Jürgen Habermas’s Post-Secular History of Philosophy*

Fernando Suárez Müller[1]

University of Humanistic Studies (Utrecht)

f.suarezmuller@uvh.nl

[…] a little Philosophy inclineth Mans Minde to Atheism; But depth in Philosophy, bringeth Mens Mindes about to Religion […]. Francis Bacon ^[2]

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Abstract

In This too a History of Philosophy (2019) Habermas observes that in the history of modern thought, metaphysical approaches are increasingly redundant; they are losing their ability to determine supra-historical principles, which constitute the foundation of the common good. He believes that a metaphysical interest in existential and ethical matters can only be of a personal nature. In what he calls the ‘post-secular era’, Habermas wants to embed religious communities in a secular conversation. It is not religion that is criticized by Habermas, but the last remnants of philosophical metaphysics that are visible in the German tradition of thought. This article argues that Habermas comes to conclusions which abandon truth orientation in philosophical metaphysics. Habermas paints a picture of the philosophical tradition in which it comes to the realization that transcendental forms of thought cannot offer strong arguments anymore. This article tries to briefly present an alternative picture of philosophy that does not identify with such a post-metaphysical interpretation. It is argued that religious intuitions can only be translated into secular language and taken seriously if this ambition of a philosophical metaphysics to express valid claims about ethical and existential questions is not abandoned.

Keywords: Habermas; metaphysical approaches; philosophical metaphysics.

HISTÓRIA PÓS-SECULAR DA FILOSOFIA DE JÜRGEN HABERMAS*

 

Resumo

Em This too a History of Philosophy (2019), Habermas observa que, na história do pensamento moderno, as abordagens metafísicas são cada vez mais redundantes; elas estão perdendo sua capacidade de determinar princípios supra-históricos, que constituem o fundamento do bem comum. Ele acredita que um interesse metafísico em questões existenciais e éticas só pode ser de natureza pessoal. No que ele chama de "era pós-secular", Habermas quer inserir as comunidades religiosas em uma conversa secular. Não é a religião que é criticada por Habermas, mas os últimos resquícios da metafísica filosófica que são visíveis na tradição alemã de pensamento. Este artigo argumenta que Habermas chega a conclusões que abandonam a orientação da verdade na metafísica filosófica. Habermas pinta um quadro da tradição filosófica no qual ela chega à conclusão de que formas transcendentais de pensamento não podem mais oferecer argumentos fortes. Este artigo tenta apresentar brevemente um quadro alternativo da filosofia que não se identifica com tal interpretação pós-metafísica. Argumenta-se que as intuições religiosas só podem ser traduzidas para a linguagem secular e levadas a sério se essa ambição de uma metafísica filosófica de expressar afirmações válidas sobre questões éticas e existenciais não for abandonada.

Palavras-chave: Habermas; abordagens metafísicas; metafísica filosófica.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LA HISTORIA POSTSECULAR DE LA FILOSOFÍA DE JÜRGEN HABERMAS*

 

Resumen

En This too a History of Philosophy (2019), Habermas observa que, en la historia del pensamiento moderno, los enfoques metafísicos son cada vez más redundantes; están perdiendo su capacidad de determinar principios suprahistóricos, que constituyen el fundamento del bien común. Cree que un interés metafísico en asuntos existenciales y éticos solo puede ser de naturaleza personal. En lo que él llama la "era possecular", Habermas quiere integrar a las comunidades religiosas en una conversación secular. No es la religión lo que Habermas critica, sino los últimos vestigios de metafísica filosófica que son visibles en la tradición de pensamiento alemana. Este artículo argumenta que Habermas llega a conclusiones que abandonan la orientación de la verdad en la metafísica filosófica. Habermas pinta un retrato de la tradición filosófica en la que llega a la conclusión de que las formas trascendentales de pensamiento ya no pueden ofrecer argumentos sólidos. Este artículo intenta presentar brevemente una imagen alternativa de la filosofía que no se identifica con tal interpretación posmetafísica. Se sostiene que las intuiciones religiosas sólo pueden traducirse a un lenguaje secular y tomarse en serio si no se abandona esta ambición de una metafísica filosófica de expresar afirmaciones válidas sobre cuestiones éticas y existenciales.

Palabras clave: Habermas; enfoques metafísicos; metafísica filosófica.

1 Introduction

The social philosopher Jürgen Habermas has become the face of post-war German philosophy. His main work, Theory of Communicative Action (1981) is a classic and a must-read for sociologists and philosophers who want to engage in social criticism. His oeuvre is very extensive and titles such as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) and The Reconstruction of historical Materialism (1976) have become milestones of what we can now regard as the first period of Habermas’s thinking. It is clear that with the theory of communicative action a second phase began, ending with his philosophy of law, Between Facts and Norms (1992), in which the moral and legal consequences of his theory of communication were elaborated. A third period – to which belongs his recently published magnum opus, This too a History of Philosophy (2019) – began in 1988 with the first volume of Postmetaphysical Thinking. In addition to the second volume of the same title from 2012, works such as Truth and Justification (1999), Communicative Action and de-transcendentalized Reason (2001) and Between Naturalism and Religion (2005) also belong to this last phase of Habermas’s work, in which he engages in a double struggle against on the one hand, the transcendental tradition of German philosophy that started with Immanuel Kant, and on the other hand against the tendency in modern societies to devalue religion as an institution and a confession of faith. Habermas has thus maneuvered himself into difficult waters. He forges a semi-alliance with an anti-metaphysical tradition in Enlightenment and modern forms of positivism and scientism, but without translating their declared aversion to metaphysics into an antireligious sentiment. In what he calls the ‘post-secular era’, Habermas wants instead to embed religious communities in a secular conversation. He therefore says farewell to the idea that progress and modernity necessarily go hand in hand with a progressive dilution of religion. It is not religion as a social institution that is criticized by Habermas, but the last remnants of philosophical metaphysics that are visible in the German tradition of transcendental thought. These include his own teacher and friend Karl-Otto Apel. It is certainly true that Habermas owes this tradition a great deal, and the critical force of his social theory would not have been possible without Apel’s transcendental-pragmatic orientation. But Habermas, so to speak, pushes away the ladder that enabled him to reach his critical heights. Indeed, the transcendental-pragmatic approach enabled Habermas’s social criticism to claim a certain general validity. Apel’s ideas about the transcendental conditions implied in the ideal of a communicative community – including discursive values such as tolerance, non-violence, equality, symmetry, openness, etc. – provided Habermas with criteria to back up his social criticism. After all, he claims, modern institutions – like the modern state and economy – still do not meet all the conditions required to enable free communicative processes and genuine forms of dialogue. Modern societies, despite the democratization that has taken place in the West in the last few centuries, still have a structural democratic deficit because the systemic rationality of state and economy partially obstruct the ideal structures of communicative action, encouraging instrumental and strategic ways of action, which end up influencing the way we deal with each other. According to Habermas, free communicative processes are necessary not only for the survival of society but also for its progress, for the development of a broad process of rationalization that escapes the narrowness of systemic rationality.

By referring to the transcendental conditions of speech, without which a serious dialogue and discussion cannot take place, Habermas was able to validate his critical sociology, using criteria incorporated in communication. The implicit claim is that any society that curtails the conditions of free dialogue cuts itself off from the modern process of rationalization. Communicative action itself – the basis of our lifeworld and of institutional society – is always bound to ideals, which may not always be fully realized, but which do not therefore lose their validity. They constitute their own sphere of reality, which makes the Habermasian idea of a ‘logic of development’ of societies conceivable. This is in fact a normative path that indicates possible stages of development, even if the development doesn’t need to correspond to reality. Since this way of representing history is adjacent to the idealism of transcendental philosophy, Habermas had already, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983), tried to get rid of this armor, with which he entered the battle against positivism and systems theory. By thus distancing himself from transcendental thinking, Habermas, in my view, started to saw the legs off his own social criticism.

The culmination of his criticism of transcendental metaphysics is his recent work, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie [This too a History of Philosophy] (2019). This book is a detailed historical foundation of his post-metaphysical position. According to Habermas, the course of Western theological and philosophical history shows that a process is underway in which philosophical metaphysics is being progressively abandoned. He believes that a metaphysical interest in existential and ethical matters can nowadays be of a personal nature, but it can no longer be backed up with claims of general validity. In Habermas’s perspective, philosophical metaphysics suffers a similar fate as religious confessions. The fate of metaphysics is even worse; in post-secular societies personal confessions can meet understanding and respect, but philosophy can no longer take up the task of developing metaphysical worldviews, even if these are well-argued. He rules out the possibility of grounding existential and ethical questions in transcendental truths. Metaphysical worldviews belong to the lifeworld of people but their truth claims cannot transcend the lifeworld. There is no higher transcendental level reachable by philosophy. Even if Habermas’s own social philosophy sketches the outlines of the general values of the ideals of a speech situation, these values remain bound to a specific lifeworld, with the only thing transcending the communicative situation being their ‘procedural’ function. Thus, Habermas thinks basic social values can escape the need to have a metaphysical foundation. An apparently sympathetic consequence of his position is that the validity of fundamental values is determined by a certain lifeworld, formally dependent on the (democratic) participation of actors. An unsympathetic consequence is, however, that philosophy, which tries to separate the universal validity of principles, ideals and values from lifeworld dependent opinions, seems thereby to be relieved of its task. If the validity of a metaphysical standpoint can only be determined within the framework of a worldview, the philosopher is no longer given the opportunity to discern ‘values in themselves’. The intrinsic and universal validity of ideals, principles and values ultimately seems out of reach. By declaring the conditions of communication to be procedural instead of transcendental, Habermas opts for the primacy of sociology; ethical values are products of a lifeworld and expressions of a temporary consensus. 

In his magnum opus, Habermas observes that in the history of modern thought, metaphysical approaches are increasingly redundant; they are losing their ability to determine supra-historical principles, which constitute the foundation of the common good. These approaches are regarded as mere expressions of a certain cultural history. It is true that metaphysical ideas, e.g. the ideals of speech, play a role in communicative acts, but for Habermas they cannot function as substantial bearers of a general truth. They are merely a ‘procedural framework’ of dialogue on an operational level. The status of transcendental conditions of communication is here lowered to that of a performative domain. Habermas henceforth prefers to speak of ‘quasi-transcendental’ conditions of speech. This ‘procedural level’ determines, he thinks, the shape of communicative actions, but never the substantial contents of truth. All this underlies Habermas’s idea of a de-transcendentalization of reason. For Apel (2001), the transcendental conditions of speech still function as general criteria capable of substantially determining the truth value of propositions, thereby constituting a ‘horizontal idealism’ – a domain of ‘ideas’ that never surpassed the sphere of intersubjectivity. Conversely, Habermas tries to ‘sociologize’ and ‘de-transcendentalize’ the main ideals of classical German thought.

In this respect, in This too a History of Philosophy, Habermas goes quite far. Even Kant’s approach to epistemology, in which the objectivity of reality depends on the inborn categories of a transcendental subject, can be translated, he thinks, into terms of an implicit lifeworld knowledge. The ‘objectivity’ of our world depends on the ‘worldview’ we have, which is always part of a pre-existing lifeworld (2019, v. I, p. 466). Even in his latest work, Habermas still uses two – never well differentiated – meanings of the word ‘lifeworld’: on the one hand, it is the whole of cultural knowledge that plays a guiding role in the background of any communicative action. The lifeworld in this sense consists of the shared ethical, political and cultural baggage of citizens. During a conversation only some worldview fragments come to the fore, becoming the potential object of a critical analysis. On the other hand, the lifeworld is a network of actions and institutions, which provide social cohesion. While communicative action is the ‘engine’ of society, Habermas defines the lifeworld both as the ‘fuel’ – the content or cultural software – and the ‘vehicle’ – the social and institutional hardware – driven by actors engaging in communication. The metaphysical and religious content in this picture – the background worldview – belongs to the software of society, but as a truth it does not transcend this particular lifeworld.

With his project of de-transcendentalization of reason, Habermas likes to present himself as the philosopher of tolerance and dialogue who gives expression to the new democratic commitments of German culture. His post-metaphysical thesis in a sense must be read in the light of this general postwar process of German democratization. That’s why Habermas not only turns against the idealist tradition of German thought, but also against the Teutonic metaphysics of Martin Heidegger, who had great influence after the war. He characterizes Heidegger’s metaphysics as quasi-hermetic, introspective and estranged from the lifeworld. So Habermas’s commitment to openness fits with a tolerant perspective towards religion in today’s society. Despite his anti-metaphysical stance, Habermas shows an appreciation of the contents and rituals of religious practice, which he considers to be part of the modern lifeworld. In his view, they offer a counterbalance to the instrumentalist thinking that is omnipresent in our societies. It is not only that they contribute to social cohesion – a thesis that since Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim is commonplace in sociology – they also contribute in a substantial way, since their richness and wisdom strengthen our ethical and existential consciousness. There is much to be learned from religion, he says – as he has been repeating again and again since Dialectics of Secularization (2005), his conversation with Joseph Ratzinger, who later became pope Benedict XVI (see also, 2012). Religious insights deserve a philosophical reflection, and translation into a secular language that is independent of any particular position. With a similar wording he also closes his last magnum opus (v. II, p. 807). Habermas brings this positive attitude towards religion under the heading of what he calls ‘post-secularization’ (2012, p. 308-327). ‘Post-secular’ is a certain type of secular thinking which does not take religions to be strange relics from another era.

Habermas seems to be unaware of a problem he creates when he says that post-metaphysical philosophy faces the twofold task of, on the one hand, abandoning transcendental and metaphysical considerations, and, on the other, offering a translation of religious content in secularized language. For how can religious insight be translated if we abandon metaphysical considerations? In fact, Habermas seems to renounce the enterprise of a humanistic metaphysics that is religion-independent but that tries to grasp the fundamental ideas of religion by rational means. In matters of metaphysics, philosophy for Habermas loses its independency and is reduced to a kind of ‘translation machine’ of religious intuition. This transforms metaphysical philosophy into the handmaiden of institutionalized forms of faith. In This too a History of Philosophy he tries to show that philosophy is brought to this position by the weight of its own history. Concepts such as ‘post-metaphysics’ and ‘de-transcendentalization’ suggest that classical metaphysical questions – such as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the existence of a deeper reality, etc. – can be left to the domain of strictly personal experiences and beliefs. A metaphysical inquiry in terms of general philosophical research that rationally and independently develops and weighs metaphysical arguments, is impeded, Habermas argues, by the weight of the history of philosophy. This history shows that no general claims of truth can be attached to metaphysical representations. A consequence of this position seems to be that metaphysical arguments, developed and improved in the course of philosophical tradition, by definition aren’t guided by the strength of the better argument. And this again leads to the idea that contemporary philosophy can only reflect or translate existing religious insight.

