendencies to these traits of modernity, specifically:

Excursus: Rene Girard's Theory of Modernity and Crisis

Before I try and discuss each of the sections, that is, the four narratives of decline, Blumenberg, and what "progress" looks like instead of decline from Habermas, I would like to talk a bit about Girard's theory of modernity and crisis.

Girard follows patterns similar to Habermas's, and has similar critiques of the narratives of decline and their solutions of folks like Heidegger. Actually, Girard has specific critiques of Heidegger. Girard's thesis of modernity is similar to that of Luhmann. Modernity always feels like it is in crisis. Any rational mind would either look towards the past or to the future for an epoch that is not perpetually in crisis.

Girard thinks that early human societies, well before the Axial Age of Jaspers, were in constant crisis. These crises were so severe that the cycle of rivalry, revenge, and murder could take out the smaller societies at the time. It was only through unconscious "trial and error" of sorts that societies stabilized themselves via the scapegoat mechanism. This was not like a modern science experiment. The anger and violence became unanimous and centered on a single victim. This victim at first would seem like a demon, the cause of the ills, but through the cathartic process of murdering the perceived cause of all problems, society found itself unified with no enemy. Thus, the scapegoat ended up being seen as a god, thus the ambivalent nature of the sacred for archaic religions and the fact that so many religions had gods that were accused of horrendous acts of violence such as rape and murder while at the same time revered for bringing good fortune, prosperity, and justice.

To reproduce the sacred, or to engender the sacred, society would try and recreate the original "founding murder" for this newly stabilized society through rituals and taboos. After many generations, most did not see the relation to human violence and archaic lynching, which explains how religions would self-censor the violence of Gods as tricks or non-canon stories, and eventually going far to essentially remove any of the human-like qualities of the gods to look more like a benevolent, but impersonal deity. Girard has extensive work on many of these religious myths and rituals, see Violence and the Sacred, The Scapegoat, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, and Job. Additionally, there are an increasing number of scholarly works on this theory, see How We Became Human (2015), Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East edited by Ian Hodder (2019), Can We Survive Our Origins? (2015).

At a certain point, the ability to "engender the sacred" weakens. This could be for many reasons: the society becomes too large, the ambivalence of the sacred generates those who emphasize the divine and good aspect over the violent and destructive aspect, or the original force of the story is diluted down generation after generation, like the original fairy tales which were darker and then got put into Disney movies.

After Christ, Girard thinks, the scapegoating mechanism is exposed as the scapegoating mechanism. The presumption of innocence of the victim, the defense of victims, and even the concept of "scapegoating" itself are all part of the moral fabric now. Because of this, there is no catharsis in scapegoating. If you blame immigrants or rich people, there will be those who come to their defense, society will not unanimously rally around any single victim. This is still a recent development, and it has never been perfect, e.g. anti-Semitism, witch hunts, lynchings in the American south, etc.

Back to Luhmann, along with Girard, this is why modernity feels like crisis is constant. There is no peace after the crisis, there is just a lull until the next one. The only path forward for Girard is to fully embrace Christ and the idea of self-sacrifice. There are many wonderful passages of this in the Bible or Augustine's Confessions that I have read recently. Girard's reading of Christianity is that it was in fact the pagan religions that were ruled by mobs and the bible exposes this. Totalitarianism is a modern manifestation of essentially the oppressive, mass mobilization of the mob. Because the sacred can no longer be produced, there are no "gods coming to save us", contra Heidegger. Rather, all that violence looks like in the end for modernity is the concentration camp and the bureaucratic extermination of peoples.

Along with this comes the need to adopt the Christian idea of meekness or humility. In Girard's Battling to the End he writes about Hegel and Clausewitz and the apocalypse. Girard thinks that Clausewitz is much more realistic than Hegel regarding the change to systems, the cybernetic and technological shift in society and warfare. This leads us to the nuclear age where the actual apocalypse is entirely possible and at times felt close. Girard sees a withdrawal from this as the only way to stop the escalation of violence and apocalypse.

