Jay Bernstein

Jurgen Habermas' construction of a critical social theory of society grounded in communicative reason is one of the very few real philosophical inventions of recent times that demands and repays extended engagement. In this elaborate and sympathetic study which places Habermas' project in the context of critical theory as a whole past and future, J. M. Bernstein argues that despite its undoubted achievements, it contributes to the very problems of ethical dislocation and meaninglessness it aims to diagnose and remedy. Bernstein further argues that the precise character of the failures of Habermas' program demonstrate the necessity for a return to the first generation critical theory of Adorno. Reading across nearly the whole range of Habermas' corpus, Recovering Ethical Life traces the development of the theory of communicative reason from its inception in Knowledge and Human Interests through its elaboration in The Theory of Communicative Action and into its defense against postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity . In separate chapters Habermas' readings of Freud, Durkheim amd Mead, Adorno and Foucault, Castoriadis and Taylor are critically examined. The focus of Bernstein's analyses, however, is always problem centered and thematic rather than textual psychoanalytic theory as an account of self knowledge, the competing claims of ethical identity and moral reason, the place of judgment in practical reason, and the debate between philosophies of language based communities versus those oriented towards world-disclosure. Critical theory is unique among current philosophies in engaging with the problems of social injustice and nihilism by siding with an abstract moral reason that forfeits the processes of intersubjective recognition it intended to salvage. Even in the fine grain of Habermas' account of performative contradictions and the theory of discourses of application, Bernstein perceives a squandering of the resources of an ethical life in need of transfiguration.

Arguably, the most promising and compelling route to demonstrating the significance of Hegel’s thought to contemporary philosophy has been the series of recent readings that construe Hegel as continuing and completing Kant’s Copernican turn. Paul Redding explicitly locates his interpretation within this program, seeing the hermeneutic dimension of Hegel’s thought as providing for the possibility of continuing the Kantian project. Kant’s Copernican turn can be loosely stated as the procedure of reflectively uncovering unexperienced conditions of experience that contribute to the nature of experience in ways that require its further re-determination and re-description. What a hemeneutic take on this reflective procedure adds is that foremost among those conditions are contexts of intersubjective or dialogical relations—structures of recognition. While perhaps disappointing to anyone interested in the problem of textual interpretation, there is finally nothing more to Redding’s account of Hegel’s “hermeneutics” than the establishing of recognitive structures as forming the ultimate horizon of human experience. I take Redding’s relentless tracking of the problem of recognition to be one of his book’s virtues.

The practical problem of assuaging the opponents of animal research may be solved without formally addressing (or resolving) the underlying ethical questions of the debate. Specifically, a peaceful boycott of the "fruits" of animal research may lead to a wider cessation of such research, than, say, vocal or even violent protest. To assist those who might wish to participate in such a boycott- and, moreover, to critically inform them of the implications of their actions-1 offer a modest proposal: the use of an "animal research advance directive", a form which enumerates precisely which "fruits of research" are declined

In the "Introduction" to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel provides a method of investigation wherein our comprehension of the nature of knowledge is to emerge through a process in which various forms or shapes of consciousness test their own conception of knowledge. For Hegel, this method is legitimated by the thought that each way or manner of cognizing what is must presuppose an idea of what is to count as a successful cognition; hence, each form of consciousness involves both a conception of what knowing is, what cognitive experience is like, and what is presumed to be revealed in experience so understood. For example, if one believes that we learn about the world through perception, as Locke construes it, then one will equally presuppose that, in perceptual experience, we gain knowledge of particulars through the diversity of sensory properties each exhibits. Phenomenological testing involves seeing whether consciousness can deliver the knowledge promised; in the case of perception, the question will be whether direct perceiving can account for the unity of an object whose specificity depends on it exemplifying an array of universal properties. Perceptual consciousness learns it cannot account for the object in this way because its passivity debars it from adequately locating the source or character of a thing's unity; it is thus forced to reconceptualize both itself and its concept of an object. Hegel calls the process in which a new self-understanding and a new concept of an object emerge from the failure of correspondence in the previous form "experience".

Moral modernity, including political modernity, is founded on the series of acts whereby, throughout Europe, torture was banned. Torture became the paradigm of moral injury, of what must never be done to an individual because it is intrinsically degrading and devaluing. The body of the torture victim is the meeting place of state and citizen: either the rule of law recognizes bodily autonomy as its own moral basis - broken laws standing for broken bodies - or the law becomes a vehicle of sovereign authority that knows no limit. Thus, it is the morally charged conception of the rule of law that holds together the ban on torture with the recognition of human dignity: remove the prohibition on torture and neither the liberal state nor modern moral life is intelligible. The connections between the abolition of torture, the rule of law, and the institution of human dignity was forged in the once enormously influential and now virtually unknown On Crimes and Punishments by Beccaria