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34 1 Habermas: A Closet Kantian Let us first turn to a still contemporary debate, between Habermas and Gadamer on our topic of the nature and possibility of critical practice under historical conditions. It is a debate in which there is ultimately at stake a Cartesian-style emptying of the apple basket, Habermas defending his conviction of the heuristic value of invoking a capacity for “pure” reflection, the provenance of which is made clear in our discussion of Kant’s aesthetic in the next chapter. As a means of highlighting the continuing influence of Cartesian/Kantian values, and the manner in which those values may be inscribed even on a contemporary awareness of the “problem of history,” the Gadamer-Habermas debate proves a valuable starting point here. But it also provides a timely opportunity to furnish some detail on those aspects of Gadamer’s philosophy with most pertinence to our concern with effective history; hence the imbalance in the first section of this chapter, in which Gadamer’s work on the themes of reason, dialogue, and language receives somewhat greater attention than Habermas’s corresponding insights. Gadamer and Habermas: Points of Comparison Reason Both Gadamer and Habermas establish their work on understanding within history in the context of their shared Enlightenment inheritance, in particular its scientistic conception of reason. Gadamer rejects this inheritance, insofar as he holds the distinction “between history and the knowledge of it” (TM 282), between objects and the methods of their identification and analysis, to be of secondary importance to understanding , an abstraction from the fundamental unity of “object” and “method” that makes understanding more “situated” (TM 301–2) than it is “objective.” If the lesson of the natural sciences has traditionally taught the primacy of the objective stance, which constitutes the topic of our critical investigation as “there” to be understood more fully, manipu- 35 H A B E R M A S lated more effectively, and profited from progressively, then the lesson of the “historical sciences,” in Gadamer’s view, teaches that “the apparent opposition of the knowing subject and his object is eliminated.”1 And this amounts not merely to a restriction of objectivity, allowing objectivity to continue as an, albeit limited, possibility; Gadamer argues that we must profoundly review our knowledge practices, and accept that the status of traditional objectifying methods is changed at its very core by the manner in which past, present, and future—a whole tradition of presuppositions—are present and implicated in every instance of understanding .2 This is no cause for disappointment, Gadamer reassures us (TM 9); only a lingering nostalgia for the certainty allegedly available to a reason “pure” of its past, present, and future would regard it as such. For understanding, within the “human” (but also the “natural”)3 sciences, is simply not measurable against the ideal of certainty by which the tradition of reason-as-objectivity is enthused; as an event that happens to one (TM 300), it is already in train by the time one would measure its allegedly objective merit. And Habermas too would undermine the complacency of scientism , with its ideal of the transcendental subject ever expanding its knowledge of the empirical world. He suggests that we drop this “somewhat sentimental presupposition” as unjustifiable except heuristically, and as heuristically limiting, and that we take the division between the transcendental and the empirical, with which Kant, as we shall see in the next chapter, begins his critical project, to be utterly “exhausted”;4 it is, Habermas claims, part of a wholesale philosophical hankering after a lost, a pre-reflective, world, a “before the fall,” irretrievable to human understanding except as an unprovable, unknowable, unthinkable, yet unquestionable regulator. Hence, on Habermas’s account, the adherence to objectivity is mere wish fulfillment, the practical expression of a philosophical desire for absolute Truth. And hence the so-influential split between the transcendental and the empirical that has plagued philosophical efforts to account for understanding: a transcendental perspective , or experience, is invoked as a heuristic so that the unquestioned value of objectivity operates as a procedural principle of knowledge practices; but, juxtaposed with this transcendental perspective, everything else—including the knowing subject, including her knowledge practices—is an object, open in principle to empirical analysis. Which, according to Habermas, disastrously reduces our interpretive possibilities , and therefore our capacity to understand, since the model of knowledge that positions the knower over and above a world of objects that includes herself remains “confined,” as Habermas expresses it, “to...

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