“Subjectivity and Critique : A Study of the Paradigm Shift in Critical Theory.” by Alexander Reynolds A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Government Department of the London School of Economics, February 1995. UMI Number: U079B09 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U079B09 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 F 720 2_ 2 Abstract of thesis. The German social-philosophical tradition of Critical Theory has recently undergone what its current practitioners have themselves described as a “paradigm shift”. Writers like Jurgen Habermas and Kari-Otto Apel are today attempting to reformulate the socially-critica! insights of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in new terms. Where Horkheimer and Adorno had tried to articulate their critique of existing social relations in a language of “subjectivity” and “objectivity” drawn largely from the classical German philosophical tradition, Habermas and Apel are trying to formulate an - ostensibly - similar critique in a language of “a priori intersubjectivity” drawn from the “ordinary language” and “speech-act" theory which has emerged since the Second World War in the Anglo-American philosophical sphere. This thesis examines the key structural features of the “paradigm shift” carried out by Habermas and his generation and weighs up what has been philosophically and politically gained and lost for Critical Theory with this development. 3 CONTENTS Introduction 4 Chapter One : Theories of Subjectivity 13 Chapter Two : Theories of Critique 74 Chapter Three: The Problem of Naturalism 141 Chapter Four: The Problem of Transcendence 200 Conclusions: The Moment of Modernity 249 4 INTRODUCTION. (i) The following study concerns itself with the past, the present and the future of the tradition in social philosophy known as Critical Theory. Specifically, it critically examines the claim made by the most prominent member of Critical Theory’s present generation - Jurgen Habermas - that the first generation of Critical Theorists - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and their associates - were labouring under aporetic and now obsolete philosophical presuppositions and that, if Critical Theory is to survive and develop, these presuppositions must be abandoned and an entirely new philosophical framework for the doctrine developed and adopted. In his recent work, Habermas calls for - to use the terminology which he himself has chosen - a “paradigm shift in Critical Theory”. We read, for example, in the fourth chapter of the 1981 “Theory of Communicative Action” that it is Habermas’s contention that “the programme of early Critical Theory foundered not on this or that contingent circumstance, but on the exhaustion of the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness” and that “a change of paradigm to the theory of communication makes it possible...to take up once again the since neglected tasks of a critical theory of society." 1 Taken thus out of context, statements like these beg innumerable questions. In what sense, the reader might first enquire, does Habermas believe himself justified in holding the programme of early Critical Theory to have “foundered” at all? After all, the first generation of the Frankfurt School continued to write, and to call what they were writing “Critical Theory”, right up until their deaths. And what precisely, the reader might also enquire, does Habermas mean by such terms as “the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness” and “the paradigm of the theory of communication" ? It will be part of the task of this study to place statements like these back into context and thereby to clarify their meaning. This is not to say that these statements’ air of “begging the question” will thereby be completely dispelled. We shall see below that to the object of the first enquiry, for example - Habermas’s idea that the programme of first-generation Critical Theory must be said to have at a certain point simply “foundered", as opposed to having been continued by radically different means - there still attaches, even where all Habermas’s reasons for holding to this idea are mustered and displayed, something of the petitio principii. This is also in a more complex sense the case as regards the object of 1 Jurgen Habermas, “Theory of Communicative Action” (Polity Press, 1991) Volume One, p. 386. 5 the second enquiry : Habermas’s conceptions of the “paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness" and the “paradigm of the theory of communication”. Throughout the course of the study, we shall come gradually to recognize how much unclarity resides here “on the side of the object”, and not on the side of the inevitable distortions of a decontextualizing exposition. The argument of the study proceeds basically as follows: Chapter One does not initially treat of the Critical-Theoretical tradition at all. It is rather in the first place a consideration of the philosophical-historical presuppositions underlying the very idea of a “paradigm shift” from the “philosophy of consciousness” to the “theory of communication” - although the specific question of the relation between first- and second- generation Critical-Theoretical thought does emerge explicitly midway through this opening discussion. The chapter begins (section one) with an account of Habermas’s argument that the “consciousness-philosophical” attempt to develop a philosophy of society by permutating the categories “subjectivity” and “objectivity” - indeed, even the attempt to develop a philosophy of subjectivity itself in these terms - is, for basic structural reasons, subversive of its own intentions and therefore doomed to failure. It also briefly reviews Habermas’s proposal that the “theory of communication’ shows the way out of these aporia. It then goes on (section two) to raise, with some contemporary critics of Habermas, an objection to this argument, or at least to Habermas’s remarkably broad application of it. The objection, namely, that, although the argument which Habermas develops may be telling against, for example, the ideas of Descartes or Husserl, it does not really have any application to the ideas of certain thinkers whom Habermas nevertheless places at the very centre of his category of the “philosophy of consciousness”, such as Kant, Hegel and Marx. These philosophies of subjectivity developed in or after the German “Goethezeit”, it is suggested, are too radically differently structured from the philosophies of subjectivity formulated by Descartes or Husserl for the category “philosophy of consciousness” to be claimed, as is explicitly claimed in Habermas, to comprehend all of these. Considered next (section three) are the respects in which Habermas’s recent thought contains a response to this objection. The account of German “Goethezeit” thought central to texts such as the “Theory of Communicative Action” and “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity” is examined in some detail. In these texts, Habermas argues - plainly taking his cue here from positions developed by Adorno himself - that although a “Goethezeit” philosophy 6 of the subject such as Hegel’s appears prima facie to draw into its problematic a philosophical factor not commensurable either with the moment of subjectivity or with that of objectivity - namely, the factor of the Absolute - the Hegelian Absolute is in fact ultimately no more than the projection or “inflation” of an empirical subjectivity subject to the same dialectic of self­ subversion as the empirical subjectivity of Descartes. In order to pass beyond this point, where the first and second generations of Critical Theory appear to be in complete accord with one another, the study takes a step back and considers, in section four of Chapter One, the structure of the philosophical culture of the “Goethezeif from a point of view initially distinct from both Habermas’s and Adorno’s. The philosophy of the “Goethezeit” is discussed in terms of the reception, into a culture dominated by the “philosophy of the subject”, of elements of a more archaic “philosophy of Being”. It is stressed, however, that this “philosophy of Being” had in its day taken two primary forms - Platonic and Aristotelian - and that the “Goethezeif synthesis of the “philosophy of Being” with the “philosophy of the subject” in turn took two primary forms : Hegel’s synthesis of the theory of the subject with the immanentistic, Aristotelian form of the “philosophy of Being”, and Kant’s synthesis of the theory of the subject with the transcendentistic, Platonic form of this philosophy. Section five of Chapter One briefly reviews both the “Aristotelian” elements of “Goethezeif culture - with reference not just to their philosophical expression in Hegel’s work but also to their even more influential expression in the work of Goethe himself - and the “Platonic” elements of this culture, with primary reference to the work of Kant. Returning, then, in section six, to the question of the attitude adopted toward “Goethezeif thought by Critical Theory, the study’s argument finally reaches the point where Adorno’s stance needs to begin to be sharply distinguished from Habermas’s. Although, it is argued in this section, Habermas ultimately rejects Hegel on the grounds that this latter remains a “philosopher of consciousness”, he nonetheless unequivocally accepts all the points made by the “Aristotelian” Hegel against the “Platonist” Kant. Habermas plainly believes as firmly as did any “Young Hegelian” that the step from transcendence into immanence, from antinomies into dialectics, taken between Kant and Hegel constituted not just a progression in time but very emphatically a progression in reason.