Carl Schmitt

Schmitt was one of the many far-right intellectuals of Germany post-WW1 that were rebelling against modernity, the Weimar, and the post-war punishment of Germany. Schmitt follows earlier figures such as de Maistre and Cortes who were early critics of the Enlightenment, democracy, and the overthrowing of the Christian monarchs.

Schmitt wrote influential books, on the left and the right, such as Dictatorship, The Concept of the Political, Political Theology, and On the Theory of the Partisan. Habermas writes "the political" is "state authority embodied in ruling persons" and that this constitutes "the centre of society". With the overthrow of the monarchs, the political center is now gone and dispersed through the systems of the government bureaucracy, law, market, and the masses that make up the democratic body. Schmitt says "The political vanishes into the economic or technical-organization".

Habermas notes that Schmitt's critique is not just a right-wing critique, such as Heidegger's critique of technology and the rise of "cybernetics". Max Weber wrote on similar dynamics. The left has also been critical of the rise of the "machine" that is democratic-capitalism, where people become inputs into a machine, meaning, language, values become mere information, and a type of instrumental reason comes to dominate the logic of society. Habermas writes:

While Lukács sees this as the motor for the subjugation of labour, and ultimately all conditions of social life, to the exploitative power of abstraction of the commodity form, Schmitt argues that the capitalist rationalization of society leads to a fateful neutralization of the political. To the extent that society becomes differentiated into functionally specified subsystems, politics and the state lose their integrating power for society as a whole.

Just as Kant made the human into the center of philosophy, and then language "detranscendentalized" Kant's philosophy, a similar "depoliticization" occurred via the state and the monarch. Habermas does not want to regress back to this however, like Schmitt. Schmitt's position is echoed much earlier by the scholar Alcuin of York, who warned Charlemagne that "vox populi vox dei" should be interpreted as Girard would, that from the mob generated the sacred god, and this sacred god is the madness of the mob.

Schmitt feels to me like a modern manifestation of this position of Alcuin, that giving power back to the "democratic mob" is dangerous. Against Schmitt, I would argue, along Girardian lines, that this always was where the power of rulers originated from, the mob. Following Arendt and many others, the totalitarian leader is no more than a focal point for the mob, and enters into a reciprocal relationship with each other. The political, in its aristocratic or democratic form, has historically always been a partnership between the masses and the rulers. At times, this partnership may have become unequal, but it historically has restabilized. This is the project, I believe, of Habermas, the left Hegelians, and Christians like Girard of how we can create a society that is not built on the stabilizing mechanism of scapegoating, lynching, persecution, etc.

Habermas acknowledges this difficulty and shares some of the diagnosis with Schmitt.

Nor is the diagnosis of a dissolution of the political mistaken in every respect. In the specific sense that societies are increasingly blocked from exercising democratic influence over themselves, it identifies a serious symptom of crisis. Therefore, it is relevant to ask whether the decentring of society is not only leading to the differentiation of the state into one functionally specific subsystem among others, but whether it also affects politics as a whole and marginalizing citizens' influence over their conditions of social life.
This worry is shared by the left Hegelians and much of the literature on the left around ideology critique, public opinion, democracy, and capitalism revolves around how the ability to affect change as political agents is diminishing. This is how understandable yet extreme positions such as "everything is political" or "the personal is the political", or debates around "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake" come to be. Or why many of the left might reject "parliamentary politics" for "direct action". Or why the left hopes for some sort of magical general strike. Or why the left sees this total dominance of capitalism over society as a small, everyday, pervasive violence, and only violence in return can withstand and overcome the systemic violence of capitalism.

It was actually Hegel, I believe, who first wrote this critique in its left-wing form, see this left-Hegelian, Frankfurt School inspired paper by scholar Karen Ng.

Habermas and others like him have the challenge of figuring out how to articulate a new conception of democratic politics that is political, non-violent, and promotes the rational use of freedom and further, Young Hegelian "rationalization" of the world.

