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Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought Thomas McCarthy, General Editor

Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective Richard J. Bernstein, editor, Habermas and Modernity Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Hans Blumenberg, The Legi.timacy of the Modern Age Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory John Forester, editor, Critical Theory and Public Life David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles Jiirgen Habermas, editor, Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age" Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time Herbert Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist Theories of History Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Carl Schmitt, Political Romantici5m Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of' Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

Twelve Lectures

J iirgen Habermas

translated by Frederick Lawrence

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

Second printing, 1987

This translation copyright© 1987 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This work originally appeared in German under the title Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: ZwOlfVorlesungen, © 1985 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, eral Republic of Germany.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any in- formation storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was typeset by DEKR Corporation and was printed and bound by Halli- day Lithograph in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Habermas, J iirgen. The philosophical discourse of modernity.

(Studies in contemporary German social thought) Translation of: Der philosophische Diskurs der

Moderne. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Philosophy, Modern-20th century. 2. Philosophy,

Modern-19th century. 3. Civilization, Modern-Philoso- phy. I. Title. II. Series. B3258"H323P5513 1987 190 87-12397 ISBN 0-262-08163-6

Contents

Introduction by Thomas McCarthy

Preface

I Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance

II Hegel's Concept of Modernity

Excursus on Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man"

III Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche

Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm

IV The Entry i11to Postmodernjty: Nietzsche_as".;;i. Turning Point

V The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

VI The Undermining of Western Rationalism throngh the Critique of Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger

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XIX

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xx Preface

lively discussions I was able to hold with colleagues and stu- dents on these occasions than could be acknowledged retro- spectively in notes.

Supplements to the philosophical discourse of modernity, with a political accent, are contained in a volume of edition suhrkamp being published simultaneously. 5

I Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self- Reassurance

I

In his famous introduction to the collection of his studies on the sociology of religion, Max Weber takes up the "problem of universal history" to which his scholarly life was dedicated, namely, the question why, outside Europe, "the scientific, the· artistic·, the political, or the economic development … did not enter upon that path of rationalization which is peculiar to the Occident?" 1 For Weber, the intrinsic (that is, not merely con- tingent) relationship between modernity and what he called "Occidental rationalism" was still self-evident. 2 He described as "rational" the process of disenchantment which led in Europe to a disintegration of religious world views that jssueci_ in a secular culture. With the autono- moiis-ai1S,- and theories of morality and law grounded on prin- ciples, cultural spheres of value took shape which made possible learning processes in accord with the respective inner logics of theoretical, aesthetic, and moral-practical problems.

What Weber depicted was not only the secularization of Western culture, but also and especially the .development of modern societies from the viewpoint of rationalization. The new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had taken shape around the organizational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber understood this pro- cess as the institutionalization of purposive-rational economic

2 Lecture I

and administrative action. To the degree that everyday life was affected by this cultural and societal rationalization, traditional forms of life – which in the early modern period were differ- entiated primarily according to one's trade – were dissolved. The modernization of the lifeworld is not determined only by structures of purposive rationality. Emile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead saw rationalized lifeworlds as character- ized by the reflective treatment of traditions that have lost their quasinatural status; by the universalization of norms of action and the generalization of values, which set communicative ac- tion free from narrowly restricted contexts and enlarge the field of options; and finally, by patterns of socialization that are oriented to the formation of abstract ego-identities and force the individuation of the growing child. This is, in broad strokes, how the classical social theorists drew the picture of modernity.

Today Max Weber's theme appears in another light; this is as much the result of the labors of those who invoke him as of the work of his critics. "Modernization" was introduced as a technical term only in the 1950s. It is the mark of a theoretical approach that takes up Weber's problem but elaborates it with the tools of social-scientific functionalism. The concept of mod-

to a alJ_<L11mtually··reinfor.cing:.to-the.for_mati()J1QfrnpitaJ<indi:he mobilization of resources; to th"…_dev.':'h!'mf'._11J…ofJli':' forces of (lroduction and the increase in the prill:lli.ctivity of lab= .to the establishment of centralized political powerand the for- m,ation of national identities; to the proliferation of rights of pg!itical participation, of urban forms_gfJife,.and of formal sc.hooling; to the secularization of values and norms; and so on. Ihe theory of modernization performs two abstractions on Weber's concept of "modernity." It dissociates "modernity" from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatio- temporally neutral model for processes of social development in general. Furthermore, it breaks the internal connections between modernity and the historical context of Western ra- tionalism, so that processes of modernization can no longer be conceived of as rationalization, as the historical objectification of rational structures.Jam es Coleman sees in this the advantage

