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From the seventeenth century onwards, the Christian world, which had long been the terminus a quo of a reflection of self in the other, became the terminus ad quem—as an object of anthropological curiosity, historical research and political theory. Although at first for a few intellectuals, the contemporary manifestations and the historical testimonies of Christianity (and now of 'religion' in general) became the other for a secular philosophy that — while claiming to be free from theological premises— took the methodology of the mathematical sciences as its model. Far from one of admiration, however, the relationship to this distanced and alienated portion of its identity — which now represented another component of the ancient world — was initially wary, then an aggressively dismissive, indeed polemical, one. For unlike Graeco-Roman antiquity, Christianity was not part of an already concluded past, but a contemporary power, moreover one experienced as repressive, from which the present first had to emancipate itself.Another Girardian aspect that I am reading into the history of philosophy, along with Habermas, is the emerging rivalry between philosophy and religion/theology. Girard's banal but important observation that human desire is imitative, with the caveat that desire is not only imitative, e.g. hunger. For a long time, Christendom had no rivals. Kings and queens bowed down, what one might call a private market in those ages. Christendom's ascent to worldly power was so impressive that the same Roman empire that executed Christ became Christian as well. But with Luther, the broader Reformation, and the French Revolution, the opening for a secular philosophy was created.
If human desire is imitative, then we imitate the Romans or Greeks when we philosophize. But once Christendom became the only power, antiquity long in the past, the conflict with the Romans or Greeks directly could not arise. Conflict would occur between existing theologians around interpretations of scripture and their philosophy. However, with the rise of a secular philosophy, rivalry was direct and alive.
No philosopher exhibits this dynamic more than Heidegger. Earlier in his life, Heidegger was a rival of the Protestants. He at one point was fully engaged as a polemicist on behalf of Catholic Germany during the Kulturkampf years. During his Nazi years, Heidegger's rival was more or less modernity itself, not just Protestantism. Included in these new rivals were capitalists, technology, the Jews, democracy, communists, basically any ideology that was modern. Later on, Heidegger was more free to imitate the ancient Greek philosophers of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaximander without any conflict.
Especially relevant for Habermas's work is Heidegger's imitation and borrowing of the language of religion. Heidegger's philosophical vocabulary was largely influenced by Christianity, and the semantic concepts he inherited such as being, time, death, a Heideggerianized "faith", silence, etc. Reading Christian thinkers like Luther or Meister Eckhart, the influence is clear.
However, the displacement of religion out of the present of the new era was also a precondition for the Romantic relationship of reappropriation from a distance. Church and religion, as powers from the past reactualized by Romanticism, became the object of renaissances of a new kind...The debate around Romanticism just rekindled a bit on substack, exactly on this question of what is Romanticism without Christianity. I tended to agree with the view that Romanticism is inextricably tied to Christianity, and that Christianity out of the Romantic movement loses more than even what philosophy lost. Heidegger himself tried to artificially distance himself from Christianity in his interpretations of Hölderlin. Heidegger could not give an inch to Christianity and instead chose a strained pagan interpretation, although present, is not the entire picture.
Today, the trend towards the assimilation of philosophy to science, which I myself welcomed unreservedly in 1971, no longer has only the clear methodological meaning of adherence to established standards of argumentation; rather, it now has the substantive meaning of a restriction to philosophical 'research'. The systematic interest of this scientistic current is focused essentially on the conceptual analysis of the subjective conditions of cognitive processes, including those of scientific cognition itself. For this current, the history of philosophy from Plato to Wittgenstein is of interest only insofar as it forms part of the history of science or only for teaching purposes, as part of an educational canon whose significance has become etiolated because, together with the problem of achieving a self-understanding, the reflection of the self in the other has lost its existential importance. What we lose sight of as a result is a systematic interest in sages in the history philosophy as a progressive process of solving distinctively philosophical problems.One thing that sticks out in the analytic era of philosophy is the desire to quickly be done with anything that reeks of philosophy. Earlier analytic philosophers like Moore and Russell at least wanted to earn their philosophical position, which from analytic perspectives would be metaphilosophical. One book that was great on this topic was Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy by Peter Hylton. Hylton argues that both Russell and Moore were the ones who did the real philosophizing, that paved the way for later philosophers to largely takeover their "metaphilosophical" positions so that they could be free to dogmatically do their philosophy, or what Habermas calls merely "conceptual analysis". Many will not even refer back to the efforts of their founding figures, but at most if anyone presses them on their "metaphilosophy", they might just say that all philosophical problems are just confusions and misuse of language, one needs to just reshape and reform the language and the philosophical problem disappears.
