STEPHEN WATSON

jürgen habermas and

jean-françois lyotard:
post-modernism and the
crisis of rationality

’Krisis’ was Husserl’s term for it: the failure of modern

thought to provide firm foundations for human endeavors,
theoretical or practical, the dream of the Englightenment’s
endless ’r6cherche de la verite’ gone wrong. The Enlighten-
ment had believed in this search: Hobbes, Locke, Condillac,
Spinoza, even Kant. Perhaps Kant especially believed it, hav-
ing structured all the transcendental arguments of the first
Critique around the victories won by Galileo and Newton on
the Kamfplatz of metaphysics and its belief that there could
be a univocal methodology for the recovery of the truths of the
objective and empirically given world. Wittgenstein’s Tracta-
tus or Carnap’s Aufbau are usually identified as its modern
legacy. Wittgenstein saw this belief ultimately shatter and the
Enlightenment’s project for a homogeneous reason that was
one in its various applications fell into, as he put it, ’a motley

play’ without foundations in the bedrock of ostensive and im-

mediate links to the real. But, Husserl himself turned back to
the Enlightenment to save it, returning to Descartes and the
Cogito to ground what scientific method by itself could not.
When all was said and done, the Enlightenment’s goal was
not dissolved in his dealing with this Krisis, but purportedly
fulfilled in the intellect’s capacity to intuit the invariant es-
sential structures science sought.
This paper will consider the attempts of two contemporary
thinkers to come to grips with the significance of modernism
and its ground in the Enlightenment’s model of rationality and
philosophical practices and ultimately their effect upon an-
alyses of social practices as a whole. The recent work of
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 Jurgen Habermas and Jean-Frangois Lyotard has centered
on this topic and can be seen to provide controversial and
countervailing tendencies vis-a-vis the problems it presents.
The dialogue that the works of the two writers sets off, then,
can be seen as articulating the space, and perhaps the limits
of contemporary thought in its response to the contributions
and failings of modernism and the ’Krisis’ it underwrites.

Ii ~

,~

Over the course of some twenty-five years Jurgen Habermas

has attempted to think through this crisis in rationality by un-
raveling its emergence within the development of Western
thought, a tracing which can be initially gleaned from the clos-
ing chapters of two of his most important works, Theory and
Practice and Knowledge and Human Interest. The account
of rationality disclosed by Habermas in this analysis discloses
shifting constellations in the bonds between dogmatism, rea-
son, and decision,2 ones which implicate both a decline from
origins as well as outlining the possibilities of fulfillment.
Habermas’ archaeology discloses the original strata of this
problematic in the Greek state. There, the theoros was the
representative sent by Greek cities to public celebrations.
&dquo;Through theoria, that is, through looking on, he abandoned
himself to the sacred events.&dquo;3 In the language of philo-
sophia, theoria was transferred to ‘looking on,’ to contempla-
tion of the cosmos, where it, too, presupposed the demarca-
tion between the immutable and the mutable. The Logos is
held to be the reality of Being, purged of inconstancy and
uncertainty and relegating doxa to the realm of the mutable
and the perishable. In viewing the immortal order of the Cos-
mos, the philosopher brings him or herself into accord with its
order and, consequently, theoria enters the conduct of life. In
so doing the reasoner orders him or herself in accordance
with the Logos and is purified of the demands placed upon
the soul by passions that are not ’in order.’ To speak Kantian,
here pure reason is of itself practical. There is no split be-
tween knowledge and human interest.

The Enlightenment slowly, but inevitably, begins to transform

this structure. To the Greeks’ contamination of the mind by
the prejudice of passion, a new prejudice is added, indeed
emphasizing the notion of pre-judice for the first time, the
prejudice of tradition, for example in Descartes’ search for the
archimedean point of the Cogito to escape the Charybdis of
scholasticism. The philosopheme of foundations, which so
2 characterizes the Enlightenment’s ’rdcherche de la verite,’

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 however, belongs originally to Bacon and his return to that
other form of immediacy which formed the zero degree of
modern certainty, now to the empirical particulars, the givens
of experience, in accord with the rise of ’experimental’ sci-
ence. Dogmatism here is seen as arising from attempts to
rise above the facts of the visible world. Still, this should not
be seen as a reversal of Greek metaphysics, or Platonism in
particular. The visible world, the laws of the empirical world
are precisely seen as immutable.

