Espen Hammer
Surprising as this may seem for a thinker steeped in Marxist theory and materialism, metaphysics was a key category in Adorno, and a concept around which his entire philosophical career revolved. By wresting this concept from its traditional associations with idealism, totality and affirmation, Adorno hoped to give it a new twist that would lead to its rehabilitation within the framework of a critical theory of society. Rather than understanding metaphysics as a purely theoretical and thus contemplative endeavour, Adorno urged his audience to think of metaphysics in social terms and ultimately as an element of unconstrained experience. He viewed metaphysics as a haven for truth: it is where experience leaps beyond the false totality of modern life and connects with the redemptive potentiality of real material being.
The history of Western metaphysics since Plato has been dominated by the attempt to distinguish between the temporal and the non-temporal, the world of finite objects in which we exist, and a suprasensible world of eternal or absolute objects. Behind the world of appearances and shadows there is a true, real and immutable world of essences about which philosophy has tried to speak. As the Greek word "metaphysics" (meta-physics, or that which exists before the science of the visible world, physics) intimates, the ultimate aim of this fundamental discipline has been to ground a science of the transcendent as opposed to the sphere of the immanent.
The classical expression of this project is, of course, to be found in Plato. In dialogues such as Phaedrus, Phaedo and Politeia, Plato claimed that the real, or what he called forms or ideas (eidos), is unchanging, transcendent and suprasensible — a world of pure essences in relation to which the sensible world is ontologically inferior and no more than a reflection or imitation.
Plato arrives at this view from many different directions. Among them, a particularly prominent one is epistemological. In order to tell that a thing is of a certain nature (that this is a car, or a scarf, or a horse), it is necessary to know something that cannot be derived from contemplating the particular thing itself. In order to know that this is a horse, one must have knowledge of what being a horse is, for otherwise one would not be able to identify this as a horse. One must know something about what all horses in the world have in common, or the conditions under which something may be said to be a horse. Once one arrives at the thought that these conditions cannot be arbitrary, changing and destructible (since if all horses disappeared, what it is to be horse would not be something tangible), then the conclusion is at hand that what a thing is must be determined by essences that exist beyond the empirical world, in a world of perfection that will never change.
For his part, Aristotle considers the forms to be inherent in objects as their animating rational principle. In his vastly influential Metaphysics, the universe is understood as an ordered teleological system in which every object strives to actualize its own nature. At the origin of this universe stands the "unmoved mover" — the arché on which everything else depends.
In the medieval world, metaphysics (in both its Platonic and Aristotelian variants) became the servant of theology, a means to articulate revealed truth in a rational language. With the early modern rationalists — including René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and especially Christian Wolff — the medieval synthesis went through a process of further conceptual purification which led to the formulation of metaphysica specialis — the doctrine of suprasensible objects such as God, the soul and the origin of the world. Metaphysica specialis (literally: special metaphysics) was separated from metaphysica generalis, or the general doctrine of being. In Immanuel Kant and the British empiricists, however, this project was subjected to extensive and penetrating criticism and, ever since the downfall of German idealism, metaphysics has predominantly met with scepticism. Pragmatism, historicism, logical positivism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, ordinary-language philosophy, existentialism, Marxism, naturalism — virtually all the major movements of modern philosophy — have not only reacted against metaphysics but considered it one of their main tasks to overcome it once and for all.
Adorno never dismisses the value and importance of the postKantian critique of metaphysics. He does not think that metaphysics can be rescued as a rational science of transcendent objects. Like Kant, he views the limits of what can be known as coinciding with the limits of possible experience; and since the objects of metaphysica specialis (God, the soul, the origin of the world) cannot be presented in experience, they cannot be known. Adorno will criticize Kant’s conception of experience for being too narrow, but he never calls into question Kant’s insistence that knowledge cannot transcend the experiential conditions of objecthood.
However, his critique of metaphysics does not centre mainly on its epistemological challenges. According to Adorno, the history of metaphysics can also be criticized on ideological grounds. In particular, Adorno raises three ideological charges against the history of metaphysics. First, it celebrates the immutable and non-temporal at the expense of the transient and temporal. On Adorno's account, this makes metaphysics complicit with a general historical trend towards increasing abstraction. This trend is problematic because abstraction is the main instrument in humanity's unchecked and destructive domination over nature.
