Martin Matustik

Can we keep relying on sources of values dating back to the Axial Age, or do cognitive changes in the present age require a completely new foundation? An uncertainty arises with the crisis of values that can support the human in the age of artificial intelligence. Should we seek contemporary access points to the archaic origins of the species? Or must we also imagine new Anthropocenic-Axial values to reground the human event? In his most recent work, Habermas affirms the continuing importance of the contemporary access to the First Axial values, but before him Jaspers anticipates that a second cognitive revolution opens areas that may be receptive to new value foundations. Habermas’ justification of the postsecular turn may not be thinkable without Jaspers’ discovery of the postaxial imaginary.

What does race add to class, as both are secular social categories? The difficulties of invidious nationalism and the conservation of races that would not foment holy wars of terror persist for both secular or postsecular theorists. Postsecular thinkers are in a stronger position than a secular theorist to challenge religiously inflected social integrations, invidious nationalism, and fundamentalism.Unmasking them as social formation proffers an external criticism, to speak of them as sacralizations of identity exposes them at the root. Secular theorists ignore postsecular sensibility at the peril of failing to challenge the invidious claim to roots that secular nationalism and religious fundamentalism profess.

In this study on post-nationalist and post-traditional identity I address critically the multicultural audiences of Europe and the USA. I reflect on Habermas's notions of constitutional patriotism and permanent democratic revolution, Kierkegaard's requirements of self-appropriation and existential living, and Havel's Levinasian dramatization of vertical identity in the Czechoslovak 1989 existential, 'velvet' revolution. ;Habermas asks what post-traditional life-form integrates socially Kierkegaard's individual. Existential self-choice grounds ethical living and moral acting. Yet, Habermas finds existential beginnings monological, self-choice decisionistic, and inwardness untranslatable into modern value-spheres. ;First, I argue that these charges betray a distorted received view of Kierkegaard. Second, I search with Habermas for those validity-domains which integrated Kierkegaard's individual. Third, I ask with Kierkegaard what existential model sustains individual and community. Fourth, I read a Kierkegaardian corrective into critical theory. This movement repeats the question: can we do for Kierkegaard what Habermas suggests, but in Kierkegaard's mode? ;I oppose the received view of Kierkegaard and argue formally a strong corrective-thesis against Habermas's formal theory with practical intent which defines the structure of practical discourse but forgets the requirements 'how' one inhabits an existential-temporal model of autonomy, communication, and the ideal: if the individual becomes autonomous through self-choice, then the 'how' of self-appropriating and of reduplicating one's identity originates a life-form which allows one to act autonomously and to communicate ethically. This 'how' of existential pathos signifies the difficulty of beginnings and marks formally by immanently vertical transcendence Habermas's formal translation of Kierkegaard into immanently horizontal transcendence towards the discursive other. ;I defend Habermas's use of Kierkegaard to critique nationalism and fundamentalism but offer a corrective: in conjunction with Habermas's reading of Hegel and Marx with Kantian means and of Kant through Mead's pragmatism and Durkheim's sociology of religion, I ask: what life-form is projected within the ideal of existentially communicating community? Habermas's permanent democratic revolution cures destructive crises-trends; Kierkegaard affords a requirement of permanent existential revolution which allows for receptive and self-active, multicultural and radically egalitarian, non-patriarchal and non-authoritative identities