Using some aspects of Habermas’s recent work, I want to analyze why Habermas, in the final phase of his thought, comes to conclusions that seem to abandon truth orientation in philosophical metaphysics. He paints a picture of a philosophical tradition that, in its disagreement with faith, comes to the realization that transcendental forms of thought cannot offer strong arguments anymore. But to what extent is that true? In answering this question, I will also try to briefly present an alternative philosophy that does not identify with such a post-metaphysical interpretation, which leaves metaphysics to religion, and still sees itself as representing a truly broad concept of rationality, although this is a concept that Habermas seems to abandon. A ‘broad rationality’ means that philosophy does not limit ‘truth’ to the insights of positive and empirical science, but that philosophy can contribute to knowledge in its efforts to reflect on ethical and existential questions. Religious intuition and belief can only be translated into secular language and taken seriously if this ambition of a philosophical metaphysics to express valid claims about ethical and existential questions is not abandoned. It would be reductive to limit the metaphysical task of philosophy to an ‘interpretation’ of existing religious intuition. Philosophy should try to value this intuition on the basis of the concept of a truly ‘broad rationality’, and will have to be entrusted with the task of producing well-argued considerations about the ‘world as a whole’. Here, in my view, the power of the stronger and most coherent arguments applies as much as elsewhere. Their validity implies a conception of truth that spans both the positive sciences and religious thought.

The question above boils down to what exactly the idea of a post-metaphysical philosophy in a post-secular age means for Habermas. Based on some important passages from Habermas’s last works, I will seek an answer to this question. According to Habermas, it was only with the nominalist revolution of scholasticism in the late Middle Ages that philosophy detached itself from theology. For him, this revolution broke with the ‘ontological metaphysics’ that prevailed previously. For Habermas, this metaphysics was connected with developments that can be traced back to the development of the Axial Age and Greek philosophy (§ 2). With Middle Age nominalism a space opened up, which made the new paradigm of ‘subject-philosophy’ and transcendentalism possible (§ 3). This so-called ‘consciousness metaphysics’ found its translation in an ethics of courage, confident of autonomous thought, with the works of Kant and German Idealism (§ 4). In a final paradigmatic shift, which started at the end of the eighteenth century, the central role of the subject was substituted by an emphasis on intersubjectivity. A person was no longer seen as a ‘transcendental subject’ but as a socially embedded individual situated in relation to others, thereby developing their own particular identity. According to Habermas, this metaphysics of consciousness then makes way for a post-metaphysical philosophy of intersubjectivity (§ 5). In my last section I will try to sketch an alternative history of metaphysics, which interprets modernity not just as a process of de-transcendentalization but also of a subsequent re-transcendentalization. In late modernity, I argue, a ‘rational metaphysics’ might become widespread and even fuel people’s religious experiences. A different picture would then emerge of a phase in the history of religion, in which humanity is propelled towards what I call a ‘humanistic spirituality’, which is based on strong rational arguments, and is thus able to stimulate an ecumene of religious denominations. For the intrinsic truth of religions can, in this view, be specified precisely by a ‘rational metaphysics’ that would constitute the force binding the churches together and marking the boundaries of the acceptable ideas and positions in religion. Thus religions will be both formed and limited by the humanist ideals already existing within them (§ 6).

 

2 The birth of philosophy in the Axial Age

Of the 1740 pages of Habermas’s second magnum opus, following a general theoretical introduction, the first 600 are devoted to the Axial Age and Greek philosophy. Another 400 pages are devoted to thought in the Middle Ages. Almost two-thirds of Habermas’s book thus sketches a picture of what he calls the ‘ontological phase of metaphysical thought’. Only with the emergence of the Reformation, which he claims was fostered by the nominalist movement, does the balance change, with ‘substance metaphysics’ giving way to a modern ‘philosophy of subjectivity’ or ‘metaphysics of consciousness’. Habermas perceives this philosophy of subjectivity, which begins with René Descartes, as a route toward Kant’s transcendentalism and German Idealism (see § 4). Like the positivist thinker Comte, the founder of modern sociology as a ‘positive’ science free from metaphysics, Habermas is convinced that philosophy began to definitively awaken from her metaphysical slumber at the end of the eighteenth century. The last 400 pages of Habermas’s work are devoted to the emergence of a modern ‘paradigm of intersubjectivity’, with which a path to de-transcendentalization, and his own post-metaphysics, is being created (see § 5). He regards Kant as the culmination of the modern ‘philosophy of subjectivity’ that ended with Hegel. But Kant, according to Habermas, already represents an advanced post-metaphysical consciousness. At the end of the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Johann Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher had already presented the new intersubjective paradigm, with which contemporary philosophy begins. Compared to the transcendentalist philosophy of consciousness, the ontological metaphysics developed in antiquity and the Middle Ages took on the much more explicit task of presenting a comprehensive worldview (2019, v. I, p. 474). In the Middle Ages it mainly served to support the Christian faith. The modern ‘philosophy of subjectivity’ was less metaphysical in this ontological sense, but in German Idealism – according to Habermas, a kind of last straw of metaphysics – it still linking the whole of being to a ‘transcendental subject’. In the work of Herder, Schleiermacher and Humboldt however, finite subjectivity is freed from its transcendental duplicate. Subjectivity can only be thought of, Habermas claims, as part of the social lifeworld and as a finite product of a specific language and culture. Habermas calls this process the ‘de-transcendentalization of subjectivity and reason’. He considers his history of philosophy to be a ‘genealogy of post-metaphysical thought’, at which forefront he positions himself. ‘Genealogy’ here means the entangled origin and development of a cultural history that began with the Axial revolution.

In this genealogy of post-metaphysical thought, Habermas situates the first emergence of philosophy in the Axial Age. Both in the East and West, philosophy emerged in different cultural contexts, as a specific moment in the axial development of religious consciousness. The concept of the Axial Age was introduced by Karl Jaspers and implies that religions in a certain phase of their development, more or less parallel in different cultures during the first millennium BC, go through a process of rationalization, ending in the so-called moralization of religion, characterized by a universalization of morals and the emergence of mono-cosmic or monotheistic representations of the world that implied a totally new perspective on existence, a new ‘worldview’, both spatially and historically (2019, v. I, p. 469). This was only possible because this perspective assumed the existence of a somehow otherworldly, transcendent deity. For Habermas, the term ‘worldview’ mainly refers to this idea of a unitary cosmos ordered by an invisible divinity. On the one hand, the divine is located ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ the cosmos, but on the other hand, it manifests itself in the creation of being. The transcendent position of God and the universalization of ethics reinforced each other. This was complemented by the development of an extensive soteriology, which emphasized the individual path of salvation or healing. In this way, the life of an individual appears as a totality; a personal ethics of existence encompassing one’s own life as a completed whole.

These developments also had consequences for the emergence of new cultic forms and rituals, which now revolved around some ‘Holy Scriptures’, which were collected, worshipped and ultimately studied and internalized (2019, v. I, p. 309). This strengthened the inner spiritual attitude of the representatives of the faith, that is, their contemplative and ascetic attitude. But the study of the scriptures also stimulated their discursive and reflective attitude. The development of which, was linked to a moral universalism, which emphasized an ethics of existence based on the idea of ‘brotherhood’, the core of a solidary activity called ‘Church’, and considered to be a means to ‘saving a community’. In Judaism, according to Habermas, this activity acquired a strong discursive and theo-political content, especially in the texts of the prophets, which is less prominent in Eastern religions. In the East, the meditative and contemplative spirit was much more central, seeking salvation and healing by reconnecting with the inner ‘flow of being’ (Dharma, Tao). We could indeed state that in the East the believer is first of all a ‘companion of being’, even to the degree that life becomes a ‘surrender to the absolute’, a kind of ‘total immersion’ in a general flow. Habermas says that in Platonism and Confucianism, the discursive and contemplative forces seem to come to a kind of synthetic equilibrium, which is translated into specific ‘moral and political ideals’. To Habermas, this ideal of humanization and Bildung of humanity manifests itself in Confucianism even more strongly than in Socrates and Plato (2019, v. I, p. 390).

Although Habermas rightly emphasizes the humanistic impulses in the Confucian ideal of Bildung, there is also much to be said, I think, for the argument that Eastern philosophy was to a large extent cosmo-centric and less based on the individual. In contrast, the humanistic basis in Western philosophy was constituted by the idea of an independent subject argumentatively or discursively creating its own image of the cosmos. This difference between East and West, which emerged at an early stage, explains why in Western culture there will be a transition from a ‘substance metaphysics’ to a ‘metaphysics of consciousness’, which was supported by the appearance of different types of philosophy of subjectivity. For unlike the more meditatively oriented philosophies of the East, which aimed at uniting the individual with the flow of the cosmos, Greek philosophy did not directly rely on the experience of a revealed truth of being. In the East such an experience, based on a meditative union with being, was a kind of natural revelation, whereas in the West, with the Greeks, an analytical and discursive rationalization was carried out by independent philosophers, who as subjects relied on their own conceptual means. This difference, which Habermas overlooks, in my view marked the way in which philosophy and humanism became strongly intertwined in the Western tradition. Philosophy became a discursive attempt to discern the meaning and purpose of being by rational or conceptual means. This reliance of man on its own rational capacities is a first sign of the humanist disposition of the West. This means that discursive philosophy is a condition, but not yet a cause suffisante, of a humanist way of life. The weight the Greeks put on the independent rational capacities of individuals, in my view also constitutes a fundamental genealogical event making the appearance of a modern metaphysics of consciousness possible. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is therefore already announced in the very beginning of Greek philosophical praxis, and in a sense this also applies to the modern conception of the person, which will serve as a humanistic translation of what in substance metaphysics was still called ‘the soul’. A similar discursive rationalization took place in Indian and Chinese philosophy, but the anchor points of this Eastern thinking were primarily the inwardness of deep meditation and the outwardness of practices of wise counselling. Socrates, on the other hand, represents the image of a humanism that starts with an inquiring individual who, independently and free from any direct divine revelation, develops a worldview based on the discursive practice of conceptual philosophy.

Although Habermas seems unaware of how entangled Western philosophy and humanism are, he rightly stresses that the discursive praxis of Western philosophy could only emerge thanks to the introduction in the Axial Age of what he calls ontologische Schichtung, an ontological differentiation or stratification that raises truth to a higher plane than the empirical world. In the East this became visible, for example in the emergence of liberative practices of meditation, which attempt to break through the vicious game of samsara (2019, v. I, p. 321). In the East the divine, despite its axial aspects of a transcendental reason, still laid a mantle of bliss over the natural world, whereas in the West the natural and historical world was characterized by a rather prosaic realism that only occasionally experienced divine eruptions. This, however, doesn’t stop the East setting out a stratification of being, which made it possible to assume the existence of a deeper reality behind the veil of the empirical world.

Without mentioning him, Habermas seems to be incorporating insights from Heidegger, who thought an ‘oblivion of being’ took place in Western metaphysics. By conceiving the divine as being logos, the West created a division that placed the world – as a collection of beings (Seiendes), in opposition to the divine. In line with Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger thinks he can escape the ontotheological conceptions of Western philosophy by revisiting the Greek natural philosophers, who, according to him, still regarded being as the primal force of the cosmos; they still had a concept of a deep force, which was not ‘contaminated’ by the idea of a rational deity. But, I think, Habermas is right when he says that these first natural philosophers were in fact representatives of the axial revolution (v. I, p. 417). Furthermore, he believes these same Greek natural philosophers were in fact the founders of the dual ontology that characterized the landscape of Western philosophy for centuries, because they sought a first principle that transcended nature and at the same time started it. Although this principle was assumed to be physical, it actually concerned a level of being from which all other principles and forms had to originate. Habermas, in my view, is quite right that from the outset in Greek philosophy a transcendent general ‘formative principle’ was assumed to exist, which Anaxagoras later characterized as nous (thought, reason). The rational metaphysics from which Heidegger tried to escape, was thus already in full swing among these presocratic philosophers. Socrates and Plato were merely continuing a trend (2019, v. I, p. 419). If we compare this Habermasian interpretation of the Greek natural philosophers with Heidegger’s distinction between ‘being’ (Sein) and ‘things being’ (Seienden), we see that this differentiation itself picks up the very ontological stratification that emerged in the Axial Age. Heidegger, after all, holds on to the axial idea that there is a depth dimension in being, which he claims has been forgotten, but which, according to Habermas, simply lives on in the Socratic tradition and throughout the whole of Western metaphysics. For Habermas, Heidegger is therefore not a modern post-metaphysical thinker because his philosophy is built on the presuppositions of an old ‘substance metaphysics’, which parts from the existence of a depth dimension of being. The relevance of Heidegger’s effort to recuperate a genuine connection to the cosmos for modern ecological thinking, however, fully escapes Habermas’s attention. But he is right to see the ontological stratification introduced by axial religions as constituting the starting point for the emergence of both the discursive and meditative practices in the awakening period of Western and Eastern philosophy.

Habermas’s interesting account implies three points. First, discursive philosophy seems to me to have developed most strongly in peripheral areas of the axial revolution where the influence of so-called axial religions was felt but had not yet massively taken a solidified dogmatic form. In my view Chinese and Greek philosophy became possible because of a certain degree of freedom from dogmatic religiousness, which explains the strong discursive nature of these traditions. The second point concerns something related to this; Eastern discursivity was substantially different to Western. In the West, the argumentative approach is completely detached from divine revelation or practices of meditation. The theo-political ways of thinking of Confucius and Plato were in this sense fundamentally different from the faith-provoking theo-political discourses of the Jewish prophets, with whom Habermas aligns Confucius and Plato. In Chinese and Greek philosophy, in my view, there was a real attempt to create a self-contained and delimited theory of the state, which was absent in the prophets. But it should also be noted that the pragmatism of Confucius’s political counseling is far less ‘constructivist’ than the strongly idealistic approach of Plato, who not only discusses the necessity of the state itself but also its possible ideal form. Like Plato, Confucius subordinates the individual to the community; both philosophers emphasize a common good that prevails in the sovereign’s wisdom, but with Plato there is also a radical will to transform the institutional system itself.^[3] Confucius understands the process of humanization as a mere ‘ethical’ development, only concerning our individual actions, and not as a ‘moral’ transformation of institutions. Within Confucianism, the individual was subordinated to a larger cosmic dynamic that clearly recalls the Indian Dharma – the natural order of an always existing higher ‘justice’. Within Platonism this order is instead mental or spiritual – in fact it is a world of ideas. Habermas rightly places Greek ‘being’ (Ontos) on a par with the Tao, Dharma and Yahweh of religious traditions, since, despite many differences, they all refer to a transcendent domain that gives earthly reality a metaphysical depth (2019, v. I, p. 465). In Greek philosophy, however, access to this Ontos is entirely discursive, that is, argumentative, and thus in principle entirely independent of any revelation or meditative experience. This argumentative way of accessing the higher truth contributed to the constructivism of Greek philosophy, which also explains why a manifoldness of philosophical positions arose in dealing with ontological truth. There is not one dogma or narrative behind Greek thought, access to truth must always result from the conceptual labor of single individuals. This can be seen as the main characteristic of Greek humanism, despite attempts, as in Plato, to integrate a diversity of narratives in a discursive and dialogical way, through so-called ‘dialectics’. Plato’s philosophy in this sense marks the dialogical dynamics of Greek thought itself; it is at the same time discursive, contemplative and integrative. The contemplative part is also substantially different from Eastern meditation, for here contemplation of the ideal world results from a conceptual construction based on individual reflection.