3 Modernity's Consciousness of Tin1e

that a concept of modernization generalized in terms of a theory of evolution is no longer burdened with the idea of .a completion of modernity, that is to say, of a goal state after which "postmodern" developments would have to set in. 3

Indeed it is precisely modernization research that has con- tributed to the currency of the expression "postmodern" even among social scientists. For in view of an evolutionarily auton- omous, self-promoting modernization, social-scientific observ- ers can all the more easily take leave of the conceptual horizon of Western rationalism in which modernity arose. But as soon as the internal links between the concept of modernity and the self-understanding of modernity gained within the horizon of Western reason have been dissolved, we can relativize the, as it were, automatically continuing processes of modernization from the distantiated standpoint of a postmodern observer. Arnold Gehlen brought this down to the formula: The prem- ises of the Enlightenment are dead; only their consequences continue on. From this perspective, a self-sufficiently advanc- ing modernization of society has separated itself from the im- pulses of a cultural modernity that has seemingly become obsolete in the meantime; it only carries out the functional laws of economy and state, technology and science, which are sup- posed to have amalgamated into a system that cannot be influ- enced. The relentless acceleration of social processes appears as the reverse side of a culture that is exhausted and has passed into a crystalline state. Gehlen calls modern culture "crystal- lized" because "the possibilities implanted in it have all been developed in their basic elements. Even the counterpossibilities and antitheses have been uncovered and assimilated, so that henceforth changes in the premises have become increasingly unlikely. . . . If you have this impression, you will perceive crystallization … even in a realm as astonishingly dynamic and full of variety as that of modern painting."4 Because "the his- tory of ideas has concluded," Gehlen can observe with a sigh of relief that "we have arrived at posthistoire." With Gottfried Benn he imparts the advice: "Count up your supplies." This neoconservative leave-taking from modernity is directed, then, not to the unchecked dynamism of societal modernization but

4 Lecture I

to the husk of a cultural self-understanding of modernity that appears to have been overtaken. 5

In a completely different political form, namely an anarchist one, the idea of postmodernity appears among theoreticians who do not see that any uncoupling of modernity and ration- ality has set in. They, too, advertise the end of the Enlighten- ment; they, too, move beyond the horizon of the tradition of reason in which European modernity once understood itself; and they plant their feet in posthistoire. But unlike the neocon- servative, the anarchist farewell to modernity is meant for so- ciety and culture in the same degree. As that continent of basic concepts bearing Weber's Occidental rationalism sinks down, reason makes known its true identity – it becomes unmasked as the subordinating and at the same time itself subjugated subjectivity, as the will to instrumental mastery. The subversive force of this critique, which pulls away the veil of reason from before the sheer will to power, is at the same time supposed to shake the iron cage in which the spirit of modernity has been objectified in societal form. From this point of view, the mod- ernization of society cannot survive the end of the cultural modernity from which it arose. It cannot hold its own against the "primordial" anarchism under whose sign postmodernity marches.

However distinct these two readings of the theory of post- modernity are, both reject the basic conceptual horizon within which the self-understanding of European modernity has been formed. Both theories of postmodernity pretend to have gone beyond this horizon, to have left it behind as the horizon of a past epoch. Hegel was the first philosopher to develop a clear concept of modernity. We have to go back to him if we want to understand the internal relationship between modernity and rationality; which, until Max Weber, remained self-evident and which today is being called into question. We have to get clear on the Hegelian concept of modernity to be able to judge whether the claim of those who base their analyses on other premises is legitimate. At any rate, we cannot dismiss a priori the suspicion that postmodern thought merely claims a tran- scendent status, while it remains in fact dependent on presup- positions of the modern self-understanding that were brought

5 Modernity's Consciousness of Time

to light by Hegel. We cannot exclude from the outset the possibility that neoconservatism and aesthetically inspired an- archism, in the name of a farewell to modernity, are merely trying to revolt against it once again. It could be that they are merely cloaking their complicity with the venerable tradition of counter-Enlightenment in the garb of post-Enlightenment.