Leo Strauss

Strauss might have been the most boring of the four. Hegel wrote of the Greeks that the Greeks experienced a type of "immediate" or "un-mediated" relation to nature. Society, politics, and culture were an integrated and organic whole. With modernity, this came apart, and Hegel's project in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right was to bring about this organic unity again, in his "sittlichkeit" or "ethical community". However, this retained the modern's self-understanding of freedom and morality, it was not some sort of return to polis of Athens. Habermas sums up the issues with Strauss:

This brilliant interpreter of classical texts explains a concept of distributive justice to his students and readers that, in the meantime, has become counterintuitive. According to this concept, the good is embodied in laws of the polis that accord every citizen what is 'due to him by nature' in accordance with his ontologically founded status. This enables everyone to live in harmony with the natural order of the human essence.
Indeed, we are not much farther than Hegel's idea of an organic unity of society. However, the abstract right of natural law gave way to modernity, which Habermas is going to articulate the story of why in his genealogy throughout the book. The fact is, this happened and happened necessarily, not by accident. People arrived at new solutions to their old problems, and the natural law of the polis gave way to modernity over two and a half millennia. Hegel systemized modernity as he saw it, with roles for the estates, the government, citizens, etc. However, even Hegel saw that this was not a static and stable society, the rabble at the top and the bottom of society threatening to undo this temporary equilibrium.

Habermas continues:

Strauss is content with a close reading that relies on the self-evidence of the assertions of the classics. This abstinence is all the more ironical because Strauss himself combats historical thinking as the second major scourge of modernity, on the grounds that historicism threatens to undermine claims to truth. He can indeed insist that there is a difference between the historicization of traditional texts and the rigorous explication of propositional contents that can still claim interest after two and a half millennia; but he would have to confront both the hermeneutic objection that we cannot leapfrog an equally long historical reception without comment and the systematic objection that we cannot simply assume the truth of classical propositions without a metacritical refutation of the counterarguments that have been presented in the meantime.
Indeed, we cannot assume, immediately, the truth of "classical propositions" from our contemporary standpoints. We cannot pretend we can ignore the rational developments of our self-understanding in philosophy, religion, science, anthropology, language, culture, etc. To do otherwise would be the philosophical equivalent of cosplaying.

Karl Löwith

Löwith recognizes a different problem with the modern world.

According to this genealogy, the root of the present crisis is not modernity's rupture with its past, but, on the contrary, the false consciousness of its autonomy and of the 'new beginning' with which it deceives itself concerning its de facto continuity with the beginnings of the biblical tradition.
Habermas summarizes Löwith's conclusion he draws from modernity as, funnily enough, the same solution as some people from before modernity, the "stoic withdrawal from contemporary affairs".

Martin Heidegger

Heidegger is the most important of the four figures, I think for me and for Habermas. Habermas is definitely influenced quite a bit by Heidegger, but is disappointed with the way Heidegger went. Instead of continuing the work of the Young Hegelians and de-transcendentalizing Kant's philosophy and pursuing a post-metaphysical path, Heidegger went the other way. He could have gone the way of

pragmatism (George Herbert Mead, John Dewey), philosophical anthropology (Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner), phenomenology (Edmund Husserl), historicism [Historik] and hermeneutics (Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Misch), theory of symbols and language (Ernst Cassirer) or existential philosophy (Karl Jaspers). But in fact, Heidegger's pretension overshoots all attempts to merely desublimate the transcendental world-projecting subjectivity of the human mind into a spontaneous mode of life in the world.
Heidegger engaged with and critiqued most of these people, as many of them were contemporaries of Heidegger.

Instead of pursuing a post-metaphysical path to language, Habermas notes how Heidegger traded language and the topic of "world-disclosure" for an ultra-metaphysical history of being. Habermas shares Richard Wolin's critique of Heidegger that Heidegger's history of being, truth as aletheia, actually "de-differentiates" the well defined and understood theories of proposition truth by "assimilating" it to the concept of a "revealing world disclosure". The fascination with a 'revealing' world disclosure is most evident in Heidegger's work on Heraclitus, especially the fragment "How could anyone hide from that which never sets".