This also explains why Confucius’s philosophical politics, as Habermas rightly emphasizes, is mainly a form of counseling aiming at extending our personal ethics of existence, whereas for Plato, society – and in fact the entire empirical realm, is in itself a construction based on rational and universal principles or ideas of justice. To underscore that, for Plato, contemplation is based on argumentation, is of importance in order to correct Habermas’s undifferentiated account of Platonism as merely being a quasi-religious movement. He tends to put metaphysical contemplation in the Platonic tradition on the same footing as religious revelations, which were entirely devoid of any discursive foundation (2019, v. I, p. 443). This underestimation of the analytical basis of the Platonic tradition also damages Habermas’s discussion of Plato’s political theory. Habermas dismisses Plato’s critical notes on democracy as mere expressions of a ‘contemplative elitism’ (2019, v. I, p. 452), which he later also sees reflected in Stoic humanism (2019, v. I, p. 530). In our current times of rising populism, one would expect a more attentive understanding of such warnings about the shortcomings of the democratic system. Habermas’s view of Platonism as a quasi-religious movement does no justice to the discursive basis of what was probably the highest point of development of Greek thought. Habermas is right, however, to perceive in Platonism an immanent connection of philosophy and soteriology, a doctrine of salvation (2019, v. I, p. 440, 547). But the fact that Plato included this fundamental element of axial religions in his own philosophy – just as he included a philosophical theology – does not justify the claim that Platonism is to be put on a par with revelational religions. In Habermas’s account, Platonic and other objective idealist positions always appear as examples of thought incapable of freeing themselves from revelation, therefore also failing to free themselves from ‘substance metaphysics’. We shall see however that this inclusion of theological content in no way forestalls the secular impulse inherent in these philosophies (§ 4).

We may conclude that in the first part of Habermas’s history of philosophy we encounter an ambivalent aspect already expressed in his earlier works. In the post-metaphysical picture he tried to sketch in earlier books, there was no place for a truth-oriented development of metaphysical and religious questions. Although his idea of a ‘post-secular’ philosophy expressed an openness to the inherent wisdom of religion, philosophy for Habermas seems ultimately unable to rationally ground religious insights and metaphysical ideas based on its own argumentative power. According to Habermas, modern philosophy therefore no longer perceives it necessary to create a ‘worldview’, because it has realized that a total knowledge of reality is epistemologically impossible and even sociologically undesirable (2012, p. 28). Seen in this light, (neo)platonic and idealist positions, which pop up again and again throughout the history of philosophy, actually appear to be the antithesis of Habermas’s idea of post-metaphysics, because post-metaphysics forecloses any form of speculative thinking, and rules out the possibility that any rational reflection on the whole can get us anywhere. Post-metaphysics only allows for ‘translations’ of religious intuitions, especially of ethical ones, into a secular language. I will come back to this critique of metaphysics later (§ 5), but here we can at least establish that it is mainly this idealist tradition, originating with Socrates and Plato, which constitutes the main opposition to the post-metaphysical attitude. Idealism resists any attempt to separate philosophy from the ultimate questions about the meaning of life and the reality of being which traditionally characterized substance metaphysics. And it was the idealist tradition that always was prepared to rationally take up the fundamental aspirations of religion itself. The very recurrence of idealist positions in modern thought would therefore endanger Habermas’s view of modernity as a post-metaphysical age.

One major reason for putting the Platonic tradition on a par with the revealed religions of the Axial Age is, for Habermas, the important role Plato and later Neoplatonists play in the development of Christianity. It is indeed right that the, so called, mystery cults in the Roman Empire opened a path to gnostic and Christian movements, which also found rich nourishment in the works of Plato and the Platonic tradition (2019, v. I, p. 483, 536). It also seems clear to me that the development of the spiritual movements of antiquity – the mystery cults, by which we mean the whole of Orphism, the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries, and the cult of Mithras and Isis, up to the emergence of forms of Gnosticism and Christianity – were symptoms of a deep crisis of a certain stage of religious consciousness, in fact, of the breakdown of what once was the mythological worldview. Pythagoreanism and Platonism played an important role in these ancient spiritual movements, which tried to resolve the internal tensions in polytheism. In his analysis, Habermas rightly emphasizes the specificity of Platonism for the development of the Christian faith, so much as to ally himself with Nietzsche, concretizing his statement that ‘Christianity is Platonism for the people’. According to Habermas, an Arbeitsteilung [distribution of labor] took place in late antiquity: while Christianity developed the element of ‘faith’ (pistis), Platonism incorporated ‘knowledge’ (sophia) in order to support faith (2019, v. I, p. 485). Habermas also gets it right when he says that in the Platonic tradition, unlike the Aristotelians, sophia provided a philosophical or intellectual background for both pagan and Christian narratives. But this in no way means that Platonism subordinates philosophy to religion. The Neoplatonist Proclus, for example, tried to resolve the immanent tensions of the mythological worldview by rationalizing ancient mythology, as Plato had done much earlier, by interpreting myths in terms of rational principles. But it is unquestionably the case that the independence of philosophy disappears in the Middle Ages, which in my view is a process that can be seen, for example, in the course of Augustine’s development. The Platonic aspects of Augustine’s early philosophy were increasingly set aside in his later work, and substituted by a purely medieval approach, which was mainly exegetical. Although the Neoplatonists, both in antiquity and later in the Renaissance, were committed to a theologia platonica, their main interest in theology always remained philosophical. This interest in metaphysics in any case doesn’t legitimate Habermas’s subsumption of Platonism under the umbrella of redemptive religions, for its basis rests entirely on discursive thinking. And on an argumentative level, Plato’s work is certainly not inferior to Aristotle’s, even though Habermas seems to perceive this differently, seeing in the rediscovery of Aristotle the primary impulse for the development of modern thought. According to Habermas it was the disputes between universalists and nominalists, based on Aristotle’s work, which constituted the main turning point towards modernity. He also interprets modernity and the post-metaphysical constellation as slowly taking shape after the Renaissance, in such a way that philosophy could definitively shake off the last remnants of idealism in the twentieth century. So, it becomes quite clear from the outset of Habermas’s magnum opus that the historical importance and influence of idealist philosophy are systematically pushed aside. We shall see that Habermas does this in order to reinforce his own idea that a truly contemporary way of thinking casts away any attempt to design a metaphysical and comprehensive worldview.

 

3 Nominalist origins of modern science

It is not without reason that Habermas leaves his discussion of Aristotle to his section on the Middle Ages, for indeed his influence on Arab and European philosophy was essential. In Aristotle and the (late) medieval reception of his work, Habermas sees a key impulse towards modern science. According to him, the Neoplatonic currents of antiquity had completely distorted Aristotle’s Organon and Metaphysics, incorporating them into their quasi-religious systems of thought (2019, v. I, p. 678). The modern aspects of Aristotle’s prosaic philosophy were thus completely nullified. According to Habermas’s perspective, it is only thanks to nominalism that Aristotle became the founder of modern science. It no longer saw itself as an instrument of religious contemplation, as was still the case, according to Habermas, with Plato and all later revitalizations of metaphysics (2019, v. I, p.682). The most important impulse of rationalization, which finally led to the modern separation of science and religion, was in Habermas’s eyes the reception of the works of ‘the philosopher’ from the twelfth century onwards (v. I, p. 689). While in the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas there was still an important influence of Platonic essentialism clouding both science and philosophy, Habermas sees in the nominalism of both Duns Scotus and William of Ockham a crucial step towards modernity. These nominalists were no longer interested in abstract universals but were oriented towards empirical data (2019, v. I, p. 693). Whereas for the ‘realists’ like Aquinas ‘truth’ meant, as for Plato, something other than ‘empirical givenness’, for the ‘nominalists’ non-revealed truth coincided with the empirical (2019, v. I, p. 700, 2019, v. II, p. 197). 

Habermas rightly emphasizes that Aquinas still subordinated philosophy to revelation. Philosophical truth was conceived as assensus – an affirmation of faith – which impeded the independent operation of philosophy (2019, v. I, p. 717). And indeed, in this sense, nominalism constituted a philosophical liberation from the grip of faith – a liberation that would play a fundamental role in the emergence of modernity. Habermas however, completely overlooks the crucial role played by the Platonic tradition in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It is well known that it was especially the rediscovery of the works of Plato and other ancient Platonists that provoked the main impulse toward modern science, both in mathematics and the humanities. The Timaios was linked to important ancient works on geometry (Euclid) and a growing interest appeared in both speculative arithmetic and geometry (Nicholas Cusanus). Also, the new astronomy of Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler are connected to these Platonic influences. But, as we saw before, Habermas underestimates the Platonic tradition by associating it, from the outset, with a religious worldview. The role the Platonic Academy played in the development of ancient mathematics and physics is totally left out of the picture. A similar underestimation of the Platonic tradition now leads to Habermas’s one-sided account of the origins of modern thought. It is clear that the history of the exact sciences is not Habermas’s strongest point, but his underrating of the influence of Platonic idealism reappears in his reconstruction of key aspects of our cultural history, such as the history of human rights.

To understand this point we have to look at the development of the humanities, the so-called humaniora. Francesco Petrarca’s profound admiration, even veneration, for Plato can be marked as the beginning of Renaissance humanism.^[4] Early modern humanism was overwhelmed by a flood of texts from the Byzantine East, often attributed to Plato and the Platonic tradition, some of which, as only later became known, were in fact written by

Stoics – even the Latin works of Cicero were held to be part of this Platonic tradition, and thus Ciceronian style became exemplary. The role of this tradition in the Renaissance is of undeniable importance. Because of direct translations of Plato’s works, Socrates’s critical stance became known to the world, and became worthy of imitation, thus influencing what can be called ‘radical criticism’. In the Renaissance this resulted in an unlimited humanistic confidence in the individual as an autonomous and self-reflective subject. The voluntarism of the nominalists was indeed a forerunner of this confidence, and so was Ockham’s critical stance towards the church authorities – but only a forerunner still taking place under the umbrella of Christian faith. It is only in the Neoplatonic metaphysics of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno that a rediscovery of the radical declaration of independence of both natural philosophy and human dignity from any specific religious revelation can be discerned.^[5] For Bruno this declaration of independence appears in the form of a philosophy of nature that is fully liberated from the picture of Biblical revelation, opening a path towards the modern natural sciences. In Degli Eroici Furori, for example, Bruno takes up Plato’s monadology transforming it into a modern cognitive science of nature: “[...] for out of the primordial monad that is the deity, this other monad arises, which is nature, the universe, the world. [...] And this second world is Diana [Gaia], an empirical being that we can indeed cognitively grasp” (1989, p. 169 – author’s translation). And in Pico’s Theses, conceived to promote a public debate, there is more than a criticism of specific doctrines of the Church, which reminds us of a similar later undertaking by the German Reformer. For unlike Martin Luther, Pico was not concerned with 95 but with 900 theses that altogether presented a completely new metaphysics, a Renaissance manifesto – in fact, the basis for a new worldview.^[6] This also implied a different understanding of humanity, for Pico’s famous Oratio de hominis dignitate (1496) was an introduction to this new humanistic metaphysics. It is also important that this Italian humanist saw science as being capable of supporting a type of faith that was not necessarily identical to that of the Roman creed, and that could, at least partially, crop up in other religions. It is important to note that in this comprehensive metaphysics Pico tried to connect positive science with an overarching philosophical interpretation of the whole that integrated the primary functions of meaning and purpose into the discovery of the world. This was in accordance with the idealistic tradition of Platonism. In this context of a rediscovery of Platonism, figures like Marsilio Ficino, Pico, Bruno and later also Tommaso Campanella, tried to reconsider the works of Aristotle beyond any connection to Christianity, and thus, much more than in nominalism, they separated him from Christian faith, thus making possible a philosophy of nature that could be fully detached from all revelation as we see in the works of for example Bernardino Telesio and Pietro Pomponazzi – a development that also heralded the work of Baruch Spinoza. So, thanks in part to the rediscovery of the Platonic tradition in the Renaissance, philosophy succeeded in partly recapturing the discursive independence that once characterized it in classical antiquity. It is also important to note that the rediscovery of the critical attitude of Socrates also made a reevaluation of ancient skepticism possible, a methodical reappraisal taken up by Pico’s cousin Gianfrancesco and later by Campanella, who can be seen as anticipating Descartes’s methodical skepticism.^[7]

The regained independence of philosophy meant that people had to discover and reconstruct the truth on the basis of their own cognitive and reflective capacities. In line with the old tradition of the ancient Academy, Platonic humanism sought to connect science and philosophy by integrating scientific knowledge of the world with larger existential and ethical concerns about the purpose of being. In a certain sense, Christianity thwarted the spirit of freedom of ancient philosophy, but this freedom was taken up again in Renaissance humanism. Whereas ancient philosophy can be labelled ‘humanistic’ in a noetic sense, meaning that a subject had to construct the discursive edifice of philosophy autonomously and independently, Renaissance philosophy can be labelled ‘humanistic’ in a noematic sense, meaning that subjectivity is becoming aware of its creative power. The formation of individuality (paideia) in antiquity was not just a way of collecting knowledge and skills to be flaunted, but first and foremost the basis for an existential art of living – the so-called ethics of existence. In antiquity, however, humans still had their feet firmly planted in the cosmos, i.e. the ‘world’ was not yet developed ‘out of the head of a subjectivity’, as became the case in modern times. In the Renaissance, a humanism emerged that we can call noematic because subjectivity became aware of its own foundational power. Man was not so much planted ‘with both feet’ in the cosmos, but the cosmos became a ‘construct’ of human action, by science as a reconstructive (and later also experimental) understanding of the world. Human subjectivity became the central way of discovering the world.

