Contemporary Perspectives In Critical And Social Philosophy (Social and Critical Theory: a Critical Horizons Book Series)

424 Pages·2004·1.6 MB·English

by  John F. Rundell

Contemporary Perspectives
in Critical and Social Philosophy
Social and
Critical Theory
A Critical Horizons Book Series
Managing Editorial Board
john rundell ‒ danielle petherbridge
jan bryant ‒ john hewitt ‒ jeremy smith
VOLUME 2
Contemporary Perspectives
in Critical and Social Philosophy
edited by
John Rundell, Danielle Petherbridge,
Jan Bryant, John Hewitt & Jeremy Smith
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2004
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Social and Critical Theory – A Critical Horizons Book Series provides a forum for
the critical analysis of issues and debates within critical and social theories and the traditions
through which these concerns are often voiced. The series is committed to publishing works that
offer critical and insightful analyses of contemporary societies, as well as exploring the many
dimensions of the human condition through which these critiques can be made.
Social and Critical Theory publishes works that stimulate new horizons of critical thought
by actively promoting debate across established boundaries.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available on the
Library of Congress website: catalog.loc.gov.
ISBN 90 04 14159 6
ISSN 1440-9917
© Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
Contents
Chapter 1
John Rundell, Danielle Petherbridge, Jan Bryant, John Hewitt,
Jeremy Smith
Issues and Debates in Contemporary Social and Critical
Philosophy 1
Chapter 2
Karl Ameriks
The Key Role of Selbstgefühl in Philosophy’s Aesthetic and
Historical Turns 27
Chapter 3
Manfred Frank
Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self-Consciousness
from Kant to Kierkegaard 53
Chapter 4
Daniel Hoolsema
Manfred Frank, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy:
Prolegemena to a French-German Dialogue 137
Chapter 5
Andrew Bowie
Schleiermacher and Post-Metaphysical Thinking 165
Chapter 6
Christoph Menke
The Presence of Tragedy 201
Chapter 7
Max Pensky
Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno 227
Chapter 8
Martin Seel
Adorno’s Contemplative Ethics 259
Chapter 9
Robert Sinnerbrink
Recognitive Freedom: Hegel and the Problem of Recognition 271
Chapter 10
Jean-Philippe Deranty
Injustice, Violence and Social Struggle. The Critical Potential
of Honneth’s Theory of Recognition 297
Chapter 11
Nikolas Kompridis
From Reason to Self-Realisation? Axel Honneth and the
‘Ethical Turn’in Critical Theory 323
Chapter 12
Stefan Auer
The Paradoxes of the Revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe 361
Chapter 13
Maria R. Márkus
In Search of a Home: In Honour of Agnes Heller on her
75th Birthday 391
Chapter 14
Agnes Heller
The Unmasking of the Metaphysicians or the Deconstructing of
Metaphysics? 401
John Rundell, Danielle Petherbridge, Jan Bryant,
John Hewitt, Jeremy Smith
Issues and Debates in Contemporary Critical and
Social Philosophy
I.Modernities,Recognition and
Subjectivities
Contemporary Perspectives in Critical and Social
Philosophy brings together a range of per-
spectives concerning ways of conceptualising
and thinking about the modern constellation.
These perspectives concern the way in which
the subject has been conceptualised, and in
relation to this debates and disputes con-
cerning its constitution, including its relation
with others. Each of these concerns is also
informed by the historicity or historical self-
consciousness of modernity. Moreover,because
each of the essays published here involves
the historical self-consciousness of modernity,
each invokes a dialogue of the present with
its pasts in terms of memories, recoveries and
interpretations. Each essay combines a longer
historical view of past interpretations with
the articulation of ongoing and contemporary
concerns. This combination of present con-
cerns with the horizons of the past includes
the recovery of the long, deep and often poorly
understood history of the Romantic current
of modernity, especially its early German version, a history with which the
essays by Karl Ameriks, Manfred Frank, Daniel Hoolsema, Andrew Bowie
and Christoph Menke are centrally concerned.
The range of different approaches to the modern constellation presented in
this volume also highlights other recent developments within German criti-
cal and social philosophy and includes essays by Martin Seel and Max Pensky,
and critical discussions of the works not only of Manfred Frank, but also
Theodor Adorno and Axel Honneth. Moreover, these recent developments
open onto dialogues and exchanges within and across the traditions and bod-
ies of work upon which these writers draw. These critical exchanges have
occurred around the traditions of hermeneutics, post-structuralism, and Critical
Theory, as well as with other traditions including the Budapest School rep-
resented in this volume by Agnes Heller and Maria Márkus.
To be sure, there are many disagreements between these writers and among
their interlocutors in this current collection of essays—disagreements that
will be explored below. Nonetheless, if, even momentarily, a single aspect
unites them and the philosophical and socio-theoretical traditions with which
these writers work, it is an unease and even alarm concerning the instru-
mentalising version of the modern world, so tellingly portrayed in the works
of Adorno and Horkheimer, and reconstructed here in the essays by Martin
Seel and Max Pensky. Whether this unease is couched in terms of the ‘the
social pathologies of modernity’ (Honneth), ‘the hermeneutical emergency of
the subject’ (Frank), or ‘of homelessness and loss of meaning’ (Heller), there
is a continuing concern that these instrumentalising actions—and the reduc-
