Ep. 391: Habermas Defends Modernity (Part Two)

Introduction

0:00Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 391, part two. We've been talking about Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. We've given the basic thesis, what his idea of modernity is, how he thinks Hegel maybe had some good ideas that he wants to tell us about in the second lecture, how in the fifth lecture, he is objecting to the critique that Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic

Horkheimer and Adorno's Critique

0:33of Enlightenment had against it. You know, all of this in favor of, don't give up on modernity, don't give up on enlightenment, we need more reason. We need just, you know, you just need to have communicative action. You need to have something social and not merely an expanded individual conception of reason or something like that. We had finally gotten into the text itself. Yeah, what Dylan, you had us about? Page 17 in the clarification of what subjectivity means for Hegel in the context of modernity.

Hegel's Definition of Modern Art

1:03Yeah. What else do we want to point out in this first lecture here? I mean, his definition of modern art is very interesting because it's a little bit more capacious than what we might think of it. It's not just like modernism, like cubism or whatever. Modern art reveals its essence in romanticism and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of romantic art. Expressive self-realization becomes a principle of art bearing as a form of life. By according to the principle of Forrest, I live as artist when all my action utterances for me only on the level of mere semblance and assumes a shape was holy in my power.

1:39Reality attains the status of artistic expression only through the subjective refraction of the sensitive soul is a mere appearance due to the eye.

Modern Artists

1:48I mean, that does describe, I would say, the pretensions perhaps of modern artists to kind of be these world disclosing figures and producing their selves in this very radical way. I think that principle holds up pretty much until the present. I mean, it's very specific, right? Actions are the level of a semblance, assuming a shape holy in the artist's power. Yeah, I just think there are many, many modern artists who would not describe, you know,

2:18they might think they're reacting against that or, you know, so the idea of, but he's trying

Tying Art to Philosophy

2:23to tie the artistic take on it to the philosophical take on it. And, you know, when Dylan was reading that list at the end of part one, the last, they all sound very, okay, we want democracy, we want individualism, but then idealist philosophy, like, oh, wait a second, that's not like, most modernists are not going to agree that that's how modern, you know, this was a real specific thing, right? But this is all supposed to flow out of Kant and Fichte, right? That epistemology. So the principle of subjectivity begins there and all these other things flow from that,

2:55including, for instance, the idea that morality is about our own will, our own autonomous will and the laws that it produces for itself. So these things, art is just one domain or sphere here. There's religious life, there's science and morality and society and all of these things embody the principle of subjectivity.

The Importance of Intersubjectivity

3:19The important part, you know, the next stage of this argument is that whereas Kant doesn't see his divisions as directions, right? He doesn't see them as a problem for modernity. He doesn't see them as leading to things like alienation. Hegel does. And the problem is now, now becomes that the principle of subjectivity must undo the schisms that it created it. And that's what I think Habermas thinks Hegel thinks he is doing, right?

3:50Because he's going to do this imminent critique thing, right? We remember from the phenomenology where it's not that you're using something external standard to judge whatever form of consciousness you're encountering. You're just noticing the contradictions within it. And Habermas doesn't think that this approach is going to work for Hegel. No, he thinks it sort of spits out. He thinks that early Hegel was grasping towards something like communicative rationality when he was describing all these different forms of communal life with these idealized images of the Greeks

4:26or early Christianity, which kind of was a form of being together that was emotionally satisfying, as well as being moral and ethical. It kind of brought these things into harmony. And then he gives up in a way, I think, in Habermas's opinion, where he kind of says, well, once you have idealistic philosophy, you can kind of just sit back and repent. And he calls it a stoic, Habermas calls it a stoic retreat into, which is kind of a devastating

4:58thing because of Hegel's belief that stoicism was kind of an incomplete form of subjectivity itself, a retreat from the world. And then he says his politics ultimately become quite conservative.

Hegel's Conservative Politics

5:10And he says there's no reason that he couldn't have done the philosophy of right for a liberal democracy. But for some reason, well, I think he gives some reasons, but I can't remember off the top of my head. He goes towards this very conservative form of constitutional monarchy rather than and sort of stops. He says, OK, he becomes himself positive, right? The process of reasoning, the process of critique, the process of revolution, it stops here because otherwise we get into trouble. And what's the point after absolute knowledge, absolute self-knowledge?

5:42There's no impetus to critique anymore. We know everything anyway. And also we have the best form of state. So how could you possibly ever want anything else?