Nor should it be seen, Habermas rightly argues, simply as the

shift that was to manifest itself with ’positivism.’ Man was still
penetrating the veil of ignorance and finding himself there.
Interest and knowledge still found a bond, albeit a fragile one.
Hobbes, Holbach, Gassendi all appear to lead reason both to
a knowledge of what nature is and to instruction on how man
is to conduct himself in accordance with nature. Contempla-
tion and felicity are neatly conjoined, a conjunction which will
not be carried out in positivism, where ’value’ will ultimately
end up having no rational content, having been transferred
behind a now impenetrable veil of irrational and unverifiable
preferences-what the Enlightenment had already on a very
limited scale described as ’tastes.’
Before the climactic emergence of positivism, the tradition
which integrally conjoins knowledge and human interest
flourished for one brief and last time in metaphysics, during
the high mark of German Idealism. Habermas stops here to
praise Fichte, approvingly quoting the famous passage from
the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre that equates dogmatism with
a form of what we would call now the ’myth of the given.’ &dquo;The

principle of the dogmatist is represented by faith in things for

their own sake: thus an indirect faith in their own self which is
dispersed and supported only borne by objects.&dquo;4
In this statement one finds intact the new constellation that
German Idealism implies. Dogmatism simply amounts to
holding onto facts. That is, dogmatism involves the identifica-
tion of objective facts in opposition to a constituting subjectiv-
ity. In fact it is just this opposition that defines dogmatism-
and thus the threat of dogmatism becomes all pervasive and
universal. All claims to knowledge are in a sense marginally
dogmatic. Likewise, this means that dogmatism in forgetting
the subjective context of its constitution amounts to a de-
unification, a dispersal of consciousness. The function of ra-
tional consciousness from Kant to Hegel, and their influence
beyond, is to unify consciousness before its experience.
3 Fichte’s important contribution is to point out the unique con-

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 nection between knowledge and interest. For Fichte there is
an antinomy (we would say, a radical incommensurability)
between dogmatism and idealism, both of which remain logi-
cally consistent with their initial premises. The difference is
one of interest in the end: &dquo;The ultimate basis of the differ-
ence between the idealist and the dogmatist is thus the differ-
ence of interest.&dquo; The idealist opts for an original act of free-
dom and ultimate autonomy to enable something like what
Hegel will call self-realization. In the last attempt that identif-
ies reason as a critique against dogmatism, which reflected
&dquo;life as a whole,&dquo; Marx, following this tradition, presented
Fichte’s antinomy of interest under concrete historical
specification, as material interests in specific historical struc-
tures of alienated labor, now in the concrete form of sup-
pressed freedom, or ’dispersed labour.’
Finally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century during the
rise of science, and at the same time its reduction to a pre-
scriptive social practice, positivism, historicism, and pragma-
tism each isolated one part of the concept of rationality as
all-encompassing. As the capacity for the empirical verifica-
tion of hypotheses, or for historical Verstand, or the
pragmatic control of behavior and environment, reason be-
comes particularized and assigned to the level of subjective
consciousness. Equally, interest, need, inclination, self-
realization are banished from the court of knowledge, as aes-
thetics had been in the Enlightenment. &dquo;The spontaneity of
hope, the act of taking a position, the experience of relevance
or indifference, and above all, the response to suffering and

oppression, the desire for adult autonomy, the will to

emancipation, and the happiness of discovering one’s
identity-all these are dismissed for all time from the obligat-
ing interest of reason.&dquo;5 And it is against this dispersal that
Habermas argues that if we are to surpass the threat of this
new dogmatism it will be necessary to return to the rationality
of ’the great tradition’:

Only a reasonwhich is fully aware of the interest in the

progress of reflection toward adult autonomy, which is in-
destructibly at work in every rational discussion will be
able to transcend power from the awareness of its own
materialistic involvements. It alone will be able to begin
reflecting on the positivistic domination of the technical inter-
est of knowledge, growing out of the interrelationships of an
industrial society that integrates science within it as a pro-
ductive force, and which thus protects itself as a whole from
critical insight... Today the convergence of reason and com-
4 mitment, which the philosophy of the great tradition con-
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 sidered to be intimately linked, must be regained, reflected
and reasserted on the level of positive science, and that
means carried on through the separation which is necessarily
and correctly drawn on the level of technological rationality,
the dichotomy of reason and commitment. 6

III
lull

Up to thispoint, however, Habermas’ position looks in a

sense just reactionary, that of a philosopher deploring the rise
of a successful scientific practice which incorporates some,
but not enough of the classical background that informs it.
And, consequently his Krisis, prima facie, just looks Husser-
lian. Not so, however. Habermas, implicitly here, but explicitly
in Knowledge and Human Interest as well as more recent
works calls into question the illusion of pure theory, and the
ontological objectivism which underlies it in the recognition
that science itself arises as an option within the realm of
human interest and thereby destroys its unconditionality. It
places it within an on-going dialectic of human practice;
hence &dquo;philosophy remains true to its classic tradition by
renouncing it.&dquo;8
Objectivism has a regulative role to play within scientific prac-
tice. It is in fact, Habermas concedes, &dquo;the glory of science.&dquo;
Still, general epistemological model it cannot help but
as a