Habermas also follows Adorno's critique in the Jargon of Authenticity regarding Heidegger's language, especially the later Heidegger. Habermas writes:

The crisis-proneness of the history of being is explained by the dialectical character of this self-interpretation of being: it simultaneously reveals and conceals itself in its epochal destinies. By withholding itself from apprehension, it makes itself felt by human beings as the calamity of God's 'absence' or—in the Hölderlinesque neo-pagan jargon of the zeitgeist—of the gods. ... From the notion of genealogy, the concept of the history of being preserves the original meaning of family ties that bind, because allegedly 'only another god can save us' from the calamity of modernity.

As much as Heidegger failed or reached a dead end, and still inspires some completely crazy people, I find him to be the most interesting philosopher in the history of philosophy. His unconscious drive to become a philosopher, a consultant to the "king", a molder of the youth, a prophet of the future, and finally a sage, exemplified many of the themes of philosophers in one individual. The only other philosopher that is close to intrigue, impressiveness, and unorthodoxy of Heidegger is Nietzsche.

A much longer and esoteric project of mine would be to trace the "neo-paganism" of Heidegger inspired by Girard's critique of Heidegger in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Heidegger's rivalry with modernity and especially theologians led him to this weird neo-paganism. Interestingly, the rivalry to distinguish himself from Christian theologians purified his philosophy to represent that which is a more pure paganism. It is not an entirely clean break, as it was hard for Heidegger to completely distance himself from the Christian roots of Paul, Augustine, Eckhart, Luther, and others.

But a few things lend themselves to this critique of Heidegger. One, Heidegger touches on the pagan ideas of fate/destiny and the Girardian idea of the sacred. Indeed, Heidegger is recognizing that, without Christianity, "only another god can save us". For Heidegger to re-convert to Christianity would mean he would have to abandon much of his ontology and prioritize faith over philosophy, and he certainly could not philosophize in the tradition of Descartes or Kant/Hegel, much less Hume/Bentham. So, the only solution is to become close to "being" by getting rid of, i.e. "destroying" those things that are obscuring our access to being. This is anything that is blocking it, whether it is reason, science, technology, democracy, Christianity, or the Jews.

There is another angle to Heidegger's anti-Semitism. His anti-Semitism was more idiosyncratic than the Nazi propagandists. Heidegger actually critiqued the Nazi anti-Semitism in his works as being founded on a naive and frankly stupid biologism. Heidegger, in his pagan viewpoint, could only understand the Jews and Christians as the ones responsible for the crisis of modernity, especially the Jews who were more closely associated with the tropes of scientism, financialization, capitalism, technology, and globalizing democracy. Judeo-Christian values, following Nietzsche and prefiguring someone like Alain de Benoist, are the ones responsible for the crisis of modernity and worsening of the world.

Another Girardian excursion

Girard agrees in an orthogonal way with this critique. Indeed, it was the Jews and Christ who are responsible. They exposed the scapegoating mechanism and unleashed division where there was unity. Girard quotes two bible passages for support:

Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:51-53)
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)
I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! (Luke 12:49)
From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations ... (Revelation 19:15)
The problem is, following Nietzsche, modernity hangs over this bridge above an abyss, can no longer back, and what is next is open to humanity. We can repaganize and take our chances again, as these four crisis narratives and many other recommend, or we can become Christian for the first time, truly. Habermas of course rejects both of these, modernity is irreversible, and opts for the new path of a secular reason that is post-metaphysical.

Heidegger's philosophy traces what I am calling the "logic of the sacred", the rise and fall of epochs of being traces the rise of and fall, the creation of pagan gods. Thus Heidegger's philosophy, contra Luther or Kant, becomes "passive" and pre-rational.