This is what Habermas refers to when he talks about us losing sight of "distinctively philosophical problems". These are the problems of freedom, of practical reason, of being, of meaning. These are the types of problems that make people obsess over Plato, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, etc. They seem to be saying or showing us about what it means to be a human in the world. Conceptual analysis is important, but philosophy is not merely concerned with concepts, truth conditions, logical syntax, and the like. One cannot imagine someone who does "formal epistemology", someone who has never read Descartes or Kant, being sent back in the past to Oxford in the 1600s or Athens in the 400s BC being respected or understood as a philosopher.
In my view, what differentiates philosophical from scientific problems is not that they exhibit a vague holism, nor that they reject the scientific method and way of thinking, nor that they make a less technical use of analytical means, nor even that they are necessarily less specialized. The key difference is rather their synthetic power to maintain two epistemically relevant references at the same time. The framework within which philosophical thought has evolved since its inception is distinguished, on the one hand, by its reference to the world as a whole — that is to say, to what we know about the world at a given historical moment — and, on the other, by the systematic self-reference of the researchers to themselves as human beings, both as individuals and as persons in general, and then to themselves as members of a social community and, finally, as contemporaries of a historical epoch.Habermas does not sound that much different to me than Robert Pippin. For Pippin, in both of his interpretations of Hegel and Heidegger, along with his Kant interpretation, broadly map to this same idea, or set of ideas. In other words, Habermas is articulating a distinctly Kantian-Hegelian position. However, like Pippin in his philosophical conversion, there is a Heideggerian tinge. I am going to assume that Habermas is not a Heideggerian, but the language of this is less absolute idealism and more Heidegger's finitude, Dasein, thrownness, and "being-in-the-world".
For a Robert Pippin or a Robert Brandom, with their Kantian-Hegelianism, there are a few things that are constitutive of their positions. Humans are rational animals in that we have a capacity to take things as a certain way and we mutually recognize that others are "takers", in fact, our taking depends on others recognize ourselves as takers. The world we live in is not just a given-at-hand world, but instead, it is a historical and socially constituted world. Language is the primary vehicle by which we understand and also create the world, it is a top-down and bottom-up process of learning, meaning, and communication. We are at the same time actively creating the world but also passively receiving the world. This is where both Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger converge, a focal point being both Luther and Kant's apperception, the "transcendental turn".
To elaborate a bit, Kant transformed metaphysics from debate around metaphysical dogmas to one in which the acting and knowing subject, the human, is instead the center of the world. I believe it was Alison Laywine in Kant's Transcendental Deduction who went far enough to say that Kant replaced God in philosophy with the human. At first, Luther might be seen as incredibly far apart from Kant here, but Kant was replacing God with human in philosophy, not faith. Kant famously said that he had to "deny knowledge in order to make room for faith", i.e., deny the Medieval and early modern metaphysical dogmas of God, the soul, and freedom.
Habermas's project so far seems to not just be about his philosophy, but the profession of philosophy and the philosophers that make up that profession. He says:
They key question in terms of which a more conclusive distinction can be make between the two traditions that became differentiated following Hume and Kant respectively, and whose professional self-understandings are currently drifting apart, is the following: do we still see ourselves today as contemporaries of the seventeenth century or instead as contemporaries of the Young Hegelians?Everyone's understanding of what philosophy is and the history of it are going to be different, but I find it odd that Habermas even asks this given how many people do not know anything about the Young Hegelians. This is understandable as one who was educated in the American philosophy world, and only through Kant, then to Hegel, along with internet and other philosophy friends I discovered the non-American deep cuts of philosophy. If they know anyone, it might be Marx and Engels, but not because they were Young Hegelians. My Young Hegelians anthology includes David Friedrich Strauss, August von Cieszkowski, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Edgar Bauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Stirner, Moses Hess, and Karl Schmidt.
To vindicate Habermas's reading a bit more, I would like to go on a little excursion into the Young Hegelians. Habermas's thesis here is that religion lived on even after philosophy became secularized. The Young Hegelians are not the only ones who thought this, you can see some similarities in works by the British idealists in their taking up of Hegel. You can also see it in those who take Kant as Luther 2.0, the moral law as the truth of the bible and God's word.