falsify conception of reality (i.e., by objectifying it) as well

our
as lose sight of the bond that ties knowledge to human inter-
est. Consequently, Habermas closes his appendix in Knowl-
edge and Human Interest (originally his Inaugural Lecture in
Frankfurt) by stating straightforwardly, &dquo;The insight that the
truth of statements is linked in the last analysis to the intention
of the good and true life can be preserved today only on the
ruins of ontology.&dquo;9
Against the perfect synthesis that Humboldt, for example,
saw flowing out of German Idealism in his model for wisdom
and its institution, the university, a synthesis in which knowl-
edge and science are seen as the unimpeded realization of
the life of the mind, and each discipline equally contributes its
part, here there can no longer be a simple homoiosis be-
tween science, the arts and life. Science has estranged itself
from humanistic culture. And this is where the project of mod-
ernism, as well as metaphysics went wrong.
The project of modernity formulated in the 18th century by the
philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to
5 develop objective science, universal morality and law, and
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 autonomous art according to their inner logic. At the same
time, this project intended to release the cognitive potentials
of each of these domains to set them free from their esoteric
forms... Enlightenment thinkers of the cast of mind of Con-
dorcet still had the extravagant expectation that the arts and
the sciences would promote not only the control of natural
forces, but would also further understanding of the world and
of the self, would promote moral progress, the justice of in-
stitutions and even the happiness of human beings. The 20th
century has shattered this optimism.’o
It is now evident that theories can become technical while
remaining impractical opposed to humanistic interest. For
or

Habermas, however, the present need is for a re-emergence

of theory, one which would reassume its responsibility vis-a-
vis interest in order that the modern project of the Enlighten-
ment may be fulfilled. We need in this respect at least to hold
on to the intention of the Enlightenment. And, the problem
thus becomes &dquo;how can the power of technical control be
brought within the range of the consensus of acting and
transacting citizens.&dquo;&dquo; Here philosophy &dquo;(r)etains its univer-
sal power in the form of the self-reflection of the sciences
themselves.&dquo;’2
Thus, if Habermas has denied the immutable totality which
would the ontological basis of scientific objectivism
comprise
with its classical roots in the Greeks’ theoria, he does not
deny to it a renewed ideal totalization or universality in the
realm of human interest. If he admits that autonomy and
responsibility likewise are embedded in the praxis of human
affairs (and consequently are ensconced within similarly ’dis-
persed’ structures) the emancipation and reciprocal dis-
cursive recognition which they imply must be equally pro-
jected upon rational non-authoritarian models of possibility.
Consequently, the unity of knowledge and interest which
Habermas still seeks is to be found at the end of a dialectical
process of enlightenment. The regulative ideal of truth and
emancipation in the end is operative equally in each sphere.
Their connection is to be no longer found in an ontological
arche, but in the dialectic and its telos of enlightenment. It is
on this basis, for example, that the later work of Habermas
has hung its weight on the importance of emancipation within
communicative dialogue, postulating in the participant a
capacity for rational interpretation, understanding, and
evaluation, ultimately allowing for emancipation within the
community and ’reciprocal ego identity.’’3
Consequently, in these works the project becomes one of
6 searching out and ’reconstructing’ the ’universal conditions of
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 possible understanding’ in discursive practices. Instead, how-
ever, of postulating this communicative consensus as an
actuality, as a focal point towards which the community is
in
actually progress, Habermas too has had recourse to the
regulative ideas of Kantian machination:
Thus, the ’final consensus’ that we anticipate for a particular
statement or a special set of statements does not signify that
we have to represent to ourselves the limit value of a cumula-
tive progress of knowledge in the form of an ’actual sequence
of future theories.’ ’Final concensus’ expresses only an idea
that is implicitly posited with the concept of truth, an idea that
determines the assertoric meaning of assertions, each in its
place and at its time.
This idea can be actualized
only as a perspective bound to
particular situations, though it requires that we neutralize all
merely situation-bound perspectivistic situations.’4 Thus, for
Habermas, as for Kant, this notion of ultimate universality
becomes regulated, reflective, conditional-while itself the
conditio sine qua non of assertability that must be main-
tained if we are to retain and safeguard the classical notion of
truth and &dquo;the role that validity claims (such as propositional
truth) play in communicative action in general, in establishing
and maintaining the intersubjectivity of a life-world inhabited
in common.&dquo;’5 Apart from this recognition, Habermas con-
tinues to argue, we will fall back into the instrumental view-
point that turns the idea of truth into &dquo;an instrument that
makes the expansion of our technical mastery over an ob-
jectivated nature all the more efficient. ,16 In this Habermas
manifests his reaction to the problem of modernism, on the
one hand in the affirmation that reason remains ’everywhere
one and the same,’ its telos in the integrity of its practice

thereby not undone, while on the other hand affirming that

despite this homogeneity reason remains always conditional,
situation bound.
z

iv

Jean-Francois Lyotard on the other hand sees the site of the

problematic in which Habermas writes as distinctly ’post-
modern.’ This word for Lyotard:

designates the state of culture following transformations

which have affected the rules of the game of science, litera-
ture and the arts beginning with the end of the XIXth century.
Here we will situate these transformations In relation to the
7 crisis in narratives (récits).17
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 This crisis involves the collapse of any ultimate appeal to an
overriding narrative or account of knowledge, science, litera-
ture, morality, or the arts. The emergence of modernist prac-
tices was one which sought the immanence and purity of
each domain, the establishing of firm foundations and spe-
cific, presuppositionless truths. It was the application of the
critical tribunal in all disciplines, establishing the limits of each
as Kant put it, allowing each consequently to mine its own
domain on foundations that were assured. At the same time,
beyond this logical requirement, what distinguished these im-
manences from those of previous metaphysics was precisely
their allegiance to the paradigm of science, either in strict
imitation or by a default that removed them from the genuinely
epistemic realm. As such, just as science had forced an inver-
sion and rupture with the classical narrative that had been
given of the ‘lifeworld,’ so too all practices which had been
formerly restrained by the ’meta-narratives’ of the culture
were now set free in their ’immanence.’