Conclusion and Transition to Adorno

5:50Well, before you abandon the point, you know, I was trying to figure out how the notion of art that you brought up, John, fits into what Wes was just describing as the outcome of Kant. I mean, we know Kant's specific theory of art, but that's very different than the romantic. In fact, it's diametrically opposed to the romantic. I am revealing the inner core of the world, you know, sort of like in Hegel, you know, drawing from Fichte, the idealist is through knowledge is revealing the inner core of the world, right? Is you're really just

6:23revealing yourself, right? That this whole thing is about the individual making judgments about himself, about the individual. The whole world ends up being the individual if you're Fichte. Right. The romantics think they're pivoting off of Kant's third critique. Where there seems to be some hope that the aesthetic can put us in touch with things in themselves, right? So you get the idea that the absolute is approachable through the aesthetic. Right. And he, in the third critique, he kind of says in the experience of beautiful and the

6:54sublime that we kind of get some idea of this other world, but we can't really put it into words or rational concepts. We get an idea of like the ordering principles of the world itself and through like beauty and the sublime, like give us an idea of like what the understanding and reason are in some way. And I think that the romantics kind of go, Kant says like still does this in this really way where he says, well, you can't really touch it, but it's out there somewhere. And sometimes

7:24you get a little glimpse of it and that's what's going on in art. And I think the romantics say like, no, that's what I'm doing. I can tap directly into it. Like I'm pushing the organs and the buttons of the sublime and the beautiful, and it's all coming out of me. I think they just got very excited about the things that Kant said were like, well, it's sort of out there and you can't really get too into it because that's beyond what we can do. So I think it does sort of, it's a radicalization of what Kant was getting at. And the third critique. Yeah. And then Schelling and Hegel, by the way, are outgrowths of this idea, right?

7:54The hope again, to know the supposedly unknowable things. This all comes from the third critique and this kind of backdoor to the absolute. And that's what they were doing. They were all as Schelling and early Hegel thought the work of art was some way to bridge this direction, this problem between reason and feeling and would overcome all the alienations of the modern world. And we'd have an aesthetically organized society. And that was their solution. And then Hegel grows up and does not, still doesn't believe,

8:30kind of drops that, but that was his young aspiration. And I think Coburn was kind of, I mean, this is a minor key in the piece, but I think he kind of thinks too bad that he dropped that because it's actually kind of got some good ideas in there. Yeah. I mean, he goes back to Hegel's Jenna period as at the end of the essay as the thing that he gave up on. Yeah. In the second essay, we get this account of early Hegel as interested in primitive Christianity,

9:01as basically modeled on Jesus's introduction of morality into the religious life of his people. So that morality isn't something just abstract and religion isn't just something abstract. It really informs people's hearts and their norms and so on. And he agrees with Kant, right? That religion is needed to give efficacy to practical reason, to morality, right? Religion in a way is the way we

9:32affect morality in the real world, but the Kantian religion of reason doesn't allow us in a way it's like a step back. It doesn't allow us to penetrate mores and the government and individual psychology, right? It doesn't appeal to sentiment and to hard and to basic psychological needs. So I think this is the problem for early Hegel and it leads him to reject, right? These two forms of positivity. One is right, traditional religion or the orthodoxy of the time, the positivity of religious authority

10:08and merit based on works and heaven and hell as incentives and priestly authority and all that stuff. And the other is the religion of reason itself, right? The Kant's religion of reason is supposed to be just another form of positivity because it objectifies rational commands, right? The commands that the will is issuing, the autonomous will issues to us is actually turns out to be another sort of alien authority on Hegel's point of view. And it's too cut off from

10:40sentiment to really have any practical social effect. So that's the real concern here is what do you do after you get too abstract? You've pulled out the rug from under religion in a way and then the thing that you've patched it up with is just this very philosophically abstract stuff that isn't going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so to speak. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's more than just that. I don't think Habermas harps on this point too much, but you know how we've read works where we're talking about the role of religion to communicate, like for example,

11:15moral messages through parables and things like that because reason, you know, when you have the idea that reason is for a small subset of people and you need a different way to communicate truth because you can't do it discursively and argumentatively, then you need things like morality plays and parables and Psalms and things like that. And so it's not just ideological at this level either. You know, the project of the enlightenment requires that it does the ideological work

11:46of putting the burden on reason, right? And pulling it away from these other potential sources of truth or at least, you know, value creation mechanisms. But it also means it goes back to that driving this radical subjectivity where individuals become responsible. It shifts the locus of responsibility for education and transmission and generation to individuals. And it changes the whole dynamic of society, which is why I think Habermas points out early on. He's talking about how the

12:18state becomes completely separated. You know, that's the whole dynamic changes and it's not just ideological. It's also all the mechanisms whereby human beings interact and are acclimated to social conditions and understanding. Their methods of understanding have to change and it's a huge burden. It's really traumatic. Yeah. Are you guys interested at all in his description of fate and criminality to describe

12:49what is happening in this kind of life world? Yeah, this is great. Because I think it's really interesting. He basically says something like moral duties don't really get at what it's like, what crime or misdeeds actually do. What it does is it kind of like tears at the life world that constitutes the person who's committing a crime. So they're kind of committing this crime against themselves and then it rebounds on them in fate. So like they feel this sense of persecution, but