Contradictory interpretations have been applied to history-making events that led to the end of the cold war: Václav Havel, using Kierkegaardian terms, called the demise of totalitarianism in east-central Europe an "existential revolution"'' (i.e. an awakening of human responsibility, spirit, and reason), while others hailed it as a victory for the "New World Order." Regardless of one''s point of view, however, it is clear that the global landscape has been dramatically altered. Where once the competition between capitalism and communism provided a basis for establishing political- and self-identity, today, the destructive forces of nationalist identity and religious and secular fundamentalism are filling the void. In his timely and significant new work, Martin J. Matutík synthesizes the critical social theory of J rgen Habermas with the existentialism of Havel and Søren Kierkegaard to present an alternative to the conceptualization of identity based on nationalism that is stoking the flames of civil wars in Europe and racial and ethnic tensions in eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. In so doing, he reinvigorates critical social theory, and points the way toward a multicultural, post-national identity and a democracy capable of resisting both imperial consensus and xenophobic backlash. Offering the most extensive examination of Habermas''s and Kierkegaard''s critiques of nationalist identity available, Postnational Identity dramatically confronts the traditional view of existential philosophy as antisocial and uncritical. This volume shows how Kierkegaardian theory and practice of radically honest communication allows us to rethink the existential in terms of Habermas''s communicative action, and vice versa. As the author explains the foundations of his work in the Preface: Critical theory and existential philosophy, brought together in this book, engender two forms of suspicion of the present age. The critical theorist, such as J rgen Habermas, unmasks the forms in which social and cultural life become systematically distorted by the imperatives of political power and economic gain. The existential critic, like Søren Kierkegaard and Václav Havel, is suspicious of the various ways in which individuals deceive themselves or other people. This study aims to integrate Kierkegaard''s and Havel''s existential critique of motives informing human identity formation with Habermas''s critique of the colonialization of fragmented, anomic modern life by systems of power and money....My argument is that existential critique and social critique complement each other and overcome their respective limitations. Organized into three distinct sections, the book begins with a study of individual and group identity in Habermas''s work on communicative ethics. This section draws on Habermas''s readings of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Mead, and Durkheim. Part Two uses Kierkegaard''s existential ethics to broaden Habermas''s notion of identity. The argument proceeds from the performative character of existential individuality to Kierkegaard''s theory and practice of communication, and, finally, to the regulative community ideal projected in his critique of the present age. In the book''s final section, the author addresses the question of identity to the nationalist strife of the present age. Overall, the book sets forth the argument that a move from fundamentalist constructions of identity to postnational, open, and multicultural identity is a critical ideal on which both the existential and socio-political suspicion of the present age converge. Postnational Identity is addressed to the three multicultural audiences that gave it shape: western Europe, eastern Europe, and the United States. One of the first works to treat seriously the existential thought of Václav Havel, the book will hold enormous appeal for students and professionals involved in existential philosophy, critical theory, philosophy, and, more generally, political science, literary theory, communications, and cultural studies.

This collection of essays is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. It begins with an overview of philosophy's role and responsibility or "task" and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. The authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language.

No one will deny that we live in a world where evil exists. But how are we to come to grips with human atrocity and its diabolical intensity? Martin Beck Matuštík considers evil to be even more radically evil than previously thought and to have become all too familiar in everyday life. While we can name various moral wrongs and specific cruelties, Matuštík maintains that radical evil understood as a religious phenomenon requires a religious response where the language of hope, forgiveness, redemption, and love can take us beyond unspeakable harm and irreparable violence. Drawing upon the work of Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, this work is written as a series of meditations. Matuštík presents a bold new way of dealing with one of humanity's most intractable problems

"This volume represents a fine assessment of the continuing applicability of Kierkegaard’s thought for the 21st century."—The Reader’s Review "Matustík and Westphal have set some agile minds to the task of drawing out the threads of Kierkegaard’s influence on postmodern and contemporary philosophy, from gender to politics and from Buber to Derrida." —Choice "... Usefully and effectively establishes Kierkegaard as a living presence in contemporary thought. It will help students of Kierkegaard attend to aspects of his thought that have eluded their attention, and it will challenge those engaged with contemporary continental philosophy not to shelter themselves from the provocations and interrogrations still uncomfortably pressing in Kierkegaard’s writings." —International Philosophical Quarterly "The standard of the essays and the calibre of the contributors are uniformly high. This is indeed one of the better collections relating to Kierkegaard published in recent years, and should do much to extend discussion of his work..." —Modern Believing "... a text of immense significance and value.... As a research tool it will surely prove indispensable." —Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter "It will be a helpful supplementary areading for teaching... the contemporary readings of Kierkegaard introduced here continue to reveal new and more exciting depths to his extraordinary philosophy." —Teaching Philosophy These essays engage Kierkegaard in conversation with critical social theory and postmodern thought. Covering a diversity of themes, this collection still reflects consensus—Kierkegaard is to be taken seriously as a philosopher at the turn of the twenty-first century

This philosophical-political profile offers the first of its kind intellectual reconstruction of HabermasOs defining existential and historical situations, his generational profile and interventions, his impact on as well as the discontents that his life work generates in others. In this work the reader is taken on a journey with Habermas through the 20th-century intellectual and political history from the defeat of Nazism, to the Cold War restoration of the 1950s, the student movement of the 1960s, the historical revisions of the 1970s and 1980s, the hope of the post-Wall era after 1989, all the way to the controversies surrounding the allied wars of intervention against Iraq and Serbia in the 1990s