(1987) honneth. enlightenment and rationality

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Enlightenment and RationalityAuthor(s): Axel HonnethSource: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 84, No. 11, Eighty-Fourth Annual Meeting AmericanPhilosphical Association, Eastern Division (Nov., 1987), pp. 692-699Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026776 .Accessed: 13/04/2011 16:48

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692 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

and ethical life. 9 To the extent that-to elude contractarian prem-ises-Habermas stresses the rationality of cooperative will formation

(reflected in an ideal speech community ), he merely appeals to aregulative principle which, in Hegel's terms, remains on the level ofan abstract philosophy of reflection. On the other hand, if escapefrom contractarianism is sought in a concrete life-world, recourseis taken to the same unreflective or prereflective traditions whichwere chided in Hegel's early writings. Even when not returning tothe cantus firmus of Enlightenment rationalism, Habermas's pro-posal thus retains at best the disjecta membra of Hegelian phil-osophy.10

FRED DALLMAYR

University of Notre Dame

ENLIGHTENMENT AND RATIONALITY*

IN modern Europe, enlightening (aufkldrendes) thought hasalways been set in opposition to orientations toward theworld which are based on tradition. The concept of Enlight-

enment -whether understood as historically designating a move-ment in thought in the 18th century, or as a concept delineating aprocess, namely, a trend in the development of the history of civiliza-tion-has always been linked to the idea of the overcoming of dog-matic traditions by means of rational insights.' Enlightening thought

9 Philosophy of Right, p. 156 (par. 258). While applauding Rousseau's philo-sophical treatment of the topic, Hegel in the same context criticizes the Frenchthinker for taking the will only in a determinate form as the individual will, and

for regarding the universal will not as the absolutely rational element in the will,but only as a 'general' will which proceeds out of individual wills as out of consciouswills (157).

'0 This aspect is revealed in Habermas's general framework (not fully discussed inhis Hegel chapter), especially in the juxtaposition of system and life-world.While embracing, on the one hand, a Young Hegelian (and quasicontractarian) viewof social praxis and will formation, the framework, on the other hand, makes roomfor an autonomous system rationality on the level of economy and the state (arationality largely indebted to Right Hegelian premises).

* To be presented in an APA symposium on Enlightenment and Rationality,December 30, 1987. Fred Dallmayr will be co-symposiast, and Tom Rockmore willcomment. See this JOURNAL, this issue, 692-699 and 699-701, respectively, for

their contributions.1 Herbert Schnadelbach, Was ist Aufklarung? , manuscript, 1987. (Trans. note:In order to avoid reducing the German word Aufkldrung to its historical meaning,it has been translated throughout as 'enlightenment', except where reference isspecifically to the historical epoch of the same name.)

0022-362X/87/8411/0692$00.70 (7 1987 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.



ENLIGHTENMENT AND RATIONALITY 693

claims to liberate the thinker from the spell of handed-down tradi-tions by subjecting to rational, universally reconstructable examina-

tion that which had previously been valid solely by being sociallybinding. Thus, from the outset, what is unique to enlightenment is itsimmanent relation to a criterion of rational validity which acts as astandard against which opinions and convictions can be upheld byrational examination. Although it is hardly possible to develop aconcept of enlightening thought without such a relation to rational-ity, ever since the days of that Enlightenment epoch, thinkers havenevertheless strongly contested the manner and possibility of pro-viding the foundations of a meaningful concept of human rational-

ity. Even within the innermost circles of the Enlightenment move-ment, a form of the critique of reason (Vernunftkritik) arose-inRousseau's, Jacobi's, and Herder's writings, and in still sharper formduring the early Romantic period-which destined enlighteningthought to enlighten itself forever about the concept of reason.2Enlightenment has been unfolding ever since as a process of en-lightenment about the boundaries and limitations of human rational-ity; as it feels its way forward, every new step of the critique of reasonhas been followed by a further stage of the self-restriction of ra-

tionality.3Today, this process of a self-critical continuation of enlightenmentwould appear to have reached an almost insurmountable barrier:with the inadvertent interplay of poststructuralism and neo-Aristo-telianism, a broad front has emerged in the critique of reason whichapplies critique at such a deep level that the project of enlightenmentseems to be robbed of its innermost rational medium. I wish todiscuss the challenge this poses, first, by distilling the decisive argu-ments from the complex span of ideas that makes up the new critique

of reason and, then, by presenting them in order of decreasinggenerality and thus of increasing accuracy. I hope thereby to showthat, in the process of self-critique which limits the concept of reasonaccordingly, enlightenment has already found an answer to eachrespective objection raised by the critique of reason. I shall recon-struct this process in three stages: (i) the critique of reason accusedreason of being exclusive in character; this accusation was counteredby an anthropological relativization of the position accorded to ra-

2 Cf. Panajotis Kondylis, Die Aujkldrung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Ra-tionalismus (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Rea-son: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1987).