Figure 1 - Figure 1 Cosmic man of Vitruvius

 

 

 

 

 

 

Metaphorically speaking, the cosmos was thus unfolded out of the ‘head of a knowing subject’ in such a way as to finally lead to human self-understanding (fig.1). This idealistic conception was later taken up again and radicalized in German Idealism. It found its expression in an exemplary way in the work of Bruno, for whom the inquiring philosopher can get insight into universal reason free from revelation of the church. Already in Pico’s conception of the studia humanitatis, humanity was able to create itself by its own forces, feeding and enriching itself from all the uplifting sources in the manifoldness of human culture. Although God made possible the conditions, humanity “can determine its laws without any fear and limitation, according to its own will”, Pico says. As an individual will and creative force, and as an independent basis oriented towards and absorbing the world (fig.1), subjectivity thus became the center of gravity of Renaissance humanism.^[8] In this sense, early modern humanism was a step ahead of the ancient one, because subjectivity was both the starting point and the ultimate goal of philosophical reflection. Whereas for Plato, subjectivity was limited by the cosmos and the world of ideas, with Pico the individual appeared as an ‘infinite creativity’ with an almost unlimited power of expansion. Its will became a main feature of the modern subject-oriented metaphysics of consciousness. In my view, this also marks our current expansionism over nature, i.e. our current ecological crisis, which, seen in this historical context, indeed requires a profound rethinking of humanism – one that in a sense has to rediscover the meaning of Plato’s metaphysics of being. So, viewed in this perspective, Renaissance humanism – and certainly not, as Habermas argues, only the German Reformation – constituted a significant transition to modern consciousness. In a certain sense, Descartes and his cogito ergo sum bring to the fore an idea that had already been in preparation for some time in the cultural world of the Renaissance. Descartes marks the start of a metaphysics of consciousness because the French philosopher takes subjectivity as an absolute separated from the world, even from its own body.

A shortcoming of Habermas’s account of the origins of modern thought, we may conclude, is the fact that he focuses his sights primarily on the English nominalists, which he directly connects with Protestantism. Habermas ignores the role of Platonic humanism. The nominalists not only reduced ‘truth’ to ‘facts’, to a collection of specific empirical entities, but they also reduced the individual to its will. Thus, they strengthened the idea that religion is a mere personal disposition rather than a realm of institutions called ‘the Church’. Luther took up this idea and established a radical separation between the objective claims of philosophy and a strict personal belief. In contrast to humanism, in my view, here philosophy was not so much liberated but instead excluded from any meaningful interference with faith, which was now considered to be strictly personal. This point also recurs within Habermas’s dispute with metaphysics, thus clearly showing his own Protestant background, for although he believes that philosophy can learn much from religion, he also draws a strong dividing line between them. According to Habermas, philosophy – and knowledge in general – should only be concerned with worldly things and not with metaphysics.

The nominalist critique of universals and by consequence of substance metaphysics, in my view, only opened up an indirect route to modernity, for modern science was not primarily characterized by a nominalist type of empiricism but by a more idealist conception of general mathematical structures applicable to nature. Habermas himself has to admit that the nominalists had a very low expectation of the capacity of human reason to grasp universal ideas. They are in fact quite skeptical about human cognitive abilities, which they saw as lagging far behind the divine (2019, v. I, p. 769). In this sense they are definitively not to be seen as the predecessors of modern science. Habermas also confesses that they robbed nature of her rational core (2019, v. I, p. 785). All this shows that to explain modernity, Habermas’s emphasis on nominalism falls far too short. Nominalism can by no means explain the importance of modern mathematics and physics. It becomes therefore obvious that Habermas should have emphasized the rediscovery of the Platonic tradition in the Renaissance, which, however, he totally omits.

We see something similar in his analysis of political thought. Habermas emphasizes the emancipatory and democratic ideas of Ockham, although there is certainly no question here of a democratic disposition in the modern sense of the word (2019, v. I, p. 848). For Ockham, the church is a communitas fidelium and the state a collection of citizens organized into ranks and guilds. And indeed Habermas is right when saying that these thoughts remain indebted to the old Platonic-Aristotelian tradition of the common good.[9] Unlike Thomas Aquinas, who invoked Aristotle, Ockham conceived the common good as being a societal order not furnished by God or nature, but, like Plato, brought about by mankind itself (2019, v. I, p. 755). But, unlike Plato, in Ockham the tendency towards individualism and modern liberalism is already unmistakable. Although state organization here certainly did not take on a modern ‘democratic shape’, but one based on the participation in guilds – an idea that also recurs in Marsilius of Padua and is later taken up again in German Idealism. In fact, Habermas briefly discusses the work of Marsilius, who indeed made an important step towards modern political theory (2019, v. I, p. 879). But now Habermas omits mentioning that this theory was based on Platonic and Aristotelian ideas.^[10] Like Ockham, Marsilius was also primarily concerned with a ‘democratic’ corporative representation in guilds and associations – an idea that, as mentioned above, German Idealism took up as an alternative to the atomism of modern liberalism.^[11] This ‘corporative model’, which distanced itself from factions and power blocs – and was very far removed from liberal democracy and party politics – in my view, has similarities with modern ideas about ‘participatory democracy’, which go beyond the so-called ‘liberal’ model of representative democracy. In this model, individuals belonging to the same guild are directly involved in decision making within their own corporations. Marsilius stood with one foot in the Renaissance and also anticipated ecumenical ideals based on interconfessional dialogue and direct participation, as became common in later Neoplatonic thinkers such as Cusanus.

In short, the Renaissance and the rediscovery of Plato and the Platonic tradition remain a far too underdeveloped element in Habermas’s otherwise impressive narrative. In his discussion of Renaissance politics and rights, we see similar omissions. He fully focuses his sights on Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorsi because the Florentine thinker pursued a functionalist and norm-free approach to politics (2019, v. I, p. 891). This marks, he says, the origins of modern society. But again, there is no description of the Platonic tradition, especially no discussion of – another Florentine thinker – Pico’s metaphysical conception of a homo universalis and his ideas on human dignity. For Habermas it seems enough to fix one’s gaze entirely on nominalism and functionalism, and their way of neutralizing metaphysical universals, to understand modernity. Pico’s Platonic ideas on human dignity, however, implied a normative constitution of the rule of law and the state. But Habermas prefers to relate the modern state to a value free concept of functionality. He thus clearly misses a key point in the history of human rights. In Pico’s idealism there is a new conception of the bonum commune in which the development of man depends on its connection with the cosmic order. The role subjectivity plays within the work of our Florentine humanist not only provides a good entry point to understand the transformation of a medieval substance metaphysics into a modern metaphysics of consciousness, but in my opinion also gives us a clue to how to redefine modern humanism, since if we read carefully we will see that his conception of the homo universalis in fact limited man’s actions to the cosmic order. Instead of discussing the works of this Platonic humanist, Habermas turns his full attention to the Spanish scholastics, who interpreted the dignity of man primarily in legalistic terms, based on a philosophical grounding that was entirely medieval. Habermas’s neglect of the Platonic tradition in the Renaissance gives a very one-sided insight into the origins of modernity and the emergence of the new metaphysics of consciousness.

 

4 Philosophy of subjectivity, transcendentalism and metaphysics of consciousness

We have seen that Habermas directly relates nominalism to modern science, and that he takes the legalism of late scholastics and Machiavelli’s functionalism to be the most important steps towards the modern state. However, the major topic of the second part of Habermas’s work is not the modern state, but the modern paradigm shift in philosophical metaphysics. This does not prevent Habermas from extensively discussing political theory, taking up major points already developed in previous works. However, it becomes clear to him that modern liberalism and democracy are based on a philosophy of subjectivity that made the idea of modern human rights possible, which means that we cannot grasp modern human rights without presupposing a certain metaphysics. Nevertheless, Habermas holds to the idea of post-metaphysical thought, because he is critical about the rational grounding of human rights developed in philosophy of subjectivity. Whereas early modernity still linked man’s dignity to an ontological ‘substance metaphysics’ that was largely dependent on the religious concept of the ‘soul’, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in particular John Locke, tried to explain the rights of man in a more natural way. But Habermas has to admit that the main efforts of philosophical grounding of that time, and particularly the effort of Locke, ultimately rely on the metaphysical idea of a substantial soul. In his analysis, Habermas is confronted with the fact that in modernity human rights philosophy never really overcame ‘substance metaphysics’ (2019, v. II, p. 179-180). That’s why in later chapters, he tries to ground human rights using Peirce’s and Apel’s pragmatism, which he therefore first needs to separate from all transcendental reminiscences. I will come back to this in the last section (§ 6).

There are several reasons why Habermas focuses so heavily on political and social theories in a work primarily dealing with faith and the history of metaphysics, for he wants to show how Western philosophy is increasingly freeing itself from metaphysics and dedicating itself to social philosophy. When it comes to the ultimate grounding of morality, the state and human rights, he observes that the prevailing modern foundations, such as Thomas Hobbes’s idea of a primordial natural law leading to civil law on the basis of an egoistic calculation of atomistic subjects, are in fact deeply flawed. Hobbes for instance, assumed the existence in man’s soul of an original ‘will to peace’, which is quite problematic in a natural state situation in which force and violence reign rather than ideals of peace. It is very difficult to understand where this idea of peace should suddenly come from, since it doesn’t belong to the empirical world and the natural state of a war of all against all. Similarly, Spinoza started from an atomistic subject existing in a natural state, but soon realized that rational calculation alone would never be able to ground the ethical orientation of a state. In his political theory he had to revert to elements of substance metaphysics, taking over Platonist motives inherited from the Renaissance (2019, v. II, p. 153). For Spinoza the common good is not an outcome of strategic calculation nor a mere consensus reached by chance. The democratic disposition of Spinoza’s common-good oriented [gemeinwohlorienteerte] citizenship is based, Habermas explains, on the metaphysical assumption that an all-encompassing substance or ‘divine reason’ is active in and through nature (2019, v. II, p. 159). This also explains Spinoza’s tendency to glue together democracy and theocracy. Here substance metaphysics is reinserted in a rationalist account about the origin of the state and the rights of man. And the Dutch philosopher does so in such a way, Habermas explains, as to become a predecessor of German Idealism – of Kant, Friedrich Schelling and Hegel (2019, v. II, p. 156). Indeed, discussions about Spinoza, incited by Lessing and Jacobi (1789), triggered the transition from a metaphysics of consciousness to modern process metaphysics, which strongly reacted against a nondynamic conception of the divine (see Vallee, 1988). As I will show later (§ 6), this process metaphysics originated in German Idealism and later developed into the vitalist philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this sense, Spinoza’s philosophy of nature not only heralded German Idealism but also contemporary forms of deep-ecological contemplation. Spinoza therefore remains a highly relevant figure in modern philosophical discussions. But Habermas is certainly right when he says that Spinoza dogmatically assumes the existence of God as ‘sole substance’ and that he has not definitively freed himself from substance metaphysics.

Habermas concludes that modern philosophy didn’t succeed in fundamentally breaking down substance metaphysics. Certainly, rationalists like Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff started from epistemological dualism (res cogitans-extensa) and had already developed a metaphysics of consciousness, but they also remained tied to central categories of earlier metaphysics (2019, v. II, p. 142). And so did Locke, who in order to ground the fundamental rights of man, took up the legal and psychological concept of the ‘person’ instead of a ‘soul’, but he could only do so by simultaneously presupposing the normative claims of a divine natural law based on substance metaphysics (2019, v. II, p. 170, 174, 179). And in future developments neither David Hume nor the French Enlightenment succeeded in dissolving the metaphysical concept of natural law. All these later thinkers took up psychological aspects of Locke’s conception of the person, which subsequently led to the impossibility of basing universal rights on particular habits and feelings. Most of these enlightened philosophers, Habermas observes, also failed to appreciate religion and faith. Hume reduced religion to a psychological phenomenon, and was, by doing so, no longer able to distinguish the contents of faith from other forms of human imagination (v. II, p. 258,260). Habermas very emphatically distances himself from this generalized anti-religiousness of the French Enlightenment (2019, v. II, p. 191, 218).

It is only with Kant that Habermas perceives a fruitful impulse towards breaking down the idea of natural law of substance metaphysics. Kant’s transcendental subjectivity makes ‘critical thought’ possible, marking – at least, this is what Habermas thinks – the beginning of the end of metaphysics (2019, v. II, p. 142). But in his view, Kant didn’t manage to offer a solid foundation of human rights. This, he argues, is only possible if the anchor of intersubjective relations, the ‘performative conditions of dialogue’, are recognized (see also, § 6). Kant’s critique of substance metaphysics however is based on a perspective, which transcendentally ‘nests itself’ completely in subjectivity. From there, Kant undertakes a thorough investigation of the limits of knowledge (2019, v. II, p. 142). But for him, this subjectivity is no longer a thing or substance, like Descartes’s ego. And the same applies for the subject’s qualities, such as freedom and all other rights related to our person. According to Habermas, for Kant freedom is a ‘fact’ of reason (Faktum der Vernunf); and this is not a thing but an activity (facere means ‘to make’, ‘to do’). Here, subjectivity itself is not a substance but a process, although fully confined to our inner life (2019, v. II, p. 195). In a similar way Kant’s ethics of duty detaches itself from an Aristotelian ethics of goals (Güterethik), in which, as in natural law, things have inherent value. Kant’s deontological ethics, Habermas argues, rests upon a procedure that harbors the categorical imperative in the inner process of self-reflection. Indeed, substance metaphysics is – at least partly – replaced by transcendental consciousness, but Habermas overlooks the fact that this ‘transcendental turn’ does not abandon metaphysics in general but, as I will try to argue in my last section, only transforms it into a ‘process metaphysics’ that will only be fully developed after Kant.

The philosopher of Königsberg never sought to break down metaphysics, as Habermas wants us to believe, for he tried to incorporate key elements of metaphysics in his paradigm of consciousness. In his Critique of Practical Reason, it is clear that in his theory of postulates, he justifies the necessity of God as an idea always present in the mind of moral actors. Although this is not a ‘proof’ in the sense of theoretical reason, which always involves an empirical basis, Kant brings in a broader concept of reason and rationality. In this concept, positive science is limited by our human capability of understanding. At the end of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant however designs a philosophical system of sciences that extends rationality beyond positive science and towards ‘speculative’ philosophy.^[12] However the very idea of a transcendental reason transcending the limits of mere science is left out of Habermas’s discussion. So Kant’s work appears as a deconstruction of metaphysics rather than as a reformulation. Habermas perceives in Kant an almost complete ‘post-metaphysical thinker’, although he also admits Kant is still trapped in the paradigm of subjectivity (2019, v. II, p. 225). This brings Kant to dogmatically presuppose the categories of reason, including the categorical imperative of morality, as transcendental aspects of subjectivity.