Secondly, metaphysics is essentially affirmative because it holds that the existence of evil and chaos in the empirical world is compatible with the existence of a rational and moral order in the suprasensible realm. Metaphysics may therefore serve as a basis for the attempt to establish a theodicy: it tries to vindicate God's existence in the face of evil. Thirdly, metaphysics subordinates to its conceptions of totality the particularity of human experience and suffering, as well as the concrete material world. Adorno thinks that such conceptions should be criticized and exposed as expressing a disregard for everything that resists subsumption under categories and universals.
All this is brought together in Adorno's reflections on radical evil and death as represented by Auschwitz.1 The historical event of industrialized mass murder means that traditional metaphysics is no longer possible. It is not just that metaphysical claims cannot be justified rationally; Adorno argues that metaphysics as it has been practised since Plato has become incompatible with the course of human history. To claim that there is some kind of deep meaning behind the phenomena, a divine principle or operation that, despite all the horror, shows the world to be good or in some sense morally acceptable, would be tantamount to mocking the fate of the victims of Auschwitz. In other words, what was always thought to be a purely a priori discipline — a study of final things and causes without any regard for the empirical world — turns out to be answerable to experience.
Extending this thought to theology, Adorno sides with influential post-Holocaust theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann when he holds that no conception of transcendence can survive such a horrendous demonstration of human evil unscathed. Auschwitz means that Western culture, including its highest achievements, has failed. Post-Auschwitz culture is "garbage' (ND: 367). The guilt it confers upon all the living generates a need for a radical rethinking of culture. It is no longer possible to entertain an affirmative conception of culture. Rather, from now on the only adequate cultural forms are those that testify to the despair and darkness of contemporary living.
Perversely, Auschwitz can be said to represent the historical realization of aspirations that were inherent in the metaphysical tradition itself. As a world unto itself beyond the exigencies of historical time, it aims to become a closed totality. In its destruction of every individuating feature of individuals, it subordinates particularity and transience to universality and immutability. More strikingly, Auschwitz is a world of radical immanence. There is no escape from the camps, no outside except death. The notion of such a context of immanence, Adorno argues, may even be viewed more generally as the organizing principle of modern, secularized society as a whole. While people are not murdered systematically under late capitalism, they are in thrall to systemic forces that mould their self-interpretations and action orientations so as to correspond to its irrational imperatives. Every feature of the modern individual — thoughts, senses, desires, body, actions — has become commodified. Immanence and identitarian reason reign uninterruptedly.
We should now be in a position to see what the relevant considerations are for rethinking the notion of metaphysics. On the one hand, the immanence of the camps, and of modern, rationalized life generally, calls for the construction of some account of transcendence. More than anything else, what Adorno retains from the metaphysical tradition is its desire for transcendence — that is, the simple sense that "this cannot be all". The only alternative to irredeemable despair must consist in the possibility of witnessing some form of alterity or otherness capable of resisting the closure effected by formal–instrumental rationality. On the other hand, for transcendence to be possible, metaphysics must be stripped of its traditional adherence to conceptions of the ideal, the immutable and the totalizing universal. For Adorno, this means that metaphysics must be given a materialist twist. Metaphysics can only survive, he argues, in so far as it accepts materialism as its ontological condition: "The course of history forces materialism upon metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism" (ND: 365).
Adorno hardly exaggerates when admitting that metaphysics has traditionally been a direct antithesis to materialism. In the tradition of materialism — from Democritus and Epicurus to Thomas Hobbes, Julien de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot and Baron d'Holbach, as well as in Marxism and later elaborations of naturalism — to believe in the ontological primacy of matter has almost always implied a rejection of the metaphysics of transcendence. Exceptions to this trend are few and far between, but one such exception is Walter Benjamin, who deeply influenced Adorno's thinking about metaphysics. For Benjamin and Adorno, transcendence must be sought, not in the order of the immutable, but in the transient and fragmentary — in what interrupts the patterns of repetition that mark historical time and redeem phenomena in their sublime singularity. While both inheriting and transforming the concepts he finds in Benjamin (especially in his famous preface to The Origin of German Tragic Drama), Adorno starts to construct a thinking very early in his career that revolves around Benjamin's concepts such as mimesis, image, aura, name and experience.2 He uses these concepts, not in order to lapse into irrationalism, or to find a vantage point entirely beyond reason, but to expand the current notions of reason and experience to include confrontations of alterity and otherness.