Against this background of a general devaluation of the 'normal' concept of reason, philosophers are promoted to thinkers and, together with the poets, are sworn to a nondiscursive 'apprehension of being'.
Another point of evidence in the "logic of the sacred" is that Heidegger's idea of philosopher goes back to Heraclitus primarily. Heraclitus is a "thinker" because, according to Heidegger, the thinker is the one who stays close to violence. Heraclitus has multiple fragments on strife, i.e. violence, that I think must be read from a Girardian perspective.
War is father of all and king of all; some he has shown as gods, others as men; some he has made slaves, others free.
One must know that war is common, that justice is strife, and that all things come into being through strife and necessity.
Indeed, all things do come into being through strife. War/strife is the father of all and king of all in that it is what "renews" the pagan societies. These are the "ties that bind" in the logic of sacred, contrasted with the self-sacrifice and peace of what I call the "logic of the holy" of the bible.

To go further down this excursion, Heraclitus is known for putting his singular work, which only remains in fragments and references, into the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. This is the same Ephesus from Girard's story he analyzes in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, the Ephesus beggar. The myth, in short, goes that there was a great plague in Ephesus, and this is understood as not a biological plague but a plague of mimetic crisis and violence, as the two blurred together in most ancient myths. This ambivalence of meaning is reflected in the Greek word pharmakos, which meant both drug and poison and referred to the ritual sacrifice of humans to cleanse the city in times of crisis.

"When the plague began to rage in Ephesos (Ephesus), and no remedy sufficed to check it, they sent a deputation to Apollonios, asking him to become physician of their infirmity; and he thought that he ought not to postpone his journey, but said : 'Let us go.'' And forthwith he was in Ephesos . . . He called together the Ephesians, and said: 'Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease.' And with these words he led the population entire to the theatre, where the image of Apotropaios (the Averting God) [i.e. the god Herakles] has been set up. And there he saw an old mendicant artfully blinking his yes like a blind man, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonios therefore ranged the Ephesians around him and said: 'Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.' Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon them. Nevertheless Apollonios insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognised that he was a Daimon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause Apollonios bade them remove the stones and acquaint themselves with the wild animal which they had slain. When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molossian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Accordingly the statue of Apotropaios (the Averting God), namely Herakles, has been set up over the spot where the Phasma (Ghost) was slain."
There is quite a bit to unpack here. The reason Girard picks this myth is for similar reason as the myth of Job, it contains evidence of the fact that humans scapegoated to unify their societies, that this originated with murder of humans, and most importantly, following Jesus, "they do not know what they do". Indeed, we can see in this quote the sacrificial origins of both the theater and rhetoric. In theater, we expect the murder of an evil person who is the cause of all the evil in the world. Rhetoric, following Augustine, has its origin as an eloquent tool of a prosecutor who can stir the crowd (mob, "jury") into believing the guilt of someone. Hence, the original meaning of the word Satan as the accuser, and why Jesus is the paraclete, the defender of the innocent.

Another point in here is that parallel between Jesus, who deescalates the mob, "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" and Apollonius, who, as Girard emphasizes, uses rhetoric to stir the crowd, to get the initial violence started which allows others to imitate the initial person, the most important person, to throw the stone.

The beggar, who was innocent and could not have caused some plague as we know now, just like the witches and Jews did not do any of the black magic they were accused of, is now turned into a demon. However, this myth is from a later point in time, where the power of the sacred was waning, but still something one could appeal to, unlike Strauss who does not recognize the appeal to norms long gone cannot be "immediate". If this was earlier in the history of humanity, and if this happened more organically and unconsciously, this might have been the origin of a god like Tiamat, Pengu, Ymir, Purusha, or Dionysus.

It takes real work to engender the sacred this late in the game, and it barely works. This is why, as Girard points out, the scapegoat is not powerful enough to become a god and is relegated to a minor demon. As we know, the sacred had less clear distinctions between what a god was and a demon was due to its original ambivalence of meaning. In place of a new god, it turns out that this beggar was in fact Heracles all along. Also notable is the image of the dog or "the hell hound".