Also in his very brief discussion of Kant’s philosophy of religion, Habermas sees a philosopher at work, who regards religion – in a very ‘post-metaphysical’ manner – only as an anthropological phenomenon (2019, v. II, p. 210). In so doing, he certainly does no justice to Kant’s philosophy of religion, which fans out into a speculative theology. For Kant does not seek the abolition of metaphysics, but heads towards a critical foundation of a new metaphysics thatin a philosophical sense, as Kant thinks, can be called scientific: “einer künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können” [of a future metaphysics that will be able to appear as a science]. That is why Kant also speaks, for instance, of a ‘metaphysics of morals’. In his political texts, this metaphysics finds its expression in transcendental ideals such as ‘eternal peace’, which again mirror Kant’s commitment to a metaphysics of consciousness, in which the human mind (Vernunft) is the seat of ‘eternal ideals of reason’. In short, we may conclude that Habermas’s interpretation of Kant as a ‘post-metaphysical thinker’ is quite suggestive (2019, v. II, p. 308-310). This characterization in fact also renders Habermas’s own project of a ‘de-transcendentalization of reason’ quite opaque, since Kant’s transcendental philosophy was a major effort to constitute a metaphysics of consciousness, the very thing that Habermas fights against.

The first steps of the history of ‘de-transcendentalization’, according to Habermas, are also taking place among Kant’s contemporaries. Habermas specifically refers to Herder, Humboldt and Schleiermacher. These thinkers made a transition possible from a philosophy of consciousness to a new paradigm of intersubjectivity, which he already sees as being ‘post-metaphysical’. At the same time, in addition to this ‘de-transcendentalization’, there was also an ‘ex-transcendentalization’ taking place in Johann Fichte, Schelling and Hegel (2019, v. II, p. 372). These idealist thinkers placed reason outside or above the world, and finally called it ‘absolute spirit’. This twofold grouping of Kant’s contemporaries has, however, something very artificial about it, because Herder, Humboldt and Schleiermacher also placed ‘reason’ above the world. In Herder, there clearly is a teleological aspect of Bildung steering the direction of history. This strongly influenced the metaphysics of both Schelling and Hegel. Humboldt delineates an idealistic development of language, which, as Habermas himself acknowledges, closely follows Hegel’s phenomenology. And within Schleiermacher, a new conception of dialectics and hermeneutics appears that takes our mind to be the mirror of a divine mind. On the other hand, with Hegel, cultural history, sociology and language played a role that is certainly as important for the authors of the other camp. The comparisons Habermas makes become even more artificial when he places Herder and Leopold von Ranke on the same side. For Ranke, all historical eras were equally close to God, so that no progress was conceivable. This is certainly not the case for Herder. Habermas overlooks the fact that Herder’s own holistic approach, which took history as a Bildungsprocess, had a remarkable influence on Hegel (2019, v. II, p. 390). And although Schleiermacher certainly emphasized the unity of thought and language, he never made thought dependent on language. Habermas himself shows that this famous German theologian understood God to be an absolute ‘self-consciousness’ (2019, v. II, p. 39). For him God was a ‘self-conscious subjectivity’. All this means that he certainly did not take ‘reason’ to be reducible to human language (2019, v. II, p. 442, 449). The same can be said about Humboldt. He clearly believed that thoughts were independent of language, because they materialized in signs and speech. All these positions are very similar to Hegel’s (2019, v. II, p. 452). In short, we may conclude that the binary grouping that Habermas tries to create on the basis of an externalization of reason is highly disputable. He tries to erect a dividing wall between a group of reasonable ‘post-metaphysical thinkers’ on one side, and a group of fancy idealists, who stick to a metaphysics of consciousness, on the other. But in fact, this whole distinction evaporates with Habermas’s own explanations.

Of all these reasonable post-metaphysical philosophers, Habermas especially highlights Humboldt’s philosophy of language, specifically his theory of pronouns (I, you, he/she/it etc.). Habermas interprets these personal pronouns as expressions of different dimensions of rationality. He thereby sees this philosophy of language as an anticipation of his own tripartition of validity claims of speech [Geltungsansprüche], which he had developed in his theory of communicative action (2019, v. II, p. 458; VE: 1984, p. 427). In this theory, the cognitive claim only corresponds to the third-person perspective; the expressive claim to a first-person perspective, and the normative claim to a second-person perspective. But in Humboldt, there are no such clean separations. Here the pronominals refer all to cognitive processes of a subject – Humboldt sees them as belonging to one and the same ‘labor of the soul’ (Arbeit des Geistes). From a third-person perspective, he says in Über den Dualis, we manage to place ourselves outside the boundaries of our own personal situation. From a first-person perspective our mind gains cognitive access to its own world. And from a second-person perspective we have a cognitive access to the social world (2019, v. III, p. 135-136). The separation of different forms of validity in terms of an expressive, normative and cognitive claim is entirely Habermas’s own, and he thereby breaks down the cognitive totality Humboldt had in mind. Habermas wants to safeguard a large concept of rationality, including normative and expressive claims, but actually he excludes them from being cognitive and relating to truth. A genuinely truth-based validity, however, is for him only possible in a we-perspective, representing a consensus about facts. The normative validity is guaranteed by accepted lifeworld presuppositions – this implies a claim of rightness, not of truth. Habermas sees this discursive differentiation as a central tenet of post-metaphysics. According to him, this also shows that thought not only always depends on speech, but is even structured by the intersubjective context which we are in. Habermas in fact takes up Ludwig Feuerbach’s idea that subjectivity is a product of society. But such conclusions cannot yet be drawn from Humboldt’s philosophy of language, in which there is no intention whatsoever to defend the idea that speech precedes thought. Humboldt is very clear about this. Although he certainly does not want to reduce language to a mere instrument of reason, his major claim remains that thought precedes speech: “Die Sprache ist durchaus kein blosses Verständigungsmittel, sondern der Abdruck des Geistes” [Language is by no means a mere method of communication, but the imprint of the spirit] (Werke, 1986, v. III, p. 135).

Habermas uses the term ‘ex-transcendentalization of reason’ mainly in his discussions about Hegel. And indeed, Hegel developed Kant’s subjective philosophy into a fully-fledged metaphysics of consciousness (2019, v. II, p. 468). This is why Habermas sees Hegel as falling behind Herder, Humboldt and Schleiermacher, who in his view already deployed the post-metaphysical paradigm of intersubjectivity. But additionally, Hegel integrated core elements of intersubjective philosophy in his conception of the ‘objective spirit’. According to Habermas, however, he only does so by immediately swallowing up intersubjectivity into the ‘absolute spirit’. This, he says, is in fact the major problem of Hegel’s entire philosophy, because it deprives finite individuals of their own right to exist; all individual voices disappear in the oneness of the absolute. But is this a sound argument? Indeed for Hegel, the ‘idea’ manifests itself first in nature, only to become ‘absolute spirit’ in the self-reflective structure of the human mind. In man, the spirit discharges itself from a previous sleep state, but this is only possible thanks to an intersubjective development in which social relations constitute our humanness.^[13] This means that in Hegel the ‘absolute spirit’ by no means deprives individuals from their voice or right to exist as individuals. It even depends on their development as intersubjective entities. The social world of intersubjectivity is thereby considered to be an integral part of the higher process of self-consciousness, which Hegel calls the ‘absolute spirit’. In my reading of Hegel, which I shall take up in the next sections, the German Idealist is one of the first philosophers of what I call the ‘paradigm of process metaphysics’, and he was the first to explicitly reconcile both subjectivity and intersubjectivity.

In this discussion, Habermas barely touches upon Hegel’s logic, ontology or philosophy of nature, as one would expect in a comprehensive work on religion and metaphysics. Taking up ideas he had extensively developed in earlier works, he limits his comments to Hegel’s ‘objective spirit’. Although he now recognizes the importance of Hegel’s social criticism of bourgeois society and market liberalism, he still mainly perceives him to be a precursor of Karl Marx and the School of Frankfurt (2019, v. II, p. 538). However, in my view, Hegel’s rejection of an atomistic interpretation of society as a space merely constituted by conflicting interests, doesn’t make him a proto-Marxist, let alone a ‘totalitarian’ thinker. Hegel seems to be quite aware of ‘class struggles’ taking place in society, but unlike Marx he does not want to determine this aspect of our society in such a way as to make an engine of progress out of it. His political ideal is a constitutional state in which the economy is oriented towards the common good. In the guild-like structures of his sittlicher Staat [ethical economy] – taking up concepts of Ockham, Marsilius and many others – he even seems to incorporate elements of participatory democracy. The outcome is something quite different from Marxism. Yet Habermas has a very different appraisal of Hegel’s political philosophy and seems to stick to a flawed Marxist interpretation of Hegel that identifies the ‘absolute spirit’ with the authoritarianism of ‘absolute monarchy’. Habermas distances himself from Marx’s interpretation by readily admitting that Hegel by no means intended to glorify the Prussian state, as Marx wanted us to believe. He acknowledges that Hegel’s critical notes on modern bourgeois society were indeed too sharp in tone to really be supportive of the Prussian state. But Habermas still maintains that Hegel’s idea of the absolute spirit made it impossible for him to embrace democracy. He had to embrace monarchy, since he was fully trapped in his own metaphysics of consciousness (2019, v. II, p. 523, 534). Unfortunately, Habermas’s arguments are not strong, since he also has to admit that Hegel defended a ‘constitutional’ and then ‘liberal’ order, and that he was by no means advocating authoritarianism. If it were true that in politics the absolute is mirrored in an authoritarian state silencing all individual voices, as Habermas argues (2019, v. II, p. 511), how could Hegel then be supportive of a liberal state? In that case surely one would expect him to advocate absolute monarchy. But Hegel clearly advocates constitutional and not absolute monarchy, which can only mean that he wanted to avoid citizens being seen as mere state puppets. In my view, Habermas’s errors of interpretation can be explained by the fact that he is still haunted by Marx’s readings of Hegel. Let’s have a closer look at this.

Despite Hegel’s words about individual freedom and progress, Habermas maintains that his political theory is an expression of absolutism, resulting from the dominance of an all-encompassing subjectivity [übergeordnetes Subjekt] (2019, v. II, p. 478) and even from his ‘speculation of the Logos’ [Logosspekulation] (2019, v. II, p. 499). In Habermas’s descriptions of Hegel’s political theory, an image of absolute unity looms up, in which all notions of freedom are nullified in a metaphysics of the absolute. But how can this interpretation explain Hegel’s advocacy of constitutionalism? In my view, a deeper analysis of Hegel’s logics and ontology could show that the ‘absolute spirit’ is indeed self-conscious but only in and through the activity of people. Hegel’s idea of an unfolding process of freedom, however, does not square with the image of political authoritarianism Habermas is giving us. We can therefore say that, notwithstanding some important corrections, Habermas’s interpretation is still very much indebted to Marx’s presumption of an authoritarian aspect in Hegel’s politics, whose state dissolves everybody’s individual autonomy (2019, v. II, p. 513). But in reality, Hegel only gave such a picture of the state as moral totality in his descriptions of the Greek (especially Spartan) state, which, as Hegel declared, was essentially different from the modern one where morality is based on the liberal idea of individual freedom and self-reflective citizenship.

Yet it is true that Hegel abhors the image of a society of mere egoistic atoms for whom state institutions are only of functional value. According to Hegel, modern citizens should be able to identify themselves in the state, recognizing it as a work of reason that reflects the image of their own personal freedom. This, however, does not mean that freedom has already been fully developed, nor that a relapse into a totalitarian state has become impossible. And I am not saying that Habermas’s critique of Hegel’s concept of the state – as lacking main elements of a representative democracy – is invalid (2019, v. II, p. 531). But Habermas certainly has no regard for the fact that Hegel values participation more than representation, and that he sees this organized in guilds and corporations, which all try to contribute to the common good. Habermas, on his side, seems quite blind to Hegel’s critique of (Anglo-Saxon) representative democracy, which he viewed quite in line with Plato’s classical warning that democracy easily slips towards populism, endangering all previous checks and balances of the state. For Hegel, representative democracy runs parallel, as it did for Marx, to the idea of a liberal market economy of atomistic individuals merely thinking about their own benefits. This was the model that took shape in England at that time. In this representative ‘liberal’ model he saw an ‘ethical’ deficiency, because it brought about both inequality and severe damage to nature. In her magnificent work Albena Neschen (2008) has clearly shown that Hegel criticized this wild type of liberalism subordinating politics to free-market thinking precisely because he advocated a model of liberalism in which both politics and economics were guided by higher ethical principles.^[14] But Habermas seems unable to discern all these favorable aspects of Hegel’s political theory because he is determined to present a picture of a metaphysician of consciousness who is unable to abandon the paradigm of subjectivity in favor of a post-metaphysical perspective on intersubjectivity.

Although in the context of his critique, Habermas repeatedly advances the thesis that a modern plurality of perspectives is not compatible with a metaphysical concept of the unity of reason (Logos), in fact, his own theory of communicative action is designed on the same basis with the large concept of a unity of reason. If Habermas’s assumptions were right, this critique would also apply to his own universalism – a point that had already been made by postmodernist thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard (1979) and Wolfgang Welsch (1995). He refuted the criticism by saying that it created a false dichotomy between universalism and pluralism. The point is that for Hegel, communication between subjects is impossible without a prior concept of the unity of reason. And likewise, Habermas’s social critique of the alienating aspects of modern bureaucracy and economy, presupposes a unity of reason determining the equality of people. Habermas’s own large concept of rationality – based on the idea of the power of the better argument – works with an idea of reason that in itself is general and universal, because everybody is supposed to be able to engage in argumentation. This also clarifies, in my view, why abandoning a ‘metaphysics of consciousness’ makes no sense. Also, Habermas’s theory of communicative action needs a unitary concept of reason. His whole theory presupposes a universal rationality sealed by the power of the better argument. Several philosophers in Germany, like Axel Honneth (1992), Rainer Forst (2007) and Julian Nida-Rümelin (2009), have taken up Habermas’s train of thought, but they, too, fail to see that such unity of reason cannot just remain an epistemological claim; it should also be perceived as an ontological dimension, because our consciousness – i.e. the process of thinking and arguing – is something existing in reality. Honneth comes closest to Hegel, acknowledging a major drive to freedom in the history of societies. He thus takes up important insights of German Idealism, but he limits thought to humans, making it impossible thereby to discern mental aspects in other creatures and nature, thus sticking to an anthropocentric view of reason, which localizes mind and freedom to this very particular part of the world: human beings. In fact, the postmodernists were right to say that Habermas was blind to the philosophy of subjectivity that is still presupposed in his own theory. Habermas can only parry this kind of criticism by admitting that the central point of a metaphysics of consciousness – the assumption that there is a general unity of reason in which we all participate – cannot be lightly brushed aside. All this, I believe, leads to the inevitable conclusion that we cannot definitively characterize modernity as a triumph of post-metaphysical philosophy, even if we can grant that modernity represents a severe test for both religion and philosophical metaphysics. The ecological crisis should finally put an end to the one-sided presuppositions of radical anthropocentrism that limits rationality to the social domain of humans, as though consciousness, mind and reason were an exclusive property of mankind. The time has come to realize that man and nature are connected to each other in a more profound way, also in the unity of the spirit, and that a general consciousness manifests itself in both man and nature, although it develops in multiple ways. This, in my view, also brings us to the necessity of perceiving the world as a communicative universe, in which intersubjectivity is a necessary stage in a metaphysical process encompassing both man and nature – and to the growing awareness of the importance of interconnectedness.

