In a career known for taking enormous swings, Habermas has just produced his most ambitious work yet: a nearly 2000 page epic on the history of Western philosophy. The first two volumes (reviewed by me here) covered the pre-Socratics to early modern thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Spinoza. Despite this volume’s impressive girth, this is wide ground to cover, which Habermas manages through quick overview. Volume Three is less sweeping, dedicating multiple meaty chapters to Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Peirce, and others.
His intense focus is no accident. Habermas argues we remain contemporaries of the “post-metaphysical” Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th and 19th century. 20th century innovators like Heidegger, Rawls, Arendt, Rorty and himself largely move in the enlightenment established terrain. Without a doubt this will prove a controversial thesis, as Habermas claims that very different philosophers hold co-extensive convictions and insights. Those inclined to a more microscopic reading of the Western canon will find this frustrating. Althusserians will, for instance, insist that Marx enacted a scientific breakthrough relative to Hegel; orthodox disciples of Heidegger may contend that it was Nietzsche who bookended the story of Western philosophy; and analytical philosophers will be frustrated that Frege, Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein barely appear in Habermas’s account. On his reading, Hume and Kant accomplished the long gestating task of ending classical metaphysics once and for all. It’s a compelling take that is hard to argue against given the enormous erudition and seriousness on display.
Far more contentious is Habermas’ whiggish evaluation of the history of philosophy. This is a subtle but hugely important shift in his interpretation. It is one thing to suggest that the history of philosophy can be read as leading up to a shared commitment to rational post-metaphysical thinking. It’s another entirely to construe this history as a positive development at every level: epistemic, moral, political, social. You name it. In a moment where reactionary forms of politics are ascendent and everyone is talking about “post-truth,” it can be very hard to adopt this form of secular faith. Habermas is naturally aware of this and labors to ward off such pessimism. Still, like all conscious efforts at self-inoculation against despair, there is a residual spirit of melancholic angst impossible to fully exorcise.
His exegesis on Hume is respectful. Habermas argues Hume is one of the first great deconstructionists in modern philosophy. Building on the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley, Hume attempted to situate thought on a thoroughly scientific basis. This led him to skepticism of core metaphysical ideas and a radical wariness about concepts of self-hood, causality, and the ideas of religion. This was a major breakthrough, since Hume’s skepticism “is aimed at the decidability of the truth of religious and metaphysical propositions since they cannot satisfy the justification requirements of modern empirical science. This already amounts to an incipient scientistic demarcation of postmetaphysical thought.”
Habermas argues Hume ran into ultimately insolvable difficulties trying to align this radical empiricist skepticism with a cautious “liberal-conservative” approach to morality and politics. On the one hand he convincingly lampooned as nonsense many of the politically transformative ideas of natural law and rights on which revolutions were based. On the other hand, Hume struggled to link a descriptive account of morality as embedded in social conventions and individual’s feelings with a normative “ought.” By “decoupling morality from reason, Hume had blocked the path of rational natural law…” As a result Hume was often pushed to a bootstrapping insistence that “reason requires” we be impartially committed to behaving virtuously even if we rarely feel motivated to do so and often suffered for it.
It was left to Kant to achieve the full breakthrough to post-metaphysical system of thought. The chapters on Kant seem dear to Habermas’ core convictions and are probably the most important in all three volumes. They are predictably dense.
Habermas reads Kant as being exhilarated by his discovery that there is a distance between our perception of reality and reality in itself It became vital to his argument that human beings could be conceived as both regulated by scientific law and morally free beings. Politically it also created the space for practical (moral) reason to stand outside the social world and pass judgements on its many inadequacies. Kant thought we were not only capable of fulfilling this politically critical role, but that we had a duty to do so. The Kantian ideal of “Enlightenment” is in the end a radical call that everyone thinks for themselves, putting continuous pressure on longstanding traditions and institutions to prove themselves before the tribunal of reason. Habermas remains immensely sympathetic to the spirit of this Kantian project.
Kant’s successors varied in their optimism. But even the skeptics admitted there was no return from Kant’s post-metaphysical insights. Where critical, they usually ended up expanding its parameters.
Hegel launched a rather conservative effort to reintroduce the themes of classical natural law and metaphysics into Western philosophy. But he did so by showing how it was not just the immediate world of experience that was created by human reason —but the whole social world. Far from refuting Kant, Hegel’s radical constructivism risked showing that conservative arguments for the naturalness of social hierarchies in domains from the family to the market failed to recognize the extent to which society was created by and through human beings. And if they were created, they could be re-created.
Hegel attempted to sidestep this possibility by integrating the movements of human reason within an absolutizing dialectic that could only be understood retroactively, consequently negating any critical potential. On Hegel’s conception, philosophical reason was affirmative, showing the place of everything that is within the absolute. This structure of affirmation is copied at the social and political level, where Hegel’s Philosophy of Right showed that all social classes have their necessary place within society. Even where Hegel noted the potential for social alienation in his most right wing moments, he refused to give them philosophical sanction. This might come across as resplendent. Habermas is less impressed. He chides that Hegel imagines the job of philosophers to be nothing more than understanding their own moment in thought and to prescribe nothing. There is an elitist nobility to this and a level of abstract removal from the concrete world.
By reconciling all the forms of alienation which critical reason detected, Hegel renounced the “sting” of his own philosophy. Reason lost the power for evaluative moral judgement and gained little more than the power of quiescent affirmation, showing why everything that existed in its present form concurred with a deeper necessity. In effect, he baptised the legitimacy of the present with the blood of past and future.