Adorno does not offer a theory of metaphysical experience. If anything, what he has to say in this regard should be read as remarks that, rather than seeking epistemological closure and completion, are meant to encircle and anticipate the event of such an experience. Many of them are negative, telling us what the antithesis to metaphysical experience might be. One particularly important concept is that of "the name", or "naming". In his most manifestly theological writings, Benjamin had already defined the name as the identity of an object from the vantage point of an infinite being.3 The name is the identity conferred on each object by Adam before the Fall. In the postlapsarian world, Benjamin imagines, the theological name, which exhausted the essence of the thing and was capable of redeeming it, is occluded by the invention of human language, which trades in concepts. Human language is structured around the capacity for predication; it subsumes the singular identity of an object under a universal concept, thereby determining it as a species of a given genus. As a result, human beings lose insight into the nature of reality.
Like Benjamin, Adorno believes that concepts have the ability to reify experience and turn us away from things as they are in their unique being. Naming, on the contrary, involves an experience of significance and expression that takes place in opposition to conceptual knowledge. Following Proust's notion of involuntary remembrance, Adorno sees such experience as taking place in connection with certain place-names — Illiers and Trouville in the French author; Monbrunn, Reuenthal and Hambrunn in the German. As names from his childhood, the holiday travels he made with his parents, they invoke a particular, yet indeterminate promise of happiness: "One thinks that going there would bring fulfillment, as if there were such thing" (ND: 373). Adorno is not so much interested in the object itself as in what we may think of as the imagination of it, especially as entertained in conjunction with the strong and passionate hopes of a child. Indeed, the village itself is likely to be both boring and grey in comparison with the dream-like anticipation of what it will have in store. Incorporated in the anticipation is the sense that only this particular village will be able to fulfil the child, and that no other village could replace it.
Adorno emphasizes that, rather than being real, the object of a metaphysical experience must be an illusion. If it were real, this would entail that reconciliation is possible within the false social totality of modern society. However, Adorno rejects this possibility. A reconciliation between subject and object, human beings and nature, would only be possible beyond the current history of domination (or what Adorno, following Benjamin, also calls "natural history"). It is a utopian concept. On the other hand, the illusion that is apprehended in metaphysical experience points beyond itself. In German, the word Schein, which is often translated as "illusion", means both something unreal and the appearance of the real. Following Hegel, Adorno understands truth as the negation of Schein. Truth cannot be had directly; it must be mediated. This view sets him apart from Benjamin, for whom truth permits no mediation and hence no rationality or conceptuality. Metaphysical experience provides a promise of something which is not a mere projection; it is a transcendence from within.
It is important to realize that Adorno wants to position himself between two extremes. He is claiming neither that metaphysical experience involves an immediate, non-conceptual form of apprehension, nor that it calls for some kind of independent justification or determinate judging. Moreover, he is not claiming that for something to count as a metaphysical experience it must in some sense correspond to something that is real. Metaphysical experience is an intimation of transcendence, not its fulfilment.
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno compares his account of metaphysical experience to Kant's thinking about the conditions and limits of human experience. On the one hand, Adorno clearly seeks to criticize Kant for imposing narrow limits on human knowledge. For Kant, objective experience is only attainable in so far as the given is presented as synthesized in accordance with a priori rules provided by the human mind. Like many critics before him, Adorno sees the kind of experience for which Kant's transcendental mind legislates as coextensive with scientific experience. Kant uncovers the a priori conditions for objective judging in natural sciences such as geometry and physics, but fails to account properly for other forms of objective experience. Indeed, Adorno goes further than this and argues that Kant ideologically posits as universal what is only a particular historical form of human experience. Thus, rather than achieving a genuinely universal account of experience, what Kant expounds as experience is modelled on the abstract and reified relations to the world and others in it that spring out of social relations under capitalism. Ultimately, our imprisonment in the immanence of appearances follows from the mind's function as a means to secure self-preservation. Kant's vision of experience is one of domination and control.