 

5 Post-metaphysics, intersubjectivity and post-secular Society

Although Habermas repeatedly presents Kant as a post-metaphysical thinker, it has become clear that this is a rather inappropriate interpretation of Kant. Conversely, Habermas himself stresses that Kant is still ‘trapped’ in the paradigm of subjectivity. But this account is also inappropriate, because Kant does not at all want to leave metaphysics. On the contrary, he tries to revive metaphysics on the basis of his transcendental approach. Although Kant is clearly a harbinger of German Idealism, he also anticipates post-metaphysics insofar as he criticizes substance metaphysics. Yet, this does not imply a departure from metaphysics in general. Habermas, however, likes to draw Kant on to his side. In his view, post-metaphysics places reason and subjectivity in a cultural and historical environment, i.e. in the social world of humans. We saw, however, that Kant’s notion of ‘transcendental subjectivity’ does not lend itself to this. Habermas’s repeated characterization of Kant as a post-metaphysician avant la lettre is particularly suggestive. It is clear that Habermas’s ‘post-metaphysics’ is intended to put a definitive end to any attempt – such as German Idealism – to elevate reason ontologically above the human realm, limiting reason to an anthropocentric concept. But it is obvious that Kant’s transcendental philosophy does not fit into such ‘sociologization’ of reason.

Habermas characterizes this widening up of reason beyond the anthropocentric horizon of human culture that German Idealism (including Kant) sought to bring about, with the rather unattractive term ‘ex-transcendentalization of reason’. He sees in this idealistic attempt, an episodic event, which only temporarily, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marked a return to metaphysics. After all, in his view, this tradition had already been largely overcome by the ‘de-transcendental’ philosophy of Herder, Humboldt and Schleiermacher. But, as we saw, these so-called ‘de-transcendental’ thinkers started from very similar philosophical presuppositions about a mind-at-large as Hegel and other idealists did. In fact, they belong to the same cultural circle, even if the philosophical elaboration of their thought is not as profound and comprehensive as that of Hegel. The fact that idealism continued to play an important role well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (not only in Germany, and especially in England and America) falls out of Habermas’s scope. Nevertheless, it is not wrong to say that post-metaphysics received a strong impulse in the modern era, and even became dominant, not least because of the emergence of a tradition of positivistic and utilitarian naturalism. This naturalism in fact presupposes its own type of metaphysics – a materialistic one. But Habermas seems not to recognize this, because he limits ‘metaphysics’ to idealistic or dualistic positions. Habermas discusses positivist philosophy mainly as it appears in modern German thinkers: Feuerbach and Marx. The selection of the authors he discusses in his final chapters, is rather small. Besides Feuerbach and Marx, he also analyses Sören Kierkegaard and Charles S. Peirce, in whom he sees the main representatives of, respectively, existentialism and pragmatism. So, instead of developing a bird’s-eye overview of the various currents of thought of modern philosophy and theology, he prefers to provide an in-depth analysis of these four thinkers. According to Habermas, they illustrate what ‘post-metaphysics’ means (2019, v. II, p. 593). Of course, a very problematic disadvantage of this strict selection is that it – in advance – excludes all metaphysical projects that have been developed since the nineteenth century. And as a result, a fairly single-minded, post-metaphysical, i.e. biased, image of modernity looms up.

In his extensive analysis of Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard, it becomes clear what ‘post-metaphysics’ means. The discussion of Peirce’s work, however, brings some confusion into the picture, for Habermas doesn’t quite succeed in portraying Peirce as a post-metaphysician because the American turns out to be, on the contrary, a metaphysician, who even presents himself as an objective idealist. This shows that modern philosophy is not so unanimously post-metaphysical as Habermas is suggesting. It turns out that Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard implement ‘de-transcendental’ philosophy in a more consistent way than Peirce, for they no longer regard the world to be part of a mind-at-large, and see reason as an exclusively human property, thus completely historicizing and horizontalizing rationality (2019, v. II, p. 595, 597). In this post-metaphysical period, faith can still play a role but is conceived as an ultimately private affair of ‘historically situated subjects’ that, as Kierkegaard puts it, in itself cannot be further rationalized nor philosophically grounded. This concept of faith that we encounter in Kierkegaard has of course its own history, and was anticipated by Luther, Blaise Pascal, and Hume, who had already placed faith in the psychological domain of feelings of fear, uncertainty and anxiety, which were to become features of modern existentialism.

Kierkegaard submerges mankind – as do Feuerbach and Marx – in the waters of finitude. Habermas takes Kierkegaard to be a ‘post-metaphysician’, because, although he is not an atheist, he plays faith and rationality off against each other. And indeed, the famous Danish philosopher represents an absurdist fideism – a position Habermas calls ‘post-metaphysical’ because faith is primarily regarded as a psychological phenomenon that cannot further be rationalized (2019, v. II, p. 673, 675). Habermas’s own quite protestant relationship to religion can in fact be situated as balancing between the positivism of the aforementioned German thinkers and the existentialism of the Dane. He does not share the outspoken atheism of his compatriots, but neither does he share Kierkegaard’s fideism. He believes that all world religions harbor valuable intuitions, especially of a moral nature, and he sees modern philosophy and science as bound to a ‘methodical atheism’ that does not affect religions. In short, Habermas purports that religions are the work of man and that, on an epistemological level, nothing sensible can be said about their claims of truth, although much can be learned from their moral intuitions (2019, v. II, p. 606).

It follows from what I have said that post-metaphysics entails that man is entirely situated in a finite world. Habermas specifically means by this that the following three aspects come together: i) human beings are fully situated in a physical world, ii) man is unthinkable outside its social environment, and iii) human reason is inseparable from language and does not precede it (2019, v. II, p. 606-613). Habermas tries to illustrate this last point using Peirce’s semiotics, but he soon realizes that the American worked towards an ontologization of consciousness that took up central topics of objective idealism. This means that human language does not precede thought as would be the case in post-metaphysics (2019, v. II, p. 601, 703, 716). It also becomes clear, that Peirce’s philosophy does not really meet other criteria of post-metaphysics, such as embedding man entirely in a finite lifeworld. It is obvious that Habermas has problems with Peirce’s transcendental view that scientists, to do their work, need to presuppose an infinite community of speech. It is not clear how this can be an expression of ‘de-transcendentalized’ philosophy, even though Habermas understands this as always belonging to the human lifeworld (2019, v. II, p. 717, 719). Calling this position ‘post-metaphysical’ is actually quite counterintuitive, for a ‘transcendental ideal’ cannot really be an expression of ‘de-transcendentalized reason’. Habermas’s picture becomes even more confused, as he presents Peirce’s idealistic ontology, which is the outcome of his transcendental-pragmatic approach. Habermas’s difficulty of picturing Peirce as a ‘post-metaphysical thinker’ elucidates my point that we cannot identify modern philosophy with post-metaphysics, even though there is a strong tendency toward it. In the next section I will try to give a more fitting picture of modern philosophy.

In a comprehensive history of faith and metaphysics such as Habermas’s, one would certainly expect a greater curiosity about the most recent developments in metaphysics. This would give Habermas a chance to realize that modern philosophy is not setting aside metaphysics but is only changing its approach to prima philosophia. Peirce is not abandoning metaphysics, but he is reconfiguring its foundation. All this does not mean that there is today no ‘post-metaphysical’ or ‘anti-metaphysical’ tenor in modern philosophy. In the West, there clearly has been a certain intellectual marginalization of metaphysics, just as there was a social marginalization of religion. Habermas is aware of this and tries to correct it by nuancing the ‘hard’ definition of secularization. This definition starts from the desirability of a progressive evaporation of religious consciousness. For Habermas however, religions represent a positive aspect of modern culture: they are a “Pfahl im Fleisch der Moderne” [a splinter in the flesh of modernity], he says, because they are able to neutralize the nihilistic entropy in which post-metaphysics can thrive (2019, v. II, p. 807). Habermas brings his impressive study of the history of philosophy to an end with these highly unusual heroic words. He again calls upon secular philosophy to adopt a post-secular stance and to translate religious intuitions into a secular language. But simultaneously, Habermas is less favorable about prima philosophia, because he considers metaphysics to be a historical dead end. But why should not philosophical metaphysics also be a ‘splinter in the flesh of modernity’? Habermas seems to be unwilling to take philosophical worldview constructions seriously. While he is positive about religions, he is on the other hand skeptical about philosophical arguments concerning the possibility of a spiritual principle of the universe. This shows a strange ambivalence in Habermas’s thought, because it is difficult to imagine how a secular language can ‘translate’ religious ideas other than through metaphysical reflection. If modernity results from a process of rationalization of religious consciousness, it only seems natural that a contemporary prima philosophia should investigate how religious intuitions about, for instance, a supernatural realm, are philosophically conceivable.

But Habermas has no faith in prima philosophia being capable of elucidating metaphysical worldviews by rational means. Post-secular philosophy limits itself to translating religious ideas into secular representations. He means by this a translation into ‘post-metaphysical speech’ and rejects the idea that religious concepts can be based on ‘the power of better argument’, since he believes this is no longer possible. But the question arises of what this so-called ‘post-metaphysical philosophy’ should then do with the sweeping truth claims of religions regarding the existence, work and scope of a transcendent divine power. Can one still speak of a ‘translation of religion into a secular language’ if philosophy is incapable of substantiating aspects of these truth claims? It is true that for Habermas ‘post-metaphysics’ does not immediately mean ‘anti-metaphysics’, but the term clearly indicates that, in his eyes, the prima philosophia can no longer develop any ontological model based on a vertical metaphysics that starts from a spiritual principle of being. His thesis that we must ‘de-transcendentalize’ reason implies that modern philosophy can no longer present any ‘vertical worldviews’, and that, as far as prima philosophia is concerned, at best, only variants or nuances of naturalism or materialism are possible. Means to actually counterbalance them, he thinks, are not realistic. Even though Habermas himself does not advocate a ‘hard’ version of naturalism, he implicitly from the start rules out the possibility of a non-naturalist position; this is reminiscent of positivism and Marxism. In fact, he had already developed this argument in 2005, when he characterized his own position as ‘soft naturalism’ (Habermas, 2005, p. 171). He returns to this very expression in his last work, emphasizing that freedom and consciousness cannot be explained in terms of a physical causality (2019, v. II, p. 579). ‘Soft naturalism’ is surely a fine expression, but it does not at all solve the ontological problem of what consciousness and freedom actually are. Many discussions about this problem are taking place in present-day ‘philosophy of mind’, and many other issues of classical prima philosophia are being taken up again today, even some that go beyond naturalism. But all this remains undiscussed in Habermas’s magnum opus. All these discussions, in my view, bear witness to the fact that modern philosophy does not coincide with post-metaphysics. They even make clear that we cannot escape being involved in a rational prima philosophia and that it is questionable whether a naturalistic metaphysics – whether ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ – can in any way support a position that holds the strongest arguments. Habermas’s genealogy assumes that there are, in history, learning processes made possible by the power of better arguments (2019, v. II, p. 587,769). But since he does not deal at all with the metaphysical debates that have taken place since the nineteenth century, he seems to exclude the possibility that positions which transcend naturalism can rationally be defended. Because religions are private affairs, they may transcend naturalist positions, but they cannot be defended and founded with rational means. However, they command respect, he says, mainly because they conceal deep intuitions of a moral nature. I find that Habermas’s own analyses make a different reading of the history of philosophy possible, one that does not end in post-metaphysics but in a new paradigm of prima philosophia, in which alternatives to the modern (naturalistic) worldview are indeed conceivable. Not only does naturalism fail to solve the problem of freedom and consciousness, but materialism also has propagated an image of nature that has caused severe ecological damage.

In addition to his skepticism about the role of a prima philosophia and the possibility of transcending naturalism, Habermas emphasizes the fact that post-metaphysics abandons the idea of an overarching worldview altogether (2019, v. II, p. 550). A post-metaphysical perspective discards any ontological concept of totality: “das nachmetaphysische Denken verzichtete auf eine ontologische Verwendung dieses Begriffs” [post-metaphysical thought renounced an ontological use of this concept] (2019, v. II, p. 559). He therefore speaks of an ‘end of the age of worldviews’ in terms similar to Lyotard’s ‘end of grand narratives’ (2019, v. II, p. 206). By this he means that society as a whole cannot be dominated by one specific worldview anymore (2019, v. II, p. 770). But Habermas loses sight of the fact that a ‘worldview’ need not be religious in nature. We can, for instance, speak of our ‘Western worldview’ taking into account the existence of a plurality of perspectives. We mean by this a worldview commonly grounded in the humanist ideal that all people are free and have equal basic rights. It is surprising however that since 2005 Habermas uses the term ‘worldview’ in a religious context – for instance when speaking of a “decomposition of axial worldviews” (2019, v. II, p. 216) or of a “desocialization of worldviews” (2019, v. II, p. 705). From Habermas’s position, a post-metaphysical philosophy can analyze existing worldviews but cannot create new ones of its own. Habermas sees in Hegel, for example, a last great (and also anachronistic) attempt to create a new metaphysical worldview on the basis of all then available scientific knowledge (2019, v. II, p. 507). Habermas assumes that the presentation of a worldview that aims to encompass as much as possible of what we know about the world contradicts our modern insight into our finitude and the world-bound nature of human knowledge. It is undoubtedly true that it is becoming increasingly difficult to encompass the totality of science into a single coherent worldview, but philosophy in my view need not go through every scientific detail in order to be able to present a new worldview. It can confine itself to an analysis of the general structures and principles of being, from which a well-argued and coherently developed worldview can emerge.