This myth, which was written in a book by Flavius Philostratus, was so popular in fighting Christianity's rise, that, according to Girard, the later Julian the Apostate, who tried to repaganize the Roman Empire, put it back into circulation later on as an archetypal myth. However, the sacred only had force partly because people did not know what they were doing. Trump's motivations and values are naked and seen for what they are, just like the myth of Apollonius and the beggar shows the pagan religions for what they really were. This sort of naked appeal of Apollonius, barely even hiding the violence, is what happens when the power of the sacred is weakening. In an inverse way, this is what Girard thinks makes the book of Job so fascinating is that it shows the sacred, the mob, in its pure form as well and prevents an alternative, i.e. the logic of the holy and innocence of the victim.

This is not the end of Ephesus. After Heraclitus, but before Apollonius, Ephesus is where the well known "riot" happened in the bible. In short, Paul was preaching against the pagan idolization of Artemis, claiming that "gods made with hands are not gods". Paul spent a lot of time in Ephesus and the threat of Christianity was so great that it not only would affect the religion, it would affect the entire way of life of the city. Hence the line in Revelation 19:15. The riot was triggered by the craftsmen who were worried that their livelihood would be overturned if idol worship disappeared. This triggered a riot in which the crowd chanted "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" for hours apparently.

Another place where Habermas critiques Heidegger is the post-reason, non-discursive apprehension of being. Mysticism is obviously something Habermas cannot admit into his project, following in the Kantian tradition. This would mean there is not just a separate way of knowing, that is non-discursive, but a more primary way of knowing truth. Thus, we need to distinguish the logic of the sacred in Heidegger from his mysticism, which would be another project in itself.

Heidegger's narrative of crisis and decline, largely influenced by his experiences in Germany, in the war, the Kulturkampf, like other Conservative Revolutionaries, is not entirely original. Where Heidegger was most interesting is in his logic of the sacred as I am calling it, his mysticism, and his reading of the history of philosophy. But, I largely agree with Habermas's and Girard's critiques of Heidegger. Girard critiques more of his paganism, and Habermas more of his narrative of decline/crisis and his mysticism.

The Independent Legitimation of Modernity

For all the strengths of these philosophers, their ability to read large swaths of philosophy and religion in impressive ways, they could not extend that charitability to modernity. To have stronger arguments of decline, these four thinkers would have had to present cases of why their narrative of decline is viewed as a narrative of "achievements from the point of view of the self-description of modernity". However, the anti-modern stances of these authors precludes them from engaging in this. Part of what they are rejecting is the picture Habermas is describing, one of rational agents that attempt to live together through communicative action, to respect others. Respecting "modernity" as an interlocutor would require them to weigh arguments between both sides and then attempt to make a judgement only after a reasonable process, like Habermas is setting out to do with his genealogy of the discourse on faith and knowledge.

Blumenberg, according to Habermas, sets out to prove just this. That is, that

... that views arising from the revision of errors are not in need of any other justification over and above the reasons that led to the revision itself. Blumenberg appeals to this characteristic of learning processes, which are in a sense justified immanently, when he insists, contrast Carl Schmitt, that the rationalism of the Enlightenment as such is not in need of justification.
With but also against Heidegger, Strauss, Löwith, and Schmitt, Blumenberg argues that the "victor" does not need to justify itself. Since the Enlightenment won, and we can view that from the historical and philosophical point of view, it needs no other legitimacy to its "sovereignty".

Habermas finds the borrowing of the political term sovereignty to be a bit weird, as do I. This problem of legitimacy echoes a problem that my former professor David Sussman and I had an interesting time thinking about in Kant's political philosophy.

For Kant, revolution is strictly prohibited in that it is unjust. Indeed, revolution is the highest crime in that it attempts to throw the commonwealth into the state of nature, which Kant characterizes as the absence of any sense of justice or "Recht", but instead characterized by force and unfreedom. However, revolution does happen in reality. From this principle, it follows that if a revolution happens and is successful, then the new power can lay claim to this principle as the current sovereign, a type of Schmittian decisionism still lies at the base of sovereignty.

But the paradox here is, at what point in our temporality is sovereignty established? This problem is taken seriously by current and historical regimes. In America, we saw this process crack a little bit with the failed January 6 rebellion. In monarchies, this was enforced by an arcane and complicated and equally fragile process of inheritance. During the French Revolution, there was a point at which it looked as if the revolutionaries won and were the new sovereign, however, that was short lived and another era of monarchy was instituted.

