“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 3” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Habermas’ final edition to his history of philosophy begins with the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. “By consistently maintaining that our only contact with the world is through our impressions, Hume makes short shrift of the concept of these two substances – mind and matter…. Hume uses subtle arguments to show that, under empiricist premises, the primary qualities ascribed to bodies in space and time as objective – i.e. the properties of motion, extension or weight – can also be traced back to subjective sensations. And just as there is no material substance, so there is no mental substance. If all that is evidently given to us are ephemeral sensory impressions, and if all individual contingent impressions, which are in turn suppressed by other perceptions, are different both from each other and from the objects reflected in them, how can such an impression represent a substance?” Habermas continues by detailing Hume’s skepticism, "The rejection of the substantialization of mind and body is a consequence of Hume’s epistemologically grounded scepticism concerning ontological statements about the constitution of the world…. Hume shares the common-sense notion of a world that exists independently of consciousness, but concerning the intrinsic constitution of which we can only speculate. Scepticism about cognitive access to nature as it is in itself does not forbid us from assuming the existence of nature in everyday life…. Hume aligns the psychology of cognition, which is supposed to explain the subjective conditions of possible knowledge of causal relations – and the meaning of causality itself – with the model of modern empirical science.”

Next, Habermas contrasts Hume with Kant, “Kant continues to treat the question of the human vocation and practical self-understanding as the central problem of philosophy. Now, however, this question has to be answered without the basic concepts of metaphysics and the corresponding fallacious inferences from ‘is’ to ‘ought’…. For him philosophy of religion and enlightenment are one and the same subject…. The enlightened person lives in an awareness of the tension between the indispensability of the exacting demands of reason and the finiteness of his capacities. Kant’s way of thinking is shaped by the unavoidability of this excessive demand on oneself and the awareness that human beings are dependent on the encouragement of their own powers. The centre of gravity of his work, therefore, is the tenacious struggle against the defeatism of reason and the equally tenacious search for stabilization through a ‘rational faith’ that inspires self-confidence…. In order to make room for practical knowledge, this theoretical cognition must be restricted to the realm of objects of possible experience and refrain from answering metaphysical questions, while rational orientation in action, in order to be able to count on justifiable practical knowledge, must be limited to well-defined questions of justice…. The subject can only ascertain the spontaneity of its independent thinking and of the autonomy of its actions in the light of its ‘self-made ideas’ and the laws it gives itself…. For the transcending power of reason, Kant paid the price of an abstract opposition between intelligible and phenomenal nature, an opposition reflected in the noumenal-empirical duality of human nature. This tension inevitably perturbs practical reason, which is now aware not only of its own finitude but also of the resistance of natural motives…. Kant believed that he could establish a ‘faith’ on the basis of practical reason…. With its power to transcend experience, reason first teaches human beings the limits of what they can know theoretically; then, with its normative power, practical reason challenges them to follow the moral law and to use their autonomy to morally overcome the resistance of their inner nature and to work politically to bring about a cosmopolitan condition…. This confirms the point on which a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking turns: the questions of religion and metaphysics that continue to resonate are, as it were, the tuning fork that produces the triad of rationally justified answers in the subject, who is completely reliant on himself and his ability to think for himself.” Kant states, “So far as morality is based on the conception of the human being as one who is free but who also, just because of that, binds himself through his reason to unconditional laws, it is in need neither of the idea of another being above him in order that he recognize his duty, nor, that he observe it, of an incentive other than the law itself.”

Habermas stresses the roles of culture and language in forming common knowledge, “The emerging economic and social sciences registered the increasing tendency of capitalist economic cycles to develop a life of their own and the emergence of new social classes and class conflicts. These developments reveal the weakness of a philosophy of the subject that was insensitive to the distinctive social-ontological character of the historically experienced reality of symbolically structured lifeworld contexts and had assimilated this reality of society and culture to that of nature as objectified by natural science…. Herder, Schleiermacher and Humboldt took up and developed Johann Georg Hamann’s basic idea that language, viewed as coeval with reason, possesses world-constituting power.”