Originally, science, as a discourse of ultimate legitimation,

found itself in strict conflict with these other ’softer practices’
in which a certain amount of relativity and undecidability could
be tolerated and even welcomed over against its foundation
as strenge Wissenschaft. As Kant put it regarding aesthet-
ics, one cannot dispute about judgments of taste, for ex-
ample. Lyotard’s claim, however, is that what constitutes the
cultural state of the ’post-modern’ is precisely incredulity with
regard to any metanarrative that might claim to be all
encompassing. And, now, even aesthetics is to have much
more affinity with the sublime’s destruction of the concept of

representation in Kant (and Burke) than with the beautiful’s

pleasure derived from the agreement between our faculties
and the object encountered.
Rather than the surpassing of one epoch, age, pe-
asserting
riod, civilization, and its truth by another, as had the Romans,
now officially Christian, in separating themselves from their

pagan past, when the word ’modernus’ emerges for the first
time, or the new, with the birth or rebirth of the Renaissance,
as those writers who entered the quarrel between the an-
cients and the moderns of the late 17th century, post-modern
writers have denied the teleological progession of meaning
and truth in history altogether. We have, Lyotard believes,
given up the ’modernist’ myth of a rationality that is complete
or decidable, totally elucidated, ultimately ’grounded’ with im-
mediate foundations, archimedean points, pure givens, etc.
In this he parallels, for example, the recognition that is in-
8 volved in the problem of ’incommensurability’ between para-

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 digms in Kuhn or Feyerabend. All told, it is a rupture with the
dream of unified science-in the first place that of Comte,
Mach, or Husserl or that of Vienna in the 1920’s, but the
ultimate break is with a much more archaic science, epis-
teme and its truth as homoiosis, as Plato put it, and all that
develops from it, all in short that Habermas seems to want to
recoup.

Consequently, rather than like Habermas, saying that what

positivism did was to lose sight of the integrity of reason and
practice which underlay the Western tradition since Plato,
post-modern thought denies that unity altogether. While it
agrees with Habermas that positivism retains the method-
ological underpinnings (in all its forms, logical or phenomeno-
logical) which reflects classical thought, the problem is not
that it has not completed that project but that it continues to
privilege it, to hold that there is something transcendental in
that framework which can divide once and for all the true from
the false, the real from the apparent; that it can separate out
verisimilitude from its assumptions, practice or context. Thus:
From this fact, the question of legitimation of knowledge
poses itself differently. When one declares that an utterance
of a declarative character is true one presupposes that the
axiomatic system in which it is decidable and demonstratable
has been formulated, that it is known by the interlocutors and
accepted by them as formally satisfying as is possible.’3
But the limits have become, Lyotard claims, too com-
monplace, and one must refuse to dissolve them. He points to
Gbdel, to the limits of formalization, the limits of a com-
munity’s legitimation decision with regard to its meta-
language, and their ultimate demonstrability. In actuality,
knowledge becomes pragmatically flexible; new theories,
new propositions are logically capable of being introduced
into the practice. Moreover, due to the ungrounded character
of each one of them, alternatives are always possible.
Legitimation, in consequence, is always partial, regional, de-
centered, and subject to transformations-as is the practice
which gives rise to it. Lyotard meets Neurath, but disgenders
the use of a standardized tool box to use in the ship’s replank-
ing.

vi
Habermas believed that the dialectic of knowledge and hu-
9 man reasonwhich he has proposed to ensure the unity which

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 the ruins of classical objectivist ontology necessitated could
be installed upon the teleology of enlightened consensus
within the community. Legitimation could thereby be insured
by a suitable epistemic contract similar to the political contract
that classical liberalism hoped to constitute on the founda-
tions of failed monarchial objectivism. For Lyotard, this, too, is
a modernist’s answer to a post-modern problem. The problem
now is not to reconstitute rational unity at a higher level, to
use a Kantian figure, but to live without it, recognizing that all