13:20that sense of persecution is just the fact that they're destroying their own life world through their criminal behavior, which I think is what we would hope happens. But yeah. Yeah. Well, he's giving that account in service of the idea that Hegel, while Hegel wants to do imminent critique, right, and derive what Habermas calls reconciling reason, the thing that's going to unify all these derempted parts to get back together, he wants to derive it from the principle of subjectivity, but he's actually going to need intersubjectivity. So he's not going to be able to do his

13:53imminent critique. He's going to need this outside standard. And that's part of Habermas's critique here of Hegel. And that the intersubjectivity that, you know, the first way it makes is its appearance is this idea that there's this kind of self-healing quality to spirit. Where are you? It's 28, 29, 30 or where he says these things. Yeah. So the criminal suffers until he recognizes that in repudiating the other,

14:23he's engaged in self-estrangement. So the ethical totality, there's a ruptured bond there and it naturally tries to heal itself. So that's intersubjectivity at work. The thing that is going to actually cure these deremptions is not, cannot be derived from the principle of subjectivity. It has to come from intersubjectivity. But you might wonder whether the principle is actually coming from the intersubjective, in the pre-fall world, it was just like, there are different cultures and you're one with your

14:59culture because you don't question the culture. And of course, the cultures are going to be different from each other. But what we want in the ideal world that Hegel is shooting for is that it's a completely rational and therefore universal culture. So still in knowing, hey, you know, we're all on the same team. I should not do anything that's going to impinge on the rights of others. Everyone is an end in themselves. That's still something I can figure out absolutely by myself, but it makes reference to other people. So being in a culture and seeing myself

15:30qua universal as a member of this culture is absolutely essential, but it's still not just depend on the historical contingencies of what that culture, right? Murder is not something that's historically contingent from culture to culture. Does everybody do that? Or does only philosopher do that level of self-reflection? Like it seems to me that he's saying most people encounter the ethical, I mean, maybe under modernity, this becomes really problematic and difficult because it asks you to reflect in certain ways

16:02that are hard. But I think he's saying that, well, we just kind of phenomenologically encounter the moral world more like in terms of this fate and then reconciliation rather than this subject doing this Kantian, what ought I do in this? It seems like he's getting- That's exactly the contrast he's trying to make here. Right. He's doing this phenomenological distinction where, and this is where relate what Habermas likes about it. He's like, well, this is the phenomenology of moral life actually, and it is more interesting

16:35and more subtle when you don't abstract from it. You can recapture what the actual practices manage to do, which makes sense on their own terms. So I think he's like, you can rational, and this is like his rational reconstruction method. I think what Habermas says that Hegel is doing at his best is he's finding in the pre-reflective life world, the actual rationality for things that abstracting reason might not see that well, because it might miss those things.

17:08Yeah. On page 30, so he says, Hegel summons the unifying power of an intersubjectivity that appears under the titles of love and life. The place of the reflective relationship between subject and object is taken by, and in the broadest sense, communicative mediation of subjects. The living spirit is the medium that founds the communality of the sort that one subject can know itself to be one with another subject while still remaining itself. The isolation of subjects then sets in motion the

17:39dynamism of a disrupted communication whose inherent telos is the reestablishment of the ethical relationship. This way of construing things might have given impetus to a communication theoretic retrieval and transformation of the reflective concept of reason developed in the philosophy of the subject. Hegel did not take this path. So this is all early Hegel. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But what that section just said sounds like, well, I've just outlined for you how Hegel could have ended up at me, but he doesn't.

18:11Right. He could have gone the route of intersubjectivity, but. But he didn't quite do it. But instead he sticks with. Yeah. Does he say why? Or does he just say that was a mistake? Does he give a reason internal to Hegel's project why he doesn't make that turn? I think he thinks that early on Hegel is thinking of the ethical totality in terms of this model of early primitive Christian and Greek communities, the Greek polis. And that's why you get this inner subjectivity as life and love and living spirit as a medium of, you know, union of individuals.

18:48We'll see in the phenomenology, right? That just becomes a stage. I think. Because it's utopian. Yeah, exactly. Hegel rethinks that and doesn't think that reconciling reason can come about by some sort of going back to tradition, going back to primitive Christianity, or that we can reform capitalist civil society by going back to the model of ancient Greece. We have to go forward. And the going forward is towards the concept of the absolute. Well, and this is what I was trying to say that amounts to the same thing, that we will be when we

19:22are in touch with the absolute, when we identify ourself as the absolute, we will be all of us philosophers in the sense that you were asking about, John, doing the pseudo Kantian, not exactly Kantian, but the reasoned reflection is just that that will be the norm. Everybody, that will be our public religion, is to think together and rejoice together and self-consciously affirm ourselves to be members of this community in a way that even in these polices that he idealizes, they were not

19:53self-conscious about it. It's just, this is, as you're saying, the way that we're just doing anthropology here. This is the way that they would think of it. I have disobeyed the group law. It's like a, you know, a wolf pack or something like, oh, you're on the outs with the group now and you are the group. The group is really important. So I want to get back in with the group. Like that's the very primordial thing, but we preserve the spirit of that. But now we're all philosophers in the way that he tried to go. It's not so, you see kind of the hint of that in modern society. You can see the phenomenology of it, which is basically like, well, you know,

