Ep. 391: Habermas Defends Modernity (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 391 are something like what is modernity and how can we best defend it? And we read Jurgen Habermas's the Philosophical Discourse of modernity from 1985 to specifically lectures 1, 2, and 5. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, engaged in a communication, theoretic retrieval and transformation of the reflective concept of reason.

0:40 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin demythologizing to dispel enchantment, which is appearing to me as a confusion between nature and culture.

0:49 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan, still trying to create normativity out of myself.

0:54 Dylan: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey, hoping we might break the spell of mythic thinking without incurring the loss of the light radiating from the semantic potential preserved in myth. In Madison, Wisconsin.

1:08 Mark: And our special guest, it's me, John

1:10 John: Ganz, and I am stripping the present's relationship to the future of any relevance for understanding the past. I don't know what that means.

1:17 Wes: I guess we'll figure it out.

1:18 Mark: Well, it seems like the joke for just about all of us here was that Habermas is wordy.

1:24 John: Oh, my God. Very, very difficult.

1:27 Mark: John, you had blogged about this in light of Habermas passing away.

1:32 John: Yeah.

1:32 Mark: Sort of. Get us started on why this text, why is this important now? And actually say something about your book, too.

1:38 John: Oh, sure. So I'm the author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and How America Cracked up in the early 1990s, which is kind of a. I think the easiest way to put it is sort of a prehistory of Trumpism that situates the origins in the late 80s and early 90s with what America was going through at the end of the Cold War, kind of crisis legitimacy that our institutions were beginning to show. Then I read this book just after college with a bunch of friends. I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a bunch of guys that I was friends with were reading Marx and Critical Theory.

And this is one of the book. One of the guys was really into Habermas, and this is one of the books we selected. I remember being fascinated with it because it was sort of a helpful. I mean, it is itself very difficult, but in some ways it clarifies a lot of things. Other things I was interested in at the time because it's his. His rejoinder critique to people like Foucault and Derrida, other stuff that I wanted to understand. So I remember finding the book to be very helpful. And then when he died, we had read some other of his, but it was the one I responded to most, I think.

So I wanted to look at it again and I found the discussion of what modernity meant to be really, really striking and interesting and kind of a. Almost elegant encapsulation of it. And it made me think, I think everybody's kind of looking back at what Habermas meant as a philosopher and what his career meant and what he means in the present. And I always thought of him in contradistinction to his predecessors in the Frankfurt School. And then what I wrote about was. Well, I mean, very simply put was who looks better now? Someone like Adorno with this very pessimistic account of modernity, or Habermas with a more optimistic account of the possibilities of modernity.

So that was kind of the question that I've been thinking about since then. And I think I've been leaning towards maybe Adorno was onto something. Maybe Habermas in this present moment seems a little. Not naive, I think is the wrong word, but perhaps was overly optimistic.

3:53 Mark: Shall we go around the horn of our. I mean, he's a difficult read, I guess these were lectures, or at least adapted from lectures. This short preface talks about that. He started this Modernity an Unfinished project was a 1980 lecture. Some more lectures came in the following years. He says our chapter five was just adapted from an already published text. So that maybe that was never a lecture at all. But it doesn't really read. They're very long sentences. It certainly does not read like, you know, the kind of oh, he's so difficult when you read him.

But if you just hear his lectures, like we did some Kant lectures recently and they definitely were much easier than the Second Critique or the Groundwork or whatever related stuff. But this seemed pretty much the same experience to me as when we read Habermas in 2020. Quite difficult, quite slow going. And a lot of it is secondary literature, right? Most of these he's going to set up his general critique. But then chapter two is on Hegel, pretty much on the stuff in Hegel we've been doing very recently. So it's like really coincidental and I think feel like a nice prefiguring of the stuff we're going to read still in Hegel's Phenomenology on Faith.

But then the fifth lecture that you had picked John was his response to Adorno. And we read Horkheimer and Adorno on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Wes and I recently did a little bit of the first lecture in that on Close Reads. We had done the culture industry as a group many, many, many years ago on this podcast, but still, you know, we're kind of taking Habermas word for some of his account of that.

5:26 Seth: I actually thought this wasn't as bad as the last Habermas reading. It has. It has its moments. Yeah. But in general, I did find it. Yeah. I mean, you know, why say with five words what you can say with 45? And he has a particular phraseology, I guess he's very much unapologetically using the jargon of the people he's talking about. So, you know, if you're hooked into that, I think it helps. But in general, you know, I didn't have a problem following the critique and what he was saying. And I would say, too, that, you know, to think about it in the way that John characterized it as, like, are we team Adorno and Horkheimer?