II

Hegel used the concept of modernity first of all in historical contexts, as an epochal concept: The "new age" is the "modern age." This corresponded to contemporary usage in English and French: "modern times" or temps moderns denoted around 1800 the three centuries just preceding. The discovery of the "new world," the Renaissance, and the Reformation – these three monumental events around the year 1500 constituted the epo- chal threshold between modern times and the middle ages. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel used these ex- pressions to classify the German Christian world that had is- sued from Roman and Greek antiquity. The division still usual today (e.g., for the designation of chairs in history depart- ments) into the Modern Period, the Middle Ages, and Antiq- uity (or modern, medieval, and ancient history) could take shape only after the expression "new" or "modern" age ("new" or "modern" world) lost its merely chronological meaning and took on the oppositional significance of an emphatically "new" age. Whereas in the Christian West the "new world" had meant the still-to-come age of the world of the future, which was to dawn only on the last day – and it still retains this meaning 1 in Schelling's Philosophy of the Ages of the World – the secular concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future / has already begun: It is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future. In this way, the caesura defined by the new beginning has been shifted into the past, precisely to the start of modern times. Only in the course of the eighteenth century did the epochal threshold around 1500 become conceptualized as this beginning. To test this, Reinhart Koselleck uses the question of when nostrum aevum, our own age, was renamed nova aetas, the· new age. 6

6 Lecture I

Koselleck shows how the historical consciousness that ex- pressed itself in the concept of the "modern age" or the:'new age" constituted a historical-philosophical perspectivel One's own standpoint was to be brought to reflective awareness within the horizon of history as a wholi Even the collective singular Geschichte [history], which Hegel'already uses in a way that is taken for granted, was a coinage of the eighteenth century: "The 'new age' lent the whole of the past a world-historical quality …. Diagnosis of the new age and analysis of the past ages corresponded to each other." 7 The new experience of an advancing and accelerating of historical events corresponds to this, as does the insight into the of historically nonsynchronous developments. At this time the image of history as a uniform process that erates problems is formed, and time becomes experienced as a scarce resource for the mastery of problems that arise – that is, as the pressure of time. The Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, one of the new words that inspired Hegel, characterizes the present as a transition that is consumed in the consciousness of a speeding up and in the expectation of the differentness of the future. As Hegel puts it in the preface to the Phenomenology of Mind: It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a birth and transition to a new period. The Spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form …. [F]rivolity as well as the boredom that open up in the establishment and the indeterminate apprehension of something unknown are harbingers of a forthcoming change. This gradual crumbling … is interrupted by the break of day, that like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world. 9

Because the new, the modern world is distinguished from the old by the fact that it opens itself to the future, the epochal new beginning is rendered constant with each moment that gives birth to the new. Thus, it is characteristic of the historical consciousness of modernity to set off "the most recent [neuesten] period" from the modern [neu] age: Within the horizon of the modern age, the present enjoys a prominent position as con- temporary history. Even Hegel understands "our age" as "the most recent period." He dates the beginning of the present

7 Modernity's Consciousness of Time

from the break that the Enlightenment and the French Revo- lution signified for the more thoughtful contemporaries at the close of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth century. With this "glorious sunrise" we come, as the old Hegel still thought, "to the last stage in History, our world, our own time." 10 A present that understands itself from the horizon of the modern age as the actuality of the most recent period has to recapitulate the break brought about with the past as a continuous renewal.

The dynamic concepts that either emerged together with the expression "modern age" or "new age" in the eighteenth cen- tury or acquired then a new meaning that remains valid down to our day are adapted to this – words such as revolution,] progress, emancipation, development, crisis, and Zeitgeist 11 These expressions also became key terms for Heg9)an pbi!B!i'.

. ophy. They cast conceptual-liistorical light on the problem 'posed for the modern historical consciousness of Western cul- ture that had developed in connection with the oppositional concept of a "new age": Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself Modernity sees itself cast back upon itself without any possibility of escape. This explains the sensitiveness of its self-understanding, the dynamism of the attempt, carried for- ward incessantly down to our time, to "pin itself down." Just a few years ago, Hans Blumenberg felt himself obliged to defend with a grand historical display the legitimacy or the proper right of modernity against constructions that tried to make a case for its cultural debt to the testators of Christianity and antiq- uity. "It is not self-evident that an epoch poses itself the prob- lem of its historical legitimacy; just as little is it self-evident that it understands itself as an epoch at all. For modernity, the problem is latent in the claim of accomplishing, and of being able to accomplish, a radical break, and in the incongruity of this claim with the reality of history, which is never capable of starting anew from the ground up." 12 Blumenberg adduces as evidence a statement by the young Hegel: "Apart from some earlier attempts, it has been reserved in the main for our epoch to vindicate, at least in theory, the human ownership of trea-

