The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices
“The One and the Many,” unity and plurality, designates the theme that has governed metaphysics from its inception. Metaphysics believes it can trace everything back to one. Since Plato, it has presented itself in its definitive forms as the doctrine of universal unity; theory is directed toward the one as the origin and ground of everything. Prior to Plotinus, this one was called the idea of the good or of the first mover; after him, it was called summum ens, the unconditioned, or absolute spirit. During the last decade this theme has taken on renewed relevance. One side bemoans the loss of the unitary thinking of metaphysics and is working either on a rehabilitation of pre-Kantian figures of thought or on a return to metaphysics that goes beyond Kant.1 Conversely, the other side attributes responsibility for the crises of the present to the metaphysical legacy left by unitary thinking within the philosophy of the subject and the philosophy of history. This side invokes plural histories and forms of life in opposition to a singular world history and lifeworld, the alterity of language games and discourses in opposition to the identity of language and dialogue, and scintillating contexts in opposition to univocally fixed meanings. To be sure, this protest against unity made in the name of a suppressed plurality expresses itself in two opposed versions. In the radical contextualism of a Lyotard or a Rorty, the old intention behind the critique of metaphysics lives on: to rescue the moments that had been sacrificed to idealism—the nonidentical and the nonintegrated, the deviant and the heterogeneous, the contradictory and the conflictual, the transitory and the accidental.2 In other contexts, on the other hand, the apologetics of the accidental and the abandonment of the principled lose their subversive traits. In these contexts, all that is retained is the functional significance of shielding the powers of tradition, which are no longer rationally defensible, against unseemly critical claims; the point is to provide cultural protection for the flanks of a process of societal modernization that is spinning out of control.3
Originally published in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992% 115–148. This edition © 1992 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Thus, the nuanced debate surrounding the one and the many cannot be reduced to a simple for or against. The picture is made even more complex by latent elective affinities. The protest against the overpowering one that is made today in the name of an oppressed plurality allows itself at least a sympathetic detachment vis-à-vis the appearance of unitary thinking in renewed metaphysical form. For the fact is that radical contextualism itself thrives on a negative metaphysics, which ceaselessly circles around that which metaphysical idealism had always intended by the unconditioned but which it had always failed to achieve. But, from the functionalist perspective of a compensation for the burdens of societal modernization, the less radical form of contextualism can also get by with metaphysics, even though this contextualism itself no longer believes in the metaphysical claims to truth. The parties for and against the unitary thinking of metaphysics only form a clear constellation in relation to a third party, in which they detect a common opponent. I am referring to the humanism of those who continue the Kantian tradition by seeking to use the philosophy of language to save a concept of reason that is skeptical and postmetaphysical, yet not defeatist.4 As seen by the unitary thinking of metaphysics, the procedural concept of communicative reason is too weak because it discharges everything that has to do with content into the realm of the contingent and even allows one to think of reason itself as having contingently arisen. Yet, as seen by contextualism, this concept is too strong because even the borders of allegedly incommensurable worlds prove to be penetrable in the empirical medium of mutual understanding. The metaphysical priority of unity above plurality and the contextualistic priority of plurality above unity are secret accomplices. My reflections point toward the thesis that the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices—as the possibility in principle of passing from one language into another—a passage that, no matter how occasional, is still comprehensible. This possibility of mutual understanding, which is now guaranteed only procedurally and is realized only transitorily, forms the background for the existing diversity of those who encounter one another—even when they fail to understand each other.
I want to begin (I) by recalling the ambiguous significance of the unitary thinking of metaphysics, which, in emancipating itself from mythological thinking that focuses on origins, still remains tied to the latter. Along the way, I will touch on three topics that have sparked the critique of metaphysics within the very framework of metaphysics: the relationship of identity and difference, the problem of what is ineffably individual, and the discontent with affirmative thinking—above all with the merely privative determinations of matter and evil. Then I would like to retrace (II), in the case of Kant, the turn away from a rational unity derived from the objective order of the world and toward a concept of reason as the subjective faculty of idealizing synthesis; admittedly, the old problem of idealism, how mundus intelligibilis and mundus sensibilis are to be mediated, returns here in a new form. Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard attempt, each in his own way, to lay claim to the medium of history in order to conceive of the unity of a historicized world as process—whether it be the unity of the world as a whole, or of the human world, or of the life history of the individual. Positivism and historicism reply to this with a new turn (III), this time toward the theory of science. As we see today, this turn prepared the way for contextualism in one version or another. The objections to this position draw attention in turn to the impossibility of circumventing the symmetrical structure of perspectives built into every special situation, a structure that makes possible the intersubjectivity of reaching understanding in language. Thus (IV), a weak and transitory unity of reason, which does not fall under the idealistic spell of a universality that triumphs over the particular and the singular, asserts itself in the medium of language. The theme of the one and the many arises in different ways in the ontological, the mentalistic, and the linguistic paradigms.
I
“The one and the many” is the central topic in the Enneads of Plotinus. That work recapitulates the movement of thought within philosophical idealism that began with Parmenides and that led beyond the cognitive limits of the mythological way of seeing the world. To hen panta does not mean that everything is absorbed into one but that the many can be traced back to the one and can thereby be conceived as a whole, as totality. Through this powerful abstraction, the human mind gains an extramundane point of reference, a distancing perspective, from which the agitated in-one-another and against-one-another of concrete events and phenomena are joined together in a stable whole that is itself freed from the mutability of occurrences. This distancing view is then able to differentiate between the totality of what is and individual entities, between the world and what occurs within it. In turn, this distinction makes possible a level of explanation that is remarkably different from mythological narratives. The world in the singular refers to one origin, and indeed to one that can no longer be of the same sort as the original powers of mythology, which appear in the plural and compete with one another. The latter remained interwoven with the chain of generations and had their beginning in time; but as presuppositionless beginning, the one is a first from which time and the temporal first emerge.
Because every phenomenon in need of explanation must now be related in the last instance to the one and the whole, the necessity of disambiguation asserts itself—everything innerwordly must be made univocal as a being that is identical with itself, that is, as an object that is in each case particular. And the explanation for the phenomena that have become objects cannot be sought at the level of the phenomena themselves but only in something that underlies the phenomena—in essences, ideas, forms, or substances, which, like the one and the whole, are themselves of a conceptual nature or, in the manner of the archetype, at least occupy a middle ground between concepts and images. The one is therefore regarded as the first not only in the sense of the first beginning or origin but also as the first reason or ground, the primordial image, or the concept of the concept. Explanation by principles, which grasps the particular under the universal and derives it from a final axiom, this deductive mode of explanation modeled on geometry, breaks with the concretism of a worldview in which the particular is immediately enmeshed with the particular, one is mirrored in the other, and everything forms an extensive flat weave of oppositions and similarities. One could say, with Nietzsche, that mythology is familiar only with surface, only with appearance and not with essence. In opposition to that, metaphysics delves into the depths.
