On Habermas and Modernity with Partially Examined Life

I visited the Partially Examined Life podcast, which I’ve been a fan of for years, to talk about Jürgen Habermas and his series of lectures, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In the book, Habermas defends the Enlightenment, reason, and modernity itself as an “unfinished project” worth continuing against its postmodern critics Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, and even his own mentor Theodor Adorno.

Habermas’s books are famously long and difficult, but I think this is the best and most accessible summation of his project as a whole and how he differed from his direct antecedents and contemporaries. One way to characterize Habermas’s idea of modernity is that it’s the era that is an issue for itself: the specific meaning of the present time becomes important to discover or create. The other way to think about modernity is that it must provide its own criteria; it can’t turn to the models of the past—tradition, religion, authority—as definitive guides for politics, ethics, or art. As Habermas puts it, “it has to create its normativity out of itself.” You might think that sounds extremely abstract and dry, but Habermas actually begins with a discussion of Baudelaire, avant-garde art, and fashion as an entry point into modern consciousness.

Baudelaire the art critic emphasizes an aspect of modern painting: “the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of what, with our reader’s permission, we have called ‘modernity.’” He puts the word “modernity” in quotation marks; he is conscious of his novel, terminologically peculiar use of the term. On this account, the authentic work is radically bound to the moment of its emergence; precisely because it consumes itself in actuality, it can bring the steady flow of trivialities to a standstill, break through normality, and satisfy for a moment the immortal longing for beauty — a moment in which the eternal comes into fleeting contact with the actual.

I first read this book many years ago, just after college, and I wonder if it burrowed into my unconscious. I realized that this description of the modern approach to history, which he calls “effective history,” is exactly what I was trying to do with my book and my study of history in general: “[T]he future-oriented gaze is directed from the present into a past that is connected as prehistory with our present, as by the chain of a continual destiny.”

I hope you enjoy Part 1 of our discussion, and please do sign up for PEL. It’s a terrific podcast that has helped me understand a great deal of very difficult philosophy and theory over the years.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unpopularfront.news/subscribe