Are we team Habermas? Like, you know, I'm squarely in the pessimist camp. I think I felt like the Dialectic of the Enlightenment put its finger on something. But, you know, Habermas is kind of like he's the poster child for trying to redeem the enlightenment. You know, like, he's all that stuff about communicative ethics and community and action and intersubjectivity. Like, he's just all in on the project and he's got to find a way. So I feel like his, you know, a lot of his criticisms we can take as valid. But at some point, I also wonder if he doesn't have sort of a little bit of a blind spot for just pushing the project so far that, you know, like, is ask yourself the bigger question of, like, is the project worth redeeming in the way that he keeps trying to recapture it, that maybe we'll get there?

6:54 Dylan: Well, if the project isn't worth redeeming, I don't know what you guys think we're going to end up with, except for some kind of unholy hell, you know. No, it's still the case. I mean, I don't remember reading Habermas. I probably have read something, but for me, it was a newer experience. I enjoyed the introduction to the volume by Thomas McCarthy. I thought it was pretty nice overview, and I found myself resonating a lot with the sort of succinct characterization of the problem of modernity and the way Habermas does something that is sort of been lurking in my entire education since I started political philosophy as an undergrad all the way through, and actually goes to why, in fact, I studied physics, which is this problem of the problem of modernity and the problem of legitimacy and authority and how we decide what things are and also what things we ought to do and how we make demands of one another in a community and still have a relationship between an individual and a community.

And to me, this is why I would say you the unholy hell that you'd be pointing to without a articulation of how the Enlightenment and the power of reason can be understood not as a new religion, but actually as an antidote and a refinement, a refined reply to the problem of authority based upon myth and authority based upon religion. If you can't see your way to that, then it ends up being, to me, an unholy hell. And you end up with all questions of how we can come to a conclusion about, again, our ethical connections as well as our understanding of the world and communicating about them.

There's just no hope. And so, to me, it's super, super interesting and incredibly timely, not just with the reading of Hegel, but frankly, of our. Our entire current political situation. It is fantastically timely. And I guess I would just put my 2 cents in for the Adorno piece is remarkably more readable than the other two. And it's not the kind of stuff that I think I could have ever read, just picked up a philosophy book not knowing anything about philosophy, but it's quite impressive. And I situate the black theorists to the dark theorists that he points to of the ultimate fate, failure of reason, as well as the mythologists in the camp of Thrasymachus, as power is what rules everything.

And this represents to me the abiding desire to articulate why that can't be true.

9:52 Wes: Yeah. So, like Dylan, I would. I mean, I'm on Team Habermas, but I would think we should distinguish a question of whether we're optimistic or pessimistic from everyone around that team.

10:04 Dylan: Sure.

10:06 Wes: Communicative reason is the best thing that we have to hope for, regardless of whether it's going to come to be or whether. Whether it's practical.

10:12 John: Yeah.

10:13 Wes: And I think his critiques of the critiques of the Enlightenment are really insightful and they say a lot because those critiques are so influential. Right. By way of Foucault and Post Structuralism, on the one hand, and Then Marxism and critical theory on the other. They're sort of. They're in many ways part of our public discourse and they enter into the problems of right wokeness and identity politics and the sort of things that show up in a crude way in the way people are fighting with each other online. So it's really good to know about this stuff in this background.

So. And as far as readability, yeah, I did my thing where I read it twice and the second time took like. Tried to rewrite it in my own words and boy, try that. That is a task. But I think. And of course, yeah, the fifth essay is much more readable in a way. I really don't fault him for the complexity of his prose because it's so erudite and he's thinking at a deep level about this stuff. And so if you write for beginners, you really. And for a general audience and you can hamper your ability to go deep in the way that. The way that he does. And I learned a tremendous amount from this.

This, like the first two essays are incredibly helpful for putting. For understanding Hegel, and I've read quite a bit of commentary on Hegel, but these essays are very helpful for looking at Hegel from the perspective of the, you know, the big picture. But I guess we should start out by saying what is the problem of modernity? And I feel like, you know, we should do like the Star wars scrolling text marquee thing when we talk about this and just, you know, do our whole recap of early modern philosophy. And Kant is in the role of Darth Vader, but has a lot to do with Kant and these diremptions that Habermas talks about taking over the word from Hegel, which is to say these splits that are created especially between, say, faith and reason or faith and knowledge, or between subject and object.