The world religions, especially the monotheistic ones and Buddhism, attained a conceptual level on a par with philosophical idealism. But when they put the world as a whole at a distance by means of a history of salvation or of a cosmology, the great prophets and founders of religions were led by questions posed ethically, whereas the Greek philosophers made the break with the immediacy of the narrative weave of concrete appearances theoretically. In this latter case, the advance from mythos to logos had more than sociocognitive potential. Yet even the act of contemplation had an ethicoreligious significance. A manner of living crystallized around the theoretical attitude of one who immerses himself in the intuition of the cosmos. This bios theoretikos was laden with expectations similar to those of the privileged paths to salvation of the wandering monk, of the eremite, or of the monastic brother. According to Plotinus, in the medium of thought the soul forms itself into a self, which becomes conscious of itself as a self in the recollective, reflexive intuition of the one. Henosis, the uniting of the philosopher with the one, for which discursive thinking prepares the way, is at once ecstatic self-transcendence and reflexive self-reassurance. The dematerializing and dedifferentiating recognition of the one in the many, the concentration upon the one itself, and the identification with the source of the limitless light, with the circle of circles—all this does not extinguish the self but intensifies self-consciousness. Philosophy refers to the conscious life as its telos. The identity of the ego forms itself in the contemplative presentation of the identity of the world. Thus, the thinking of the philosophy of origins did indeed have an emancipatory meaning.
Metaphysics also belongs to the world-historical process described by Max Weber from the perspective of the sociology of religion as rationalization and by Karl Jaspers as the cognitive advance of the “axial period” (extending from Buddha via Socrates and Jesus up to Muhammad).5 Of course, that was a process of “rationalization” in an entirely different sense as well. From Freud to Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectic inherent in metaphysical enlightenment has been retraced.6 The spell of mythological powers and the enchantment of demons, which were supposed to be broken by the abstraction of universal, eternal, and necessary being, still live on in the idealistic triumph of the one over the many. The fear of uncontrolled dangers that displayed itself in myths and magical practices now lodges within the controlling concepts of metaphysics itself. Negation, which opposed the many to the one as Parmenides opposed nonbeing to being, is also negation in the sense of a defense against deep-seated fears of death and frailty, of isolation and separation, of opposition and contradiction, of surprise and novelty.7 This same defensiveness still betrays itself in the idealist devaluation of the many to mere appearances. As mere images of the Ideas, the surging phenomena become univocal, the surveyable parts of a harmonic order.
The history of metaphysical thinking fuels the materialist suspicion that the power of mythological origins, from which no one can distance himself and go unpunished, is merely extended in idealism in a more sublime and less merciful way. Metaphysics labors in vain on certain key problems that seem to result from the rebellion of a disenfranchised plurality against a unity that is compulsory and, to that extent, illusory. From at least three perspectives, the same question is posed again and again: how are the one and the many, the infinite and the finite, related to each other?
First, How can the one, without endangering its unity, be everything (Alles), if the universe (das All) is indeed composed of many different things? The question of how the identity of identity and difference can be conceived, which was still the concern of Hegel's Differenzschrift, emerges out of the problem of methexis in the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. Plotinus had already incisively stated this problem with a paradoxical formulation: “The one is everything and yet not even one (among all things).”8 The one is everything insofar as it resides in every individual being as its origin; yet, at the same time, insofar as it can preserve its unity only through its distinction from the otherness of each individual being, the one is also nothing among them all. In order to be everything, the one is thus in everything; at the same time, in order to remain the one itself, it is above everything—it both lies beyond and underlies everything innerworldly.
Metaphysics entangles itself in such paradoxical formulations because, thinking ontologically, it vainly tries to subsume the one itself under objectifying categories; but as the origin, ground, and totality of all beings, the one is what first constitutes the perspective that allows the many to be objectivated as the plurality of beings. For this reason, it was still necessary for Heidegger to insist upon the ontological difference between Being and beings, which is supposed to guard against the assimilation of the one to the other.
Plotinus transfers this paradox out of the one itself and into nous: only within the human faculty of cognition does the gap open up between discursively grasping the many and intuitively melting together with the one; the former process merely moves toward the latter. Of course, this negative ontological concept of the one as something effusive, which refuses all involvement with discursive reasoning, clears the way for a self-referential critique of reason that continues to hold the thinking of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida under the influence of metaphysics. Whenever the one is thought of as absolute negativity, as withdrawal and absence, as resistance against propositional speech in general, the ground (Grund) of rationality reveals itself as an abyss (Abgrund) of the irrational.
Second, there arises the question of whether idealism, which traces everything back to one and thereby devalues innerworldly beings to phenomena or images, can do justice to the integrity of the particular entity in its individuality and uniqueness. Metaphysics uses the concepts of genus and specific difference in order to break the universal down into the particular. Following the genealogical model, the family tree of the Ideas or generic concepts branches off from each level of generality into specific differences, each species of which can in turn constitute a genus proximum for further specifications. The particular is a particular only relative to a universal. For the individuation of the particular into single entities there are available the nonconceptual media of space, time, and matter, as well as those accidental features through which the individual deviates from what is appropriate to it by virtue of its membership in genera and its specific differences. Thus, the individual remains accessible only in the accidental husk that clings to the core of the generically and specifically determined being, only as something that is external and contingent. Metaphysical concepts break down in the face of the individual. In the end, this motivates John Duns Scotus to extend the essential all the way down to single entities. He coins the paradoxical concept of haecceitas, which stamps individuation itself with the seal of the essential, yet which, as something that is itself like an essence, persists in an indifferent universality vis-à-vis what is truly individual.
From its inception, idealism had hidden from itself the fact that the Ideas inconspicuously include within themselves the merely material and accidental moments of individual things, from which they had indeed only been abstracted.9 Nominalism exposed this contradiction and demoted substances or formae rerum to mere names, to signa rerum that, as it were, the knowing subject tacks on to things. When the modern philosophy of consciousness finally dissolved even desubstantialized individual things into the material of sensation, from which the subjects themselves first form their objects, the problem of the ineffability of an individuality that withdraws from conceptual subsumption became even more acute. The critique of the understanding (Verstandesdenken) is motivated by the murky constellation joining the universal, the particular, and the individual. After Hegel, this is transformed into the critique of a form of reason that controls and identifies; it terminates in Adorno's attempt to rescue the moment of the non-identical from the assaults of instrumental reason.10
From within the movement of metaphysical thought itself there emerges the third theme in the critique of metaphysics—namely, the suspicion that all its contradictions come together in the venerable concept of matter; the latter constitutes the dross, as it were, of affirmative thinking. Should matter, to which innerworldly beings owe their finitude, their concretion in space and time, and their resistance, be determined purely negatively as nonbeing? Must not matter, in which the Ideas are supposed to be deluded and to wane into mere phenomena, be conceived as a principle that not only contrasts with the intelligible but contradicts it—not merely as privation, as a residue that is left over after the removal of all determinate being and all good, but as an active power of negation that first generates the world of appearance and evil? This question has been insistently repeated from a genetic perspective. Once the primacy of the one, which precedes and underlies everything, is posited—why then are there any beings at all, rather than nothing? The question of theodicy is simply a moral-practical variant of this: given the primacy of the good, from which everything is derived, how then does anything evil come into the world in the first place? Schelling still labored away on this question in 1804 and again in 1809 (in his treatise on human freedom). He set himself against the Platonic tradition, in which what is material or evil is represented as a mere shading, weakening, or diminishing of the intelligible and the good, and not as the principle of negating and of egoity, of closing off, of actively striving back into the depths. In his remarkable polemic against the bias toward the affirmative, against the purification and the harmonization of the unruly and the negative, of what refuses itself, there also stirs an impulse to resist the danger of idealist apotheosis—the same impulse that directly provides the impetus for the critique of ideology that extends all the way up to the pessimistic materialism of the early Horkheimer and to the optimistic materialism of Bloch.11
II
Schelling's reflections already presuppose the premises of a philosophy of consciousness that no longer thinks of the unity of the many as an objective whole prior to the human mind but conceives of it as a result of the synthesis executed by mind itself. Beyond this, Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800) already contains a first, partially elaborated construction of world history. Both of these elements—reason as the source of world-constituting ideas, and history as the medium through which mind carries out its synthesis—revolutionize the basic concepts of metaphysics and give rise to the resulting problems that, with the Young Hegelians, set postmetaphysical thinking in motion.