For Habermas, Hegel is a return of philosophy to the metaphysical realm, “Hegel does not suppress the ritual core of the sacred, but makes the philosophical interpretation of the figure of Jesus – i.e. the earthly embodiment of the one and invisible God in the Son of Man – the fulcrum of the dialectical self-movement of an absolute spirit, which in turn comprises subjective and objective spirit within itself. With this understanding of the incarnation of the absolute as a simultaneously natural and symbolic embodiment, he lays the groundwork for an idealism that appropriates, in an individualizing Christian way, the Plotinian, but performatively interpreted, figure of thought of the self-externalization of the One – and thus merges the ancient understanding of the world with the modern self-understanding influenced by Christianity…. Hegel is the first philosopher to take ‘history’ seriously as the resistant medium in which the formation processes of finite rational beings take place. Starting from crises of social integration, he understands practical reason as a mediating force between the particular and the universal, which also overcomes the divisions [Entzweiungen] of modernity in the ethical figure of the modern constitutional state.”

Perhaps undervalued, and predating Hegel and Herder, Vico also stressed the roles of particularity, culture, and language in forming reason and common knowledge within a peoples, “Vico (1668–1744) had already understood why the social-ontological constitution of the object domain is such that the scientization of history cannot conform to the pattern of the objectification of nature as interpreted by the philosophy of the subject. His bold anti-Cartesian project for a ‘new science’ – the first edition of Vico’s Scienza Nuova appeared in 1725 – emphasizes that the historical formations of society and culture are object domains created by human beings themselves according to their own concepts…. An empirical science of the rise and fall of cultures must not assimilate the conceptually realistic structure of the human world to the nominalist natural scientific conception of nature…. The cultural and social objects of experience encountered in the lifeworld – communication processes, languages, documents, narratives, texts, works of art, styles and general cultural traditions, not to mention artefacts, procedures and technologies, actions, contexts of interaction, conventions, rights and institutions, and organizations and systems – are inherently conceptually structured…. Culture and society consist of symbolic products of subjective mind, congealed into objectivity, so to speak.”

Habermas returns to Hegel, “Hegel is a postmetaphysical thinker insofar as he no longer takes totality as such as his object – in the form of being, or the one, or of God-and-the-world – but conceives it in the shape of the performance [Performanz] of the acts of ‘sublation’ through which all the transitory particularizations and individuations of the universal are mediated in the concrete universal. The universal marks the semantic shape of the contents of thought…. Hegel understands the unity of thoughts and thinking in turn as the cycle of continuous steps of reflection of an all-encompassing subject…. Hegel now transforms the metaphysical idea of the ontological difference between the unifying and inherently infinite totality of that which is, on the one hand, and the many finite entities in the world, on the other, into the idealist notion of a process of reflection that runs through everything that exists in the world; this process in its entirety takes the place of the absolutely one and infinite subject…. He conceives of the comprehension that creates unity in performative terms, as the execution of a logical concatenation of all the individual steps of thought, progressing through affirmation and negation and ending in absolute knowledge.”Hegel, himself, states, “There lies in empiricism this great principle that what is true must exist in actuality and be there for perception. This principle is opposed to the ought, with which reflection inflates itself and looks down on actuality and the present in the name of a beyond, which is supposed to have its seat and existence in subjective understanding alone.”

Habermas stresses the lineage implied by the concept of postmetaphysics, “The genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking will come down to the practical alternative between whether, following the historical traces of the learning process of finite subjects and aware of our fallibility, we can still try to make autonomous use of our reason, guided by self-given norms, in order to retain some shaping practical influence, however exiguous, on our social existence; or whether there is no scope for such an exercise of autonomy, so that we are forced to come to the fatalistic or ‘realistic’ realization that all we can do is use technologically exploitable objectifying scientific knowledge to skillfully adapt given preferences to the self-generated social complexity of uncontrollable systemic contexts…. Under the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking, these two dependencies of which the subjective mind becomes aware in reflection – on its own organism, on the one hand, and on history, culture and society, on the other – stand out against the resistant objective world of sense experience which has always been thematized by the philosophy of the subject…. It experiences its lived bodily [leiblich] existence performatively in an intersubjectively shared sociocultural form of life as a form of dependence on organic and spiritual resources that empowers from behind.”