teleologies ultimately fail.’9

In his recent article, &dquo;Reply to my Critics,&dquo; Habermas, has in
fact affirmed at least Lyotard’s claim regarding the
heterogeneity of our narratives:
The unity of reason has become unattainable at the level of
cultural interpretative systems ever since the latter were de-
tached in the modern period from the validity syndrome of
everyday communication and split up under individual
aspects of validity.2°
Habermas appeals to Weber here in characterizing cultural
modernity by the independent differentiation of three special
spheres of value in our rational practices (science, morality,
art). Still, despite this differentiation, it remains the case that
in the independent pursuit of its own values each of the spe-
cialized domains retained a belief in foundations, purity, and
immanence. And it is perhaps just this same belief that
Habermas himself maintains in characterizing the role of rea-
son in his own theory in relation to the cultural play of in-
terpretations :
(C)ritique can no longer draw upon the guiding thread of
philosophy of history. It must be oriented to the possibility of
learning processes opened up by a level of learning already
achieved historically. The critique of ideology can no longer
set out directly from concrete ideals intrinsic to forms of life,
but only from formal properties of rationality structures.2’
In having recourse to the formal properties which are again
the universal conditions of possible understanding and rea-
soning, the theory of universal pragmatics will accomplish
what cannot be had at the level of culturally-relative interpre-
tations. It would provide the formal properties of rationality
structures, the unavoidable presuppositions of the conditions
for discourse. Such an enquiry remains transcendental,
though, Habermas claims, not connected with the failure of
transcendental deductions. That is, it retains no commitment
regarding a univocal, transcendental content. And yet while
10 there is to be no transcendentally deducted specific narrative
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 or content, he still holds that language, and discourse (at least
regulatively) operates with respect to its claims and possibil-
ity of their adjudication univocally and commensurably. In
short, against, for example, the later Wittgenstein he must
hold that in fact language does, indeed must do one specifi-
able thing, have one thing in common throughout, just as
reason remains in some sense everywhere one and the
same. And it is here that Lyotard balks.

vii

Lyotard delineates two formal presuppositions in the pro-

gram. The first, again, is that all participants are m fact able to
fall into accord &dquo;on the rule or meta-prescriptions universally
valid for all language games, while it is clear that the latter are
heteromorphous and bring about heterogeneous pragmatic
rules.&dquo;22 Secondly, Lyotard in perhaps a more controversial
move denies that the finality of dialogue is consensus. This
accord is only one state of discussion and not its end, since
any synchronic linguistic state is open to transformation. And
without these two suppositions Habermas’ program begins to
fail, he believes:
What disappears with this double affirmation (heterogeneity
of rules, the investigation of dissent) is a belief which still
animates Habermas’ investigations, a knowledge that
humanity as a collective (universal) subject seeks out its com-
mon emancipation by the means of a regularization of
&dquo;moves&dquo; permitted in any language games, and that the legiti-
macy of any kind of statement resides in its contribution to this
emancipation.23
Consensus in principle guarantees nothing. If it forces the
emergence of an acceptance of a certain discursive order it
does not, for example, prevent the emergence of a false,
defective, even facist order. It is perhaps not a ’new’ recogni-
tion, if its consequences are controversial, overdetermined by
interpretation, that the people, i.e., that rational agents, do not
always act ‘rationally’ or in their ’best interest’ for their
‘emancipation’-that consequently, emancipation is ambig-
uous, just as is reason itself.

Lyotard’s alternative thus claims that within the post-modern

spectrum &dquo;(c)onsensus has become a suspect and obsolete
value.&dquo;24 Consensus simply presupposed what cannot be
presupposed, a unity that is ethically grounded within the
community, a truth that would be if not a priori then at least
final, an emancipation which is acceptable to all, once and for
11 all. What Lyotard decries here again is the metaphysics of
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 modernism, in fact it is metaphysics itself: a unity, a totality, a
goodness, which would be the thread which runs through all
things. It is not unity but difference which he claims rules
reason and ontology now.

Still, this position should not be taken as one which loses its
commitments to democratic institutions. Rather, what it loses
is the metaphysics that takes consensus to be teleologically
the guarantee of the veracity and ethicality of the community.
As Merleau-Ponty stated vis-a-vis a similar recognition,
rather than guaranteeing the community its fulfillment,
democratic institutions guarantee that difference will not be
reduced by identity. They guarantee, rather, at least &dquo;a mini-
mum of opposition,&dquo; and only thereby, truth.25