It is well known that Kant connected the concept of knowledge with the synthetic accomplishments of the productive imagination and of the understanding, through which the manifold of sensations and representations are organized into a unity of experiences and judgments. Apprehension within intuition, reproduction within imagination, and recognition within the concept are spontaneous actions that run through the manifold, take up its elements, and combine them into a unity. Kant uses the construction of simple geometric forms and number series to elucidate the operation of producing unity in a previously unordered multiplicity. In doing this, the independently acting subject proceeds according to fundamental rules, for the representation of unity cannot emerge out of the act of combination itself. And for their part, these synthetic connections in the understanding are unified by the higher-level synthesis of pure apperception. With this title Kant refers to the formal “I think,” which must be capable of accompanying all of my representations if the egological unity of a constantly identical self-consciousness is to be preserved in the manifold of representations. If the subject is not to forget itself and submerge in the stream of its lived experiences, it must hold itself fast as the same subject. Only this identity, which is produced in apprehending self-consciousness, and which is by no means empirically given but is instead transcendentally presupposed—only this identity permits the self-attribution of all of my representations. Only through the transcendental unity of apperception does the manifold of my representations take on the general connectedness of representations that are my own, that belong precisely to me as the knowing subject.
The Critique of Pure Reason thus reaches the point from which, in its own way, it connects with that metaphysical figure of thought, universal unity. That is, the transcendental unity of the knowing subject who relates itself to itself requires, on the side of what is known, a symmetrical concept of everything that stands over and against the subject, a transcendental concept of the world as the totality of all appearances. Kant calls this world concept a cosmological idea, that is, a concept of reason by means of which we make the totality of conditions in the world into an object. A new type of synthesis thereby comes into play. Gosmological ideas generate the “unconditioned synthetic unity of all conditions in general”; by aiming at the whole of possible experience and at the unconditioned, they follow principles of completeness and perfection that transcend all experience. This idealizing surplus distinguishes the world-constituting synthesis of reason from the synthetic accomplishments of the understanding, which allow us to know something in the world. Because the ideas are concepts that project a world, nothing that looks in any way like an object of experience could correspond to them. In relation to the world of appearances, they are suitable only as principles that regulate the use of the understanding and obligate it to the goal of systematic knowledge, that is, to theory formation that is as unitary and complete as possible. They have heuristic value for the progress of knowledge.
By taking the totality of beings and making it dependent upon the synthetic accomplishments of the subject, Kant downgrades the cosmos into the object domain of the nomological natural sciences. The world of appearances is no longer a “whole organized according to ends.” Thus, although the transcendental concept of the world traces everything back to one, it differs from the old metaphysical concept of the world in that it can no longer also satisfy the need for establishing a meaningful organization, an organization that would absorb contingencies, neutralize what is negative, and calm the fear of death, of isolation, and of what is simply new. In exchange, Kant now offers the compensation of another world, namely, the intelligible. True, the latter remains closed off to theoretical knowledge, but its rational core, the moral world, is nonetheless attested to by the fact of the “ought.” That is, unlike the cosmological idea, the idea of freedom finds support in the moral law; it not only regulates but determines moral action: “Reason is here, indeed, exercising causality, as actually bringing about that which its concept contains.”12 It is only the affiliated concept of a “world of rational beings” that is regulative, a world in which each acts as if, through his maxims, he were at all times a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends. In this way like theoretical reason, practical reason also projects an unconditioned unity of all conditions in general—but this time the whole to which it is directed is that of an “ethical-civic” commonwealth. The latter would come about by systematically connecting all humans through shared objective laws. The world-constituting synthesis of reason once again comes into play, but this time its idealizing surplus does not have a merely heuristic meaning that guides cognition but a moral-practical meaning that obligates us.
Through this doubling of the transcendentally redirected concept of the world, Kant solves two of the three problems mentioned above, upon which metaphysics had labored in vain, The question of how the identity of the one and thé many is to be conceived was only an unsolvable problem under the constraints imposed by the conceptual strategy of an ontologically objectifying thinking, which mixes up the world and beings in the world. But the transcendental illusion that the one and the whole must correspond to objects vanishes as soon as world-concepts are seen through as ideas of reason, that is, as the result of an idealizing synthesis. The problem of matter, too, is dissolved, because synthetic accomplishments are attributed to a subject that must be given its material, both in cognition and in action. Of course, the initial metaphysical question—how the one and the many or the infinite and the finite are related to each other—now reappears in a transcendentally modified form. The murky side-by-side status of the intelligible and the sensible worlds translates the old problem into many new questions, questions about the relationship between practical and pure reason, between the causality of freedom and the causality of nature, between morality and legality, etc. Kant is unable to overcome this dualism of worlds even by introducing a third kind of Idea of Reason, one that places the consideration of nature and history under teleological perspectives. For, without the solid empirical foundation provided by the judgments of the understanding, Ideas of this kind do not have even heuristic significance. Rather, they form the focus imaginarius for a way of viewing nature and history that treats them as if they were capable of constituting a kingdom of ends.
In any case, the inherited problem of the ineffability of the individual remains unsolved.13 The scientific activity of the understanding subsumes what is particular under universal laws without having to worry about what is individual. No place remains for the ego qua individual person between the ego as something universal and the ego as something particular, that is, between the transcendental ego as one over and against everything and the empirical ego as one among many. To the extent that knowledge of myself is transcendental, it encounters the naked identity of the ego as the formal condition for the connectedness of my representations. To the extent that this self-knowledge is empirical, my inner nature appears as foreign to me as outer nature.
As long as a redemptive significance for the individual soul extended to philosophical theory as a form of life, the subject who devoted himself to theory did not need, within theory itself, to reassure himself of his unique existence; he could be satisfied by the promise of the salvation that was to be obtained through participation in the theoretical life. It was secularized confessional literature, for which Rousseau provided the great example, that recalled that the basic concepts of rational psychology had never gotten a hold on the fundamental experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition, despite the kinship of metaphysics with theology. The experience to which I am referring is the individuating gaze of that transcendent God, simultaneously judging and merciful, before whom every individual, alone and irreplaceable, must answer for his life as a whole. This individuating power of the consciousness of sin, which could not be captured by the concepts of philosophy, sought for itself a different, literary form of expression in the autobiographical revelation of one's life story, as the published documentation of an existence that has always to answer for itself. In addition, the theme of ineffable individuality takes on new relevance as historical thinking comes on the scene.