Finally, Habermas concludes with Peirce and pragmatism, “The idea of a definitive agreement on what is true and what is false, to be reached in the long run, only makes sense if the collective research process itself has characteristics that justify the prospect of a progressive elimination of errors and a cumulative learning process. The spontaneous achievements of the transcendental subject are replaced by the cooperative search for truth by empirical subjects, so that the expectation of a continuous increase in knowledge can only be justified by the procedural rationality of the research process in conjunction with the categorial framework of the language in which reality is represented…. It is crucial for the progress of knowledge that the current generation of the community of investigators is not confronted with a tabula rasa, but is embedded in a context of past interpretations to which it can refer when forming its hypotheses…. The logical framework of the forms of inference is thus intended to regulate a practice consisting of background beliefs, discourses, interpretations and tests in such a way that the unfinished sequence of constantly revised interpretations can be understood as the expression of learning processes of the community of investigators….. This is more reminiscent of the hermeneutic approach, which seeks to gain a better understanding of a text of which we have a prior understanding – to exhaust its potential for meaning more thoroughly.” Peirce states, “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge.”

“Kusamakura” by Natsume Soseki (translated by Meredith McKinney)

This short novel by Soseki is narrated by an artist, who is the only visitor to a hot spring inn up in the mountains far off from his home in Tokyo. “Yes, here among these mountains, in immediate contact with the phenomena of the natural world, everything I see and hear is intriguing for me. No special suffering can arise from simply being beguiled like this—at worst, surely, it is tired legs and the fact that I can’t eat fine food…. But why is there no suffering here? Simply because I see this scenery as a picture; I read it as a set of poems. Seeing it thus, as painting or poetry, I have no desire to acquire the land and cultivate it, or to put a railway through it and make a profit. This scenery—scenery that adds nothing to the belly or the pocket—fills the heart with pleasure simply as scenery, and this is surely why there is neither suffering nor anxiety in the experience…. If I picture myself, a sodden figure moving in this vast ink-wash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows, not as myself but as some other person, there’s poetry in this moment.”

The unnamed narrator spends much of his time on his retreat contemplating life, worldly attachments, and the beauty of art, “While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust. The reputation we grasp at, the glory that we seize, is surely like the honey that the cunning bee will seem sweetly to brew only to leave his sting within it as he flies. What we call pleasure in fact contains all suffering, since it arises from attachment. Only thanks to the existence of the poet and the painter are we able to imbibe the essence of this dualistic world, to taste the purity of its very bones and marrow. The artist feasts on mists, he sips the dew, appraising this hue and assessing that, and he does not lament the moment of death.”

At a tea ceremony at the inn, the narrator meets his host’s young nephew, who is about to depart to the war in Manchuria, “I’ve been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man’s arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming.”

Finally, our narrator contemplates the life of the aesthete, “Only by bringing myself to this unknown mountain village and steeping myself deep in its late spring world have I at last found within me the attitude of the pure artist. Once I have crossed this frontier, all the beauties of the earth become mine. Though no drop of paint nor iota of brushstroke ever meets the pure white canvas before me, I am nevertheless an artist of the highest order. I grant I do not equal Michelangelo in artistry, nor Raphael in skill, but my artist’s soul can take its place alongside those of the great men of antiquity, proud and equal. I have not made a single painting since arriving, indeed I almost feel that to have brought the painting box along at all was a mere whim. And you call yourself a painter? you may say with a sneer. But sneer though you may, I am for the present a true artist, a magnificent artist.”

