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3. The Occidental Path of Development and the Claim to Universality of Postmetaphysical Thinking

Like the last chapter, this chapter was not philosophically rich. This is fine and I enjoyed reading it and understand how it fits into Habermas's project. However, I am not going to write up about it. Part of the reason is the sociological and political literature is very contemporary.

Habermas takes a left-Hegelian approach that is realistic in not assuming the path of the West is the path everywhere. For example, he highlights how, through capitalism and before that religious missionaries, and now especially with international organizations like the UN, modernity is spreading around the world. This creates interesting dynamics where tradition and modernity manifest differently in different places.

One example is the different approaches around the world in the field of transitional justice. The Nuremberg trials took an extremely juridical approach to transitional justice. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission combined a juridical approach and a Christian approach of forgiveness, recognizing that truth and forgiveness are the only ways to solve this going forward since they would have to live with each other. In Rwanda, transitional justice leveraged local gacaca courts to handle the juridical proceedings. Gacaca courts were the local town "courts" that the Rwandan tribes had for centuries to handle disputes of justice and punishment.

Another interesting discussion, Habermas cites Ingeborg Maus on this, is the simultaneous dialectic of de-legitimization of the nation-state, i.e., the weakening of the nation-state as the center where politics happens in favor of the at times anarchic and limited global international sphere of governance. This vacuum creates a need for a "supranational" state.

International politics is a new development. Historically, it is mostly agreements between leaders. The UN security council is potentially the most binding and forceful of international politics, but there is nothing yet like a "supranational" state. Some say this would be theoretically impossible, since the problem of the "state of nature" between individuals is quite different from the "state of nature" between states; you cannot create a sovereign "supranational" state out of already sovereign states. Rather, the only primary agents are states and at best you can have agreements like NATO.

Habermas hints at something stronger, such as a supranational constitution. Will this look like the federal government of the United States or the EU?

In sum, this section seems parallel to the problem at the individual level of how to reconcile competing worldviews and whether practical reason can have autonomy and the "final say" in politics. If there is a legacy that Habermas is shooting for in this book, it is to dismantle the critiques of modernity and secularization as only Western and to present a case that postmetaphysical thinking, in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, and the Young Hegelians, can be a shared conception of practical reason that can be used to guide international and potentially supranational politics.

If Habermas tells a convincing genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking that shows this postmetaphysical thinking is latent even in non-Western traditions, then those not part of the Western tradition of philosophy can trace a similar line of thought from their own traditions to modernity and participate as active thinkers in the emerging, global public sphere.