20:28we do a lot of things together unreflectively, but then we also can't like, you know, we go and do all sorts of public rituals, watch sports, get married, so on and so forth. You know, we do these things kind of unreflectively, but then we occasionally reflect on them and have discussions about their meanings and so on and so forth. So we kind of are that, like we've done it. It's just, it's still, I think that the alienation, the idea that that alternating between

21:00participation in communal norms and then reflecting on them is good enough or what we should aspire to. I think it doesn't quite get over the alienation. And I guess different traditions would have different reasons why. Obviously Marxian tradition would have one reason why. Nietzschean tradition that would have another reason why. But I think that basically like Hegel might say to a modern person, listen, the problem is you, you have all the resources in your society to reflect,

21:30to exist in an ethical totality. You know, you're not living up to, well, maybe that's wrong. But I think that the Habermasian and maybe implicitly Hegelian position is like the institutions are there. You just have to relate to them in the correct way and understand what they are when you're doing them. So I just, the trajectory of this essay, right, is that he moves away from intersubjectivity in this early Hegel stuff. And he rejects positivity as a way of overcoming the directions, right? Because

22:02they're just forced, right? And again, we can't go back to tradition. And then ultimately we get the absolute, which is really interestingly described in this essay as, how does he put it? Basically, it's unconditionality involves this endless process of self-relation. It's not something static. I'll leave it that we can go into that in more detail if we want to. But the end point for all this, of course, is the absorption of civil society into the state. And that's section four.

22:33I don't know if we want to say any little bit about that and what civil society is and the distinction between the state and what it means to, yeah. Yeah. Isn't that what we've been talking about in our last couple of Hegel's Phenomenology episodes is that, you know, it used to be in the fall, before the fall in the polis, that civil society is the state. You don't need a separate state. But then, you know, we've gone to this in our last discussion of this, the pull of state power who, you know, they, is a positive law, but the divine law,

23:05the sort of the distributed moral intuitions are elsewhere. And we were characterizing, well, wealth is the power that we as individuals might accrue through the economic system, say, that are apart from state. So there's already an alienation there between us and the state, as soon as we leave the polis-like state of innocence. Yeah. Well, civil society is self-directed, is a system of interdependency, but it's all self-directed action. And the state returns the principle of collectivity and helps us get over

23:40the divided and self-interested, fragmented place civil society brings us to. Yeah. The dynamic was, it started in Hegel with, okay, we're on the side of sort of wealth, civil society, and then the state has become something alienated from us. But then civil society itself, culture becomes alienated from us. It's something that we participate in. It's a clothing that we have to put on to be somebody, to participate in society. But still then the new division, the new alienation is as actually, you know, faith, our spirituality, something that can't be

24:13captured by culture is going to be fundamentally divided from everything that culture gives us. So this is going to get us into, you know, what we'll talk about when we return to that book about faith. Habermas, at the beginning of Four, to me, just does this incredibly astute and incredibly condensed summary of what happened in the modern era since Hobbes and after with liberal democracy and what happened with it compared to the previous time. And he says, you know,

24:46in the Aristotelian tradition, the old European concept of politics as a sphere encompassing state and society was carried on without interruption into the 19th century.

24:58On this view, the economy of the entire household, a subsistence economy based on agrarian and handicraft production and expanded through local markets, forms the foundation for a comprehensive political order. Social stratification and differential participation in or exclusion from political power go hand in hand. The constitutional political authority integrates with society as a whole. So that sounds right. But then capitalism comes along and this conceptual framework no longer fits modern

25:31societies in which the commodity exchange organized under civil law of the capitalist economy has detached itself from the order of political rule. The social system has been separated from the political. A depoliticized economic society has been separated from a bureaucratic state. Since the end of the 19th century, it has split apart into a social theory grounded in political economy on the one hand, in a theory of the state inspired by modern national right on the other. Yeah. So we get this depoliticized economic sphere, which is civil society, which is grounded on self-interest.

26:07But Hegel and Habermas says this here, and we saw this in our Hegel episode, he's very impressed by Adam Smith's idea of the invisible hand. So self-interest does in a way lend itself to interdependence and it does lend itself in some ways to the general welfare. But civil society is beset with all sorts of problems, including poverty and income inequality. That's where the essay heads after this. And it can't self-regulate them. That's why we need the state. We need the state to preserve the

26:40results of emancipation of freedom, right, that comes from the principle of subjectivity. But we have to ameliorate its self-destructive tendencies as they occur in civil society. And that's right. Civil society is market-like. It's, you know, based on private law relationships and individualism, and we need something to overcome that. And now a word from our sponsor, NordLayer. You know how much of our work happens in browsers these days? Emails, SaaS apps, dashboards, pretty much everything.