Relatedly, Kant cuts off our ability to know things in themselves, including God and the soul and any metaphysical object he might speak of. And in doing that, he gives us this kind of religion of reason and normativity as based in the autonomous will. But for Hegel and the Romantics and others, this leaves us in kind of a position where normativity and religion are kind of anemic. They don't really speak to us at a deep level, to our deepest needs, our desire for meaning. So that's part of the crisis. We can no longer appeal to tradition or religion in its old forms to ground ourselves when it comes to norms and the way we organize society and politics and all of that stuff.

13:02 Mark: Yeah, if we're not listening to tradition, then what's the alternative? It's everybody has to decide things for themselves. And I was sort of thinking about this in the Tocqueville. His characterization of Americans like they all have an opinion on something. But of course, it's very different with the different Enlightenment figures, with the different modern figures of how criteria that are not simply. So it's not just subjective whim, but how Ross characterizes modernity as subjectivism. Right. Terms of Descartes, basic phenomenological point of view.

I have to decide. So if I'm going to decide what is good and bad, well, I don't just have to listen to a tradition. I don't want something alien, as Rorty put it. I want to get something that is. Hopefully it's something that we all have in common. We all have this capacity to reason in common. So for Kant, like, yes, we're all individually making this, but we're using universal criteria. We're not just using, you know, my whims of the moment, but it still ends up being subjectivist in the sense that it is an individual doing the deciding. And, you know, there's a lot to criticize about that.

Can one really provide foundations for ethics, for human rights, for all these things on that foundation? A lot of folks like Foucault say no. You think you're using objective reason, but actually you're just using your desires, you're using power. So we get this hermeneutics of suspicion. And the direction that Habermas takes it is the same way that Rorty did, which is to say, well, you don't. That's not the only alternative, either something completely alien and traditional, or just you with your perfectly reasonable sensibility. No, it is something fundamentally social.

And so this is the point that we've been hammering about with Hegel, that Habermas says Hegel had a good idea that he was in the Enlightenment, he was in the modern age, but he pointed it in the right direction toward the social. And so in our Hegel episodes, we were saying in. Right. You know, getting into this idea of what is spirit, that anytime you think you are making an individual decision, I'm just calling it like I see it. You are actually relying on social criteria. And we should keep that in mind. They're not universal. All time and space, they're social criteria.

But at the same time, Habermas wants to argue that there's room within that, just like Rorty wanted to argue for criticism. It's not Just mere cultural relativism, which would be a degradation, a lower form of a retreat from the Enlightenment to something pre ethical. And Habermas wants to say, no, actually this is the only source we could have for the ethical and it is enough.

15:38 John: Yeah, I mean, I guess he's doing, he thinks Hegel partially does what he's trying to do in regards to the critics of enlightenment. Right. So he's saying, okay, they raised some good points about the limits of enlightenment when it's just this, in this very abstract, you know, idea of subject centered reason. But then we can incorporate that and we don't have to throw the baby out of the bathwater and just say there's no reason anymore. It's just like reason is a moment, a part of what it means to be a self reflective subject. But being a self reflective subject, being a subject is not the be all end all.

And in fact, if you make that the center of your philosophy, you end up in a lot of philosophical problems and you end up, I think, also in practical moral problems because you treat everything instrumentally as something to be disposed of, as something to be manipulated. So I think he thinks that in Hegel you start to get the outline of some philosophy that takes the specificity of human institutions, embodiment, if you want to say it like that, seriously, but doesn't totally get rid of critique or rationality, just want to kind of put these things into a balance.

But he thinks that the problem of modernity is that it can't look to the past, it can't look at tradition. Tradition is what Hegel calls positive, which I think the easiest way to kind of understand what that means is like something that's merely positive. It's just like, oh, you do it because you're told to do it. And he says, well, we don't really accept merely positive things anymore. We have to appropriate for ourselves, we have to have a reason. So he says modernity and subjectivity kind of have the same structure, which is that it can't just exist in its life world without problem.

It has to reflect, it has to understand what it's doing. It has to say, why do I want to do this? Why should I do this? It can't just be like, well, this is the way things have always been and therefore I will keep on doing it. And then he says, well, Hegel had these good ideas, didn't fully make good on them, but I think I know where he was going. But then these other guys came along and they said, well, the whole project of Enlightenment should just be thrown out because there's no way of distinguishing it from power or domination or something like that.