Both romanticism and the cultural sciences that arose in its spirit filled the transcendental concept of the world with new unities in the temporal, social, and spatial dimensions: with (the one) history, (the one) culture, and (the one) language. These new singulars introduced a synthetic unity into the plurality of histories, cultures, and languages, which had until then been seen as products of natural growth. Herder, Humboldt, and Schleiermacher assumed straightaway that this synthetic unity resulted from an underlying mental or spiritual productivity. And yet this synthesis must be conceived according to a model different from that of the construction of a straight line or of a number series, because in the spheres disclosed by the cultural sciences, the particular can no longer be subsumed under the universal while the individual is disregarded. It is, in an emphatic sense, individuals who are enmeshed in their histories, their forms of life, and their conversations, and who for their part convey something of their individuality to these engulfing, intersubjectively shared, yet concrete contexts. The particular of a specific history, culture, or language stands, as an individual type, between the universal and the singular. It was with groping concepts such as these that the old historical school operated.14
It was to this stage of the debate, which had been transformed equally by Kant's critique of metaphysics and by post-Kantian historical consciousness, that Hegel responded. The ambivalence that was only incipient in Kant emerges openly in Hegel's philosophy: by taking up and radically developing the theme of self-critique that had issued from the movement of metaphysical thought, Hegel renews the unitary thinking of metaphysics for the last time. In demolishing Platonic idealism, he adds the last imposing link to the chain of tradition that extended through Plotinus and Augustine, Thomas, Gusanus and Pico, Spinoza and Leibniz; but he does this only by revitalizing the concept of universal unity in a distinctive way. Hegel sees his philosophy of reconciliation as an answer to the historical need for overcoming the diremptions of modernity in modernity's own spirit. The same idealism that had denied any philosophical interest to the merely historical qua nonbeing is thereby placed under the historical conditions of the new era. That explains first why Hegel conceives of the one as absolute subject, thereby annexing the metaphysical figures of thought to that concept of autonomously acting subjectivity from which modernity draws its consciousness of freedom and, indeed, the whole of its characteristic normative content consisting of self-consciousness, self-determination, and self-realization. And it explains second why he lays claim to history as the only medium for the mediation of the one and the many, the infinite and the finite.15
These two aspects of his conceptual strategy compel Hegel to revise a premise that had remained in force from Plotinus to Schelling's Jenaer Identitätsphilosophie. Conceived in the terms of first philosophy, the one, as the ground of everything, could not be equated with the totality of beings. And the absolute had been held fast as the one itself, prior to and higher than everything. To this relationship between the one and the many, the infinite and the finite, there corresponded a subordinate position for a human spirit that was reflected into itself and already divided within itself. Characteristically, nous formed the first hypostasis in Plotinus: in the discursive mind, the one had already stepped outside itself. In place of this, Hegel now makes reflection itself absolute—reflection as the self-reference of a spirit that works its way up out of its substantiality to self-consciousness and which bears within itself the unity as well as the difference of the finite and the infinite. What had still been true for Schelling is inverted: the absolute subject is precisely not supposed to precede the world process. Rather, it exists only in the relationship of the finite and the infinite to each other, in the consuming activity of reflection itself. The absolute is the mediating process of a self-reference that produces itself unconditionally. One and all no longer stand over and against each other as relata; instead, it is now the relation itself, set in motion historically, which establishes the unity of its relata.
With this innovation, Hegel confronts both problems that Kant had bequeathed to his successors. As soon as history is placed on the level of metaphysics and the self-mediation of absolute spirit takes on the grammatical form, so to speak, of the historical progressive, the fractured continuity of a single self-formative process generates itself. This self-formative process sublates the dualisms of the sensible world and the moral world, of the constitutive and the regulative use of the Ideas of Reason, of form and content. Moreover, each particular is granted the solid form of a concrete universal by syntheses that have congealed to shapes of spirit, and for which nothing provides the material other than the preceding shapes of spirit themselves. The concrete universal is supposed to allow each conceptually grasped individual to receive its due in exactly the same way that it allows history to be glimpsed as a self-formative process. Adorno's negative dialectics can only sue for the recovery of the nonidentical from Hegel because the nonidentical was already on Hegel's programme.
But in the present context I am merely interested in the thesis that spirit falls within history. Until Hegel, metaphysical thinking was cosmologically oriented; nature was identical with the totality of beings. Now, the sphere of history is supposed to be integrated into this totality. Moreover, the synthetic labor of spirit is supposed to be performed through the medium of history and assimilated to the progressive form of the latter. Along with history, however, contingencies and uncertainties break into the circular, closed-off structure of unifying reason, and in the end these contingencies and uncertainties cannot be absorbed, even by a supple dialectic of reconciliation. With historical consciousness Hegel brought a force into play whose subversive power also set his own construction teetering. A history that takes the self-formative processes of nature and spirit up into itself, and that has to follow the logical forms of the self-explication of this spirit, becomes sublimated into the opposite of history. To bring it to a simple point that had already irritated Hegel's contemporaries: a history with an established past, a predecided future, and a condemned present, is no longer history.
III
Marx and Kierkegaard drew the moral from this. Along with the primacy of practice and of existence, the participant perspective of the “for us” and the “for me” also takes the lead theoretically. Historical consciousness thereby recognizes its provinciality in relation to the future. The synthesis of the process of world history or of a life history, whether it be executed through social labor and revolutionary practice or through Christian consciousness of sin and radical choice, follows the Kantian rather than the Hegelian model. But the stages run through by social formations or by one's own existence still obey a teleology, even if it is only to be carried to its end practically or existentially. A foundationalist residue adheres to Marx's social theory and to Kierkegaard's existential-dialectical writing. Since their day, it has become ever harder to ignore the way in which history intrudes into the structures of unifying reason with the contingencies of what is unforeseeably new and other, and these contingencies belie all rash syntheses and limiting constructions. For the later nineteenth century, this experience made the scientistic renunciation of metaphysics and the withdrawal into the theory of science seem advisable.
With Newton's physics in view, Kant had already set phenomenal (which primarily means scientifically objectified) nature free from metaphysical structures of meaning; he watered the unity of the cosmos down to the heuristic goal of unified theory construction. Why, then, should history not be similarly released from the burden of unitary thinking in the philosophy of history, which was a substitute for metaphysics, and be left to the human sciences that had since been established? Indeed, unlike the nomological sciences, the hermeneutic appropriation and narrative representation of tradition no longer seemed to obey even the heuristic imperative of a unified description of reality. Historicism, in any case, declared the context- dependent knowledge of the interpreter and of the narrator to be the domain of a plurality that escapes the claims of objectivity and unity for knowledge. In dualistic conceptions of science, which arose above all in Germany, the unity of reason was removed not only from the cosmos but from subjectivity as well. Unity evaporates into a methodological ideal that is now supposed to be valid only for the natural sciences, whereas according to historicist self-understanding, a plurality set free from all syntheses makes relativism inevitable in the human sciences. In the latter arena, then, histories triumph over the philosophy of history, cultures and forms of life triumph over culture as such, and the histories of national languages triumph over the rational grammar of language in general. Interpretation and narration supersede argumentation, multivalent (vieldeutig) meaning emancipates itself from simple validity, local significance is freed from the universalist claim to truth.