“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 2” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Volume Two of Habermas’ magnum opus is where he recounts how the fissures between faith and knowledge solidified. First, Habermas notes the differences between classical Athens and Christian Jerusalem, “There remains the crucial difference between the metaphysical path of salvation, which privileges the thinking and intellectual contemplation of the sage as epistemic ways of approaching the unknowable One, and the religious path of salvation, which teaches the sinner's faith in the promise of the invisible but communicatively accessible God…. Christians believe that they can only be redeemed from their sins by God's prevenient grace and through faith in Christ's sacrificial death, the Platonist knows that he can only free his rational soul from the material entanglements of a corporeal existence and reunite it with the transcendent good through insight, that is, intellectual self-liberation.”

The lynchpin between classical and Christian philosophy was Aristotle. “Aristotle's writings on physics, biology and psychology assume as self-evident the idea of a hierarchical 'ladder' of nature, which has retained its relevance to the present day, extending from inorganic nature through self-reproducing plants and animals endowed with consciousness to ensouled human beings…. Individual things are composed of 'form' and 'matter'; and the law-governed connections between things are analysed from the perspective of a craftsman making a product in accordance with four causal aspects (the form, the material, the applied movement and the desired end). But since what exists as a whole is conceived as a self-sufficient cosmos, eternally resting within itself, the telos inherent in things cannot be understood on the model of the mode of production as a fixed or intended purpose. Rather, as in an organism, the 'telos' is 'implicit' in each thing as a specific or generic determination…. This teleological structure pervades that which is as a whole, so that in this respect Aristotle's ontology is congenial to the Christian doctrine of creation…. It is not primarily by reconceptualizing metaphysics in scientific terms that Aristotle leaves the via antiqua and points towards modernity, but rather by decoupling practical and theoretical reason…. The Aristotelian theory of virtue is not based on any metaphysical premises…. The bios theorêtikos is no longer conceived as a path leading to a transcendent goal; it loses the religious meaning of a preparation for a fulfilled life of the immortal soul after death. Rather, the philosopher's life, devoted to intellectual activity, is a source of pleasure and contains the reward of satisfaction in itself…. In accordance with the ancient ideal of the life of the wise man, the life of the theoretician is distinguished from the already privileged ways of life of the politician and the soldier, of the businessman and the craftsman, by the advantages one enjoys in the sublunar spheres. This is what ethics as such is about: it is a guide to the good life, which belongs in general to the telos of the human species.”

It was the juxtaposition of Plato, carried into the Middle Ages through Neoplatonism, and Aristotle, first subsumed through Aquinas via Albertus Magnus and the Arabs, that would form the foundations for western metaphysics, “In the Platonic theory of knowledge, experience, discursive thought, intellectual intuition and wisdom still refer to each other. The complex relationship between these cognitive faculties reflects the unity of the understanding of the world and of oneself, of theoretical and practical reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, constructs such a relationship only at the biographical level, through the philosopher's way of life dedicated to theory. In Aristotle, the perspective of a first person seeking practical orientation becomes so independent of the observer perspective of the natural scientist that the doctrine of metaphysical principles can no longer provide information about the principles of ethics. This task is now left to practical prudence, which no longer has to satisfy the demands of scientific knowledge. Ethical reflection is oriented towards a highest good that already lacks the redemptive power and transcendent position of the Platonic idea of the good. The downgrading of practical reason in the hierarchy of cognitive faculties goes hand in hand with the profanation of its goal—the good life assumes the concrete form of a telos in the world…. If, like Thomas, one wishes to discover the monotheistic god of creation and salvation in the anonymous shell of the 'unmoved mover', the ontotheological idea of a first being suggests itself as the common ground of philosophy and theology…. But God cannot be grasped with the senses, nor can he be subsumed under a generic concept (such as 'living being') or a specific concept (such as 'man' or 'plant'). Otherwise, he would just be one composite being among others. Using our natural reason, we can only infer God's existence indirectly from the effects he causes in the world…. This makes it all the more urgent to trace the boundaries between the realms of faith and knowledge, and thus to ask how far conclusive scientific knowledge extends into the realm of the truths of faith. Thomas chooses two indirect ways in which the human mind can get confirmation, at least in outline, of the divine essence, using metaphysical concepts alone: the first is the via negationis, the negation of general statements that we use to describe what we typically perceive as imperfect features of natural processes in the world; the second is the analogia entis, the analogical comprehension of qualities…. In both cases, we not only presuppose from the outset the teleological structure of being as a whole, but also tacitly assume that God has a personal nature. Otherwise we would not be able to know his essence either via negationis as the exalted compensation of perceived deficiencies, or per analogiam as the asymptotic perfectioning [infinitesimale Perfektionierung] of the most highly valued faculties of the human mind, that is, of an individuated mind embodied in a person.”