And for some people like Nietzsche, they say, well, why not? That's great. And for Adorno and Horkheimer they said, well that's horrible, but I don't know what's the way out of it. Do you think that that's a pretty good summary of it? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, but I think that where I relate to this as a person is basically like. I think that what I want to do in life is something like what Habermas kind of stipulates is like, oh, you're involved in some kind of practice, it's self reflective, but it's situated in a context and you're using reasons, but it's also embodied.

But I'm also tempted, I have to say, maybe in darker moods, you know, I'm tempted as a. I think we all, as modern subjects maybe are all tempted by the Nietzschean outlet, which is just to be like, look, it's my taste and I decide the values and I don't really need to worry about if this isn't, you know, serves some larger project. It's just kind of aesthetic self creation and if anything that says it's serving a larger project is just some kind of instantiation of power itself. I think it's a temptation because it seems self consistent. Right.

It seems internally coherent. But I think that what Habermas says to all of these different criticisms of enlightenment is that they have an internal problem, which is that they use his famous performative contradiction, which is that they use the tools of enlightenment, they use the normative presuppositions of enlightenment to do this critique. And he says, well, you know, you're still. I think he thinks especially about this with Foucault, which I think is the person he kind of is like, raises a lot of good points about the domination of systems in culture and society.

But he says, but his conclusion is not consistent because he just says, well, I'm going to use the tools of reason to show reason is all a system of power. But I think that Habermas basically says, well, where does that leave you? Where does that leave your own diagnoses? Why should we take them seriously at all? Why should we take any of these critiques seriously? They must be situated. He says, like, oh yeah, I think like the hell. Like you get annihilism, you get a meaningless project if you don't situate this. He says, like, we have to keep going with enlightenment, we can nuance it, we can take the good things out of all these different critiques, but you can't just throw it out, otherwise you're left with nothing.

And I'm broadly very sympathetic for that. And I think that sounds right.

20:45 Dylan: The other alternative is to go back completely to myth. Right?

20:49 John: They're kind of the same.

20:50 Dylan: Right, well, so this is the difference, right? The accusation is that reason and rationality is, simply speaking, another form of myth in a very simple way, which is why where the power of the critique ends up subverting and undermining reason itself in a kind of radically skeptical way. But you know, Habermas is basically saying, well, it's not exactly the same that reason has, you know, the rational conversation has the power to, you know, the right understanding of the individual with respect to the community as the community is indispensable, even if the individual is also indispensable.

And there has to be a way of accounting for, and not just to solve the problem, but to actually reflect the way in which we work and figure things out in the world and operate as a community that ends up girding itself, holding itself together, while at the same time admitting to the process of critique as a fundamental element of reason. But it's not a death spiral, because if it is, if it does become a death spiral, then it's just self refuting. In fact, you're using it in the wrong way.

22:01 Wes: Yeah, I think he thinks that, you know, both Hegel and Adorno and Horkheimer, they stop being involved in critique, essentially, right? They, they cease to be engaged with the problems of the day. Hegel, because he sort of solves his problem too well with the absolute. And Adorno and Horkheimer, because of the performative contradiction and saying, right, that reducing reason to power or, or something like that. I think the question is, do we believe that we can engage in persuasion with others, that we can reason with others, sort of do this bottom up thing and approach the political order in that way?

Or do we, are we tempted by authoritarianism in one form or another? Do we think we need a strong state, or do we think that we need to control culture from the top down so that identities are constructed in a better way? Right. Control discourse, because discourse is power. So I would say, yeah, communicative reason maintains some faith in this idea that we can reason with people, which is clearly not true. But we got to try. We got to try.

23:11 John: Well, I think unlimited, I think he wants to use these examples. He wants to say, look, we do this all the time. And this is also something that like he's getting from Hegel's, which is, he looks at an existing institution, he says, look, you know, this is where the rationality is being modeled and we do it all the time. And he says, he gives all these different examples of productive human activity where this communicative action is happening. And he says, you know, like it happens like people do get together and work together productively. I think that the rejoinder to that is like, well, at scale, at some point, you know, you get, you engage with somebody who's impossible, you know, you engage with somebody who's impossible and is going to be from the point of view of the people trying to cooperate together, have some kind of pathology or something that's going to be a pain in the ass.

And then this is when you revert to coercion, right? And you say, like, listen, you know, we're trying to do something here and you're fucking it up.