VIII ,

But what of all that the notion of the unity of consensus in

Habermas was supposed to foster-if nothing else the emer-
gence of a true, just-and ultimately, thereby, rational social
order? Lyotard holds fast here.
Consensus has become a suspect and obsolete value. What
has not is justice. It is necessary therefore to arrive at an idea
and a practice of justice which is not linked with those of
consensus. 26
What is to be is an account of justice which is not
sought
‘metaphysical,’ which does not succumb in particular to the
voluntaristic metaphysics of consensus. It is, he says, a first
step in that direction to recognize the heteromorphy in lan-
guage games, and this implies the renunciation of any
attempt to realize their isomorphy. Against the attempt to es-
tablish and affirm positive and universal criteria of justice,
Lyotard claims that consensus must always be admitted to be
local. 27 The abandonment of the project of totalization forces
then what he terms &dquo;the renunciation of terror&dquo; that is pre-
supposed in any attempt to realize an isomorph, a structure
which could claim to positively affirm itself in an unconditional
fashion over against others.
But if all positive accounts have lost the power to affirm un-
conditionally, what weight will justice itself have? Justice is,
after all, a classical word and so are the notions of duty or
imperative. However, what Habermas gleans from the notion
of enlightenment in the Kantian &dquo;Kritik,&dquo; Lyotard’s recent
work, especially his book Au juste, published the same year
as La condition postmoderne, has taken from the break
12 between theoretical reason and its search for totality, and the
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 imperatives of which are in the end underiv-
practical reason
able. In response to the question &dquo;Why be just?&dquo; in an in-
terview published in Au juste, Lyotard states:
When you ask this sort of question, you play the game of the
philosophers or metaphysicians, because you require me to
produce a descriptive discourse, or the kind of discourse that
one calls ’speculative,’ that accompanies the clause of
enunciation with a certain number of operators which
characterize philosophical discourse. This discourse declares
itself capable, among other things, of justifying the ’you
ought,’ that is to say the existence of nondetermined prescrip-
tion, as Kant would say, and therefore the existence of some
sort of obligation in general... What appears to me to be
very strong about the Kantian position, certainly, but the posi-
tion of Levinas, also is precisely to refuse in principle this
derivation or deduction.28
In a sensewhat Habermas owes to Kant is precisely what
Lyotard denies him and he does so in Kant’s name. Kant’s
move from the conditioned to the conditions, the drive to unity
which constituted the Enlightenment’s rdcherche de la véri-
te, was also recognized by him to be a simple focus imagi-
narius, the delirium of metaphysicians. In this recognition
Kant himself was forced, if not enabled, to posit for the first
time the problem of the incommensurability, the undecidabil-
ity of theories, that of freedom and determinism, thereby
opening up the ungrounded and yet justified language game
of prescriptive practical reason. And, for Kant, this incommen-
surability demanded respect simply as a factum of reason
itself.

Lyotard, still, acknowledges nonetheless that the problem of

prescription is in the end one of justification.29 And, in a
sense, his account here becomes paradigmatic for him in the
problem of justifying the pragmatics of alternative discourses,
and therefore, paradigmatic, as well, for his difference with
Habermas.

ix

In an article examining the meaning of a phrase of Adorno’s,

the question of human existence &dquo;after Auschwitz,&dquo; Lyotard
has taken up the issue of the incommensurable in a fashion
which attempts to rescue it again from logical or ontological
oblivion. The enunciation of the phrase &dquo;After Auschwitz&dquo; in-
volves an &dquo;abominable model of this incommensurability, ,30
Lyotard states, just as Adorno before had stated that &dquo;(t)he
13 earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy
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 of Leibniz.’,31 It introduces Kant’s factum of reason, one that
remains irreducible to the limits of the theoretical, one which
is absolutely other to the ’same’ of the Speculative and differ-
entiates itself from the logical equality of the theoretical, in-
stead to obligate, to set off a pragmatics radically altered
from that of the theoretical, and involves an accompanying
valorization of the pragmatic field. As such, it introduces a
different conception of rationality, one which loses neither the
problem of incommensurability nor that of the ’truth’ of obliga-
tion within it, which acknowledges the endless agon of in-
&dquo;

terpretation while affirming the &dquo;Ich stehe hier of the ...

imperative. By respecting and limiting the power of the

philosophical tradition (or at least Kant’s break with it that
grants a primat to the practical), a &dquo;new&dquo; emergence of rea-
son and a politics of action is to be allowed, a new belonging-

together of reason and human interest. In Lyotard’s words it is

one which allows for the emergence of &dquo;a politics designed in
which the desire for justice and that of the unknown will be
equally respected.&dquo;32 Habermas’ hopes for a time when ’the
spontaneity of hope, the act of taking a position, the response
to suffering and oppression, the desire for adult autonomy,
the will to emancipation, and the happiness of discovering
one’s identity’ will not thereby be lost, but further protected
now from the myth of Western metaphysics, as it takes the
final turn to affirm its drive for identity, happiness, and unity.

The other figure to whom Lyotard has recourse here is Levi-

nas, who in a sense continues the break which Kant had
delineated between the theoretical and the ethical. Levinas
delineates an ethics and justice which refuse all reduction to a
’reason’ or ’ontology.’ For Levinas the ancient speculative
attempt to reduce the Other to the same is ruptured in the
simple appearance of the Other, most primordially disclosed
in the &dquo;Otherness&dquo; of the other person. Rather than an object
for subsumption within the speculative judgment, the face of
the Other involves a &dquo;moral summons,&dquo; as Levinas puts it,
one which demands my respect precisely in its refusal to be
contained.33 In this regard, the prescriptive concerning the
Other is here, as was the domain of the practical for Kant,
underivable. The Other is not a simple empirical fact, an
obstacle, and does not represent a threat. It is not a question
here of the truth which could ultimately reduce the risk of
rationality or ethical commitment with an unavoidable conclu-
sion. There is at best a truth, that of the Other him or herself34
which demands a decision, an end in itself which Lyotard
describes classically, following Levinas, as a matter of ’trans-
14 cendence.’35
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 The force of the ethical in all this can be limited to no proposi-
tion, is contingent upon no theory, and remains in its un-
encompassability logically underivable. Rather as Kant again
claimed, despite its underivability with regard to the theoreti-
cal, the domain of the moral &dquo;is firmly established of itself (fur
sich selbst fest).&dquo;36 And yet against the immanence of mod-
ernism, the immanence that rationalism prays for, as Levinas
aptly states, this immanence occurs only by withdrawing
itself from the grasp of reason. Against the bulk of the tradition
whose impulse is to subsume the ethical under a broader
(and rational) hierarchy, Lyotard then must speak of the
prescriptive as &dquo;risk,&dquo; albeit one already contained in Kant’s
subjunctive if not in his architectonic: &dquo;if morality is to be
possible... &dquo; Lyotard’s position, then, decenters and
contextualizes, if refusing to relativize, the notion of justice
and truth, by linking them with what he calls the unknown, the
undecidable, that which constantly always exceeds them.
Modernist answers always assumed that not only could
objectivity be had, but that the notion was in itself well formed.