Habermas thinks turning to Marx is necessary to correct these serious Hegelian errors. Marx was more faithful to the Kantian project by restoring reason as a critical, even revolutionary, force. For Marx, Hegel was right to stress that human beings created their social world and history. But this did not mean it could be understood purely through abstract reason, nor that social forces answered directly to human will. For Marx, a spell of “ideological enchantment” obscures these social relations; these social forces created through human activity become alienated from us and take on a life of their own. Capitalism is applauded a thousand times a day as simultaneously responsible for all the modern world’s improvements, while also being defended as an eternal representation of human nature. Why capitalism didn’t emerge over the course of most of human history if it is so reflective of our basic nature is hardly ever deeply explored, consequently obscuring the novelty of capitalist social relations. If one mode of production has historically replaced another there is no intrinsic reason the same cannot happen again. By negating such possibilities, ideological obfuscation and alienation contribute to the ongoing domination of human beings by their fellows.
Marx was not the first to draw attention to the fact that social relations generate illusions. This observation goes back to Socrates’ critique of doxa, and includes luminaries like Kant. But Marx was probably the first to stress that philosophy is distinctly ill-equipped to push aside these social illusions, despite the fact that it presents itself as the pursuit of truth and wisdom. This is because ideology is not largely the product of human beings making errors about what is true and false regarding their social world. Rather, the occlusion of ideological illusions is produced by social relations.
By launching this critique of Hegel, Marx enacted a major breakthrough in social epistemology. He recognized ideological illusion as rooted in society rather than emanating from individual human cognition. In order for human beings to better apprehend the truth of their social world the answer cannot just be to offer reason’s criticisms. If ideological illusions are to be dissolved, one must change the actual social relations. This is an important aspect of Marx’s stinging rejoinder that philosophers have only interpreted the world when the point is to change it. One therefore might also say that we will only begin to correctly interpret the world when it has been changed.
The most intriguing dimension to Habermas’ entire project is the seriousness with which it takes the complex relationship between faith and reason that defines much of Western philosophy. In the Postscript he echoes the Straussian ambition to trace the “history of philosophy back to its Greek and Hebrew origins” and insists that philosophy “in its occidental form developed in the field of tension between these two traditions.” Habermas clearly sides with Athens. He expresses considerable admiration for Hume and Kant’s offensive against the metaphysics of Christian theology. Essential to the “post-metaphysical turn” is the conviction that there is little that reason can say about God. Whether God exists and how God exists (if God does exist) are questions beyond the parameters of thinking. Not coincidentally the book includes detailed accounts of Feuerbach’s and Marx’s critique of religion.
The one exception to this trend in Habermas’ narrative is the great Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is an odd fellow, combining two seemingly irreconcilable stances. Kierkegaard the “theologian…challenged his colleagues, believers, and organized Christianity by accepting the result of the argument of the atheists.” He followed the methodological atheism of post-metaphysical thought, insisting that no rational argument could be made for God (let alone the Christian God’s) existence. This cleared the way for a transformative demarcation of faith as separate and passionate commitment beyond the realm of reason. Conceived this way, faith can only be evaluated by the emotional intensity of its authenticity and the degree to which it subsumes all else in life. By making belief in God entirely a matter of irrationalist faith, he put such belief beyond the possibility of any kind of proof, any kind of rational criticism.
This leads to remarkable conclusions. In his Attack on Christendom the “rather conservative” Kierkegaard consequently attacks almost all existing Christian institutions. They make the way to faith easier through building hierarchical and cliquish parishes, linking worldly success to adherence to Biblical morality, judging others, and relishing in the feelings of superiority that entails. For Kierkegaard all of this constitutes Christendom, which lacks even the redemptive honesty of true atheism. For the authentic Christian a dedicated unbeliever is to be preferred to the bourgeois “Christian” nationalist. At the least the unbeliever intensely felt their way to believing nothing and might find some transient excellence in the aesthetic spheres. The Christian nationalist, on the other hand, became a believer in Christendom because the Church happened to be a great place to network for their business.
Despite their extreme differences, Habermas tries to make an innovative link here between Marx and Kierkegaard as simultaneously the two greatest critics and disciples of Hegel. Marx stood as the great social revolutionary who thought in terms of the long arc of history and Kierkegaard as the arch individualist for whom the individual is higher than society. But Habermas cannily notes that there is a connection between the two for those who look beneath the surface: “namely, how to conceive of the freedom of historically situated subjects of action in terms of liberation from existing dependencies, whether these are rooted in a biography or in socialization and social structure.” “Both,” writes Habermas, “see history as a sphere of freedom…” This desire to acknowledge the embeddedness of human beings in context while still emphasizing their potential freedom forms a genealogical link. This genealogy explains why 20th century Christian existentialists were allured by the prospect of taking Marx to Church while, at the same time, shaking Kierkegaard out of his self-absorption and marching him into the streets. I suspect that a 21st century Christian socialism would have to aspire to a synthesis rather like this —albeit of more enduring power.
What appears at the close of Also a History of Philosophy: Volume III is a scholar of surpassing generosity of mind and analytical powers — even if his political opinions on issues like the humanitarian crisis in Gaza often can be problematic or appalling. This is a work of willed optimism that continues to believe that deep knowledge and cogent arguments can win the day when one treats their reader as intelligent and equally committed to reasonable discourse. Habermas acknowledges that this ideal is hard to believe in today, but insists progress has still been made. This is a difficult insistence to get behind in such troubled times. But as Habermas well knows: reason by itself is not enough. Sometimes one needs faith that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.
Matt McManus is author of The Political Right and Equality (Routledge) amongst other books.