24:07 Dylan: This is really a critical part of the communicative reason is that the presence of unreasonable people or people that are a pain in the ass or the presence of conflict between points of view is not in the end, the end of the story with respect to there being communicative reason as a way to solve our problems. And also the same thing is, the same thing is also true that acknowledging that community requires an element of authority that will end up being coercive at some level does not mean that authoritarianism is what that is.

24:46 John: Right, right, right. Because it has to justify it. There's a difference between. He says authority is fine as long as it gives some kind of rational justification for itself. I guess the critics of Enlightenment would say would always be like, well that's always a lie. You know that that's the philosophy, the hermeneutics of suspicion think that all rational justifications of power are just ideologies or something like that.

25:09 Wes: But he wouldn't agree with Hegel that the state must incorporate society, right. Civil society, or that they must be united.

25:16 Mark: And yeah, we should point out where I think it's the part that we really haven't read yet of Hegel, that where he thinks Hegel has gone wrong, though it's clearly gestured at the end point of the phenomenology of spirit is supposed to be a single self conscious spirit. So it's sort of an outgrowth of an individual ego still. But that encompasses the whole civil society. So civil society is in harmony with itself because it's completely reasonable and it has a public Religion. So it is feeling together in unison. So very different than Rawlsian liberalism or something like this.

And as a, you know, Habermas doesn't actually talk that much about the phenomenology of spirit, just because it is very hard, as we've. We've seen, to figure out exactly what his view is at any given time in it. But he talks a lot about. About early essays in which these ideas that went into the phenomenology were hammered out, and then a little bit about the philosophy of right where he is very explicit that the solution is a constitutional monarchy, that it is not, you would think rationality would say democracy. Liberalism. That is what. And I guess this is another thing I just.

I wanted to ask this group, I was on vacation, had a discussion last February where we read a bunch of things about liberalism. And it was. It was. So I was thinking that this was pretty much liberalism.

26:39 Wes: Including Deneen, unfortunately, yes, the loathsome Deneen. Truly terrible. But go ahead.

26:46 Mark: We're dealing with a little more the foundational philosophical stuff, right? The view of reason that's supposed to drive this. But the assumption from the, you know, the liberal point of view is that reason drives democracy. And so we are specifically talking about liberalism, right, as the product of reason and how people are losing faith in that. People like Deneen and maybe are trying to push toward totalitarianism or something like this, whereas Habermas, you know, we're treading over the kind of the same ground, but at a much more fundamental philosophical level of how does one engage in critique?

Which it did occur to me, you know, there have been a lot of. We've done a lot of philosophy of science episodes, and you might have thought with Bacon that reason just gives you science and science just grows step by step, and we become ever more adequate. It becomes ever more adequate to the real world until we will just know everything. And of course, that's been thoroughly debunked. But nobody says, oh, well, then there's no such thing as science. No, it's just. You have to understand from the Kuhnian or whatever point of view that science does not advance in this simple way.

But at least no scientist has really given up and just said, well, I only think what I do because I'm this kind of person in this kind of society is just bourgeois values. Like, no, you know, if we think that people get stuck in paradigms, it's just. It's more science. So there's the push toward progress and ultimate faith in science has not relented given These observations. So why would we think that? Because there are problems with critique. Because, oh, this defense you gave of this law that you thought was just based on reason, actually, you know, we need to approach it with a hermeneutic suspicion.

It seems like the Habermas solution of, no, no, no, we need more enlightenment like that. That is the thing that is comparable to science.

28:40 Wes: We should say what this word critique means because it means something very specific. But I think Seth might have been trying to say something first though.

28:47 Mark: But yeah, go ahead, Seth.

28:49 Seth: I mean, you might want to define those terms. You might not, but I think.

28:52 Wes: No, I definitely do.

28:53 Seth: But no, I mean, before I say this thing, that kind of. Two of the key points that Habermas, when he's doing the characterization of what this critique of enlightenment is, is he says, you know, modernity is constructed in such a way that it is built conceptually kind of out of itself. It's just like subjectivity. It is formed through this process. And it's not. It sees itself as kind of like, I don't want to say ahistorical, but it as a break from tradition and past. Right. So it's kind of like autochthonous in some sense. Right. And then the second piece of it is that as, as critique, modernity sees itself as kind of through reason, as the ultimate arbiter.

And so the question becomes, okay, if I said, I am the judge of what's right and wrong, and somebody says, well, how do we know your judgments are right or wrong? And I'm like, trust me, you don't. Right. You know, Habermas is basically pointing out that the critique of modernity, the critique of enlightenment, and the project is you've gotten to this point where you've set yourself up as this kind of like ultimate arbiter that springs from some principle.