Philosophers have seldom been satisfied with such dichotomies; every dualism prods them to an explanation. Joachim Ritter's compensation theory represents such an attempt to come to terms with the historicist dichotomization of the scientific world.16 Ritter begins by placing the natural sciences, which are committed to unity and universality, in relation to civil society, and the human sciences, which are committed to plurality and individuality, in relation to personal life. Then, by way of these contexts of employment, he brings the two types of science into a complementary relationship with one another. The natural sciences develop the productive forces of an industrial society undergoing modernization; the human sciences look after the powers of tradition in a lifeworld threatened in its historical substance. The natural world and the historical world are said to form a rational and dynamic whole only as long as the human sciences, which specialize in narrative re-presentation, compensate for those losses in the lifeworld that are unavoidably brought about by the depersonalization and modernization of life conditions induced by the natural sciences.
I refer to this familiar thesis because today it serves to limit the human sciences to the business of narration and, in the name of a culture of multi- valence, to release them from cognitive claims of the kind connected with theory construction and, indeed, with argumentation in general. This moderate variety contextualism includes the further thesis that the lifeworld can only be protected from disintegration and civil war, from “hermeneutical manslaughter,” when reason, in the sense of an orientation toward agreement based on reasons, is no longer imputed to it.17 The text of the life- world must be made up of contexts alone. I do not want to dwell on the fact that the explanatory social sciences, together with linguistics and other reconstructive human sciences, find no place in the model of science thus established (which, incidentally, Schelsky already noted in his own day).18 More important in the present context is the fact that the compensation theory itself operates with a concept of reason that it fails to identify. Without saying so, this theory relies on an anthropology that would have to explain why human beings require an equilibrium between modernization and historicization. Such an anthropology would have to indicate why a deficit of compensatory enchantment, refamiliarization, and transmission of meaning comes about in the first place; when the deficit grows into a “loss unbearable for humans”; and how it can be balanced out through the production of narratives by the human sciences.19 There is no such anthropology. And if one has any idea how difficult it is to come by universal statements about the human being, one is almost tempted to consider a theory that is at least available in draft form, one which tries to use the structures of the type of action that is oriented to mutual understanding in order to explain why and when lifeworlds are in danger of becoming deformed under the pressure of system imperatives.
Praising the many, difference, and the other may be able to count on acceptance today, but a mood is no substitute for arguments.20 Of course, postempirical theory of science has indeed used arguments to change the image we have of the sciences.21 In the wake of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Elkana, and others, unifying reason has been deprived of its last domain, physics. Richard Rorty22 had only to draw the consequences from this to deconstruct the picture of the “mirror of nature” that had been derived from the philosophy of the subject and to relieve the natural sciences as well as epistemology from the requirement of unitary theory construction and the need for “some permanent neutral framework of all possible inquiry.”23 Finally, then, even the weakest of the Kantian ideas of reason has been retracted. Without the spur of an idealizing world projection and a transcendent truth claim, objectifying science is swallowed up by its contingent contexts in the very same way as everyday practices are. In the laboratory as in life, the same culture of multivalence prevails once all standards of rationality and practices of justification claim to be nothing more than actually exercised conventions—nothing more “than just such practices.”24
Having arrived at the threshold of the present, I want to end my retrospective in the history of ideas. As it is, the impression of a history of ideas might have been given only because an elaborate development of the arguments wrapped up in the ideas has been unnecessary for an audience of philosophical experts who are informed about the subject. However, in the matter of radical contextualism I have to become explicit. But first, one more comment about the shift in paradigms from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language.
Of course this linguistic turn had various motives. I will name one: the conviction that language forms the medium for the historical and cultural embodiments of the human mind, and that a methodologically reliable analysis of mental activity must therefore begin with the linguistic expressions of intentional phenomena, instead of immediately with the latter. Now it is not accidental that this realm of objective spirit came into view from two angles, on the one side from the angle of language, culture, and history in general, and on the other side from the angle of individual national languages, cultures, and histories. Hence the old theme of unity and plurality comes up once again in the question of how these two aspects are to be brought into relation to each other. As before, nothing would stand in the way of the concept of one reason today if philosophy and science were able to reach through the thicket of natural languages to the logical grammar of a single language that describes the world, or could at least come close to this ideal in a promising way. In contrast, if even the reflexive activity of mind always remained caught in the grammatical limits of various particular worlds that were linguistically constituted, reason would necessarily disintegrate kaleidoscopically into a multiplicity of incommensurable embodiments.
The question of how objective knowledge is possible has been answered by some theorists in an objectivistic and by others in a relativistic sense. Members of the first group reckon on an independent reality, toward which our interpretations finally converge, in the sense intended by a correspondence theory of truth. This group leaves intact the idea of reason that holds that in the long run exactly one true and complete theory would have to correspond to the objective world. On the other hand, the relativists hold a socialization theory of truth. They are of the opinion that every possible description only mirrors a particular construction of reality that inheres grammatically in one of various linguistic worldviews. There are no standards of rationality that point beyond the local commitments of the various universes of discourse. Both these positions are, however, confronted with insurmountable difficulties. The objectivists are faced with the problem of having to take up a standpoint between language and reality in order to defend their thesis; but they can only argue for such a null-context from within the context of the language they themselves use. On the other hand, the relativistic thesis, which concedes a perspectival right to every linguistically constituted view of the world, also cannot be put forth without a performative self-contradiction. So whoever absolutizes one of the two aspects of the linguistic medium of reason, be it its universality or its particularity, gets caught in aporias. Both Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam want to find a way out of this situation, and I will link up with their discussion here.25
Rorty represents a contextualism that avoids the relativistic consequence of equal status for incommensurable standards and perspectives. If he did not, he would have to explain how a kind of truth extending beyond the perspective of our Western traditions could be thought to accrue to the perspectivistic thesis itself. Rorty recognizes that contextualism must be cautiously formulated in order to be radical. The contextualist must exercise caution in order not to take that which he may assert as a participant within a specific historical linguistic community and a corresponding cultural form of life and translate it into a statement made from the third-person perspective of an observer. The radical contextualist claims only that it is pointless to uphold the distinction, going back to Plato, between knowledge and opinion. “True” denotes what we hold to be justified according to our standards in a given case. And these standards of rationality are simply not to be distinguished in type from any other standards used in our culture. Practices of justification, like all other social conduct, are dependent upon our language, our traditions, and our form of life. “Truth” does not signify the correspondence between statements and some X prior to all interpretations; “truth” is simply an expression of commendation, with which we advise those who speak our language to accept the conceptions that we hold to be justified. Rorty explains the objectivity of knowledge in terms of the intersubjectivity of an agreement based, in good Wittgensteinian manner, on agreement in our language, our factually shared form of life. He replaces the aspiration to objectivity with the aspiration to solidarity within the linguistic community to which he contingently belongs. The cautious contextualist is not going to extend his lifeworld into the abstract; he must not dream of an ideal community of all those who communicate (Apel), freed from their provinciality, as Peirce and Mead dreamed of the ultimate community. He must rigorously avoid every idealization, and it would be for the best if he did without the concept of rationality altogether. For “rationality” is a limit concept with normative content, one which passes beyond the borders of every local community and moves in the direction of a universal one.26
An idealization of this sort, which conceives of truth as acceptability grounded in reasons under certain demanding conditions, would constitute a perspective that would in turn point beyond the practices of justification that are contingently established among us, one that would distance us from these practices. According to Rorty, that is not possible without a backslide into objectivism. The contextualist should not let himself be lured out of his participant perspective even when the price he has to pay for this is admitted ethnocentrism. He admits that we have to privilege the interpretive horizon of our own linguistic community, although there can be no non-circular justification for this. But this ethnocentric standpoint only means that we have to test all alien conceptions in light of our own standards.27 Confronting this position, Hilary Putnam shows that an idealizing concept of truth or of validity in general is both necessary and possible without objectivistic fallacies.