On the other hand, however, Kant should be praised for his "rescue of the intelligible sphere" (ND: 385). Outside the world of appearances (to which human experience is objectively and necessarily indexed) there is an intelligible sphere, a world that can only be thought or, as Adorno puts it, imagined, but not known. Despite the ideological nature of his theory of experience, there is a deep speculative truth in Kant's understanding of metaphysics. He is aware that there must be something which transcends the (false) order of appearances. Yet Kant also resists the temptation, so prevalent in later idealists such as Fichte and Hegel, to postulate some kind of philosophical route to reconciliation.
While Adorno finds congenial this restrained show of awareness of something outside the world of appearances (or, for him, the social totality), he takes issue with Kant's ahistorical construal of it. For Kant, the distinction between the order of appearances and the order of things-in-themselves is impervious to social and historical change: it is an opposition that follows from the doctrine of a priori conditions of knowing — or conditions that generate a world of appearances against which one must countenance a world of thingsin-themselves. For Adorno, however, the delusive context (Verblendungszusammenhang) of late modernity, which Kant’s philosophy reflects, may seem to be eternal, but it must be understood as created by human beings. It is therefore contingent, rather than necessary. Kant is right in resisting an easy passage to the metaphysical object, yet wrong in hypostatizing the opposition between appearances and things-in-themselves.
We have seen that Adorno attempts to obtain markers for providing a materialist account of transcendence, and that one of the ways he does so is by introducing a notion of metaphysical experience understood in terms of naming. Another important concept, however, is mimesis. Like that of naming, the concept of mimesis can be traced back to Benjamin, who uses it to designate a form of imitative behaviour.4 Before the acquisition of language, Benjamin argues, the infant responds mimetically to the environment. Rather than reducing, as Kant would have it, its experience such as to satisfy rational constraints, the infant assimilates itself to the object and takes part, as it were, in that object's own realization. For example, rather than stating that a bird sings, thereby turning the bird into an object, a baby will imitate the bird's song and communicate with the bird as a subject in its own right. It is this element of radical receptivity — a receptivity which is prior to our everyday practices of objectifying the other — that interests Adorno. He does not understand mimesis as the capacity to produce a copy of reality. Rather, mimesis is a form of apprehending the other which challenges the selfidentical subject and exposes it to a sublime touch which effaces the distinction between touching and being touched.
Adorno strongly emphasizes that metaphysical experience promises a fulfilment, not just of the intellectual powers, but of the bodily subject. In Freudian terms, it involves at least the illusion (Schein) of a reconciliation between the ego principle and the id or the unconscious. Indeed, Adorno takes very seriously the fact that human beings exist as radically embodied and therefore finite beings. The subject's normal relation to nature is dominated by the desire for self-preservation, which governs the ego's orientation in the world and translates into a relentless quest for dominion. Yet there are moments — threatening or exhilarating — when the repression is lifted and a "remembrance" may be conducted of the nature in the subject.
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno also associates the fact that we are natural beings with death. Like Ernst Bloch, he sees death as the absolute antithesis to happiness and fulfilment — the anti-utopian par excellence. According to Adorno, a very distinctive fact about death in modern society is its total absurdity, its complete incommensurability with life. Death simply cannot in any way be viewed "epically", i.e., as a meaningful end to an otherwise meaningful and full life. If society were such as to permit the existence of epic lives — of lives united around the pursuit of acknowledged forms of virtue — then death would appear to be meaningful. In particular, if the pursuit of virtue were combined with a strong metaphysical framework that provided a source of authority to the individual's quest for moral authentication as well as good reasons to believe in an afterlife capable of rewarding good conduct on earth, then death, though always frightening, would be an event with which members of society could reconcile themselves.
Contemporary society offers nothing of this. Instead, it leaves the individual with scant or no resources with which to integrate the fact of death in any comprehensive notion of a good and completed life. This is why Adorno thinks that any attempt to reconceptualize and reintroduce a conception of epic death would be ideological. He accuses Heidegger's metaphysics of death (Todesmetaphysik) of doing precisely such a thing. On Adorno’s reading, Heidegger offers a "heroism of death": Being-towards-death is the heroic condition of complete authenticity whereby Dasein comes to terms with its own ungroundedness and finitude. It is thus capable of entering into a "resoluteness" which will make life as a whole meaningful. But Adorno objects that modern dying cannot be meaningful in this way, and when taking the death camps into account it becomes almost sacrilegious to hold that meaning can be obtained from death.