30:04 John: Right.

30:04 Seth: Or some principles that were self generated. So now how can you actually even critique that? Because you can't bring import transcendental concepts or religious concepts, or go back into the past and use historical or mythical concepts. And you know, so that characterization. And his point is like, okay, what do we do in the face of that? Let's all agree that that's. That this is a problem we have to deal with. Adorno and Horkheimer have one strategy, Nietzsche has another, and he's got a third.

30:31 Dylan: I think so. But I mean, I don't know if it's part of the third. With Habermas, it's certainly aligned, but it's not like there aren't people who have rejoinders that to postmodernism or the Nietzschean critique of the Enlightenment. I mean, Korsgaard would be an example of someone who's rehabilitating Kant along these lines. And as well, we haven't read her yet. But Haack is another example in a pragmatist vein that's directly aligned to the question of how do we talk about what evidence counts and how do we talk about inquiry that matters in a way that responds to the fact that we disagree, that we may change our minds, that we might, you know, how do we talk about that consistently still be.

Have some notion of truth, the whole pragmatist tradition. Rorty stands out. You know, while I agree with the notion that he is the spokesman for conversational accounts, Rorty just throws up his hands and gives up the notion that we're actually still aimed at something like truth, which Haack basically thinks he's fundamentally non pragmatic because of that. But there's rejoinders.

31:46 Wes: I just want to make a quick distinction between when we're using the word critique, this Hegelian critique of modernity, which is really an attempt to solve the schisms created by modernity and Kant in particular, right, between faith and reason, or faith and knowledge, subject and object, all of those things. And then there's ideological critique, or ideology critique is what Habermas calls it, by which I think it was ideological critique, which is specifically about the representation of the interests of a few as if they were the interests of the many, or as of something that is contingent and historical, as something natural and universal.

So in the case of Nietzsche, ideological critique, right, he wants to reduce reason with a special focus on morality to will to power. He wants to say that slave morality, which represents such and such values as true for all, as good for all, is really about the good good of the weak. Right? And the weak are just representing their values as good for all. And likewise with Marxian, you know, Marxian ideological critique goes the opposite direction. The interests of the dominant class are represented as if they were in the interest of all. And critique is supposed to play a role in raising consciousness and maybe helping us along with the getting towards the revolution.

What happened to Adorno and Horkheimer, according to Habermas, is that they, like many, when they saw what happened historically with Marxism and so, for instance, the Soviet Union or in Western society with the culture, industry and things like that, they despaired that the internal contradictions of capitalism would actually lead to any changes in the relations of production or in class. Right?

33:47 Dylan: So the.

33:48 John: Well, or it would produce fascism instead of communism, basically.

33:52 Wes: Exactly. Right, right. Or that increases in the power of technology. Right. And the relations of production are those that. That's supposed to lead ultimately to communism, to changes in class relations. But if it just increases the standard of living on the one hand, and then makes people kind of shallow consumers of the culture industry on the other, if it just pacifies people, then it's not going to go anywhere. So I think that's the point at which Adorno and Horkheimer make this move from traditional Marxian ideological critique to something that looks more like Nietzschean critique, which is far more despairing and subject to this performative contradiction.

34:34 John: Yeah, they say, look, it's rotten at the core. It goes all the way back to the beginning, all the way back to the Odyssey. There's domination and unreason lurking in every step towards enlightenment. And enlightenment ultimately is just a way in which the evil of domination has found a way to return. And you know, my way of thinking about that is you can't really, I mean, just thinking about the historical context of which Adorno and Horkheimer writing, and then Habermas was writing, you can make sense of their positions because I mean, they wrote that in 1944 and the way the world looked in 1944 was pretty damn awful.

And then Habermas is writing in the post war period and the second half of the 20th century and doesn't look so bad. So he says, I think they were a little too pessimistic, basically. But I think writing in 1944, you can completely understand it. But there's a passage in his rejoinder to Horkheimer and Adorno which I think really helps to elucidate what he thinks are the practices that embody communicative reason and kind of work. And this is his critique, this is his issue with Horkheimer and Adorno.

35:47 Wes: What page is this?