3 Cf. Jiirgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp, 1985).




tionality; (ii) the critique of reason objected to the instrumentalcharacter of reason; self-critical enlightenment had already parriedthis objection with a self-differentiation of the categories within theconcept of reason; and, finally, (III) the critique of reason has turnedon the all-unifying compulsion inherent in a differentiated conceptof rationality; this indictment has been answered by the formalisticself-restriction currently adopted by a concept of rationality whichstands in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Only after traversingthese three completed stages in the self-critique of enlightenmentwill it become apparent which of the objections raised by the critiqueof reason have still been left unanswered.

IAt the first, elementary stage of the critique of reason, the view wasadvanced that any formation of rational attitudes and orientationswas ineluctably accompanied by an exclusion of corporeal sensuous-ness. An exclusive character inhered in rationality or reason, becauseits use necessitated abstracting from sensuous sentiments and feel-ings, from needs and predilections. This thesis on the exclusive char-acter of reason found expression in a series of theoretical models.The clearest and, at the same time, most questionable model is to be

found in vitalism, which dates back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche;indeed, some positions adopted in French poststructuralism can beunderstood as a covert continuation of this train of thought.4 Theobjection that reason is exclusive in nature is made sharper by theassertion that rational achievements, in principle, entail an enforcedinterruption of the normal course of human life and, to this extent,lead to a destruction of corporeal and emotional abilities. Disregard-ing the fact that the metaphysical implications of such a hypothesiscan be criticized without difficulty,5 this claim lays bare the theoreti-

cal premise on which the thesis of the exclusive character of reasonmust necessarily rely: namely, that the practical process of human lifemust always be presumed to be an occurrence devoid of rationality;in other words, rational achievements intervene in it as if from out-side. For only if rationality is posited as something foreign or diamet-rically opposed to the practical course of human life can its applica-tion be understood as an act of suppression or exclusion of theopposite of reason; if, in contrast, one calls the strict oppositionbetween the sensuous-practical course of life and rational achieve-

4Cf. Jacques Bouveresse, Rationalite et Cynisme (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit,1984); Manfred Frank, The World as Will and Representation, Telos, LV (1983):166ff.

5 Cf. Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland 1831-1933 (Frank-furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 176ff.




ments into question, then the thesis of exclusiveness loses its sugges-tive power. Indeed, a theoretical process already set in motion dur-

ing the age of Enlightenment undermined the opposition of sensu-ousness and reason by inquiring into the rational content of humanfeelings and the affective roots of rational achievements.6 From thisstarting point, the attempt to desublimate the concept of reason orrationality was then continued by the Left Hegelians, pragmatism,phenomenology, and philosophical anthropology in such a fashionthat gradually rational achievements were being shifted and im-planted at an ever deeper level in human life.7 At the end of thisprocess, rationality was understood not just as a human ability an-

chored in history, but one also inextricably linked to the body; and,concomitantly, the position of rationality within the whole of humanlife has been relativized-it is now regarded as that form of reflexiveinterval which is necessary once a well-functioning form of actionhitherto successful in practical terms is disturbed by problems. Inthis manner, the inclination of subjects capable of action to make useof fallible knowledge reflexively in the solution of problems of actionposed in practice comes to be called rationality. Indeed, thisanthropological relativization of reason would seem to have deprived

the thesis of the exclusivity of rational achievements of its theoreticalbasis. For one can no longer assert of a rationality that-as theproblem-solving force behind using knowledge reflexively-is com-pletely embedded in the sensuous-practical course of human life thatit abstracts from or even destroys a sensuousness linked to the body.The self-critical process of desublimating the concept of reasontherefore has, in a certain sense, shifted the coordinates of the En-lightenment's anthropological frame of reference. Reason, as amental ability, is thus no longer accorded superiority over the pro-

cess of human life; but, in contrast, as a moment of reflection, it isnow so embedded in the course of human life that it serves to solveconflicts or problems that arise therein. Rationality conceptualizedin such a manner cannot be accused of destroying or excludingprecisely that which, by dint of its own achievements, it is supposedto be recreating, namely, an intact form of the sensuous-practicalcourse of human life.

