The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures by Jürgen Habermas

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures Reviews

• 
  Eric

  The publisher's description of the book is inaccurate and does the book a disservice. This is not a critique of French philosophy, but a critique of the "philosophy of the subject" so en vogue and monolithic in French philosophy. Having said that, it originates in German philosophy, namely Nietzsche and Adorno who also come in from a critique from Habermas. Philosophy, he believes, has been led away from demonstrable conclusions into a morass of reflexive and reductionist rhetoric that ill serves the unprivileged classes from which it draws its raison d'être. Habermas wants to take the philosophical narrative down a different path from Hegel.
  
  Whether his case for communicative action is the best solution to the problems of (now not quite) contemporary modernist philosophy, it's a fascinating critique of philosophical texts that have either been enthusiastically accepted or rejected and ridiculed outright out of discomfort or refusal to engage the text directly.
  
  Some will reject the narrative that Habermas constructs in his genealogy of the philosophy of the subject, but his contribution to the discussion is invaluable. A couple of decades later, the zeitgeist seems to have largely to have shrugged at this literate attempt at debate (Derrida excepted). It's well worth a close read.
  
• 
  Tony

  Very useful to get a handle on difficult concepts in Western philosophy such as the “dialectic of the Enlightenment”. In fairly quick-paced chapters, the book does an admirable job of explaining why various 20th-century approaches have been dead ends, including the genealogy of power (Foucault), the heroic projections of Dasein (Heidegger), deconstruction (Derrida), and negative dialectics (Horkheimer & Adorno). Habermas is not as dismissive of Luhmann’s systems theory (1984), but Habermas is not very much impressed with systems theory either, as Luhmann reduces communication to just so much “noise in the system” and therefore, Luhmann leaves no space for reason, or validity claims, severely truncating the human endeavor, depriving it of its normative content. Luhmann is another antihumanist in a long line of counter-enlightenment thinking, a line of that goes back all the way to the early modernity of the 17th century. A masterful overview.
  
  For those unfamiliar with Habermas altogether, these twelve lectures are a far more fruitful place to begin than his later publications, such as the inordinately dense Beyond Facts and Norms (1992).
• 
  Rowan Tepper

  While his commitment to the Enlightenment project is indeed laudable, Habermas refuses to acknowledge the fact that Modernity's characteristic faith in the ineluctable progress of reason has been decisively refuted. Already, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin exposed the ideology of Progress for what it had become: bankrupt and complicit with the ascendance of fascism. The horrors of the second World War were not the result of a regression into barbarism, but were rather the culmination and apotheosis of instrumental reason: genocide was committed systematically and efficiently by functionaries and technocrats (see: Eichmann, Adolf). Likewise, Hiroshima and the subsequent nuclear arms race are the irrational culmination of the progress of Reason: the potential self-annihilation of all life on earth, of reason itself. The project of Modernity ended with the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
  
  This is not, however, to affirm the premature proclamations of "postmodernity" and "postmodernism" (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, etc). With regard to this, Habermas is rightly critical - but for the wrong reasons. The epoch into which the world has entered is only POST-modern: it is a period of transition, or one still wracked with growing pains. Whatever the meaning of our age may be, we must await its maturation to recognize it for what it is.
  
  Nevertheless, this is not by any means to dismiss or denigrate Habermas' work, reactionary though his thought may well be. His hyper-critical and rather catty attitude toward his colleagues and contemporaries does rub me the wrong way.
• 
  Pinkyivan

  Unreadable marxist drivel
• 
  Kyrill

  While I am no fan of Habermas and ultimately disagree with the positive picture he advances here, I was pleasantly surprised by this book. The common thread through these lectures is a helpful and fairly comprehensive historical overview of the birth of postmodernism. I didn't know Habermas was interested in Battaille and it made me take Battaille seriously as a thinker rather than just an artist - the comparisons and contrasts with Heidegger here were especially interesting. It's also interesting that Habermas aims to survey everything he takes to be a challenge to his "communicative rationality" view, including the cybernetics of Lumen.
• 
  sologdin

  solitary second generation frankfurt marxist v. all of postmodernism. frankfurt marxist pwns. duh.
  
