From Transcendental to Originary Philosophy (original) (raw)

A. THE STRUCTURE OF THE MODERN Cartesian doubt usually is considered the beginning of modern philosophy. But this doubt is only a beginning. It does not fully determine the structure of the modern, nor does it explain how modernity became possible, in fact or in theory. The doubt has deepened as modernisation and rationalisation have spread horizontally to new domains at the same time that their vertical penetration has increased. This is not the place for a sociology of knowledge. Suffice it that by the end of the nineteenth century, modernisation appeared to be a method for increasing the social good. At the same time, from the cognitive point of view, the substantive, modernity, came to indicate a structure driven by an internal crisis. The doubt that produced positive social and political accomplishments turned on its own products, and turned too against itself. The critique of traditional forms of life and thought typical of the early, confident phase of modernity gave way to self-criticism. While sociological and historical grounds can be adduced to explain the transformation of positive modernisation into a self-critical modern civilisation, the results of the Frankfurt school's attempt to join together the insights of Marx, Weber, and Freud suggest the possibility and the necessity of a broader synthesis. The historicaltheoretical (and pessimistic) conclusion of this orientation is Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. It argues that the traditional attitudes subjected to corrosive doubt were rationalised out of existence. The modern forms that have replaced them are now themselves the objects of critical doubt. Doubt becomes self-doubt; the critique loses its self-confidence, its justification can no longer be taken for granted. The result is a loss of anchorage and a 'crisis' of the modern sciences. The second-generation Frankfurt theorist Jiirgen Habermas has confronted this crisis in a series of works whose summation is the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas joins a theory of social action and a theory of the social system by means of a theory of social evolution that mediates between the two. The theory of social action can be interpreted as 49