Adorno is much more sympathetic to Kant, who argued in his practical philosophy that, in contemplating death and the always existing possibility of evil triumphing over good, reason is inevitably led to postulate immortality and a benevolent God. Rather than suggesting that death can be a source of meaning, Kant held that the highest good, the unification of happiness and virtue, is made possible only if we suppose that the soul lives forever in a metaphysically just universe. But it would surpass possible experience to have knowledge in this area. So Kant argues that we can say only that it is in the interest of reason to suppose that we are immortal and that God exists because the highest good cannot be realized on earth with any certainty, yet must be able to motivate the moral will.
In the same way, Adorno insists that the experience of negativity — of death and radical evil, and indeed also of the utter loss of meaning which he thinks characterizes ordinary life in the rationalized social world — brings about a "metaphysical need". If we are honest and reflective, we simply cannot avoid desiring transcendence. Indeed, even to recognize how bad things are, we need a contrasting vision — a concept or experience with utopian implications — with which to oppose it. Adorno’s thought here is that the dystopian and the utopian, immanence and transcendence, belong together: the one cannot be conceived without the other. Just as the idea of transcendence springs out of suffering, so "grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole" (ND: 377–8).
Adorno's vision of metaphysics in an evil world of radical immanence may appear to have much in common with gnosticism.5 Indeed, he seems at least indirectly to acknowledge this when, referring to his literary hero Samuel Beckett, he writes that "to Beckett, as to the Gnostics, the created world is radically evil, and its negation is the chance of another world that is not yet" (ND: 381). For the gnostics, the material world, created by a dark spirit or devil, is uniformly evil; and the only possibility of salvation consists in negating one’s implication with matter and finding the spark of divinity within, or pneuma. Obviously, if Adorno were a gnostic of some kind, then a pronounced tension would arise between his metaphysics, on the one hand, and his moral and political aspirations as a critical theorist in the Marxist tradition, on the other.
Much criticism of Adorno has focused on the apparent antinomy between claiming that the world is inherently evil — with change being possible only in so far as a wholly different world is created —and criticizing existing society with a view to reforming it. Critics have argued that Adorno's metaphysics is that of a melancholic conservative, locked inside his vision of the meaninglessness of life, who justifiably renounces any attempt at reform. How can this apparently desperate metaphysics support the effort to articulate a rational basis for social critique?6
Several points bear mentioning. First, Adorno places his metaphysics in close conjunction with morality. There is a metaphysical moment present in the simple acknowledgement of pain, in which the perception of pain in attentive individuals engenders a sense of commitment to offer support. Our moral life is founded not on universal principles but on the ability to empathize with others as unique and finite human beings with an endless capacity for both joy and suffering. This explains Adorno's anger at what he calls "bourgeois coldness", the prevalent form of moral attitude in late, post-Auschwitz modernity: it shuts itself off from the suffering of others, thereby promoting civilization's repression of nature. Rather than renouncing any attempt at reform, metaphysical experience generates a demand that suffering be resisted and a less violent social world created.
Secondly, Adorno is merciless in his critique of those, such as the theologian Karl Barth, who designs a notion of "the wholly other", completely untainted by culture (ME: 121–2). Such a notion, he argues, will necessarily fail: it will be abstract; it will draw on specific cultural resources; or it will dogmatically postulate what that "other" may be. There can be no unmediated absolute other. Finally, it is hardly the case that resignation or despair is the only option left to anyone who holds a view of contemporary society that is similar to that of Adorno. Adorno does not claim that change is impossible. His view is that it can only be possible in so far as the negativity and the irrationality of society are taken properly into account. Metaphysical experience is Janus-faced: while locating a moment of transcendence, it also makes us aware of the negativity of immanence. It offers a normative basis for social critique.