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31:31abandoned carts and more with Shopify and the ShopPay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash P-E-L. Go to shopify.com slash P-E-L. That's shopify.com slash P-E-L. It's really remarkably modern. And well, I would just want to say, so Hegel is definitely not a libertarian because he doesn't think that the market is the only institution you need and it's self-regulating and solves all problems. He's thinking it generates insoluble problems. And actually,

32:02you know, the state is required to try to put them back in shape, which is kind of everybody's common sense understanding of what happens. Like, yeah, you know, like sometimes the economy goes a little bad and then... It's just how much state do we need? You know, are we Rawlsian liberals? Are we Nozickian libertarians? Are we something else? Yes. But his, I mean, he says, oh, well, Habermas says he doesn't go into liberal, it doesn't fully make the step into liberal democracy. But up until now, this is kind of like

32:33generally compatible, maybe not with liberalism as a philosophy, but with kind of actually existing liberalism as a set of institutions and maybe when they're working really well. But he doesn't go all the way. He says, along this line, a democratic self-organization could have taken the place of the monarchical apparatus of state. By way of contrast, the logic of subject conceiving itself makes the institutionalism of a strong state necessary. Is he saying that because of the subject's

33:04reflective and dissolving, abstracting action, you need to have strong institutions from preventing everything to fall apart? Is that what that means? Well, he's drawing on the Hegel's model of the absolute as the self-conscious subject, right? And it unifies the individual particular I, person, self, with the universal subject, which is the state. But the state, that unification, according to Habermas, is accomplished only if the universal, which is to say the state, maintains its primacy over the individual,

33:38right? In other words, too much individual freedom and you don't get that union. You don't get that self-knowledge reunion between subject and object or individual universal. That's where Hegel's being conservative because he's saying, look, you know, if you mess around too much with this stuff, it's not going to, the machinery won't work. It won't do the, people won't identify with this unity and feel good about it. Yeah. This is where Habermas, I don't know if you already read this, but he gives his alternative here. A different model for the mediation of the universal and the individual is provided by the

34:11higher level intersubjectivity of an uncoerced formation of will. No, I didn't say that. Within a community. Okay. Because he does this in a couple of places in our reading. He just gives a little gloss of his whole thing, right? So within a communication community existing under constraints towards cooperation in the universality of an uncoerced consensus arrived at among free and equal persons, individuals retain a court of appeal that can be called upon even against particular forms of institutional concretization of the common will. In other words, we have rights,

34:46right? And the common will isn't everything and we can make appeals to that sort of thing using reason and rationality. So this is communicative. This is communicative reason. And this is the alternative that Hegel is passing over. It's bottom up, right? Like civil society, this is bottom up, but it's a bottom up process that hopefully will lead to some sort of unity. Yeah. It's even a little bit more radical. You know, he's, people have identified him with liberal democracy, but that sounds even a little bit more radical because that's more participatory than

35:21representative. I mean, it's not incompatible with representation, but it requires something more substantive, right? Like you have to participate or, or the potential has to be there to participate in governance or self-governance in a way that's more, I don't know, council-like or something like that or grassroots than just representative democracy. Yeah. Although the technocrats, right, will be the ones having the lion's, lion's share of these

35:51conversations, right? Right, right, right. Yeah. Certain groups will have a much greater role in the communication community than, than others. Right. Like us, right? Right. I'm sure Habermas addresses this in other works, you know, how much of an actual egalitarian he is. Certainly in Hegel's formulations, you know, when, when he's talking about the mediation between different groups and different forces within the dialectic, it turns out that he is just talking about a very narrow slice of people, right? That it's in recently it was,

36:27okay, the state has concretized itself in one self-consciousness, in other words, a monarch. And then there's the others who are reacting to that and giving their allegiance to the monarch. And there's sort of a open-ended thing like, well, all the citizens are really giving their allegiance to the monarch. They're putting their selfhood in the monarch. But the thing he's actually describing in detail in the section is the nobles in the society, because they're the ones that retain some independent power in through their wealth. And that, you know, have this cycle of

36:58they suck up to the king and call the king, king. And therefore the king grants their claims to wealth and make sure that they are taken care of. Most people are completely left out of this product. But Mark, that's in the phenomenology description of absolutism. That's different from his ideals. He thinks that's unstable. And that's not what he's describing in the philosophy of right. Right. In the philosophy of right, there are bureaucrats who are the universal class, but he thinks that nobility, that the dialectic of the nobility has been overcome because of the

37:32revolution and so on and so forth. It's not, there's no nobility. I don't think there's a hereditary nobility in his ideal state. I think that's just a description of the way it worked in the past. I just wasn't sure if even in Habermas's model, the idea or Rorty's model, the idea that we work together to come up with the, that it's not the individual and it's not from tradition, it's a dialogue. Well, does the dialogue actually have to involve everyone or does it just have to involve enough people that the people who don't care or just, you know, follow along, they're part

38:05of the families. They're part of the, but ultimately we're going to have to deal as enlightenment spreads as this, you know, the, with everybody and everybody's opinion and, you know, why we need universal education, all this stuff. So I would absolutely interpret Habermas as the most egalitarian kind of liberal that you could get, that we actually need to get everybody raised up so they can participate in this cooperative effort. But do you need that to have a society that fulfills his requirements for communicative action as opposed to mere subjectivity, as opposed to tyranny of some

38:41sort? Yeah. I would say maybe he would say as an ideal that we should move towards, but you would also not want to say, he's not a radical in the sense that he would say a society that falls short of that, but has some functioning institutions is worthless, right? So he wouldn't say, he would say, well, not everybody is, you know, but we've got some features of liberal democracy going on and that's okay. Again, almost a very reasonable in the everyday sense of the term position, I think.