• 
  FotisK

  Κυκλοφόρησε στα Ελληνικά, ως "Ο φιλοσοφικός λόγος της νεωτερικότητας", εκδόσεις Αλεξάνδρεια
• 
  Wolf Van Troost

  Dit boek verdient een review:
  
  Ik had me onmogelijk kunnen voorstellen dat mijn 2022 ging eindigen met een lezing van dit werk, nog minder had ik kunnen voorspellen hoezeer een werk de laatste 300 jaar filosofie tot een grote grap kon reduceren. Bij het lezen van Habermans PM ervaart men op iedere pagina de gekende “wtf did I just read’ - alleen kan ik niet goed beslissen of deze ervaring in dit geval positief of negatief moet worden verstaan.
  Wat zeker is: Habermans is een van de grootste geleerden van de 20ste eeuw. Wat niet zo zeker is: maakt dit uit? Wat ik ondertussen absoluut zeker ben: ik zeg de filosofie, zoals Habermans haar bedrijft, voor eens en altijd vaarwel. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, Foucault - niemand kan volgens Habermans in de buurt komen van Habermans - hij is de “the god who is coming”, Nietzsche’s Dionysus, Heideggers poëet en Derrida’s (ik weet niet wat - misschien Thoth?). Alhoewel de meeste (misschien wel alle) filosofen noodzakelijk dit complex tot een kunst moeten verheffen (wat is filosofie als het niet berust op het kleineren van de voorgangers?) - Habermans verlaagt het tot steenschopperij (wat is dat?), tot een kermis van ad-hominem argumenten gepaard met filosofische constructies die zo transparant zijn dat ze onzichtbaar, in de zin van onbruikbaar, worden. In navolging van FIFA-baas Gianni Infantino’s WK speech verklaar in dat “today, I feel immigrant”.
  
  Tot nooit meer Habermans, je was me een waar genoegen.
  
  (Aan degenen die tot hier hebben meegelezen: een prettig 2023! En btw: er bestaat geen twijfel over de waarde van dit werk voor het discours van de moderniteit - de vraag rest echter: wie wil hier in godsnaam nog z’n hand opsteken?)
• 
  Joshua

  Tough read. Nevertheless it is AMAZING. Habermas discusses (continental?) philosophy since Hegel, focusing broadly on the critique of modernity as formulated by Nietzsche and extended through a Nietzsche-Bataille-Foucault path and a Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida path. I don't entirely agree with Habermas, but he is an amazing philosopher.
• 
  Jamey

  I vaguely remember liking this around 1998, but I cannot remember a god damn thing about it, which means that I am old (39) and maybe that this is not the single greatest book in the world. Got any soup?
• 
  Michael

  An overview of the most important philosophical trends in twentieth century continental philosophy, Habermas is judicious and critical of the philosophers and their positions.
• 
  Hal Johnson

  "The absence of any influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of Habermas’s thought."
  –Brian Morton, “L’Isle de Gilligan” (1990).
  
  Note that Morton is joking. About Habermas's influence on Gilligan's Island certainly and about Habermas's all-pervasiveness possibly…but who can return to 1990 to check how things were at the time? (My fuzzy memories of 1990 make me doubt said pervasiveness, because Habermas is not even French!)
  
  I can't say I understood every part of Habermas's book here, especially when he strays into writers I'm less familiar with (an embarrassing number of them, honestly). Still, I found the parts I did get informative, and it seemed to me that this passage, which comes late in the book, offers a kind of summary of his findings, and so I present it to future readers, in the hopes that it may make a challenging book less daunting:
  
  "Since early Romanticism, limit experiences of an aesthetic and mystical kind have always been claimed for the purpose of a rapturous transcendence of the subject. The mystic is blinded by the light of the absolute and closes his eyes; aesthetic ecstasy finds expression in the stunning and dizzying effects of (the illuminating) shock. In both cases, the source of the experience of being shaken up evades any specification. In this indeterminacy, we can make out only the silhouette of the paradigm under attack—the outline of what has been deconstructed. In this constellation, which persists from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Foucault, there arises a readiness for excitement without any proper object; in its wake, subcultures are formed which simultaneously allay and keep alive their excitement in the face of future truths (of which they have been notified in an unspecified way) by means of cultic actions without any cultic object. This scurrilous game with religiously and aesthetically toned ecstasy finds an audience especially in circles of intellectuals who are prepared to make their sacrificium intellectus on the altar of their needs for orientation."
  
  Rooting out the ill-defined or fake-o "limit experience" is Habermas's goal. Whether his own "communicative action" lacks a limit experience (fake-o or otherwise)—well, I'll leave that debate to someone how knows Habermas better.
  