Finally, one may wonder how culture is supposed to sustain the possibility of such experience. Other forms of socially important experience — scientific, political, educational and so on — take place within institutions that possess technical, epistemic and organizational apparatuses geared towards making these experiences possible. Compared with scientific experience, for example, metaphysical experience seems hopelessly flimsy and non-committal. Adorno's answer, however, is that cultural modernity does in fact possess such an institution. In advanced art practices, whether literary or musical, he finds that metaphysical experience is enacted at the level of the artwork's so-called "truth content" (Wahrheitsgehalt) (AE: 131ff).
When such an artwork, as in Arnold Schönberg's music or Beckett's dramas, succeeds in giving form to nature's own expression, it penetrates everyday experience and reveals a fragment of a shattered totality. Adorno argues that the artwork's truth content can be viewed as a mimesis of the beautiful in nature. Just as untrammelled nature provides an image of the non-identical, so artworks, when sublimating this experience into artistic form, are objects of metaphysical significance. Although they ought never to be administered, they provide sanctuaries for experiences that other modern institutions, science in particular, refuse.
In insisting on the need to "rescue metaphysics in the moment of its fall", Adorno stands out among his fellow associates of the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer, his close friend and co-writer of Dialectic of Enlightenment, was, with the exception of his Schopenhauerian reflections on suffering, more empirically inclined. So too was Adorno’s assistant, Jürgen Habermas. The latter even introduces “postmetaphysical thinking” as a requirement placed upon all serious philosophical reflection in our time.7 Philosophy, Habermas argues, should restrict itself to reconstructing a theory of rationality, all the while being in close rapport with the empirical social sciences. Although religious and metaphysical beliefs are often ineradicable sources of orientation in moral and ethical issues, they can only be taken seriously as claims in so far as they are filtered through a rational discourse.
Against such trenchant opposition to metaphysics, drawn mainly from Kantianism and pragmatism, Adorno's position may seem vulnerable and marginal. There are good reasons to believe that his rescue operation may not succeed. However, there are equally good reasons to think that it ought to succeed. According to Adorno, the most important reason why metaphysics ought to find some sort of haven in a world that seems to have rejected it is that the alternative would be a condition marked by a total nihilism. But, on Adorno's view, complete evacuation of meaning from the lifeworld would be unbearable. Meaninglessness is nothing to be cherished, as some of the most cynical postmodern thinkers would have it, but a predicament calling for resistance and hope. There is a strong element of hope in Adorno’s fragile epiphanies of transcendent experience.
The apparent resurgence of religion, in both private and public life, would not have impressed Adorno. Although he was strongly oriented towards Catholicism in his early youth, he remained very sceptical of traditional religion. He argued that in a society such as ours, religion can offer nothing more than a false substitute, an artificial and hence unjustified injection of meaning into a meaningless universe. The danger, always, with the metaphysical impulse is its urge to affirm. Although post-Auschwitz culture cannot be affirmed, the desire to point beyond it will hardly be relinquished. If ours is a postmodern culture, a culture of the present, a culture without past or future, submerged in cycles of commodified consumption, then Adorno’s work, which refuses to let go of the modernist values of truth, transcendence and meaning, is an anachronism. However, if these values are implicit in a larger project with which even contemporary humanity can identify, then Adorno’s reflections on metaphysics will continue to be relevant for both ethical orientation and political struggle.
1. For further reflections on the importance of Auschwitz in Adorno's thought, see Fabian Freyenhagen's and Marianne Tettlebaum's essays in this volume (Chapters 6 and 8).
2. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977).
3. Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and the Language of Man", Selected Writings, vol. 1 (1996), 62–74.
4. Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty", Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1978), 333–6.
5. For more on gnoticism, see, for example, Michael Pauen, Dithyrambiker des Untergangs: Gnostisches Denken in Philosophie und Ästhetik der Moderne (1994). See also Micha Brumlik, Die Gnostiker: Der Traum von der Selbsterlösung des Menschen (1992), 303.
6. See, for example, Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society (1992), 196: "Both [Adorno and Arnold Gehlen] raise elitist claims and courageously suppress their longing for something better: melancholy appears as the atmosphere in which critique leaves things as they are. The comfortable 'Hotel Abyss', to which Georg Lukács referred so viciously, offers rooms to both thinkers."
7. See Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (1993).