Putnam establishes the unavoidability of an idealizing conceptual con struction with the following argument. If the distinction between a conception that is held to be true here and now and a conception that is true, that is, one that is acceptable under idealized conditions, collapses, then we cannot explain why we are able to learn reflexively, that is, are able also to improve our own standards of rationality. The dimension in which self-distancing and self-critique are possible, and in which our well-worn practices of justification can thereby be transcended and reformed, is closed off as soon as that which is rationally valid collapses into that which is socially current. To this Rorty would reply that of course someone could at any time come up with new evidence, better ideas, or a novel vocabulary; in order to take that into account, however, we should not hold our conceptions, which are always only locally justified, to be “true” in an objectivistic sense. But the objectivistic alternative invoked by Rorty does not pose itself for Putnam. Rorty once said that for him the aspiration to objectivity is not the desire to flee from one's own linguistic community but simply the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible, namely, the desire to expand the referent of “for us” to the greatest possible extent.28 In light of this intuition, I would reformulate Putnam's objection as follows: can we explain the possibility of the critique and self-critique of established practices of justification at all if we do not take the idea of the expansion of our interpretive horizon seriously as an idea, and if we do not connect this idea with the intersubjectivity of an agreement that allows precisely for the distinction between what is current “for us” and what is current “for them”?
Putnam and (in a penetrating contribution to the relativism controversy) Thomas McCarthy rightfully insist upon the existence of a symmetrical relationship between “us” and “them” in the exemplary cases of intercultural or historical understanding, in which rival conceptions collide not only with each other but with conflicting standards of rationality as well.29 The cautious contextualist's ethnocentrism, admitted by Rorty, cannot but fail to capture the symmetry among the claims and perspectives of all participants in a dialogue because it describes the process of understanding as an assimilative incorporation of what is alien into our (expanded) interpretive horizon. But in a situation of profound disagreement, it is not only necessary for “them” to try to understand things from “our” perspective, “we” have to try in the same manner to grasp things from “their” perspective. They would never seriously get a chance to learn from us if we did not have the chance to learn from them, and we only become aware of the limits of “our” knowledge through the faltering of “their” learning processes. The merging of interpretive horizons, which according to Gadamer is the goal of every process of reaching understanding, does not signify an assimilation to “us”; rather, it must mean a convergence, steered through learning, of “our” perspective and “their” perspective—no matter whether “they” or “we” or both sides have to reformulate established practices of justification to a greater or lesser extent. For learning itself belongs neither to us nor to them; both sides are caught up in it in this same way. Even in the most difficult processes of reaching understanding, all parties appeal to the common reference point of a possible consensus, even if this reference point is projected in each case from within their own contexts. For, although they may be interpreted in various ways and applied according to different criteria, concepts like truth, rationality, or justification play the same grammatical role in every linguistic community.
Certainly, some cultures have had more practice than others at distancing themselves from themselves.30 But all languages offer the possibility of distinguishing between what is true and what we hold to be true. The supposition of a common objective world is built into the pragmatics of every single linguistic usage. And the dialogue roles of every speech situation enforce a symmetry in participant perspectives. They open up both the possibility for ego to adopt the perspective of alter and vice versa, and the exchangeability of the participant's and the observer's perspectives. By no means do these universal pragmatic presuppositions of communicative action suggest the objectivistic fallacy according to which we could take up the extramundane standpoint of a subject removed from the world, help ourselves to an ideal language that is context-free and appears in the singular, and thereby make infallible, exhaustive, and thus definitive statements which, having neither the capacity nor the need for a commentary, would pull the plug on their own effective history. From the possibility of reaching understanding linguistically, we can read off a concept of situated reason that is given voice in validity claims that are both context-dependent and transcendent: “Reason is, in this sense, both immanent (not to be found outside of concrete language games and institutions) and transcendent (a regulative idea that we use to criticize the conduct of all activities and institutions).”31 To put it into my own words: the validity claimed for propositions and norms transcends spaces and times, but in each actual case the claim is raised here and now, in a specific context, and accepted or rejected with real implications for social interaction.32
IV
The linguistic turn did transform reason and unitary thinking, but it did not drive them out of the philosophical discussion, as is shown by the outcome of the controversy surrounding both versions of contextualism. All the same, contextualism has become a manifestation of the spirit of the times. Transcendental thinking once concerned itself with a stable stock of forms for which there were no recognizable alternatives. Today, in contrast, the experience of contingency is a whirlpool into which everything is pulled: everything could also be otherwise, the categories of the understanding, the principles of socialization and of morals, the constitution of subjectivity, the foundation of rationality itself. There are good reasons for this. Communicative reason, too, treats almost everything as contingent, even the conditions for the emergence of its own linguistic medium. But for everything that claims validity within linguistically structured forms of life, the structures of possible mutual understanding in language constitute something that cannot be gotten around.
All the same, the postmodern mood is making its mark, all the way into the detective novel and onto the back-cover blurb. The publisher extols Enzensberger's new book with the notice that he enlists what is irregular against the project of homogenization, the margins against the center of power, living from difference against unity—Derrida's jargon migrates into commodity aesthetics. And a well-known author of detective stories has the thematic thread of his fable unravel in the confusion of a rich variety of contexts, to the extent that the genre-specific distinction between perpetrator and victim becomes unrecognizable in the weave of many small differences—after a sympathetic talk with the likable murderer, who is finally caught, the police neither report him nor prosecute him.33 Repulsion towards the One and veneration of difference and the Other obscures the dialectical connection between them. For the transitory unity that is generated in the porous and refracted inter subjectivity of a linguistically mediated consensus not only supports but furthers and accelerates the pluralization of forms of life and the individualization of lifestyles. More discourse means more contradiction and difference. The more abstract the agreements become, the more diverse the disagreements with which we can non-violently live. And yet in the consciousness of the public, the idea of unity is still linked to the consequence of a forced integration of the many. Greater universalism is still treated as the enemy of individualism, not as what makes it possible. The attribution of identical meanings is still treated as the injury of metaphorical multivalence, not as its necessary condition. The unity of reason is still treated as repression, not as the source of the diversity of its voices. The background for this anxiety is still formed by the false suggestions of a unitary thinking that was left behind one hundred fifty years ago—just as if it were necessary today, as it was for the first generation of Hegel's students, to defend ourselves against the predominance of the great masters of metaphysics.