Contrasted with the Young Hegelians are the Old Hegelians, these are the ones who were more or less "Orthodox" Hegelians, interpreted Hegel as Hegel and not as a bridge to something new. Primary was Friedrich Göschel. The editor, Lawrence S. Stepelevich, writes, also quoting Göschel:
"Indeed for Göschel, becoming a Hegelian was not unlike undergoing a religious conversion, a philosophical 'Pentecost', for 'without a re-birth no one can rise from the sphere of natural understanding to the speculative height of the living notion'. Further as the reward of attention, God's word could be esoterically discerned in the language of philosophy, and to find out that word, one mustwillingly and fully transport thyself into the concepts of philosophy;... be only first disposed to endure and to accept them, and thou shalt experience in thy heart their life and truth, that is, their total agreement with the word of God, whose restatement they are.
Feuerbach, the most important of the Young Hegelians, is quite different. Feuerbach is more similar to Habermas in that philosophy should play a more active role in shaping the world with reason. Just as Christendom shaped the world, reason shall shape it even more. Stepelevich writes
"To Feuerbach, the knowledge gained through the study of Hegel should not merelyIt is not hard to see how Marx and Engels inherited Feuerbach's legacy in their critique that the "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." This famous quote comes from the Theses on Feuerbach by Marx and Engels.be directed to academic ends, but to mankind — for at the least, the new philosophy can make the claim that it is compelled to break through the limits of a school, and to reveal itself as world-historical, and to be not simply the seed in every spirit of a higher literary activity, but rather to become the expressed universal spirit of reality itself, to found, as it were, a new world-epoch, to establish a kingdom. ...There is now a new basis of things, a new history, a second creation, where...reason will become the universal appearance of the thing.
Another of Habermas's claim is that the Young Hegelians were indeed atheist to some degree, and rejected Christianity, but they did not reject it in the way Hume, Bentham, Russell, Moore, and their followers did. The Young Hegelians has the radical idea that mankind itself is the actual savior of mankind, not some messiah. This is atheistic or anti-Christian in that it rejects a central dogma of essentially any Christian denomination. Stepelevich writes that, with works such as Strauss's Leben Jesu "Hegelianism was transformed, in the eyes of a younger generation of philosophers, into at least the rival, if not the actual destroyer, of Christian orthodoxy." Stepelevich goes on to quote Strauss, that "The messianic ideal of a redemption of mankind"
does not squander its fullness on one individual in order to be stingy to everybody else. Its desire, rather, is to distribute its wealth among the multiplicity of individuals...Is not the idea of the unity of divine and human natures a real one in a more lofty sense when I regard the entire human race as its realization than if I select one man as its realization? Is not the incarnation of God from eternity more true than an incarnation limited to one point in time?
It will be interesting to see how Habermas's project grapples with the narratives of say, a Heidegger or Joseph Ratzinger. Since the Young Hegelian movement ended up, in many ways a disaster. Habermas knows this more than anyone else as student of the Frankfurt School and academic in Germany immediately after the Nazi regime. But the rationalism, the exaltation of the human subject, the rejection of faith and scripture for a more pure reason, led to the Holocaust, the technological worldview, and the capitalist and communist societies. The space for something like Habermas's communicative social theory seems more narrow than ever. Something that Heidegger and Ratzinger could have predicted is that the rationalism would lead to nihilism. Stepelevich quotes Nicholas Lobkowicz:
Hegel had idealized the existing world. His disciples from Strauss to Marx felt forced to translate Hegel's idealizing description of the world into a language of ideals to be achieved. In the course of this development they also tried to concretize Hegel's abstract idealizations by translating talk about religion into talk about mankind, talk about the state into talk about existing bourgeois society, etc. Stirner might be described, and in any case was understood by Marx as the man who made the final step in this development — a step which leads beyond Hegelian idealism and negates it. For Stirner achieved the final concretization of Hegelianism by reducing all Hegelian categories to the naked individual self; he denounced not only a certain type of ideal, but all ideals whatsoever.
To "sharpen" this question, Habermas creates four categories that show the difference in the two traditions, Hume/Bentham and Kant/Hegel as opposed to the usual Anglo-American Analytic vs Continental Interpretive dichotomy. These categories are
their attitudes to religion and theology (a); their cognitivist versus noncognitivist conceptions of practical reason (b); their stances on the philosophical relevance of the human sciences—or, in Hegelian terms, of 'objective mind' (c); and, finally, their respective positions on reflection on the historical location of philosophical thinking (d).
There are two archetypal philosophers for the two camps. One is Hobbes, the other is Spinoza. Hobbes tries to explain the religious phenomenon using materialist/psychological means, while Spinoza attempts a rational reconstruction of the Bible. Kant, with his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is more like Spinoza, while Hume is more like Hobbes.
Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason tries to reconstruct and extract the rational elements of Christianity and the Bible, particularly influenced by Luther's reading of the scripture. Kant takes on the "two-kingdom" view of Luther in his idea of the visible and invisible church. Habermas writes:
For Kant, the biblical truths of ecclesiastical faith, communicated in narrative form and inculcated through ceremonies, henceforth only have the pedagogical task of imprinting on untrained minds the moral law, which philosophy justifies within the bounds of reason.As the late and wonderful Bruce Rosentock told me in one of the couple long discussions we had on Kant, there are those who think that Kant is the third great revolution in Christianity, the first being the 10 commandments, the second being the life of Christ, and third being Kant's moral law, the most pure and rational formulation of the Word of God.
Both Hume and Kant take on the new found objective view of nature as formalized by the "mathematical natural sciences". Kant's critique of Hume hinges just exactly on their understanding and interpretation of the justification and epistemic relation to the mathematical natural sciences, i.e. physics. The epistemic attitude of the physicist is a further narrowing of traditional epistemology. This narrowing of the understanding to "law-governed connections between physical phenomena marked the dissolution of this fusion of descriptive, evaluative, and normative aspects of validity". Habermas writes:
For the epistemologist reflecting on this act of objectivization, the categorial framework within which he himself operates shifts. His direction of gaze shifts from being as a whole to the relationships between the representing subject and the world as the totality of representable objects; and it is directed inwards: the epistemologist observes from the 'first person' point of view his own representations as part of his subjectivity. This introspective self-objectification acquires conceptual precision through the sharp contrast between the two equally objectivizing directions of the gaze — the one outwards to the representable objects in the world and the other inwards to the apparently immediately given subjective experiences. The evident self-giveness of these experiences is regarded as a criterion of truth, now understood as certainty.The way in which the physicist looks at the world became the way in which the philosopher looked at the world. When it comes to looking at the world as relations of causes, this gaze inevitably turned onto itself. This is why Habermas writes that the Humean tradition is "empiricist objectivist", or a noncognitivist when it comes to the question of practical reason. There is a subject, but it is more a less a passive observer of the world, just as the physicist is the observer of natural phenomena.
This is also the diagnosis that Heidegger has of much of philosophy. Within this gaze, this way of looking at the world, we run into not only problems of nihilism, but problems of skepticism of the external world. How can this passive subject with a "view from nowhere" actually come to know the external world? For Heidegger, this is non-sense, the human subject was always already in the world. Heidegger rejects the descriptive as the only form of objective validity, just as Kant sought to do with his three critiques.
Habermas traces a different lineage for Kant, starting with Duns Scotus (who Heidegger submitted his postdoctoral thesis on) to Descartes and then Kant.
Here, the epistemologist's first-person perspective on one's own subjectivity as the source of spontaneous accomplishments supersedes the third-person perspective on one's own subjectivity as a container of evident facts. The first person turned back upon itself, is not envisaged as an observer, but as an active mind that must understand and reconstruct its operations in order to be able to describe them. It is only by means of a rational reconstruction of the achievements of the subject that the philosopher can grasp the knowing subject's performative knowledge.Again, Brandom, Pippin, and Habermas all think that the achievement of modernity is the achievement of the subject's self-knowing, and that modernity is the "rational reconstruction of the subject". No where is this more evident than in Hegel, whose "dialectical" writing style attempts to do just such a thing in his Science of Logic, Phenomenology of Spirit, and Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The supercession of first-person perspective is most pronounced in Kant's philosophy. Kant in his famous third antinomy did not declare freedom or determinism as the winner. However, when it came to the second Critique, there is a tie goes to the runner situation where, practical reason has primacy over theoretical reason, and thus the human as an active agent must think of itself as free.
Kant focuses on the performative character of an active subjectivity. The theological reconstruction of the experiences of the believer from Augustine to Luther had already taken account two further epistemic attitudes over and above that of the observer: as a practising member of a universal religious community, the believer regards himself from the we-perspective of the first-person plural, whereas in his interactions with God and fellow human beings he adopts the attitude towards a second person. Kant was able to make these two perspectives fruitful for the justification and observance of binding norms and thus to develop a cognitivist conception of practical reason, because the appropriation of the religious tradition prompted him to understand subjectivity as the site of an 'acting' operative reason.On the performative character of an active subjectivity, this is spread throughout Kant's philosophy. In almost all of his writings, there is an element of spontaneity of the subject. This is the moral law, practical reason, apperception, imagination. With respect to the first-person plural, this is the many manifestations of the self-legislating community. In the Groundwork, this is the kingdom of ends.