39:15Yeah. Should we move to Adorno? Yeah, let's do it. I think we got a picture. I've already said the way this essay ends, which is just that Hegel ends up critiquing subjective idealism and its obscurities and false positives of religion and state, but that leads to a lack of interest in actual criticism of social and political life and its decadence. So it just is a retreat. It's a withdrawal, but yeah. He literally thinks that he figured it all out and he doesn't need to do anything. Yeah. His job is to figure it out at a, this very abstract level.

39:47And that's good enough level. He's not a social critic. I mean, he kind of is, but yeah, but anyway, yeah. So let's do some Adorno here. Cause this really is such a great, I'm glad you added it, John, cause this is like the most enjoyable and clearest and it's such a critical, critical critique. Is that what I want to say? Essential critique. Yeah. It makes everything very clear what his position is and what his predecessor's position were and the people that he's trying to oppose. So it's the entwinement of myth and enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno is the name of the

40:19chapter. And like I said, Wes and I recently tried to read the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment. And we, we were kind of flummoxed and stopped after three sessions because it got completely historical. Like we're just talking about the ancients. And so it was really, you know, nice to hear in this secondary source about that book, how in the second essay, he gets into this analysis of Homer that, you know, so we just in going through this, like we wanted, we thought he was going to talk about kind of what Habermas is talking about in here, which is what is reason is reason universal.

40:56Does the dialect, does the hermeneutics of suspicion undermine reason such that, you know, modernity is doomed. And it just seemed like a very, very long excursus into this consideration of ancient sources that was not obvious to us where it was going. So we got to see here and he tells how in this thing on the Odyssey, that it's like, these are the things that individuals give up when they're raising out of the pre-modern condition, you know, the, what Hegel was calling

41:29the golden age, you know, they were just mere members of the flock when we raise up to individually and we sacrifice these things. And we end up then, you know, as Nietzsche puts it, having to sacrifice part of ourselves or Freud, right? Civilization and his discontents is okay. You've got this freedom. You're using reason now, but in order to do that, you have to conquer the animal within yourself. You have to sacrifice something pretty significant. Yeah. This is, you know, his account of their account of the Odyssey and it makes it seem brilliant.

42:02And I suppose, you know, it must be, even though, you know, during that close reads episode, I was just making fun of them. Yeah. What a really interesting reading of the Odyssey where the story of Odysseus is a story of the liberation of subjectivity from prehistoric mythic power, basically. So that, you know, he wants to write Odysseus wants to go home, but home is not actually right. Those mythic origins, that's where he's stranded and to establish his identity, his individuality,

42:34he must get away from them. He must get back home. But that, the cost of that, as Mark was just saying, is basically alienation for ourselves and the rupture of communal solidarity and all that stuff. Yeah. Odysseus is sort of the first calculating intellect on their account. The first person who kind of detaches themselves from their culture to try to accomplish his own purposes. And there's a gain and a loss, but they think that it starts the whole dialogue. In this foundational text of

43:08Western culture, you find the entire story essentially of what's going to happen for the next 3,000 years or so, which is, I mean, it's astonishingly ambitious reading and brilliant, but a little bit stupefying and it's grandiose claims. And I think Habermas thinks so too a little bit. But yeah, but then they keep on doing this dialectical back and forth where they want to say there is something like reason that's different from calculating or instrumental reason. But the

43:41mythical world of domination continually kind of reasserts itself. The pre-enlightened world reasserts itself in every step of enlightenment because enlightenment becomes about instrumental reason, practical know-how, technical power over nature and others. So they say, well, you know, it was meant to free man from domination and recreated domination in the end in a much more severe and

44:12serious way. But they create this kind of inescapable dialectic that there's, that they don't say there's a way to recapture. It turns into self-domination, right? Right. Self-domination. The idea is that, yeah, we want to liberate ourselves from these mythic forces, but with each, right. So for Odysseus, with each adventure, he's building his ego. He's building up a subjectivity, but he does that by sacrificing this unity with both external nature and with internal nature,

44:43with his own instinctual life. And that's what's supposed to be represented by the siren song, by the way, which had never occurred to me, that that's what the temptation of the siren song is, this archaic unity that we're tempted to go back to. But in fashioning our selfhood, we have to accept the split. Tie ourselves to the mast. Yeah. Yeah. What happens is we kind of internalize the split and we develop this compulsion for Adorno and Horkheimer towards rational domination of both, right, the external world

45:16through science and technology and our internal nature with repression and all of that stuff. And that, yeah, that's the problem. I'd be interesting to see how good the analogy works throughout the Odyssey in that a few things like the siren song or Circe, like you're on the island having sex all the time. I mean, there's a sacrifice to actually get away from that, but like Odysseus's cave, I mean, the Cyclops's cave, what is he sacrificing to get that? I just, I don't really understand. Well, it's not getting to the weeds on that.