The reasons for this attitude appear to reside in society rather than in philosophy itself. For society has indeed become so complex that it can hardly still be made transparent from within as the dynamic whole of a structural organization. The functionally differentiated society is decentered; the state no longer forms the political apex in which the functions relevant to the whole of society could be united; everything appears to have become part of the periphery. The economy and public administration have in fact expanded beyond the horizons of the lifeworld. These media- steered subsystems have congealed into a second nature. As depersonalized networks of communication, they recede from the intuitive knowledge of members, who are shunted aside into the environment of these systems. It thus seems plausible to treat society, which can no longer be grasped through narratives, in a way similar to that in which nature has been treated, to entrust it to an objectifying social science—now, of course, with the result that our self-understanding is immediately affected. That is, to the extent that the objectifying descriptions of society migrate into the lifeworld, we become alienated from ourselves as communicatively acting subjects. It is this self-objectification that transforms the perception of heightened societal complexity into the experience of being delivered over to sheer contingencies. All referents for coping with these contingencies have been lost—both the societal subject and transcendental consciousness have long since slipped away from us, the anxious members of the high-risk society.
The resulting discouragement is expressed in the radically contextualist processing of paralyzing experiences with contingency. But this discouragement will shed its character of being unavoidable if it is possible to defend and make fruitful for social theory a concept of reason that attends to the phenomenon of the lifeworld and permits the outmoded concept of the “consciousness of society as a whole” (which comes from the philosophy of the subject and finds no foothold in modern societies) to be reformulated on the basis of a theory of intersubjectivity. Even the decentered society cannot do without the reference point provided by the projected unity of an intersubjectively formed common will. I cannot pursue this thought further here. It signals, however, the practical implications resulting from the transformation of the unitary thinking of metaphysics and from the controversy surrounding contextualism. I have gone into this controversy with the intention of rendering plausible a weak but not defeatistic concept of linguistically embodied reason. I want to close with a few brief theses relating to (1) the transformed status of the debate, and to (2) the question of what still remains of the normative content of metaphysics “at the moment of its downfall” (Adorno).
(1) The concept of reason that is identified in the presuppositions of action oriented toward mutual understanding frees us from the dilemma of having to choose between Kant and Hegel. Communicative reason is neither incorporeal, like the spontaneity of a subjectivity that is world-constituting yet itself without a world (weltlos), nor does it twist history into a circular teleology for the sake of the absolute self-mediation of a historicized spirit. The transcendental gap between the intelligible and the empirical worlds no longer has to be overcome through the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of history. It has instead been reduced to a tension transferred into the lifeworld of the communicative actors themselves, a tension between the unconditional character of context-bursting, transcendent validity claims, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the factual character of the context-dependent “yes” and “no” positions that create social facts in situ. Kant's irreconcilable worlds, the objective world of appearances and the moral world of autonomous action, shed their transcendental-ontological dignity. Together with the inner world of the empirical subject, they return in everyday communicative practice as more or less trivial suppositions of commonality that make possible the cognitive, the regulative, and the expressive uses of language, and thus the relation to “something in the world.”
Yet, beyond this, communicatively acting subjects are freed from the work of world-constituting syntheses. They already find themselves within the context of a lifeworld that makes their communicative actions possible, just as it is in turn maintained through the medium of these processes of reaching understanding. This background, which is presupposed in communicative action, constitutes a totality that is implicit and that comes along prereflexively—one that crumbles the moment it is thematized; it remains a totality only in the form of implicit, intuitively presupposed background knowledge. Taking the unity of the lifeworld, which is only known subconsciously, and projecting it in an objectifying manner onto the level of explicit knowledge is the operation that has been responsible for mythological, religious, and also of course metaphysical worldviews. With criticizable validity claims, and with the ability to orient oneself toward validity claims, everyday practice becomes permeated with idealizations that nevertheless set the stage for social facts. The ideas of meaning-identity, truth, justice, sincerity, and accountability leave their marks here. Yet they retain world-constituting power only as heuristic ideas of reason; they lend unity and organization to the situation interpretations that participants negotiate with each other. A transcendental illusion arises therefrom only when the totality of the lifeworld, presupposed as a background in everyday practice, is hypostatized as the speculative idea of the One and All, or as the transcendental idea of a mental spontaneity that brings everything forth out of itself.
The concept of pragmatic, yet unavoidable and idealizing presuppositions of action oriented toward reaching understanding must be differentiated according to the various burdens it has to bear. Those acting communicatively presuppose the lifeworld behind them in a different manner than the validity basis of their speech. In yet another way, understanding a thematically uttered propositional content presupposes understanding the associated illocutionary act, whose meaning “comes along” unthematically in the performance of the complete speech act.
The philosophical tradition, as we have seen, has always held only privative concepts or negatively encircling formulas ready for what is individual because it has privileged the being of entities, the knowledge of objects, and the ässertoric sentence or propositional content and has equated these with the comprehensible. But if we assume that the only thing we can understand is the propositional contents of assertions, then the individual essence—the very expression is paradoxical—unavoidably eludes the infinitely many (falsely objectifying) specifications. Since Kierkegaard we have been in a position to know that individuality can only be read from the traces of an authentic life that has been existentially drawn together into some sort of an appropriated totality. The significance of individuality discloses itself from the autobiographical perspective, as it were, of the first- person—I alone can performatively lay claim to being recognized as an individual in my uniqueness. If we liberate this idea from the capsule of absolute inwardness and follow Humboldt and George Herbert Mead in grafting it onto the medium of a language that crosses processes of socialization and individuation with each other, then we will find the key to the solution of this final and most difficult of the problems left behind by metaphysics.34 The performative attitude we have to take up if we want to reach an understanding with one another about something gives every speaker the possibility (which certainly has not always been put to use) of employing the “I” of the illocutionary act in such a way that it becomes linked to the comprehensible claim that I should be recognized as an individual person who cannot be replaced in taking responsibility for my own life history.
(2) The concept of communicative reason is still accompanied by the shadow of a transcendental illusion. Because the idealizing presuppositions of communicative action must not be hypostatized into the ideal of a future condition in which a definitive understanding has been reached, this concept must be approached in a sufficiently skeptical manner.35 A theory that leads us to believe in the attainability of a rational ideal would fall back behind the level of argumentation reached by Kant. It would also abandon the materialistic legacy of the critique of metaphysics. The moment of unconditionality that is preserved in the discursive concepts of a fallibilistic truth and morality is not an absolute, or it is at most an absolute that has become fluid as a critical procedure. Only with this residue of metaphysics can we do battle against the transfiguration of the world through metaphysical truths—the last trace of “Nihil contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.” Communicative reason is of course a rocking hull—but it does not go under in the sea of contingencies, even if shuddering in high seas is the only mode in which it “copes” with these contingencies.
