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Therefore, the most that this new traversal of the history of Western philosophy can aspire to is to render a certain reading plausible, specifically regarding what we would nowadays call a 'meta-theoretical' question: what can still count as an appropriate understanding of the task of philosophy today?Habermas is setting out on a question at the end of his career that, for most major philosophers, is in the beginning of their career. This is not to say that Habermas naively assumed a certain 'meta-theoretical' stance dogmatically. But rather, the confidence he had was waning, and now as a retired academic, he is free to slow down and reflect on what we're doing when we do philosophy. This preface reminds me of the prefaces of works that deeply influenced both Habermas and me, namely, Kant and Hegel. Both philosophers wrote prefaces to their major works that are stances on their meta-theoretical approach, as a way to justify to the reader the approach they are taking, and maybe to ask for some patience as one embarks on these tomes of philosophy.
The book was originally supposed to be titled: 'On the Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking: Also a History of Philosophy, Taking as its Guide the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge'.Publishers be damned, Habermas says, who is going to stop this almost 100-year-old titan from titling his book how he pleases? He instead opted for this shorter title, as an allusion to Herder's famous essay.
Habermas's guiding thread, the discourse on faith and knowledge, is also a reference to an earlier debate that Habermas engaged in. Earlier in 2025, I read Dialectics of Secularization, which is a debate, or maybe just two speeches given at the same occasion is a better characterization, between Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, see my review of the debate here, Post-Secular Reason. The debate centers around the following question by Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde:
Does the free, secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee?Habermas was the weaker of the two in this debate. Ratzinger, on the side of faith and religious reason, seemed a bit more humble and understanding of the failures of both state and church. It could be that I am more interested in alternatives to a position like Habermas's. It would be presumptuous to assert that Habermas felt he held the weaker position given that he is spending the remaining decade of his life—his final large work, I can only guess—on a book wrestling with the "discourse of faith and knowledge". However, the fact that he openly admits that he went back and engaged more deeply with primary works of Greek, Roman, and Christian philosophy, the meta-narratives of modernity of Schmitt, Strauss, Löwith, and Heidegger shows to me that he became more concerned with his own position after this debate.
When he started out on this project, Habermas says that he was only going to be able to "offer a rough sketch" in the line of tradition from Kant to Hegel. This would have been an interesting project, but nothing as grand as what he pursued. There are already numerous books on this era from Kant to Hegel, such as The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy by Eckart Förster and Between Kant and Hegel by Dieter Henrich, not to be confused with the collection of primary works by di Giovanni and Harris published with Hackett under the same title. There are also numerous other books that engage in various permutations of the Kant to Hegel story, some including only Fichte, some including just Kant and Hegel.
Habermas says that, once he completed his 'Third Intermediate Reflection', one in each volume, of this history of Kant to Hegel, he would have entered the debates in his own lifetime between the two camps, on the one side Hume and Bentham, the other Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Habermas is less concerned with the differences and main arguments between the two camps, but rather how much they implicitly share. Habermas is more interested in what he calls the "prehistory" of modern philosophy and what it says about the self-understanding of the modern philosopher.
One interesting thing to note is that Habermas claims Kant more for the Continental / Interpetive tradition over the Hume/Bentham school. He goes into more detail in the next section on why, but the recent Norton anthology of Western philosophy places Kant as the root of both Continental / Anglo-American Analytic or Interpretive / Analytic traditions. We will see how this claim plays out in the next section, but Habermas rejects this dichotomy for a new one, although like the Norton, they both share similar origins.
In the current form, Habermas is pessimistic about philosophy's future.
But I have become doubtful whether philosophy as we know it still has a future — whether the very format of those questions has not become obsolete, so that all that will be left of philosophy as a discipline will be its expertise in conceptual analysis and the administration of its own history. Philosophy is succumbing to the same pressure towards ever-greater specialization as all other disciplines. In some places, its role is already reduced to providing conceptual analyses for the cognitive sciences; in others, the core of the discipline is disintegrating into offers on the expanding market for advice in the areas of business ethics, bioethics, and environmental ethics.Following Kant, Habermas thinks philosophy ties its identity to orienting ourselves in the world (see Kant's famous essay), a holistic sense of the world. The language at this part of the book seems oddly close to Heidegger. Back with Kant, Habermas thinks that philosophy should not be passive, but make an active effort to be autonomous and "shape" our "social existence".
But this "enlightening impulse" is a "mysterious impulse", the impulse to use our rational freedom. Habermas finds this impulse at work throughout the writing of thinkers like Kant and Marx, but, again in the Heideggerian language, the "economic and technological dynamics of growth" are projecting an "ancient necessitarianism" or "fatalism" upon modernity.
Habermas thinks that we can shed light on this mysterious impulse by searching for the origin of philosophy itself.
