Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0262082098
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This collection of Habermas's recent essays on philosophical topics continues the analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In a short introductory essay, he outlines the sources of twentieth-century philosophizing, its major themes, and the range of current debates. The remainder of the essays can be seen as his contribution to these debates.
Habermas's essay on George Herbert Mead is a focal point of the book. In it he sketches a postmetaphysical, intersubjective approach to questions of individuation and subjectivity. In other essays, he develops his distinctive, communications-theoretic approach to questions of meaning and validity. The book as a whole expands on his earlier efforts to define a middle ground between nostalgic revivals of metaphysical conceptions of reason and radical deconstructions of reason. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt.
The Essays: The Horizon of Modernity is Shifting. Metaphysics after Kant. Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking. Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning. Peirce and Communication. The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices. Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead's Theory of Subjectivity. Philosophy and Science as Literature?
traditional unit breaks apart in the decisions that are demanded from it.82 Of course, this proposition leaves open whether the familial lifeworld is crumbling under the growing pressure of decisions or whether it will transform itself as a lifeworld. If one regards the detraditionalization process only from the perspective of the labor market and the occupational system, only as the flipside of ‘inclusion,’ then it is to be expected that the drifting apart of individualized life
Henrich (Theorie der Subjektivität, ed. K. Cramer et al. [Frankfurt, 1987], 425ff.)] 4. Dieter Henrich, “Die Grundstruktur der modernen Philosophie. Mit einer Nachschrift: Über Selbstbewußtsein und Selbsterhaltung,” in Subjektivität und Selbsterhaltung, ed. Hans Ebeling (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 114. 5. Ernst Tugendhat and Ursala Wolf, Logisch-semantische Propädeutik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), 7ff.
world-projecting spontaneity. This problem of intersubjectivity is rendered unsolvable once one accepts the premise of a Dasein that can authentically project itself in response to its possibilities only in solitude.15 In his later philosophy Heidegger developed an alternative. Here he no longer encumbers the individual Dasein with the process of world-disclosure; he no longer conceives of worldconstitution as an accomplishment at all but instead as
accidental to Egohood in general, that I, the individual A, am precisely this A, and since the impulse of self-sufficiency is to be an impulse of Egohood in general, as such, this impulse certainly does not crave the self-sufficiency of the particular individual A, but of reason in general. …[I]f this self-sufficiency can only be represented in the individuals A, B, C, etc., and through them; then it is necessarily altogether indifferent to me whether A, or B, or C
self-consciousness first arises out of the encounter with another ego confronting (entgegengesetzten) me. To this extent, the “posited” (gesetzte) ego is comparable to the “me.” But in the naturalistic view of pragmatism, this “me” appears as the form of mind that is higher or reflected and not as the product of an antecedent ego (“itself positing itself”) which withdraws from consciousness. Admittedly, Mead neglects the distinction between an originary