Habermas's Aquinas is the philosopher who, more than any other, re-ontologizes what Aristotle had cut loose, “Whereas theoretical reason aims at describing an existing ontic 'order' that reason itself does not produce but only considers (ordo quem ratio non facit, sed solum considerat), practical reason first produces such an order in the world (ordo quem ratio considerando facit) by guiding action accordingly. Practical reason owes its existence to the extension of the intellect to another faculty of the human mind, namely, the will, in order to guide it in action…. By providing practical philosophy with a metaphysical foundation, Thomas removes it from the sphere of mere considerations of prudence and returns it to the realm of ratio. This enables him, in contrast to Aristotle, to ground the binary coding of the free decisions of the will as 'good' and 'bad' in the truth code of rational knowledge…. Ethics can indeed be guided by the theoretical philosophical concepts of the ens realissimum and the summum bonum; but this 'highest good' remains an ontological abstraction from the 'face-to-face' encounter with the transcendent God.”

The political consequences of this ontology are treated as a shift in the order of the disciplines, not as doctrine, “For Aristotle, human beings are inherently 'political' in the sense that they can realize their telos only in exercising their rights as citizens within the framework of the polis…. For Thomas, this becomes animal sociale et politicum. He sees how Aristotle defines human nature through language as a medium of communication and sociability. Language makes possible a form of cooperation based on a division of labour by which human beings can compensate for the deficiencies of their natural endowment…. Thomas is more likely to have in mind the kinship groups of the Old Testament when he declares the 'oikos', the family household and its associated economic ties, to be the nucleus and paradigm of society…. Augustine’s relationship between civitas divina and civitas terrena had shaped political theory insofar as, in the former, human beings are united under the realized law of the New Testament in a community of love governed solely by virtue, whereas, on earth, the law of the Old Testament is in the hands of a political authority that administers justice by spreading fear and terror with the sword. From this perspective, which is informed by the theology of history, the ethical already appears to be superior to the political…. The political goal of 'the good life' is subordinated to the ethical goal of blessedness, not only for the individual but also for the organization of society…. From this perspective, in contrast to Aristotle, ethics also takes precedence in the system of sciences over politics as the doctrine of wise government.”

Ockham’s nominalism introduces mentalism and contingency into God’s actions, freeing the immanent world from necessity, “Ockham rejects the claim that 'abstractive knowledge does not attain the object in itself under its perfect idea but only in a certain diminished likeness, while intuitive knowledge attains the object in itself under its perfect idea’…. He extends the faculty of intuitive experience from sensible to intelligible objects, so that the introspectively accessible acts of the human mind become as much objects of cognition as the things and states of affairs encountered in the world…. This blurs Scotus's juxtaposition of the two cognitive faculties of intuitive experience and abstract cognition to such an extent that Ockham can also question the primacy of intuition and the dependence of conceptually abstract cognition on intuition…. Ockham transforms the ontological dualism of mind and matter into the epistemological relationship between the subject of knowledge and the world of objects…. The nominalist de-structuring of the ontological order makes external nature the object of a science that, relying solely on natural reason, must search for traces of the order contingently established by God in the diversity of the objects of experience we encounter. And because it is directed in a similar way to internal nature, the subjectivity of the human mind, this objectifying view of external nature generates the opposition between subject and object that would eventually make epistemology, along with rational natural law, the royal road of modern philosophy.”