IIThe second, less fundamental stage of the critique of reason centers

on the argument that a rational approach is inexorably linked to aperspective that involves the domination of things and persons. Ra-

6 Cf. Kondylis, op. cit., p. 325ff.7Cf. Habermas, op. cit., ch. xi.




tionality or reason has an instrumental character, because it serves asa means to know (erkennen) existing states of affairs and to make it

possible to handle practical tasks. This form of the critique of rea-son-which can take motifs from early Romanticism as precedentsand which found impressive expression in Dialectic of Enlighten-ment8-starts from the assertion that, by the capacity for rationalbehavior, we usually mean the ability to know objects in order then tomanipulate or control them in terms of the goals of one's own action.It is easy to show that, once it has come to predominate one's deal-ings with other people or with one's own wishes and needs, such acapacity for purposive-rational knowledge becomes a medium of

instrumental domination. Yet, even the age of Enlightenment haditself witnessed the inauguration of attempts both to cast doubt onthe one-sided interpretation of reason as a capacity to know objectsas well as to prove the existence of other types of rational knowl-edge. Although one already comes across a systematic distinctionbetween different forms of reason in Kant's work, it is, above all, hisopponents who endeavor to demonstrate that specific forms of ra-tional attitudes can also guide a person's relation to other humanbeings and to itself.9 These initial projects led to the second process

of the self-critique of enlightenment, one which began to differen-tiate internally within the already desublimated concept of rationalityby making a distinction between systemically different claims to ra-tionality either made indirectly within the practice of acting or raisedimplicitly in verbal utterances.'0 For, if rationality describes thehuman capacity for a reflexive mastering of practical problems, thenthe mere fact that there are different classes of problems whichhuman beings encounter in the course of everyday practice meansthat a certain compulsion exists to differentiate within the concept of

rationality; thus, we claim to behave rationally not only when weencounter a technical problem, but also, for example, if we comeinto moral conflict with others. As soon as one can demonstrate thatthe course of human life entails different types of rational knowl-edge, however, this also highlights the fact that the model of a ra-tional relation to objects which has prevailed in modern Europeconstitutes but a one-sided interpretation of the human capacity for

8 Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Die Dialektik der Aufkldrung(Amsterdam: Querido, 1947).

9 For example, Charles Taylor, Hegel (New York: Cambridge, 1975), Part 1.'0 Cf. Karl-Otto Apel, Zum Problem der Rationalitatstypen, in Rationalitdt:

Beitrdge zu einer Theorie, Herbert Schnadelbach, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-kamp, 1984), p. 15ff.; Jiirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action,Vol. I, Thomas McCarthy, trans. (Boston: Beacon 1984), p. 1ff.




reason. A purpose-directed knowledge of states of affairs, which iswhat the thesis on instrumentalism suggests is the predominant fea-

ture of reason, comprises only one of the different forms that therational relation of a person to itself and its world can take; there-fore, rationality as such can also not be criticized by referring to itsinstrumental character.

IIIThe theoretical preconditions of the accusations of logocentrism,which in the shape of the theses on exclusivity and instrumentalismhave accompanied enlightenment like a shadow ever since its begin-nings, are invalidated by the two stages in the self-differentiation ofreason. A rationality which has been relativized with regard to itsposition in practical life, which has been relinked to corporeal abili-ties, and which has been embedded in historical praxis and differen-tiated in different dimensions can with good grounds reject the ac-cusations both of its being, in principle, exclusive and of its necessar-ily being instrumental. A third stage of the critique of reason,however, one which is particularly influential at present, has chargedthat, with the emphasis on rational attitudes, the great variety ofcontents of knowledge and of convictions is inevitably referred backto one single yardstick. Rationality or reason possesses an all-unify-ing quality, because its claims to universalism force it to make judg-ments on the validity of statements of different sorts over andbeyond all local and temporal boundaries. Whereas the two versionsof the critique of modern logocentrism both take the ideal of ra-tionality as such as their point of departure, the third stage in thecritique of reason concentrates on the universalistic claims that areineluctably connected with enlightening thought's reference back tostandards of rationality. This claim, raised above all by the represen-tatives of postmodernism,12 demonstrates that even an enlighten-ment that has restricted itself via a differentiated concept of rational-ity nevertheless cannot dispense with universally reconstructable cri-teria for examining convictions. Yet Kant had already ceased to applysuch universalist standards of rationality directly to the contents ofindividual convictions; he applied them only to the methods wherebythey had been produced. Attempts today to effect a formalistic self-