This problem is mirrored in philosophy, Habermas points out. To assert the immediate and unjustified (unconditioned) legitimacy of modernity is to be dogmatic again. This plays right into the exact critique of those who think modernity is in some way worse. Borrowing from Nietzsche (like all four of them do), Habermas writes:

According to Schmitt, the enemies of the political—with Hans Kelsen and neo-Kantian jurisprudence representing their juridical vanguard—merely disguise their own political power claims hypocritically behind the façade of normative universalism. Liberal political culture is literally the work of the devil. For, from the perspective of the drama of salvation history, all those elements that erode the political play into Satan's hands; and the devil manifests himself in the cacophony of the public sphere and in abstract law, in criticism and naysaying, in political party squabbles and societal pluralism, as well as in the power of parliaments and the procedure of deliberation.
Echoing Girard, Habermas understands and takes seriously this critique of modernity. For Girard, it is to prove that Christianity does share similarities with pagan religions, but in fact the similarity is an inversion, and there is a fundamental difference between the two. The Nietzschean critique goes, if Christianity and modernity is not only the same under the mask of "normative universalism", then its claim to legitimacy is eroded via the "hermeneutics of suspicion". Similarly, for Habermas, if modernity cannot present a legitimation narrative, then those that feel the negatives or downsides of modernity will inevitably view the values and principles of modernity as oppressive and no better, if not worse, than those before.

Habermas thus agrees with Blumenberg's negative project, his critique of the crisis and decline narratives, but disagrees with his positive project.

Therefore, Blumenberg's criticism is aimed in the right direction insofar as the authors of the narratives of decline of modernity failed to seriously entertain some important questions: might the philosophical pioneers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not have had good reasons to abandon the Greek and Christian concept of the logos or of divine reason and to take the mathematical natural sciences of jurisprudence and international law as their model instead?
This is where Habermas sees his project as offering the only meta-theoretical approach that modernity can offer, a rational reconstruction of modernity itself such that it takes seriously the claims of the competing meta-theoretical philosophies as if they were other rational people, something Schmitt, Strauss, Löwith, Heidegger, and Blumenberg do not do.

For example, we see the secular premises of postmetaphysical thinking in a different light when we discover that they are not the result of a return to premises of Greek thought that were Christianized, distorted and buried during the 'Dark Ages', but of a protracted theological discourse on faith and knowledge. However, the genealogical approach to learning processes would contradict itself if it did not ensure that the independence of the validity of the propositions from their genesis is preserved at the logical-semantical level. The reconstruction of the learning process from which postmetaphysical thinking emerged in no way diminishes the persuasiveness of its presuppositions; however, it expands the understanding of its context of origin in a way that illuminates not only the gains, but also the costs, of this learning process.
Habermas thus views the "advances in knowledge" as not only gains, but that there are associated costs. These costs are important to include because they bring your interlocutor along, to recognize the validity of their claims, while simultaneously defending the narrative of modernity as one of progress still. Habermas is thus making better of the project of modernity than say, Marcus Willaschek does, by recognizing the costs that others are feeling and experiencing. This is more difficult, since those defenders of modernity and Enlightenment usually take the dogmatic route, appealing to the ways in which modernity is working, and simply label anything and anyone that disagrees as irrational, whether it's pagans or Christians who feel left out of the conversation.

Economic excursus

There is another interesting angle here that is most likely going to be left out. But this angle is the economic basis for crisis thinking. I don't find it a surprise that the rise of anti-modernity philosophy and theory usually encompasses times of stagnation and decline in the economic prospects of a people, see the defense of the Ephesians against Paul, but also the Conservative Revolutionaries of Germany after WW1, the postmodernists or neo-pagans (Benoist) in France and Europe after WW2, or the era in America currently where we are feeling the effects of decades of slowdown in the American growth. Ideologies or philosophies, whatever you want to call them, look good when the times are good, but when the times are bad, and people feel it in scarcity of resources, the ideology looks functionally less "true".