Still, it that this alternative to objectivism and its denial

seems
of any adequate or final overriding theoria, which denies the
homogenity, the homoiosis of both Being and Logos is sim-
ply relativism, irrationality, and skepticism. This is a problem
which all post-modernist ’deconstruction’ has had to face, ul-
timately, and it is one that threatens not only Lyotard’s work
but has seemingly been a constant foil against the excesses
of post-structuralism. The charge seems straightforward, in-
deed classical. Don’t all descriptions, expressions, judg-
ments, language-games, etc. ultimately at least designate
one reality? Lyotard’s position seemingly ’puts all in doubt,’

simply making the real a ‘theoretical construct,’ the function of

an interpretative reading, a detotalized structure of localized

practice. Still as he has stated vis-a-vis similar problems in

literary criticism:
Any work may be read, and there are many ways to read a
work. This does not imply that all possible readings may be
applied to every work, nor that every reading may be applied
to all works. Neither does it mean that the act of interpretation
has lost its value, rather it announces the disintegration of
critical typologies ...

At the time it does not necessarily follow that because

same

anything may be read and reading may be anything, the work

15 escapes reference, the benediction of meaning: rather, desig-
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 nation is inevitable result of reading, obtained through a
an

relentlessly imaginative elaboration and use of letters, words,

and syntactical structures... -But we no longer expect a
single view of a collection of works to reveal one complete
and exclusive truth. Traditionally the goal of art criticism and
theoretical writing in general, this ideal is unable to survive (if
ever it existed) the dissolution by contemporary artistic prac-
tice of the principle of the proper point of view (or audition). 37
The search for ’complete and exclusive truth,’ the ultimate
designation falls with the failure of modernism. And likewise,
with the search for absolute foundations, for presupposition-
less knowledge, the search for univocal justifications or legiti-
mations must fall as well. What remains in this collapse, then,
is not skepticism and relativism, if it has given up the posit of a
Truth that might be univocal and irreversible. Rather it opens
up an account that allows for the divergence of possible read-
ings as well as the fact that not every reading is possible: in
disclosing its objective every interpretation will under-
determine its object, but this does not imply that every in-
terpretation will be consistent with the interpretandum, i.e.
will not stand in need of correction, as phenomenologists
put it.38
. What ultimately divides Habermas and Lyotard is not the
commitment to justice or emancipation, or even legitimation
and truth. It is the project of ultimacy, totalization. Haber-
mas’ project reaffirms and continues the notion of reason as
absolute and all encompassing which he expertly ex-
trapolates from German Idealism-if only as a regulative
ideal. Still, as Jacques Derrida has stated in relation to this
regulation in the Kantian text (and with its phenomenological
legacy in mind), &dquo;the Idea in the Kantian sense designates the
infinite overflowing of the horizon which, by reason of an
absolute and essential necessity which itself is absolutely
principled and irreducible, never can become an object itself,
,,39
or be completed in a sense what lies at issue here is
...

whether this principled impossibility still can play a role within

our rational practices.

As has been seen, the failure of modernism is not at issue

between these thinkers. As Habermas has put it in his Adorno
prize paper &dquo;Modernism versus Postmodernism,&dquo; &dquo;(T)he
problem won’t go away: should we try to hold on to the in-
tentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or
should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost
cause?&dquo; Lyotard has denied the completability of the project
of modernism on various grounds, all involving the partializa-
16 tion of Reason and the deferral of totalities. He has done this,
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 for example, on formal grounds (the conditionality of any and
all conclusions on ultimate premises which cannot be them-
selves justified), on semiotic grounds (the dependence of a
text upon its archive), even on Marxist grounds (the con-
ditionality of a text upon the social practices underlying it), etc.
And, consequently, against the Humboldtian conception of
the institution of knowledge discussed above, Lyotard’s
paralogy is one which refuses each science a unique and
separate role, ultimately to be crowned by speculation.
Rather, Lyotard calls for a ’deconstruction’ of isolated dis-
ciplines, that is, calls for an interdisciplinarity which would
both cancel the unique claims of particular disciplines in rela-
tion to the world and force a reconsideration of the role that
the heterogeneity of methods, approaches, topics, contents,
etc. comes to hold vis-6-vis the accomplishments of their
performances.
The relation to knowledge is not that of the realization of the
life of the mind with the emancipation of humanity. It is that
between the users of a conceptual apparatus and a material
complex and the beneficiaries of its performances. Neither
does it dispose a metalanguage nor a metanarrative to formu-
late ends and proper usage. Rather, there is a brainstorming
to reinforce performances.4’