But the issue of the use of rational freedom returns in full force as soon as philosophy seeks assurance concerning its context of origin. Once it realizes that it does not have an absolute starting point and must abandon the assumption of a view from nowhere, philosophy can only secure its independence of judgement through a historical self-reference.Rejecting the "view from nowhere" is not original, but it does go against the common ideology of most philosophy. Whether it's the absolute idealists of Hegel's followers or analytic philosophers, philosophers commonly think that philosophy gives its own starting point or does not need one. Habermas here, again, sounds a bit like Heidegger. Heidegger searched both in language, particularly German, Greek, and poetry broadly, but also in the beginning of Greek Western philosophy in Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaximander.
After a few years of reading the tradition that Habermas is engaging with, the post-Hume/Bentham/Kant/Hegel tradition that is modern philosophy, I also became interested in the pre-history and origin of philosophy. Like Habermas, I leaned more on the Kant and Hegel side. However, two other thinkers are important for me: Heidegger and Nietzsche. Heidegger and Nietzsche throw open the question of both camps of philosophy. But it wasn't until I read Girard that I became interested in the other angle Habermas is looking at, the origin of philosophy. It is promising to me that Habermas dedicates much of volume 1 to the axial age where philosophy was not yet divorced from religion and culture.
Habermas's idea is that, by retracing this history of philosophy, he can earn his communicative social theory by grounding it upon the only thing one can: the "long conversation" that is the history of philosophy, particularly the discourse of faith and knowledge.
However, this self-reference must go beyond a short-winded reflection on how current thinking is always tied to the historical context of its social references and political changes.Thus, Habermas wants to distinguish his project from mere ideology theory. It is not merely re-tracing his steps through the history of philosophy. Rather, Habermas wants to rebuild the very background which contemporary philosophy operates in.
Only an understanding of the reasons that have compelled the philosophy of the subject since the Reformation to undertake an anthropocentric shift in perspective, and above all to embrace the postmetaphysical rejection of belief in a restitutive or 'redemptive' justice will open our eyes to the degree of willingness to cooperate that communicatively socialized subjects must demand of the use of their rational freedom.Another aspect of Habermas's history is reintegrating the history of religion into philosophy. Luther's Reformation was extremely important for modern philosophy, see his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, the language in it is very similar, it is the root of both Kant and Heidegger. We struggle to see that directly in the works of major philosophers, especially when we separate the history of philosophy from the history of theology.
One thing I am unclear about in this quote—which we will see later in the sections on Schmitt, Strauss, Löwith, and Heidegger—is what this redemptive justice might be. The little peek I had of one of Habermas's engagements with Girard was not enough to see Habermas's entire argument. Habermas probably did not read all of Girard's major works, he said in his old age he couldn't consult too much of the secondary literature. I suspect this redemptive justice is not much different than Heidegger's saying that "only a god can save us", the idea that only with some sort of renewal (the subtext here is violence) can we be saved from society, the world, or ourselves. It should not be too much of a leap to relate Christianity / Girard's theory of scapegoating and the sacred to see the connection between the two.
Lastly, having not read Habermas's major works, his position seems to come extremely close to that of someone like Robert Brandom. Brandom arrives from the opposite path, coming from the Hume/Bentham school of Anglo-American conceptual analysis. However, it was the American pragmatists, I think, that kept Brandom on track in his career to his more mature position in A Spirit of Trust. Habermas ends his work with Peirce I believe in volume 3.
Today, the question of what philosophy can and should still dare to achieve is decided, regardless of its frankly secular character, by that transformed religious heritage. This heritage, however, has found its way into just one of the two contemporary competing forms of postmetaphysical thinking. This is interpreted to mean that philosophy has only managed to make a consistent break with the religious heritage in the empiricist or naturalistic strand of postmetaphysical thinking. What speaks against this assumption is how profoundly the Young Hegelians' radical historical and materialistic critique of religion broke with Hegel, despite their continuity with his thought — without, however, thereby renouncing the interest in detecting the traces of reason in history and, in general, an understanding of their philosophical work as oriented to fostering rational conditions of life.Another point I agree with Habermas on is the tragic separation in much of philosophy from religion. This strand broke off entirely from religion and wed itself to formal logic, science, and technology. As Habermas said, the only value these philosophers hold is skills in conceptual analysis, but the sciences do not need these conceptual analyzers to make progress or do research.
Habermas has to qualify his statement since it is obvious that after Hegel, the Young Hegelians got in a lot of trouble precisely for their atheism. But the atheism is of a different kind than one like Bertrand Russell's. Many remark that Marx inherits and repurposes many concepts of history and reason that are similar to Christianity. Feuerbach's critique of Christianity was not a wholesale rejection, just as much as Kant or Hegel's were not either.