This foundation is not even stable enough for a negative metaphysics. The latter after all continues to offer an equivalent for the extramundane perspective of a God's-eye view: a perspective radically different from the lines of sight belonging to innerworldly participants and observers. That is, negative metaphysics uses the perspective of the radical outsider, in which one who is mad, existentially isolated, or aesthetically enraptured distances himself from the world, and indeed from the lifeworld as a whole. These outsiders no longer have a language, at least no speech based on reasons, for spreading the message of that which they have seen. Their speechlessness finds words only in the empty negation of everything that metaphysics once affirmed with the concept of the universal One. In contrast, communicative reason cannot withdraw from the determinate negations in language, discursive as linguistic communication in fact is. It must therefore refrain from the paradoxical statements of negative metaphysics: that the whole is the false, that everything is contingent, that there is no consolation whatsoever. Communicative reason does not make its appearance in an aestheticized theory as the colorless negative of a religion that provides consolation. It neither announces the absence of consolation in a world forsaken by God, nor does it take it upon itself to provide any consolation. It does without exclusivity as well. As long as no better words for what religion can say are found in the medium of rational discourse, it will even coexist abstemiously with the former, neither supporting it nor combating it.
There is also something more in being able to do less and in wanting to do less than negative metaphysics entrusts to itself. The analysis of the necessary conditions for mutual understanding in general at least allows us to develop the idea of an intact intersubjectivity, which makes possible both a mutual and constraint-free understanding among individuals in their dealings with one another and the identity of individuals who come to a compulsion-free understanding with themselves. This intact intersubjectivity is a glimmer of symmetrical relations marked by free, reciprocal recognition. But this idea must not be filled in as the totality of a reconciled form of life and projected into the future as a utopia. It contains no more, but also no less, than the formal characterization of the necessary conditions for the unforeseeable forms adopted by a life that is not misspent. No prospect of such forms of life can be given to us, not even in the abstract, this side of prophetic teachings. All we know of them is that if they could be realized at all, they would have to be produced through our own combined effort and be marked by solidarity, though they need not necessarily be free of conflict. Of course, “producing” does not mean manufacturing according to the model of realizing intended ends. Rather, it signifies a type of emergence that cannot be intended, an emergence out of a cooperative endeavor to moderate, abolish, or prevent the suffering of vulnerable creatures. This endeavor is fallible, and it does fail over and over again. This type of producing or self-bringing-forth places the responsibility on our shoulders without making us less dependent on “the luck of the moment.” Connected with this is the modern meaning of humanism, long expressed in the ideas of a self-conscious life, of authentic self-realization, and of autonomy—a humanism that is not bent on self-assertion. This project, like the communicative reason that inspires it, is historically situated. It has not been made, it has taken shape—and it can be pursued further, or be abandoned out of discouragement. Above all, the project is not the property of philosophy. Philosophy, working together with the reconstructive sciences, can only throw light on the situations in which we find ourselves. It can contribute to our learning to understand the ambivalences that we come up against as just so many appeals to increasing responsibilities within a diminishing range of options.
NOTES
1. Robert Spaemann, “Natur,” in Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart, 1983), 19ff.; Spaemann, Das Natürliche und das Vernünftige (Munich, 1987); Dieter Henrich, Fluchtlinien (Frankfurt, 1982); Henrich, “Dunkelheit und Verge wisserung,” in All-Einheit, Wege eines Gedankens in Ost und West, ed. D. Henrich (Stuttgart, 1985), 33ff.
2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1988); and generally, Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca, 1983).
3. Odo Marquard, Farewell to Matters of Principle, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Oxford, 1989).
4. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981).
5. See Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston, 1963); and Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, Vol. I, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1962).
6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972).
7. Klaus Heinrich, Dahlemer Vorlesungen, Vol. I (Frankfurt, 1981).
8. Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen (Frankfurt, 1985), 3Iff.
9. Karl Heinz Haag, Der Fortschritt in der Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1983), 33.
10. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. ?. ?. Ashton (New York, 1973).
11. H. Brunkhorst, “Dialektischer Positivismus des Glücks,” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 39 (1985): 353ff.; M. Korthals, “Die kritische Gesellschaftstheorie des frühen Horkheimer,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 14 (1985): 315ff.
12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1965), B385.
13. See “Individuation through Socialization,” in Jürgen Habermas, Post-Meta-physical Thinking (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 149-204.
14. E. Rothacker, “Die dogmatische Denkform in den Geisteswissenschaften und das Problem des Historismus,” Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaft und der Literatur (Mainz, 1954).
15. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 7ff.
16. Joachim Ritter, “Die Aufgabe des Geisteswissenschaften in der modernen Gesellschaft” (1963), in Subjektivität (Frankfurt, 1974), 105ff; see my critique in J. Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 16ff.
17. Odo Marquard, “Über die Unvermeidlichkeit der Geisteswissenschaften,” in Apologie des Zufälligen (1986), 98ff.; Marquard, “Verspätete Moralistik,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 March 1987.
18. Helmnut Schelsky, Einsamkeit und Freiheit (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1963), 222ff.
19. Odo Marquard, “In Praise of Polytheism,” in Farewell to Matters of Principle, 87ff.
20. The compensation theory does not become more plausible when its political meaning is revealed to us. Marquardt “In Praise of Polytheism” is based on the following narrative. There are wholesome myths; they are the ones that We normally call myths and that always appear in the plural. What is harmful is monomythology, because it always lays claim to exclusivity; monomythology first appears in the doctrines of universal unity in monotheism and the philosophy of origins. Due to a paucity of safeguarded non-identity among the circle of their followers, these doctrines generate an unfree ego-identity. In the wake of the disintegration of this religious-metaphysical unitary thinking, a vacuum arises, which in the course of the eighteenth century is filled by the most harmful monomythology of all, namely, that of progress. The absolute autarchic mythology is the philosophy of history, which takes the power of the one over the human many and intensifies it into open terror. The only thing that could help counter this would be a disenchanted return of polytheism, in the form of Geisteswissenschaften that are no longer bewitched by the universalism of reason. I am amazed by the explanatory burden that this story is expected to bear. Why should the thinking of the philosophy of history, which has always entertained arguments, be vanquished by an anti-philosophy-of-history that is offered narratively, that is, without arguments? I also have no idea who, today, still thinks in terms of the philosophy of history at all, if that means “defining history as the long march into the universal and as the dissolution of the individual in the species.” (“Universalgeschichte und Multiversalgeschichte,” in Apologie des Zufälligen, 70.) Only the political meaning of the whole undertaking is clear: the continuation of a very German tradition, namely, the venerable struggle against the ideas of the French Revolution.
21. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1983).
22. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982).
23. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), 211.
24. Ibid., 390.
25. Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York, 1985), 3ff.; Hilary Putnam, “Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized,” Synthese 52 (1982): Iff. (Reprinted in After Philosophy—End or Transformation?, ed. K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy [Cambridge, Mass., 1987], 222ff.)
26. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,” in Truth and Interpretation, ed. E. LePore (Oxford, 1986), 333ff.
27. Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” 12f.
28. Ibid., 8.
29. Thomas McCarthy, “Contra Relativism: A Thought Experiment,” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame, 1989), 256-271.
30. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, 1982).
31. Putnam, “Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized,” 228.
32. Jürgen Habermas, Philosphical Discourse of Modernity, 322f.
33. Jan van de Wetering, Rattenfang (Hamburg, 1986).
34. See “Individuation through Socialization,” Sec. IX, in Postmetaphysical Thinking, 188–193.
35. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).