Act according to maxims of a universally legislating member of a merely possible kingdom of ends.
This first-person plural is also the basis for Kant's conception of the political commonwealth i.e. the republic (see Doctrine of Right)and the ethical commonwealth i.e. the visible and invisible church (see Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason). On the second person, this is respect for other subjects as persons as ends-in-themselves.
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.The second person, the I-thou relationship, appears in the Doctrine of Right as well as the basis of private right. It is a common sense of American politics today that other people are autonomous subjects and should not be treated as a mere means to other's ends.
Combining all these together, we get a morally-rich view of our relationships with other people. This contrasts with the Humean tradition, which for this reason has always been one of the major issues with me. Most of the philosophy I started reading was moral and political philosophy and the Humean tradition is deprived of this richness for the worse. Habermas agrees.
Because empiricism can only understand subjectivity from the first-person perspective as a psychological object domain of subjective experiences, Hume takes as his starting point motives for action and attitudes that others may value as more or less pleasant, prosocial or advantageous and useful, but can no longer judge from the moral point of view to be more or less rational.
This and the next section are different in that there is less comparing and contrasting with the Humean tradition. Instead, it is mostly about the Kantian tradition. The Humean position, Habermas assumes, is clear at this point. My guess is as follows. On the Humean side, the philosophical relevance of the human sciences is that they are descriptive of the world, objective, and are known through the gaze of the physicist. Each field is built upon sense data of physics and the equivalent data of human psychology. Whether the Humean side has a weaker idea of causality, like Hume, or some slightly stronger, it is primarily distilling the world down into elemental parts, reducing it, such that the same language of logic, pleasures, utility, etc. can be used in domains such as physics, economics, psychology, sociology, or politics.
The Kantian tradition developed a more nuanced view over time with the human sciences while also undergoing changes itself. Habermas notes how the Kantian transcendental turn was replaced by the linguistic turn, in which Kantian philosophy became "detranscendentalized". The Kantian "world-constituting subjectivity" was replaced by a metaphysically weaker position of language embedded in "history, culture, and society". This transformation occurred in the post-Kantian phase of German idealism, primarily with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
In Kant's day, the only real science that was recognized was physics and the accompanying math that was a tool of physics. After the Scottish philosophers like Adam Smith, economics became a science in its own right. Back in Germany, the study of history, culture, language, and society was further developed by the likes of Herder, Schlegel, and Humboldt. For Hegel, these new sciences were the "objective mind" or "second nature".
However, this is where the Young Hegelians, in Habermas's genealogy, were responsible for further philosophy to the postmetaphysical era.
Inspired by Schelling's later work, the Young Hegelian countermovement, taken in the broadest sense, broke open the basic concepts of the philosophy of the subject encapsulated in absolute mind and brought about a further paradigm shift by deciphering the—now homeless—'objective mind' in terms of the philosophy of communication and language. This detranscendentalization of reason deprived Kant's world-constituting subjectivity of the armour of a priori knowledge, but without stripping finite reason, now conceived as embodied in language and organic nature and as situated in history and society, entirely of its world-projecting spontaneity.To sum up, he says:
From this perspective, subjective reason withdraws into acting and learning subjects who stand in social relationships to each other in their respective lifeworld contexts.The Humean tradition would thus lack any of the capacity to develop a position such as this. There would be no society, no first-person plural or I-thou relationship to generate a philosophically meaningful metaconcept called "society". Rather, there would only be concepts and subjects that are objects. No doubt there are those in the Humean tradition that would strain their philosophical vocabulary to articulate a conception of society such as this. Margaret Thatcher embodied this tradition when she said "They are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families".
Like the above section, less is said about the Humean tradition, so I can only guess by what was omitted. The post-Hegelian side of the postmetaphysical thinking views itself as both participant and observer. Thus, the location of philosophy is similar to the above section.
What does it mean for philosophy's self-understanding if it regards the form it currently assumes both hermeneutically and in an objectifying manner — namely, as the result of an internally reconstructed history of development and, simultaneously as a component and function of its various social contexts?Like above, the Humean tradition does not have the capacity to understand itself like this, due to their view from nowhere. This is why other people have to write their social histories for them.
Habermas ends the section with a summary of what he sets out to accomplish in four stages in this first section of his book. We are still not going to be into the genealogy, this first section continues the work of setting the stage for Habermas's methodology. Only in section 2, "The Sacred Roots of the Axial Traditions", do we actually begin the genealogy. These four chapters seem to be a way to lay the groundwork for his genealogy while also hoping to win over readers who might be skeptical of his project as another naive Western philosophical history.