Besides Habermas’s reticence about the possibility of creating a new worldview and his emphasis on the limiting role of the lifeworld, he also claims that we cannot place ourselves outside the world in order to contemplate totality: “[Es] setzt sich die Einsicht durch, dass sich die intuitiv gegenwärtige Totalität des lebensweltlichen Hintergrundes als Totalität der Erkenntnis entzieht” [[It] is clear that the intuitively present totality of the lifeworld, as a totality of knowledge, escapes us] (2019, v. II, p.773). The only concept of totality that seems workable for Habermas is the lifeworld itself, but this is a ‘performative totality’ that only plays a role as ‘background knowledge’ of all our actions, and of which only fragments can be thematized (2019, v. II, p. 566, 568). But, as I indicated before, there is no need to bring everything together in order to conceive a worldview, nor is it necessary to physically transcend time and space. These kinds of arguments are fundamentally flawed. Otherwise, we couldn’t speak about anything, because all the concepts of language are totalities, which we cannot represent all at once. We speak daily about ‘the world’ without imagining ourselves in front of a totality, or without knowing every detail happening in it.

Finally, Habermas’s understanding of post-metaphysics and his reluctance to connect worldviews with a philosophical foundation also involves the idea that modern consciousness only permits hypothetical insights and does not provide infallible knowledge. He himself admits that this does not deprive philosophers of the duty of constantly substantiating the truth of their own claims. In my view, such a substantiation can only be about the ‘truth’ of worldviews or metaphysical positions, and is not primarily about emphasizing their hypothetical character. In principle, this marks the specific difference between philosophy and religion, which settles ‘truth’ not by argumentation but by revelation. A philosophical metaphysics, however, is always a rational reconstruction of being, based on an incessant process of reflection about the whole. Philosophy in this sense engages in a rational account of the meaning of the whole. Habermas’s reticence about the ability of philosophy to understand the whole in terms of meaningfulness, i.e. in terms of a comprehensive worldview, ultimately pushes him to conceive of worldviews only in terms of a cultural background. This ties in with his assertion, from 2012, that philosophy would be well-advised “to distance itself from the production of any worldview” (Habermas, 2012, p. 20).

The fact that this advice is particularly undesirable from a social point of view becomes obvious in the face of the ecological crisis. For there is something fundamentally wrong with the classical anthropocentric worldview of the Enlightenment that is apparently adhered to by Habermas. His assertion that worldviews cannot be rationally construed and only fragments can be changed (2019, v. II, 773), illustrates this anthropocentric perspective. Habermas’s post-metaphysics transforms the ontological interests of any philosophical worldview production into questions about background beliefs (2019, v. II, p. 773). He even speaks here of the ‘unsurpassable status of the lifeworld’ [Nichthintergehbarkeit des lebensweltlichen Hintergrundes]. In fact, Habermas is culturalizing or sociologizing a philosophical interest that is primarily ontological. He thus replaces a genuine interest in worldview construction with an interest in the cultural background of people. Worldview issues are thus reduced to cultural representations. All interest in the ontological dimension of truth is thereby lost. In my view, this changes if we take worldviews to be more than just cultural background.

Although a worldview is our image, it also expresses an ontology that raises claims of truth. For example, it expresses what nature is. But this ‘is’ cannot be reduced to the cultural lifeworld of people, because nature is more than the representations we have of the natural world. Nature cannot be reduced to a subjective or cultural image in our brain. As an entity, nature transcends this image; it has its own ontological reality. Hence, the rational worldview offered by metaphysics can never be substituted with an analysis of people’s lifeworlds. Metaphysics is concerned with the world as being in itself and not simply cultural background. Swapping worldviews for lifeworlds bears witness to the anthropocentric narrowing down of perspectives taking place in Habermas’s post-metaphysics, because this hides the fact that nature has a being of its own, and is not just a cultural image.

To further substantiate his thesis, Habermas emphasizes that worldviews always incorporate normative aspect of meaning (2019, v. II, p. 207). The Platonic and Christian worldviews, for example, share the view that the human spirit has a higher status than the body, and they relate this to a narrative about the meaning of life. But the claim attached to these normative aspects of meaning is ontological. That’s why prima philosophia grounds and studies worldviews not as cultural phenomena, but as constituting a normative ontology; it sees structures of meaning and layers of values at work in nature itself. Value domains are part of being, and reality is seen as a domain in which values are creatively worked out by nature itself, a process that happens ‘out there’. Such normative presuppositions are also hidden in naturalism, as it appeared in modern humanism and our industrial culture. The anthropocentric worldview accompanying positivist and utilitarian naturalism brought about a normative separation in nature between humans and nonhumans – although it disavowed this and regarded the nonhuman domain as an object ontologically characterized only by mere physical causes. The nonhuman domain, ontologically speaking, had no rights. This neutralization of nature was in itself, as we now recognize, a normative aspect of modern naturalism, characterized by a fundamental disavowal of its own normative presuppositions. Retrospectively, we can describe this as a cultural aspect of our modern industrial lifeworld, but an alternative to this modern worldview – let’s say an ecohumanist worldview that takes nature as being value laden – cannot simply proclaim itself as a possibly deviant cultural perspective; it must take its own ontological claims seriously and therefore rationally try to prove that it offers a better and more faithful representation of nature than modern anthropocentric naturalism. The most crucial aspect of a worldview is its ontological claims of truth. The Habermasian idea that we should treat worldviews in terms of a critical analysis of human lifeworlds, of people’s cultural beliefs, is in my view an anthropological and sociological reduction of the ontological claims of metaphysics. It substitutes metaphysics for cultural philosophy, which, by definition, is incapable of answering the question of truth.

 

6 A splinter in the flesh of modernity: the rise of objective idealism

Let us now move towards a first elaboration of a possible alternative to post-metaphysical modernity. There are some indications of such an alternative already in Habermas’s own work, mostly related to the inconsistencies and open ends we have encountered. This alternative is composed of a) a teleological interpretation of history, b) a nonmaterialistic, i.e. idealistic, foundation of human rights, c) a substantialist or ontological interpretation of the ideal preconditions of speech, d) an epistemological realism grounded in ontological idealism, e) a philosophy of nature working with a reason-based concept of nature that transcends anthropocentrism and conceives communication as a universal process, f) a circular, in fact spiral, understanding of the development of philosophy and metaphysics, g) a dynamic toward a systematic process metaphysics that integrates substance and consciousness, h) and that takes up the effort acclaimed by Habermas of translating religious ideas into secular speech, manifesting itself as a post-secular, humanistic worldview, which i) would entail a revival of objective idealism that works to j) integrate the philosophy of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in a metaphysics of love.

Habermas perceives the post-metaphysical era as resulting from a learning process in history. This is what his partly affirmative, partly negative genealogy is all about. His genealogy of post-metaphysical reason has in fact much of a ‘reconstructive’ or ‘hermeneutic’ teleology, which delineates how modern rationality came into being. He also characterizes his genealogy as a “Phänomenologie der Vernunft” [a phenomenology of reason] (2019, v. II, p. 753). This learning process taking place in history, according to him, leads to post-metaphysics. But it is important to see that his idea of genealogy has not yet unequivocally taken up the shape of an ‘affirmative genealogy’. His history of the relation between faith and knowledge remains ‘negative’ in the sense that it leaves out prima philosophia as a possible rational creation of worldviews. It doesn’t include metaphysics as an integral part of modernity. According to him metaphysics has been sacrificed by the modern rationalization of philosophy, which has come to understand that ‘worldviews’ are only cultural representations. There is however an ‘affirmative’ aspect in Habermas’s genealogy, because he tries to rescue the ‘value of religion’ as a cultural institution. But Habermas does not seem very interested in the ontological truth claims of religions. His genealogy only wants to be a reconstruction of faith – as a source of cultural wisdom (v. II, p. 207); but at the same time, it is a deconstruction of any rational metaphysics. This means that the ‘affirmative aspect’ of his genealogy does not extend itself to the project of a philosophical foundation of the contents of religion. This reduces religion to a psychological or sociological phenomenon, i.e. to a mere aspect of the human lifeworld. Its inner value, according to Habermas, is a thoroughly private matter. He clearly states: “der religiöse Glaube ist nicht wahrheitsfähig” [religious faith is not capable of claiming any truth] (2019, v. II, p. 138). Faith is an entirely subjective experience. But at the same time, Habermas believes, religions conceal unprecedented intuitions, which still remain useful in a post-metaphysical age. Here, as we saw before, he is mainly thinking of the usefulness of a personal commitment, implied in religions, to the universality of truth and morality. This belief in moral objectivity, he thinks, can put a stop to the nihilistic tendency experienced in our post-metaphysical age. But this positive attitude towards religion is, however, immediately undermined by Habermas’s claim that a rational metaphysics determining the ontological truth of religions and worldviews is impossible. In doing so, Habermas neutralizes his own positive claims about religion. Religions and worldviews are a mere expression of fideism because they cannot be rationalized. This then also means that a translation of religious ideas into secular speech can merely be a transposition into another type of discourse and not into a rational foundation of their worldview claims. Habermas’s own attempt to ground ethics and human rights may, as he admits, find inspiration in Christianity, but it is not itself directly based on Christian doctrines. He believes that keeping one’s distance from religious contents – he speaks of ‘methodical atheism’ – also means keeping philosophy free from metaphysical thinking. But, as I said earlier, a deep incursion into any philosophical foundation gives evidence of the fact that a rational metaphysics can indeed produce a worldview that possibly substantiates aspects of faith.

Habermas’s critical comments about the various classical attempts made to establish a non-religious foundation or justification to human rights, show that for him these foundations are rather unsatisfactory. It appears that in the background, the dignity of human beings is always linked to a Christian conception of natural law. Modern philosophical foundations too, which start from a naturalistic or materialistic approach, introduce aspects that smuggle in the idea of dignity from the outside, Habermas discusses this especially in the context of Hobbes, but also of Marx. In Hobbes’s narrative the ‘idea of peace’ suddenly pops up in the head of people engaged in a constant struggle; it makes its appearance in a wild state of nature, where nobody would expect it, and then, in a second step, this idea induces ‘interested’ and ‘calculating’ subjects to enter into a ‘social contract’. And for Marx, the idea of freedom as a fundamental human right is actually at odds with his own economic determinism and historical materialism. Habermas shows that this materialism contradicts the emancipatory goals that nourish Marx’s own political philosophy. Habermas’s explanation is that in fact Marx takes this idea from outside; he builds on a Hegelian concept of freedom, which presupposes an idealistic metaphysics, and which Marx’s own materialism is incapable of offering. Habermas shows how in Das Kapital, Marx very accurately describes the laws of modern economic societies, but then totally neglects the philosophical foundations of his own idea of freedom (2019, v. II, p. 656).

 It is because of these problems related to the philosophical, secular foundation of human rights that Habermas attaches so much value to the findings of Peirce’s transcendental pragmatism. For he believes this is a way of escaping the metaphysical, i.e. idealistic, presuppositions hidden in Hobbes and Marx. Although Habermas does not elaborate upon his own philosophical foundation of human rights, he thinks that starting from Peirce can give us an indication of how to proceed. Both the American pragmatist and later also Habermas’s former tutor Karl-Otto Apel, start from the idea of an ‘unsurpassable reality’ [Unhintergehbarkeit] of transcendental-pragmatic, ethical principles, which they consider to be naturally involved in intersubjective communication. Peirce connected these normative principles with the ideal of an ‘eternal community of critical subjects’, which Apel then translated into the image of an ‘ideal community of communication’. This ideal includes all kinds of normative conditions (equality, reciprocity, tolerance, openness, freedom, peacefulness, etc.), because communication, which is free and non-violent and oriented towards the best arguments, is only possible if these norms are not only ‘presupposed’ but also again and again ‘realized’. Habermas himself in his theory of communicative action speaks of an ‘ideal situation of speech’, which includes the above-mentioned ‘necessary preconditions’ of a symmetrical, open and repression-free communication. These normative preconditions constitute the most advanced basis, according to Habermas, for a philosophical justification of the universal idea of fundamental human rights (2019, v. II, p. 757-758). But we already saw that Peirce was not at all a post-metaphysical thinker and that he developed an idealistic version of pragmatism.

As we pointed out before, it is only by interpreting these principles or preconditions ‘procedurally’, instead of ‘ontologically’, that Habermas manages to distance himself from the more idealistic interpretations of communication offered by Peirce and Apel. He takes the set of ideals, which claim general validity, as being a mere bundle of ‘procedures’ or ‘operational conditions’ regulating communicative action. However, in my view, this creates a serious problem, because from a strictly operational perspective it is impossible to guarantee the universal validity of the ideals and norms expressed in communication. As procedures, operational principles only have an ‘occasional’ validity and not the universal or general validity of normative ideals implied in Peirce and Apel. Taken as mere procedures, the validity of the preconditions of the ‘ideal speech situation’ can now occasionally be switched on and off, depending on whether or not a communicative action takes place. The ideals of peace and freedom, for instance, just taken as ‘procedures’ of communicative action would suddenly lose their validity in a situation in which communicative action is not predominant, such as in a combat situation, because the operational anchoring of the ideals of dialogue is not activated. In this ‘occasionalism’ of Habermas, reason only radiates in situations where communication is already active, and falls back in all others. But in the (not really pacifistic) wording used by Habermas to express this procedural aspect, he clearly needs to recuperate aspects of idealism: “Die Vernunft durchlöchert die kommunikative Alltagspraxis mit den Sprengsätzen des idealiserenden Gehalts unvermeidlicher Präsuppositionen” [Reason perforates the daily practice of communication with the explosives of the idealizing contents of inevitable speech presuppositions] (2019, v. II, p. 756). It seems to me that this quotation clearly shows that the ideals of dialogue, taken in this operational sense, only occasionally hit our everyday world. In my view the universalizability of the conditions of the ideal situation of speech is thereby clearly threatened, because these preconditions are just thought to be procedures of operationality, and are no longer seen as being truly transcendental ideals substantially and ontologically existing as such; they therefore have no validity outside the actual activity of communication. As procedural conditions, they lose their transcendental status, thereby also losing their validity in situations in which communication is not active.