  I look to philosophers to force me to view the world in a new way, and Habermas didn't do that…but he did get me to reconsider previous thinkers who had so forced me, which is less fun but still valuable. I should probably reread this book, but won't.
• 
  Steve

  This overview of the discourse of modernity is a powerful work of intellectual criticism. I hadn't read any Habermas but have read many discussions of his concept of communicative rationality in various works about science and knowledge. Habermas discusses Kant, Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, George Bataille, Foucault and Derrida in the context of their critiques of subject-centered reason and the Enlightenment project. He seems to be fair in his assessments, but invariably describes their critiques as dependent on the very concepts they're trying to demolish. If his ideas on communicative rationality are idealistic, he at least makes the case that he's reshaping reason as a communal, constrained endeavor rather than in a Romantic individualist light.
  
  These lectures are clearly and consistently argued. However, Habermas is writing for a scholarly audience and makes no attempt whatsoever to be entertaining. Without so much as a thought experiment or analogy in the entire text, the result is undeniably rigorous but admittedly a little dry and airless.
• 
  Jimena

  El tema me gusta, sin embargo detesto a los filósofos que escriben en forma laberíntica, es decir, ellos ponen palabras tras palabras y tu intentas dilucidar que cojones han querido decir para que después de 400 hojas te des cuenta que podría haberse explicado en tan sólo 28.
  
• 
  Matt

  
  
  One of those books I read in college which is marked up, well-thumbed, and I probably wrote a "B" paper on it ten years ago but I really only remember maybe a sentence's worth- if that- at this point.
• 
  Karl

  Sober and considered thinking on Modernity/Postmodernism and Struturalism/Poststructuralism. A more ‘German’ view of some of the major topics of late 20th century French philosophy.
• 
  Zoonanism

  Painful prose, nice critique of Heidegger, Foucault and Bataille, couldn't care much for the rest of it...
• 
  mimosa maoist

  Nobody likes him, but I agree with him about Heidegger ontologizing Nietzsche, and the difference between philosophy and literature; but the last three chapters were deadly boring.
• 
  Aref Abboushi

  الترجمة العربية للكتاب الصادرة عن دار الحوار من ترجمة حسن صقر هي عقيمة جدا. لم استطلع اكمال المقال الاول من الكتاب
• 
  Leonardo

  Problemas de Filosofía Contemporánea. Unidad 5.
  
  
  ...la tesis central de Adorno y Horkheimer en
  Dialéctica de la Ilustración es que fenómenos como el fascismo son «síntomas» de la modernidad, su consecuencia necesaria (por lo que, como señaló Horkheimer en una frase memorable, aquellos que no quieren criticar el capitalismo también deberían guardar silencio sobre el fascismo), mientras que para Habermas los mismos fenómenos indican que la modernidad sigue siendo un «proyecto inacabado», que todavía no ha desarrollado todo su potencial. Esta indecibilidad es en última instancia un caso especial de la indecibilidad más general de la propia «dialéctica de la Ilustración», bien percibida por Habermas: si el «mundo administrado» es la «verdad» del proyecto de la Ilustración, entonces, ¿exactamente cómo puede ser criticado y contrarrestado por medio de la fidelidad a ese mismo proyecto?
  
  
  Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.394
• 
  Corbin

  I read this with a particular focus for my research, and so perhaps was not as attentive as I needed to be for many sections of the book, but this was a slog. Habermas isn't particularly charitable to his subjects, and many of his own suggestions seem to be just more charitable renderings of those figures. (Not always, and it's important to show differences, but it was difficult to trust his renderings of other thinkers when some of the ones I was familiar with seemed treated poorly--particularly Derrida, Wittgenstein, and ordinary language philosophy.) Lecture XI is probably an important read for getting to know Habermas' thought, and if you want to see how he treats specific figures, you could read the relevant parts without reading the whole book. But I don't recommend reading those sections without some familiarity with the relevant subjects, because Habermas does not explain the technical terms very well, and it can be tough going unless you already know what's happening.
• 
  Phillip

  I only read the first essay of this book, since I am concerned with Habermas' explanation of time in modernity. I am working on a paper about the uses of time in three film versions (one modernist, one postmodernist, and one relatively pre-modernist) of King Lear, and Habermas was one of the sources in David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, which is a key text. So I figured I'd go to Habermas, though he wasn't as specific about the uses and conceptions of time as I had hoped he would be (in his defense, the book isn't primarily about time, but the first essay seemed relevant. I hope to have more luck with "Modernity--An Unfinished Project."
• 
  Tyler

  not jurgy's best but still good...
• 
  Andrew

  While I'm not big on Habermas' ideas I loved his understanding of the progression of modern philosophy.
• 
  William West

  I'm definitely not an Habermas guy. But I allow that he's interesting, if misguided.
• 
  Corey

  Serious misreading of Foucault and genealogy as a method.
• 
  нєνєℓ ¢ανα

  A very excellent work from Jurgen Habermas...