45:49I think it works well enough that Odysseus is of all the Greeks. He's the smart one. You know, he's the one who takes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many-wade. Yeah. Yeah. He's the many-wade man. He's the wily one. And a contradistinction to Achilles and other leaders. He's the one also who has the distrust of his fellow Greeks because he is a subverter and cunning, a trickster. Yeah, he's the modern. Yes, he's the modern. And I think everybody, I mean, I think why I found this book when I encountered it so

46:23amazing or mind-blowing was like, oh my God, that's absolutely right. They teased this whole story out of that character, but they were really true to the way he works in the narrative. So I just thought it kind of gets some rhetorical power from, you know, how faithful they are to the text in a way. So the idea, I mean, the general idea is that, right, reason makes humanity possible, but then it assimilates it to instrumental rationality, to rationality, you know, that's meant to dominate and meant to be useful. The problem, according to Habermas, is once again, is that they're not

46:57showing that science and morality and art are actually subordinate. I think, John, you probably already read part of this, but they're not subordinate to instrumental rationality. Science doesn't just abandon theoretical knowledge for technical utility, for instance, right? And John, you made all these other points earlier. And so I think that's really important is they don't like really weigh the pros and cons of reason as it's manifested in modern society. He has a nice one paragraph summary of that on page 113. I just want to throw that.

47:30Why don't you read it unless it's the one, it's what already, unless John already read it. Yeah. I'm sorry. I jumped the gun. Oh, okay. I didn't connect the two. Sorry. Is it the paragraph that begins? It's the only full paragraph. Does not do justice to the rational content. Right. Yep. It's also a brilliant or stereotypical representation of Habermas's writing style. Hearing Habermas's take on Aderno and Horkheimer, it makes me think of him basically characterizing them. Look, they're like teenagers who got out into the real world and are complaining

48:07about the fact that they don't have their parents to tell them what to do anymore. And they don't know how to grow up. Unfair. Well, that's what he seems like he's saying about them. And that the problem is that you have to figure out how to take care of yourself. Yeah. But again, I just think that this is not, he doesn't adequately just put them in their historical context, which is that the conclusions that they come to about enlightenment spitting out horror is not an unreasonable one in the conditions. It's not a petulant

48:37one. I mean, if it was under different historical conditions, you could say these guys were kind of crazy or something, or they had a visionary transport to somewhere else. But it's a natural way to think about the world as it looks in 1944. And it is persuasive on that dimension. And you can historicize, sorry to use that word, but we historians use it. We can historicize Habermas in the same way now as we exit that era, which is that, well, yes, in the era of high liberal democracy, a lot of the conclusions that he comes to seem

49:10quite reasonable. Maybe we still see little hints of it. But I guess to return to what I kicked it off with, it's just like, well, what account of rationale, what account of reason and modernity to us seems not more desirable, but just a better description. And unfortunately, I think Adorno has more to say for himself or Adorno and Horkheimer account resonates more than I think that Habermas said it did at the time he was writing.

49:42Well, I think your point, he, Habermas mentions this, but it's worth emphasizing that when Adorno and Horkheimer were writing this and the circumstances in which they were writing it, you know, they were looking at the horrors of World War II. And I think it's, we had the same experience if you read Camus, he had the same experience when you read Sartre and various others. It's like, you know, there, we have to, if modernity is characterized by its self-creation out of the present, and that was the present, then I think it's perfectly reasonable to be,

50:16to see what they did. But more importantly, they're only representative of, they're not the only people that thought this. They weren't alone in this characterization. It was a very broadly held, and I think that's why Habermas takes it seriously too, is it's not just, you know, a couple of cranks. So, it's the way in which they choose to articulate it is one thing. And I thought, actually, after this first section, he has a short second part of this chapter where he talks about their kind of fidelity to Marxism and representing kind of the collapse of society in such a way where

50:53it kind of like, it undermined Marxist notions of like the proletariat and class unification and things like that, where even in the postmodern writers, you see people who clung to Marxist structures and Marxist ideology and were trying, still trying to make it fit. The 70s, you know, the 80s, it was, and I'm not saying that right or wrong, I'm just saying that a way that Habermas is kind of pointing to, they were sort of hamstrung by that framework in a way that had they jettisoned