8 Lecture I

sures formerly squandered on heaven; but what age will have the strength to validate this right in practice and make itself their possessor?"I3

The problem of grounding modernity out of itself first comes to consciousness in the realm of aesthetic criticism. This becomes clear when one traces the history of the concept "mod- ern."14 The process of detachment from the models of ancient art was set going in the early eighteenth century by the famous querelle des anciens et des modernes. 15 The party of the moderns rebelled against the self-understanding of French classicism by assimilating the aesthetic concept of perfection to that of prog- ress as it was suggested by modern natural science. The "mod- erns," using historical-critical arguments, called into question the meaning of imitating the ancient models; in opposition to the norms of an apparently timeless and absolute beauty, they elaborated the criteria of a relative or time-conditioned beauty and thus articulated the self-understanding of the French En- lightenment as an epochal new beginning. Although the sub- stantive modernitas, along with the pair of adjectival opposites, antiquilmoderni, had already been used since late antiquity in a chronological sense, in the European languages of the modern age the adjective "modern" only came to be used in a substan- tive form in the middle of the nineteenth century, once again at first in the realm of the fine arts. This explains why Moderne and Modernitiit, modernite and modernity have until our own day a core aesthetic meaning fashioned by the self-understanding of avant-garde art. 16

For Baudelaire, the aesthetic experience of modernity fuses with the historical. In the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity, the problem of self-grounding becomes acute, be- cause here the horizon of temporal experience contracts to the decentered subjectivity that splits away from the conventions of.everyday life. For this reason, he assigns to the modern work of art a strange place at the intersection of the axes of the actual and the eternal: "Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one-half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable." 17 A self-consuming actuality, which forfeits the extension of a transition period, of a most recent period constituted at the center of the new age (and lasting several

9 Modernity's Consciousness of Time

decades), becomes the reference point of modernity. The ac- tual present can no longer gain its self-consciousness from opposition to an epoch rejected and surpassed, to a shape of the past. Actuality can be constituted only as the point where time and eternity intersect. In this way, modernity is rescued, not from its infirmity surely, but from triviality; in Baudelaire's understanding, it is so disposed that the transitory moment will find confirmation as the authentic past of a future present.is It proves its worth as that which one day will be classic: "Classic" is henceforth the "flash" at the dawning of a new world – which will of course have no duration, for its collapse is already sealed with its appearance. This understanding of time, radi- calized yet again in surrealism, grounds the kinship of modernity with mode (or fashion).

Baudelaire picks up on the outcome of the famous debate between the ancients and the moderns, but he shifts the weight between the absolutely beautiful and the relatively beautiful in a characteristic manner: "Beauty is made up, on the one hand, of an element that is eternal and invariable … and, on the other, of a relative, circumstantial element, which we may like to call … contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion. Without this second element, which is like the amusing, teasing, appe- tite-whetting coating of the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible, tasteless, unadapted, and inappropriate to hu- man nature." 19 Baudelaire the art critic emphasizes an aspect of modern painting: "the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of what, with our reader's permission, we have called 'modernity."'2° He puts the word "modernity" in quotation marks; he is conscious of his novel, terminologically peculiar use of the term. On this account, the authentic work is radically bound to the moment of its emergence; precisely because it consumes itself in ac- tuality, it can bring the steady flow of trivialities to a standstill, break through normality, and satisfy for a moment the im- mortal longing for beauty – a moment in which the eternal comes into fleeting contact with the actual.

Eternal beauty shows itself only in the guise of the costume of the times. (Benjamin later adopted this feature under the rubric of the dialectical image.) The modern work of art is

10 Lecture I

marked by a union of the real or true with the ephemeral. This character of the present is also at the basis of the kinship of art with fashion, with the new, with the optics of the idler, the genius, and the child, who, lacking the antistimulant of conventionally inculcated modes of perception, are delivered up defenceless to the attacks of beauty, to the transcendent stimuli hidden in the most ordinary matters. The role of the dandy, then, consists in turning this type of passively experi- enced extraordinariness to the offensive, in demonstrating the extraordinary by provocative means. 21 The dandy combines the indolent and the fashionable with the pleasure of causing surprise in others while never showing any himself. He is the expert on the fleeting pleasure of the moment, out of which the novel wells up: "He is looking for that …