It becomes clear that this procedural turn of Habermas makes it impossible to philosophically justify ‘egalitarian universalism’, nor any other fundamental human right, even though this is Habermas’s pretense (2019, v. II, p. 779). However, it is true that his strategy of argumentation is not directly tied to the contents of religious worldviews (v. II, p. 780), but clearly touches upon idealistic assumptions, which then, as we came to see, sets his post-metaphysics in quite troubled waters. Furthermore, Habermas also tries to combine a ‘soft naturalism’ – he tries to escape idealistic and dualistic ontologies – with an epistemological ‘realism’ based on Peirce’s theory of language and signs. He tries by all means to avoid Peirce’s idealistic interpretation of realism, i.e. the objective idealistic ontology of Peirce’s ‘realism’. On the one hand, Habermas does not want to regard truth and moral law as ‘ontological realities’, but as mere regulative ideas of claims involved in intersubjective communication, which, he says, only have a ‘counterfactual’ character (2019, v. II, p. 755-756). Yet, on the other hand, he leans upon Peirce’s realism that defines ‘reality’ as a ‘referent of language’. He feels, this allows him to say, that there is no language-independent reality of facts: “Die Welt ist ein tranzendentaler Begriff; sie besteht aus Gegenständen möglicher Referenzen, nicht aus den sprachunabhängigen Tatsachen, die wir von dieser Referenten aussagen” [The world is a transcendental concept; it is made out of objects of possible reference, and not out of language-independent facts that find an expression in our references] (2019, v. II, p. 776). While for Peirce this means that reality cannot be interpreted as existing outside a general mind capable of language, Habermas tries to avoid this idealistic conclusion by just stating that there is no reality incapable of being expressed in human language. Corresponding to the way post-metaphysical philosophy says goodbye to Kant’s Ding an sich [Thing in Itself] as a general ‘abstract’ other beyond subjectivity (2019, v. II, p. 774), Habermas rejects reality as a general ‘abstract’ other beyond language. But how can we think of a language-bound reality? If reality does not consist of ‘facts’ then it is, as Peirce proposed, a mental structure. But Habermas cannot accept this solution, because this would bring him unintentionally close to objective idealism. It does however remain the case that a language-bound reality (like a subject bound one) must have in itself (ontologically) a mental and language-like structure; it is very, very difficult to see how Habermas can avoid the conclusions Peirce coherently arrives at if he still wants to adhere to some form of realism at all.

Although Habermas now and then acknowledges that his intersubjective theory of communication entails metaphysical implications (and especially also complications), he clearly rejects a prima philosophia that could rationally deal with all these implications. He nowhere shows, for example, how a ‘soft naturalism’ is possible or conceivable, nor does he explain how this naturalism can be combined with a language-bound realism. But it is important that, for Habermas, there is a reality, which also constitutes the unifying point of speech and reason. It appears that this (language-bound) reality makes universal knowledge and morality conceivable. Habermas takes this reality to be a referent of “a we-perspective that transcends all local communities and social boundaries” [alle sozialen Grenzen und lokalen Gemeinschaften transzendierende Wir-Perspektive] (2019, v. II, p. 786). But Habermas seems unwilling to further elaborate on the metaphysical consequences of such a perspective that transcends all localities; it is only by avoiding this that he manages not to burn his fingers on metaphysics. But it is clear that in his last chapter he unconsciously raises all sorts of metaphysical questions that cannot easily be answered from a ‘post-metaphysical’ perspective. Habermas’s idea of the unity of reason, in my view, shows that today in philosophy it should not be question of giving up the idea of a philosophy of consciousness, but of establishing a metaphysics that unites both subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and in an integral way. In doing so, reason should be expanded beyond the anthropocentric exclusivity it now has under Habermas (and many other so-called post-metaphysical authors). In all his major works Habermas binds rationality exclusively to the human lifeworld. His realism however urges him to admit a rationality existing ‘in being itself’. After all, as he says, nature is a language-bound reality. But if this rationality grounding the outside world is separated from our human lifeworld, and is independent from all local communities and human boundaries, then it should be possible for nature, both as a ‘being in itself’ and as ‘a possible communicative partner’, to participate in this one and same, i.e. natural and human, concept of rationality. It would then indeed even be conceivable to understand this communicative universe as an ultimate reality. This would be the main subject of a new prima philosophia including both a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of mind.

If we now allow ourselves to see modernity as being guided by this proposed alternative picture of a unitary reason both transcending and including the human lifeworld, then our timeframe will not appear as an age of post-metaphysics, but as an age in which the philosophy of consciousness (subjectivity) and of intersubjectivity strive to holistically merge together. Modernity would then appear as the incubator of a new phase in the history of prima philosophia – a phase deploying a new metaphysical paradigm that conceives intersubjectivity as being part of a larger concept of rationality and reason that also includes nature itself. My use of the term ‘paradigm’ here is slightly different from the use Thomas Kuhn (1962) made of it. For, if we take the history of thought as a learning process, the idea of an incommensurability or incompatibility of paradigms is not as radical as Kuhn takes it to be. There is indeed an incompatibility insofar as an old paradigm cannot encompass the new one, but the reverse is not the case: seen from the new one the old paradigm is not by definition incompatible, because it can be ‘sublated’ and incorporated into the new one. The development of a metaphysics of consciousness can be described as incorporating a previous stage into the new paradigm. Instead of drawing, as Habermas does, a straight line through history describing a progressive triumph over an ‘old’ metaphysics of consciousness, it becomes possible to describe the history of philosophy in a circular, i.e. spiral, manner. The new paradigm would not just be a victory over the old one, but also partially integrate it. Unlike cumulative or linear succession, in a circular model learning processes take up or translate ‘old insights’ in the new understanding of the world, deepening them with new ones. Such a spiral model of progress is nothing new, because it has always underpinned the way some philosophers dealt with the past. Philosophy, as an activity, was always a conversation with the past, with old philosophical sources, making steps of progress by means of an overarching historical dialogue, a dialogue of timeframes, that dialectically takes metaphysical questions to higher levels of understanding. The linear model of development presupposed by Habermas is in fact not a model that fits the history of philosophy, but that is inspired by the linear development of positive sciences, in which advances are cumulative, whereas in philosophy advances are primarily regenerative.

If we apply this dialectical model to the history of metaphysics, it appears as initially taking up the shape of substance metaphysics, and as then being ‘sublated’ and deepened by a metaphysics of consciousness. The gradual transition to the modern philosophy of subjectivity already took place in the Renaissance, and was a historical precondition for the philosophy of transcendental consciousness. In German Idealism, then, a transformation from a transcendental metaphysics into a process metaphysics took place, which integrated aspects of both substance and consciousness metaphysics. For Hegel the absolute mind is not simply a transcendental consciousness but also a general process of being, as Habermas himself rightly emphasizes (2019, v. II, p. 559, 564). Seen in this way, Hegel’s metaphysics of consciousness was subordinated to a larger process metaphysics, which made it possible to again connect to, and integrate, aspects of substance metaphysics. After Hegel, several types of process metaphysics developed in modern philosophy; Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Heidegger, Alfred N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and many others can be regarded as philosophers developing (or trying to develop) different types of such a process metaphysics. In these new forms of metaphysics, several categories of intersubjectivity such as love, compassion, recognition, power, competition, listening, communication, cooperation, etc., start to play a central role. The process is often a dynamic taking place along a spectrum with two opposing ends, e.g. an initial pole of power, and a final one of love. Of course, not all the conceptualizations of these philosophers integrate the same elements of substance and consciousness metaphysics. Even conceiving of our history as a learning process, as Habermas does, implies a dynamic moving between opposing poles. So, we may conclude that it is possible to conceive the whole history of philosophy as a dynamic, not ending in a post-metaphysical age, but moving towards an age of process metaphysics, in which different substances and forms of consciousness are taking part in one overarching dynamic.

This delineates the possibility of a metaphysics that survives the post-metaphysical critique, and that repeatedly reinvents itself and explores aspects of the old metaphysical paradigms at ever deeper levels. Seen in this way, philosophy is not a “Liquidierung des Dings an sich” [an annihilation of the idea of a thing in itself] as Habermas proclaims (2019, v. II, p. 774), but a reformulation of it. The development of history is then not simply, as Habermas proposes, the linear process of a “Versprachlichung des Sakralen” [verbalization of the sacred] (2019, v. II, p. 572) – in which communicative action becomes the ultimate and only instance of a grounding of normative principles – but is conversely also a ‘sacralization of speech’, since language – in line with von Humboldt – can be seen as an articulation of a general reason, of which human reason is just a particular manifestation. In this perspective of a reformulation of metaphysics, it is not simply a matter, as Habermas proclaims about post-metaphysics, of adopting an ever more consistent ‘methodical atheism’ (2019, v. II, p. 353, 480), but also a matter of bringing about a deeper understanding of what it means to speak of God, i.e. of creating a fusion of methodical atheism and speculative theism. Along these lines, concepts of the old substance metaphysics and a modern metaphysics of consciousness are integrated into a new picture of being as a processual whole – a process that can be described both in terms of subject philosophy as a growth of ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’, and in terms of a philosophy of intersubjectivity as an intensification of a ‘coming-together’ or an ‘encounter with the other’. It cannot be denied that along all these lines philosophy meets religion again and again, because if we indeed take up a large concept of reason, in which natural and human rationality are unified, a convergence of all forms of truth becomes thinkable. The circular model of the history of metaphysics would indeed allow us to think that philosophy can translate religious ideas into a secular language, which is what Habermas was trying to do. But this translation into secular speech would definitely need a metaphysical foundation incorporating the basic concepts of religion into a rational prima philosophia.

It is especially promising for a renewal of idealism that different types of contemporary process metaphysics are always pregnant with ‘idealistic assumptions’, which is something Habermas rightly observed in Spinoza’s work – although he is wrong to characterize the Dutch philosopher as an idealist (2019, v. II, p. 152). Process metaphysics integrates a large concept of reason, that is in some degree already at work in nature. This large ‘rationality’, a mind-at-large so to speak, covers all entities in nature; it is a common ‘reason’ in which we all participate, and that over time transforms conflict into cooperation, power into love, egoism into altruism, singularity into commonality, distance into encounter, ignorance into understanding. In this way it becomes possible to understand nature itself as a form of value-led work, as a contribution to the development of a cosmic consciousness that recognizes and reinforces higher values. For, if reason effectively manifests itself in nature, it strives towards the higher values of intersubjectivity, which are perceived as constituting the ultimate pole of the ‘love metaphysics’ we spoke of above – a pole that constitutes the telos, a final stage towards which the whole of being is heading. From the perspective of current evolutionary biology, structures of cooperation arise entirely by chance, although they clearly seem to be of material benefit, but from a perspective of ‘process metaphysics’ this same dynamic can be interpreted as a materialization of higher intersubjective ideals.^[15] Attempts to justify or substantiate the general validity of principles like solidarity, peace, freedom, equality etc. in a biological or naturalistic setting are doomed to failure, because what can be proven is, at best, the practical use of these principles in specific groups or situations, but not their universal validity. Freedom, solidarity, peace, etc. seem to be guiding ideals of reason, belonging to a mental domain transcending the physical world, although these principles can subsequently materialize in biological and social structures. And what is true of values is also true mutatis mutandis of the ‘mystery’ of consciousness. Habermas seems to want to acknowledge that such a mystery exists, for this is why he defends a ‘soft naturalism’. In a process metaphysics that features a large concept of reason however, nature can be conceived as being immersed in, and as participating in, consciousness and morality. A general concept of mind [Geist, spirit] makes it possible to conceive a gradual differentiation of levels of consciousness, including primary levels of sub- and unconsciousness. Many contemporary types of process metaphysics still stick to ‘objective vitalism’, basing all dynamics of being upon a large unconscious vital force, instead of punching through to ‘objective idealism’. But all these forms of vitalism – think of Nietzsche, Eduard von Hartmann, Bergson, Deleuze – are in fact variations of Schopenhauer’s conception of idealism, and stem from important idealistic presuppositions. They therefore all acknowledge that consciousness and reflection rise out of unconsciousness, which implies that they must presuppose that nature is in some degree already pregnant with reason from the very beginning.

From what I just have said, we can understand how important Hegel and German Idealism were for the development of the current new paradigm of metaphysics. One of Habermas’s reasons to reject the Hegelian metaphysics of consciousness is that it reduces finite subjects to a kind of ‘puppet existence’ within the absolute (2019, v. II, p. 383).^[16] We already saw that on a political level the argument Habermas uses is flawed, but this changes when we look at his general metaphysics. Indeed, in Hegel’s version of process metaphysics, the original substance, the mind-at-large [spirit, reason], is given major importance. By consequence the sphere of intersubjective relations threatens to evaporate into a general process of unification. We already saw that in his politics this is not a position he supports. But in my opinion, it is a consequence of Hegel’s interpretation of ‘dialectics’, which he primarily conceives as a logical event, and not really as a dialogical process (in the intersubjective sense the word ‘dialectics’ still had for Plato). Had he placed this dialogical aspect in the foreground, intersubjectivity would have appeared on the scene of his philosophical system much earlier. It would also have played a more prominent role in his philosophy of nature. And if one thinks about the deepest intention and purpose of the ultimate substance of being, then process metaphysics could probably best be described in terms of a ‘metaphysics of love’. With such an adaptation of what dialectics is, all criticisms against process metaphysics concerning its alleged ‘totalitarianism’, would fall away. For in love, totality is a unity in which subjects eternally, i.e. with a feeling of eternity, preserve each other’s individuality in an intimate connection of souls. This concept of unity is familiar to us through intense experiences of love that take place in our daily lifeworld. These lifeworld experiences foretell, in a phenomenological way, the eternity of the other. For in love, we experience truth not as a fusion but as a deep everlasting connection (religio). Alain Badiou has fully clarified this point in his theory of love, which is heavily influenced by Plato.^[17] ‘Fusion’ is in fact a physical state, whereas the human spirit recognizes the other as a companion, as a complement. Love therefore strives not towards fusion but towards deep connectivity. This schema of love is also, I think, the deeper principle grounding Habermas’s theory of communicative action. For it determines the idea of a free communicative society, i.e. of a (utopian or ideal) image of non-violent institutions, which facilitate a genuine intersubjective encounter of people. This schema also constitutes the grounds for the conception of the common good (koinonia) as a well-ordered state (politeia), in which, for Habermas, the dignity of individuals remains linked to the possibility of engaging in genuine reciprocal relationships. The strict separation Habermas operates with, between an ethics of benefits and an ethics of duties, is therefore only superficially justified, for the idea of duty is always connected with this concept of the common good. A vision of the common good ultimately grounds the principle of universalization of any ethics of duty. I can only know which actions are universalizable, if I first have some knowledge about how things ought to be organized in the world, i.e. if I have an intuition or representation of the common good. Whereas a more classical philosophy of consciousness would end up in a closed ‘subjective monadology’, this revised process metaphysics results in an open ‘intersubjective monadology’. Here a ‘community of souls’ makes it possible to think of the divine as a ‘we’. And it is this community, which constitutes the ultimate substantial grounding of Habermas’s ‘ideal situation of speech’. From such a process metaphysics, in which the monad is in itself always a ‘we’, it is possible to join Pico della Mirandola’s humanism, which saw a trace of a common truth in all natural entities and in all cultures – especially in all religions – and thus envisaged an ecumenism, in which religions were tied together by overarching humanistic ideals. In the same manner, this idealistic renewal of process metaphysics makes it possible to adopt the humanism of Spinoza, who tried to conceive democracy and theocracy as converging rather than separating forces. If we manage to join reason and love together in our spirit, then we might indeed be able to discern the higher meaning of existence.

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