35:48 John: I'm sorry? Yeah, it's 113. The Dialectic of Enlightenment does not do justice to the rational content of cultural modernity that was captured in bourgeois ideals and also instrumentalized along with them. I'm thinking here of the specific theoretical dynamic that continually pushes the sciences, and even the self reflection of the sciences beyond merely engendering technically useful knowledge. I am referring further to the universalistic foundations of law and morality that have also incorporated in, however distorted and incomplete a fashion, institutions of constitutional government into the forms of democratic will formation and into the individual's patterns of identity formation.

I have in mind finally the productivity and Explosive power of basic aesthetic experiences that are subjectivity and liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity and conventions of quotidian perception, gained from its own decentering experiences that are presented in works of avant garde art that are articulated in the discourses of art criticism and also achieve a certain measure of illuminating effect, or at least contrast effects that are instructive in the innovatively enriched range of values proper to self realization. What he's basically saying is, come on guys, some of the things we have are pretty good.

Like modern science is not merely just coming up with technology to control things. It also is doing kind of incredible feats of self correction, rational process. He's saying constitutional government, yeah, has its problems, but look like it's gotten us somewhere. And it is good. And modern art, pretty incredible and pretty interesting and illuminating and actually does something when you encounter it, if you encounter it in the right way. And the criticism of generation is interesting. So he's saying, like, look, they were way too the things that modernity has produced in science and in government and in art actually.

And the practices that are involved in all of them, like, have made, I guess, I don't know if I exactly want to use this word. Progress might be the wrong word, but they do something generative and productive that is not merely reproducing domination. I think that's right. Like, can you. What would be the counter argument? Like, I think even Adorno and Horkheimer, especially when it comes to art, maybe they think constitutional government is bs, maybe they, they don't believe science is bs, but they're definitely modern works of art that they respond to and think, well, they see the dark side of them, but they see the illumination possible in them as well of, of a better future or something like that.

So I think that that's basically almost existentially a reason to live. Because it's like, look, there are severe problems with all these things, but we have examples of their accomplishments as well. It verges on perversity or just wanting to put things down to just constantly be like, science is bullshit, art is garbage, democracy is bunk. So I think that this is a very strong point. And he situates it in the practices themselves. And I think that that's the strength of what he's saying. He's like, look, if you return, like, let's get out of our heads.

Let's get out of trying to abstractly justify these things. Let's look at the actual practices and what these practices do every day is actually accomplishing something quite remarkable. It's Only when you abstract from it and try to solve these problems completely in terms of the philosophy of the subject, that you get into these kind of Kantian aporias or contradictions. There's no contradictions. Like they're doing their thing and they're doing their thing. Well, sometimes I think that the problem for me, though, is we are seeing potentially there may have been a golden age when those institutions or practices really look like they were kind of humming along or had things that maybe you could get rid of some bad stuff and they would do things now.

And I think it's everybody's sense of the world now that on each and every one of those, maybe less and scientific progress, there's problems. Right. If we reflect that art today is not speaking to us, not providing something that feels satisfying, transformative, help us to understand the world. Democratic government looks in bad way. Maybe it's coming back a little bit and I don't know, maybe science right now, I guess you could come up with a third criticism and say, well, it's just coming up with all kinds of gadgets and nonsense, and now it's coming up with surveillance technology.

That's a very dialectic.

40:19 Wes: AI, AI. Who knows if that's destroy, Accelerate.

40:22 John: Yeah, it's garbage. It's garbage in, garbage out. So, yeah, I guess where I would. I believe it and I believed it, and then where I was shaken in my beliefs was like, well, none of those things are really doing so great right now.

40:35 Mark: So before we edge toward the end of our first half here, I did want to characterize what he means by modern, not in terms of what are the criteria for a modern theory or, you know, this specific stuff about philosophical history that west started us up with. But just that I think Habermas is following in Hegel's footsteps in kind of mixing up the chronology such that we're not talking about a specific time period, because modern and Enlightenment, right, The Enlightenment is like the Renaissance. Modern philosophy, like Descartes, but then modern art, that's like 1910, what, you know, 1950, contemporary art.

But all this stuff gets put in one. It's sort of like there is the age of innocence where we just follow tradition. And this is again, in our recent Hegel's phenomenology discussions. We characterize this as, you know, Hegel's. His love for, like, the ancient Greek polis. And Habermas pointed out that he had equally in mind original Christianity, you know, the small Christian. But so in that, like, people just follow, there's a harmony between their belief system and what they see as the law, and it's just not questioned. Whereas once you then burst that bubble and everybody gets their own opinion, we're no longer just following what society has programmed with us, then this just opens up the can of worms that is modernity.