Luther’s reforms would unleash a chain reaction of new ideas through western Europe that was unfathomable at its start, “Luther no longer attempts to explain the believer's encounter with God with the philosophical intention of clarifying the propositional content of this experience and, if possible, justifying it on philosophical grounds. He develops a hermeneutic awareness of the methodological primacy of the performative meaning of religious experience over its propositional content; but he no longer seeks to reconstruct and justify the latter rationally in order to prove that faith is rational. Rather, he focuses on the relationship between the sinner struggling for salvation and God, and decouples the act of faith from reason as such.” This irony is the hinge of the whole second volume, “It is precisely the theocentric doctrine that human destiny is unconditionally dependent on God's inscrutable mercy that, as a result of the resolute emancipation of faith from all metaphysics, opens the door to an anthropocentric turn in philosophy — and thus becomes the forerunner of postmetaphysical thought.”

Habermas locates the origin of that communicatively accessible God in Augustine, whose inward turn discovers the will as a faculty distinct from the intellect and, with it, the first-person stance that Luther will later seal off from the world entirely. Henceforth, after Luther, theology and philosophy would separate into their own spheres of interest, never to overlap, “Theology is supposed to follow the epistemic stance of the believer 'before God', while philosophy and science take the position of an inquiring observer 'towards the world'. Luther sees no way of mediating between these two epistemic stances. This definitive decoupling of faith from knowledge is a consequence of the doctrine of justification…. Faith depends on the motivational condition of a radical awareness of sin and an intense desire for existential conversion—and is no longer tied to the context of a particular worldview. Faith is a matter of trust, not of knowledge…. Until Luther, philosophy and theology had sought to demonstrate their truth by embedding the articles of faith in the context of a well-founded worldview—in other words, by proving the coherence of faith and knowledge…. There is nothing to be learnt from the knowledge gathered coram mundo for the faith experiences coram Deo. For the latter, all that counts is trust in God's promise of salvation, which can be trustworthy or untrustworthy, and not the affirmation of propositions, which can be true or false…. From a sociological point of view, this fideistic turn amounts to a self-referential isolation of religious faith from any interference by propositions from other domains…. From the point of view of the participants, the truths of faith, tailored to truthfulness or authenticity, become detached from the spectrum of assertoric and normative validity claims raised for statements and the content of statements…. The price paid by Luther for the renewal of an internalized, subjectively deepened faith was a fideistic separation of faith and knowledge, which in the following centuries called into question the religious mode of faith as such all the more, the more the faith thus sealed off also lost its roots in the ritual practice of the community…. Without a connection to God's will and his promise of salvation, practical philosophy must separate questions of justice from the perspective of the righteous life that leads to salvation, and justify moral precepts by reason alone. It must also face the resulting problem of how rational morality and rational law, tailored to questions of justice alone, relate to the socially integrative energies of moral cohesion in an increasingly secular society…. From the point of view of a philosopher who also saw himself as a natural scientist, laws of nature could still be traced back to a divine lawgiver, but they could no longer be understood in an ontotheological double sense as at once naturally necessary and normatively commanding laws of God. In any case, once the theological aspect of salvation history recedes into the background, the idea of nature as a self-sustaining whole operating according to unchanging mechanical laws suggests itself…. Once philosophy is no longer interested in the salvific relevance of the god of salvation, it makes no essential difference to the concept of law whether the divine lawgiver is conceived in deistic terms as limited to the establishment and maintenance of a self-reproducing nature (Descartes), or in pantheistic terms as merging with the living spirit of nature (Spinoza), or in materialistic terms as playing no role at all (Hobbes)…. The philosophy of the subject is faced with the question of where to locate the normative dimension of the right and the good as such.”

