Philosophy and the Dialectic of Modernity :: Philosophical Essays

Philosophy and the dialectical of ModernityABSTRACT Habermas social philosophy can now be perceived in its oppositional structures and their symbolic meaning. His repeat of structural opposition finds its expression in the symbolism which pervades The Philosophic discourse of Modernity in the opposition amidst the dreaded myth of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the redemptive fantasy of the path yet to be taken. to a enceinteer extent significant for the intellectual culture of innovationality is the neglect, by erasure on the part of this esteemed philosopher, of the great free rein of philosophy in our time. This is the drama occasioned by the dialectical struggle, rushing to climax in the 20th Century, between Enlightenment reason and its Counterenlightenment opponent. The struggle between these philosophicalal constellations is refracted in the great wars of this century. Thus the drama of the philosophical thought of the century and its historical development is lost. The philosophic discourse of modernity has yet to be written. Its text, once it has been freed from the pertinacity of ideological hostilities and their erasures and concealing circumlocutions, will at the same time permit the sought-for foundation for social philosophy and a just society it is the philosophic framework of Modernity itself which is the foundation of all modern philosophies, in the dialectic of Enlightenment and its Counterenlightenment other. The social philosophy of Jurgen Habermas, outstanding philosopher and master dialectician of our time, has an immediate spell to American philosophers, educated in the history of the Protestant migrations to the New origination in search of religious freedom educated also in the Founding Fathers who drew up a constitution for a modern republic heralded by Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence proclaiming the catholicity of human equality and natural rights educated as well in the social philosophy of American pragm atism, in which Enlightenment principles of democracy and learning become normative social processes.The appeal of Habermas to American philosophers long acculturated in the Enlightenment tradition is that of a voice speaking for reason and evaluator he stands forth philosophically on behalf of rehabilitating the Enlightenment in the panorama of various current modes of thought engaged in its undermining. Habermas has been widely commended for his unassailable unequivocal stand as a German intellectual against the Nazi movement and the Holocaust it produced, and against any revisionist circumlocutions seeking to obscure those atrocities. Habermas is also commended for his forgoing of Martin Heideggers complicity with Nazism and his retreat to linguistic mysticism.