So where does that go? You know, we've talked a little about the overall push toward Enlightenment, as in Kant's essay, what is Enlightenment? That we read at some one point where he was really just like, are people really at the point where we should give it, have real equality?

42:11 Dylan: Right.

42:11 Mark: The assumption before that is most people are ignorant, they need to be controlled in some ways. So a class system makes sense, but with the Enlightenment, with the modern age, no, that's actually not the rational thing. Maybe some people are so ground down that they need to be, you know, we need to wait for the next generation or, or reeducate them or whatever, but everybody should be able to handle liberty. And so that is what we're talking about as the modern age. So that is why I'm associating it with the idea of liberty in general.

42:39 Wes: Well, in the first essay, he. Right. He tells us that Hegel's use of it is of modernity is to refer to an epoch which we can take in part as chronological. Right. So everything that's after the Middle Ages, but also we can take it in this functional sense that it involves this self consciousness of our period as different from the past and a development out of the past and towards our own. I think he calls this time consciousness, but. Right. The present period is oriented to the future and open to novelty, and it's conscious of a rapid movement towards further differentiation in the future.

So there's a special type of consciousness that kind of shows up with modernity. And then it's also partly, again, it's related to this way in which we get severed from the force of tradition by becoming overly aware of it in a way, by becoming too conscious of the way we are related to it causally from some sort of historical point of view. So in the first essay, I think he thinks it occurs first with art and its movement away from traditional aesthetic models. So we get with Baudelaire this idea, right, that modern art combines the fashion or the fleeting moment with the eternal in some sense.

And so it's this, I think, I think it appears. I think I just bring that up because it's a good concrete example of what it means to have this kind of consciousness associated with modernity. And you don't have to Go to modern art in the sense of what we mean by modern art. You can just be talking about what's going on with Baudelaire.

44:22 John: Modernity cares about what's. I mean, this is sort of, I'm sorry, circular, but it's kind of the simplest way to. Modernity cares about what's modern. Like it cares about the present and it thinks it's important and thinks it's different from the past and thinks it's an opening to the future. Right. Like it thinks that there's something important about the moment we're living in that needs to be grasped and needs to be understood on its own terms, rather than. It's just the eternity of everything's been this way.

44:48 Seth: Yeah, it's a problem.

44:49 Mark: That quote is from page 8 from Baudelaire. Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. It is one half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable. So Seth started to say, like, the modern period is atemporal. And that's in a sense, that's right, because we don't have to pay attention to the history, we're just paying attention to the fashion of now. But then we're also, once we sort of get through, we're using the fashion of now to get to something that is eternal. So of course the ancients, you know, they thought they were doing something eternal as well. It's just that we think, you know, we don't want to fall into the trap of, oh, well, if, then, if we want to get to the eternal stuff, then we have to imitate the ancients. Like. No, no, we do it our own way.

45:30 Dylan: Yeah. So the first few paragraphs of section three, I think are super helpful on this. I'm looking at the bottom of page 16. So he says, with regards to Hegel, Habermas says he sees philosophy confronted with the task of grasping its own time. And for him that means the modern age and thought. Hegel sees the modern age as marked universally by a structure of self relation that he calls subjectivity. Quote, the principle of the modern world is freedom of subjectivity. The principle that all the essential factors present in the intellectual whole are now coming into their right in the course of their development.

The greatness of our time rests in the fact that freedom, the peculiar possession of mind whereby it is at home with itself, is recognized. So you have two huge characteristics of, I think, very recognizable as modern subjectivity and freedom. And then he has this nice outline of the four connotations of subjectivity, individualism in the modern world. Singularity particularized without limit. The right to criticism. The principle of the modern world requires that what anyone is to recognize shall reveal itself to him as something entitled to recognition.

Autonomy of action, responsibility for what we do is a characteristic of modern times. And finally, idealistic philosophy itself, where Hegel considers a the work of modern times, that philosophy grasps the self conscious idea.

46:59 Wes: I just want to add to that criticism criteria. Right. It's the idea that authority has to justify itself. Yes, it's really important. I'm glad you read this, Dylan, because it's this principle of subjectivity comes up often in these essays.

47:12 Mark: All right. We finally defined our main terms and that's a good way to end part one here. People should come back next week for part two and let's. You want to become a partial Examined Life Supporter, partially examined life.com support in which case your part two, if you've subscribed through the website or Patreon, should be in your feed already. If not, you know, within the next day. Thanks.

47:34 Wes: Thank you.

47:35 Dylan: Thanks.