Luther had successfully sealed faith off from within. The natural sciences now are able to do it from without, “The modern natural sciences and their philosophical foundations claim a monopoly on scientific knowledge that deprives faith of its rational character and relegates it entirely to the realm of the irrational…. As Hegel would note, Descartes's attitude of not accepting as true any proposition that does not withstand the most scrupulous rational scrutiny embodies the modern consciousness of freedom.” Spinoza takes the opposite tack, not sealing religion off, but going in after what is salvageable, “Spinoza is the first philosopher to seek to understand the biblical tradition in its historical context in order to reconstruct a truth content hidden in religion itself; he wants to teach religion about its own rational core.” And the modern political settlement is what emerges from the wreckage of the scholastic worldview, “A crucial legacy is the conceptual tools of late scholastic natural law, which Hobbes and Spinoza put on a secular footing: political rule can only be legitimized by the general consent of free and equal citizens who agree with each other—each with all the others—to unite in a political body and cumulatively transfer their natural individual power to the legally constituted authority of a government…. Like Hobbes and Spinoza, Locke endows human beings with primordial natural rights. From the right to self-preservation follow the fundamental rights to life and bodily integrity, liberty and property.” The final question is one Habermas returns to, whether reason alone can generate the normative substance that the metaphysical path of salvation used to supply, or whether it can only inherit it from theology.

“Smoke” by Ivan Turgenev (translated by Donald Rayfield)

This short novel by Turgenev takes place almost entirely amongst the large Russian community taking in the waters, the mountains, and the casinos in Baden Baden. “If a dozen Russians get together, the very first question to arise—as you’ve been able to see today—will be the meaning, the future of Russia, all in generalizations, from Leda and the Swan onward, with no evidence or conclusions. They keep chewing over this miserable question like children with a mouthful of rubber: no juice, no point. And of course, that means the rotten West will get a kicking. Some parable, you might think! The West beats us on all counts, but it’s rotten! It wouldn’t be so bad… if we really did despise it, but it’s all hot air and lies. We certainly curse it, but the only thing we value is its opinion, I mean the opinion of Parisian morons.”

The theme of Russia’s place in Europe recurs often amongst this affluent Russian set, “I’m a Westernizer, I’m devoted to Europe, or to be precise, I’m devoted to an educated culture, which we Russians make such gentle fun of nowadays, to civilization—yes, yes, that’s the right word for it—and I love it with all my heart, I believe in it, and I have no other faith, and am not going to change…. All the other terms—national character, or glory—have a smell of blood about them. To hell with them!… Yes sir, I both love and hate my Russia, my strange, dear, nasty, precious motherland.” Class is another recurring motif in the novel, “Litvinov felt more and more uncomfortable. His pride, his decent plebeian pride, was making him feel indignant. What did he, the son of a minor civil servant, have in common with them, these Petersburg military aristocrats? He loved everything they hated; he hated everything they loved—of that he was only too clearly aware, he could feel it with his entire being.”

The entire plot of the novel centers around Litvinov and a past love, who after a decade apart, reenters his life just when he is about to be married, “Litvinov tried to expel Irina’s image from his head, but he had no success. That was the reason that he hadn’t even remembered about his fiancée; he felt that today Irina’s image would not give way. He proposed, without worrying any more, to wait for this entire “strange story” to reach a conclusion. That conclusion could not be far off, and Litvinov had no doubt at all that it would be a wholly innocuous and natural one.” However, the story proceeds as expected to all except Litvinov, perhaps, “That night Litvinov didn’t sleep at all, and didn’t even undress. He was very distressed. Being honest and fair-minded, he could understand the importance of obligations, the sacrosanct nature of duty, and he would have found it shameful to try to be evasive, given his weakness and his misconduct. At first, he was overcome by numb consternation, and it took him a long time to shed this constant half-conscious, dark, oppressive, and confused feeling. Then he was overwhelmed by horror at the thought that his future, which he had with great effort virtually assured, his future was once more enveloped in darkness. He was horrified at the thought that the solid house which he had only just erected had suddenly collapsed…. Positive people, like Litvinov, should not let themselves be carried away by passion, for it unhinges the very meaning of their life. But nature can’t handle logic, our human logic; it has its own, which we can’t understand and won’t recognize until it runs over us like a carriage wheel.”