Cf. Herbert Schnaidelbach, Vernunft, in Philosophie: Ein Grundkurs,Schnaidelbach and Frank Martens, eds. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985), p. 77ff.12 Cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowl-edge, George Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis, Minn.: Minne-sota UP, 1984); for a critique, see my An Aversion against the Universal: A Com-mentary on Lyotard's Postmodern Condition, Theory, Culture & Society, II, 3(1 985): 147ff.




restriction of reason move along this path opened up by Kant, im-planting the rationality standards of the contents of knowledge in the

procedures for their examination: here, rather than in the contentsof convictions, only the methods for their examination by argumentare still proven to be rational. This step is also already suggested bythe first, elementary process of the self-critique of reason: for, ifrationality is understood to signify the capacity of persons capable ofaction to apply fallible knowledge in solving practical problems, thenit makes sense to accept only the rules for such an application ofknowledge as the respective standards of rationality. As soon asknowledge is, in addition, conceived of as being mediated through

communication, then rationality comes to be measured formallyagainst the procedures of argumentation for the vindication of in-tersubjectively raised validity claims.'3 Such a step of procedurallyself-restricting rationality deprives the charge that reason is inexora-bly all-unifying of its foundations; indeed, such a charge proves to bea substantive misunderstanding to the extent that rationality, fol-lowing the avenue Kant had first opened, is no longer claimed for thecontents of individual convictions, but only for the procedures forexamining them. Indeed, if the categorial self-differentiation of rea-

son is taken seriously, then different forms of vindication by argu-mentation must also be shown to exist for the different claims torationality. Yet, even if it should prove possible to achieve this bytaking the promising path of a universal pragmatics pursued nowa-days (Karl-Otto Apel, Jurgen Habermas), this in turn means that anew problem arises, namely, that of the formalism innate in such aconception of reason.

It may well be that proceduralism or formalism does indeed con-stitute the real problem of an enlightenment that has become self-

critical. Travelling down the path of the gradual correction of itsconcept of reason, enlightenment has eventually seen itself forced torestrict its claims to such a great extent that it can of itself no longergenerate a substantive knowledge of what is true or false, what isgood or bad.'4 A self-critical enlightenment is only in a position tocounter indirectly the charge of barren formalism brought against itby neo-Aristotelians, in particular. For it would only be meaningfulto rest content with a procedural concept of rationality to the extentthat historical or sociological, i.e., empirical proof is forthcoming to

show that what enlightenment has identified as rational procedures

13 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, p. 1ff.14 For example, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University

Press, 1981), ch. 5.




for examining forms of problematic knowledge are indeed usedwithin the practices of social life. In such a case, it is admittedly not

the philosophical concept of reason itself but rather a life-world thatorganizes itself rationally which generates a concrete knowledge ofthat which is true or false, good or bad. Thus, in the final instance,enlightenment will only be able to assert itself if it is able to demon-strate empirically that it itself has, in fact, already become an integralelement of social praxis.

AXEL HONNETH

Frankfurt University, West GermanyTranslated by Jeremy Gaines

ENLIGHTENMENT AND REASON*

It is no accident that the Enlightenment period, roughly the eigh-teenth century, is widely known as the Age of Reason. We find herethe continued rise of the idea of independent reason which surpassesall forms of superstition, unexamined presuppositions, and dogma-

tism, especially religious and other arguments from authority. It hasbeen suggested that the movement set in motion by the ProtestantReformation was translated into the philosophical realm throughKant's critical philosophy, which, arguably, culminates in Hegel'ssystem. So Heine, a great poet but also a student of Hegel, arguedthat in Hegel's thought the circle is closed which began with the riseof the principle of independent reason.

This Hegelian reading of the rise of reason, well known in thewritings of the Young Hegelians, has been contested ever since its

formulation. Nietzsche, it is well known, held that the very idea ofsystem is indicative of a lack of good judgment, a view which is widelyshared by later thinkers. Heidegger, distantly following Nietzsche,saw in Hegel's thought the culmination of the form of metaphysicswhich represents a fundamental mistake. Jacques Derrida, in Hei-degger's wake, has tried to deconstruct the form of thought whichdepends on the so-called metaphysics of presence.

In his recent writings, the German social theorist Jiirgen Ha-bermas has provided a rival reading of the modern concern with

reason centered on Hegel and the relativist revolt against Hegel

* Abstract of a paper to be presented in an APA symposium on Enlightenmentand Rationality, December 30, 1987, commenting on papers by Fred Dallmayr andAxel Honneth, this JOURNAL, this issue, 682-692 and 692-699, respectively.

(1987) honneth. enlightenment and rationality

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