tion of the subject to nature, a system, a text, a language—will not only con-
tinue unabated but also transform the self-understanding of what it means
to be human.1
However, and as will become clear in the critical exchanges with the works
of Manfred Frank, Theodor Adorno, Axel Honneth, and Agnes Heller in this
volume, these writers and their traditions part company and enter into deep
disagreements concerning their own responses to this particular modern land-
scape. For Honneth and Heller the responses are driven by politically moti-
vated critiques that attempt to re-work the legacy of practical reason. For
each of these figures modernity remains a politicalproblem, which is addressed
2 • Editorial Introduction
in terms of political form and ethical actions. For Frank, and the long Romantic
heritage with which he engages, as well as Adorno, an aesthetically charged
response opens onto the unique and creative dimensions of humanity that
are either ignored, or suppressed, or written out by instrumentalist accounts.
Moreover, each of these different responses is grounded in competing para-
digms. For Heller and Honneth, the political responses to the instrumental-
ising dimension of modernity are invoked through an intersubjective paradigm,
whilst for Frank and Adorno the aesthetic response opens onto a recon-
struction of the paradigm of the subject.
Nonetheless, and notwithstanding the differences of approach that occur in
the works of Frank, Honneth and Heller, and by implication Adorno, there
is also an affinity between them in the light of their critiques not only of
instrumentalist rationalism, but also of rationalism per se. This is especially
the case with regard to the more recent procedural rationalism of Jürgen
Habermas’ theory of communicative action, whose work forms the back-
ground against which many of the critical dialogues in this volume are made.
Whilst it is beyond the scope of this introductory essay to do more than point
to their own critiques of Habermas, each in their own way criticises his reliance
on the propositional use of language as the quasi-transcendental ground of
a universal pragmatics.2Each in their own way, points to pre- or non-linguistic
and affective dimensions of human action that already and always are invoked
in any pattern of action. Frank invokes the notion of inner self-conscious
awareness or selbstgefühl, which has some affinities with Heller’s own philo-
sophical anthropology of feelings and needs, whilst Honneth emphasises the
pre-cognitive and affectively articulated struggles for recognition.3
These essays, then, should be read both as presentations of the positions of
each of these writers and the traditions in which they work, and as contri-
butions to ongoing debates between those who may be viewed as protago-
nists, but from the perspective of greater distance share some striking ‘elective
affinities’.
II.Recovering German Romanticism: The Aesthetics of
Selbstgefühl and the Modernity of Tragedy
One of the enduring legacies and practices of modernity, apart from its instru-
mentalising version, is another current expressed as aesthetic self-creation,
Editorial Introduction • 3
which Charles Taylor has termed, following Herder, the expressivist tradi-
tion.4One of the major figures who has attempted to recover this expressivist
tradition beyond its articulation in the works of Herder is Manfred Frank.
His work opens onto the uniqueness of the subject—a topic and pre-occu-
pation central to early Romanticism in particular. For Manfred Frank, the phi-
losophy of the subject, in which the issue of aesthetic self-creation is usually
couched, is neither an outdated nor a dead issue.5 He not only critiques the
intersubjectivist turn in contemporary critical and social philosophy, but also
posits an irreducibility of subjectivity to context. His particular notion of the
subject signals both his debt to the early Romantic tradition in German phi-
losophy and his ongoing recovery of its contours against the backdrop of
Kant’s own program and its legacy in German Idealism.
The transcendental program laid down by Kant provided a problematic model
for the nature of subjectivity, a model that entailed that the subject was both
the synthesiser of knowledge concerning nature and society, and was the
source of this synthetic activity through the faculty of reason. Reason entailed
that judgements could be made from within the subject’s own resources.
Notwithstanding the anthropological revolution entailed in Kant’s transcen-
dental program, it, nonetheless, presupposes a capacity for the subject to
reflect upon the condition of the formation of knowledge without knowing
the nature of this capacity—a charge that, for example both Fichte and Hegel
made against him. In other words, the transcendental capacity to generate a
reflection and form a synthesis entailed that the subject could be both sub-
ject and object simultaneously. The objectivating capacity was due to the fac-
ulty of reason, whilst the substance of the subjective was left un-addressed,
or was sublated to the capacity of transcendental thinking. Nonetheless,
Kant recognised that whilst this thinking is limited to the way in which it
synthesised intuitions, he had to assume the existence of a ‘something’ in
addition to a deontological capacity. In other words, for thinking—or more
generally, consciousness—to be operable something in addition must be pre-
supposed. This pre-supposition is the starting point of much of Manfred
Frank’s work, and is formulated as a familiarity or self-consciousness that
must be present for the subject prior to its cognitive activity.
Karl Ameriks, in “The Key Role of Selbstgefühlin Philosophy’s Aesthetic and
Historical Turns,” argues that Manfred Frank draws on three paths that devel-
4 • Editorial Introduction