51:25that, perhaps they could have provided the same critique, but with, you know, from a different perspective or with a different framework, and it might not have been quite as jejun or whatever it is that he's, we want to characterize it. Well, that's what he says about everybody, though. If they had only figured out the theory of communicative reason, they would have avoided. Oh, does that Habermas' thing? I mean, it seems sort of like the way he said, yeah, yeah. He's like, well, you know, I mean, that's totally fair because it's his project and he's insistent upon it, but. Yeah. So we have to wrap up here, but the way that this ends after talking about Nietzsche by

51:58comparison for a while, which I was a little annoyed at because we skipped lecture four on Nietzsche and yet here's, you know, 10 pages of Nietzsche on here. But, you know, after the point is to compare how the two figures, Horkai or Dorno on one hand and Nietzsche on the other hand, deal with the performative paradox of criticizing reason, right? You're using reason to criticize reason. So is there a problem with that? How far can you take that? And on page 129, when we're getting Habermas' conclusion here, talking about Horkheimer and Dorno, they surrendered themselves to an

52:29uninhibited skepticism regarding reason instead of weighing the grounds that cast doubt on the skepticism itself. So that's just the strategy that we've come. Yes. Again and again, this is Hegel's rejection of skepticism. This is the Nyaya rejection of skepticism, the doubt, right? And, you know, we should be okay with the idea that discourse is impure, right? That we're not just using objective, context-free, social, society-free notions of reason that everyone would agree on.

53:00We all, yes, standpoint theory. We all come to an argument from our own standpoint things, but that's okay. You know, we just admit that, admit that some of our attempts to try to describe truth involve something like myth, right? That we're not always able, this is the criticism when we had Graham Harmon on against literalism. Like, I think we can incorporate that into Habermas' idea that, yeah, discourse is not as simple as the naive Enlightenment folks thought it was,

53:33but this is the tool that we have, and it's produced a lot of good for us. And it is definitely the obvious way forward rather than the sort of pessimism of the people that he's critiquing. So that's my closing. I can dig it. Sounds good to me. Yeah. Any other final words for anybody? I feel like I'm somehow obligated to defend the pessimist position after the last six months of this podcast, but I want to find a way to kind of embrace the critical aspect

54:04of the critique of Enlightenment or the dialectic of the Enlightenment broadly construed. And at the same time, recognize that it feels to me that when you say something like, when Habermas says, you know, it's characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer and saying, you have this critique, it's built on this self-generated foundation, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, but how do you critique it from the outside? It's like, you're just, you keep repeating the foundationalist enterprise. How can I find that thing, that final thing that's going to validate this or put the

54:38truth to that? And, you know, and he says, when we talk about art, the spheres of science, morality, and art, all having mechanisms that are supposed to provide the same function, reason shows that they don't work, blah, blah, blah. Like, at what point do you say, you know, the skepticism of the critique is not a skepticism of methodology, so to speak, but a skepticism of premises or assumptions, like the project of this type of rational foundationalism.

55:10Yeah, of course, if you're looking for that, and you go to aesthetics, or you go in judgment, or if you go to morality, and religion, right, you're not going to satisfy. So stop trying to satisfy, stop trying to scratch that itch. Let's admit, you know. Yeah, although I would say the ultimate authority ends up being the discursive process itself. It's not anyone issuing speech, it's not an authority figure like God, or even an expert. We think that there's an emergent effect to the discursive process that gets us, right, that improves society

55:42and gets us closer to the truth, I would say. Yep. And the critical piece of that with respect to skepticism is that if you stand solely in the skeptical point of view, which is you're just end up being a naysayer, and your critique ends with critique, and the critique can be powerful and on point and part of the discursive element. But that by itself is not going to lead to the change, the resolution, the solution, except maybe by stimulating somebody else. You can point out all

56:17day long what the challenges are, and that's good. But that skeptical position is not going to solve the problems itself. Well, clearly, there's a lot more texts that we could talk about. And I think we're going to have some sort of supporter only part three to this to wrap up some loose ends. So become a supporter at partiallyexaminedlife.com slash support to do that. The next full topic that we'll have, the next thing you'll hear on the public feed is we're going to return to Hegel, but we're not actually going to go straight back to the phenomenology. We're going to make a pit stop

56:48inspired by this reading to read some of Hegel's 1802 book, Faith and Knowledge, focusing on the chapter in there critiquing Kant. So we're hoping that that will, in a much more straightforward way, say what his position about faith is, as alluded here. You know, when I'm heading out towards Hegel, I like to take a pit stop at Hegel. That's what I like to do. But then we will go back after that to the phenomenology and hopefully finish it up in an episode or two. Not the whole book, but the part that our concern with the religious aspect of it.

57:22Thanks so much for joining us, John. Thank you. Yeah, John is excellent. Thanks, John. People should let us know what else they want us to cover. Email us, P-E-L, at PartiallyExaminedLife.com. Reach out to us through Twitter, through Facebook, through the blog posts associated with this, at PartiallyExaminedLife.com, through Patreon. Thanks, everybody, and good night. Good night. Good night. Bye-bye.

57:49Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did, and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at MintMobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for a three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at MintMobile.com.

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