Still, Lyotard is quick to say that scientific praxis does not

amount to In an article examining the
simple pragmatism.
notion of decadence in the ruins of metaphysics, &dquo;The Ex-
pedient in Decadence,&dquo; Lyotard states,
Science is not the discourse of efficacious knowledge which
pretends to find the attestation of its values in its conformity
with reality. It is creative of realities, and its value consists in
its potential to redistribute perspectives, not in its power to
master objects. It is in this regard that it is comparable to the
arts.42
In this regard all that Kuhn, Toulmin, Feyerabend et al. have
said concerning post-modern science is situated in a sense
within a ’Nietzschean’ project regarding the creativity of in-
terpretation by Lyotard.

xi

Still, for Habermas,as he has spelled out in his 1980 accept-

ance of the Adorno award, such a position can only lead to
simple nihilism and impotence before reactionary tendencies
vis-A-vis the accomplishments of modernism. The charge is
17 made against what Habermas calls &dquo;The Young Con-
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 servatives&dquo; and he provides a geographical placement as
well as proper names, ones close enough to Lyotard to cite
them with him.
The Young Conservatives recapitulate the basic experience
of aesthetic modernity. They claim as their own the revela-
tions of decentered subjectivity, emancipated from the im-
peratives of work and usefulness, and with this experience
they step outside the modern world. On the basis of mod-
ernistic attitudes, they justify an irreconcilable anti-mod-
ernism. They remove into the sphere of the far away and the
archaic the spontaneous powers of imagination, of self-
experience and of emotionality. To instrumental reason, they
juxtapose in Manichean fashion a principle only accessible
through evocation, be it the will to power or sovereignty, Be-
ing or the Dionysiac force of the poetical. In France this line
leads from Bataille via Foucault to Derrida.43
The charge appears true enough, perhaps. Foucault and Der-
rida did indeed recite the litany of aesthetic modernism, es-
pecially in the sixties when both wrote with the Tel Quel group
on writers and painters such as Artaud, Bataille, Kafka, Ma-

gritte, etc. and the decentered character of rationality. And,

Lyotard in these respects at least has been close by, even
comparing, as has been seen, science to this aesthetics.
Whether their critiques of representational thought and the
metaphysics of presence, with its emphasis on difference,
dispositives, traces, etc. amounts to a new form of man-
icheanism is perhaps more problematic, as is their con-
demnation as ’neo-conservative.’ All, in any case, equally
deny the move which would reinstate the intention of the
Enlightenment. Michel Foucault, for example, in a recent in-
terview which turned around the issues of his connection to
the Frankfurt School, claimed that it was neither a question of
continuation or break since the notion of rationality itself had
become pluralized, de-totalized:
... I am not prepared to with the
identify reason entirely
totality of rational forms which have come to dominate... For
me, no given form of rationality is actually reason... I can
see multiple transformations, but I cannot see why we should
call this transformation a collapse of reason. Other forms of
rationality are created endlessly. So there is no sense at all to
the proposition that reason is a long narrative which is now
finished, and that another is under way.44
While refusing Lyotard’s version that what had come to pass
is a shift between the search for a meta-narrative and a
18 pluralization, a heteromorphy, Foucault’s claim here affirms
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 that no final rational practice exhausts or founds all others.
That is, he is unable, consistent with the issue in question, to
claim anything like a universal structure to reason. In both
cases then, the question remaining, as Habermas recog-
nized, is whether the Enlightenment and its intention, as well
as the institution of that intention, the university, is to be
praised or buried, whether, for example, the university should
fulfill the intentions of science or Wissenschaft as the
Enlightenment saw them vis-a-vis society or disclose other,
’post modern’ alternatives.

xii

For all their differences here, neither Habermas nor his

French critics ever simply endorse classicism tout court, and
in this they stand fully together. There is a failure to the trope
of foundations and that of the Cartesian tree of knowledge
that guarantees each discipline its own independence to sim-
ply plunder a region of knowledge in search of the truth. It has
to do perhaps with a shift in the epistemics of modernism
itself. Nietzsche saw it in his Basel lectures on The Future of
our Educational Institutions.

(T)he study of science has been extended to such intermin-

able lengths that he who, though not exceptionally gifted, yet
possesses fair abilities, will need to devote himself exclu-
sively to one branch and ignore all others if he ever wishes to
achieve anything in all his work. Should he then elevate him-
self above the heard by means of his specialty, he still re-
mains one of them in regard to all else,-that is to say, in
regard to all the most important things in his life. Thus, a
specialist in science gets to resemble nothing so much as a
factory workman who spends his whole life in turning one
particular screw or handle on a certain machine, at which
occupation he acquires the most consummate skill.45
What joins the separate cogs in the educational industry,
Nietzsche states, as is the case with what later Adorno will
call the culture industry,46 is no longer a special discipline (a
metaphysica generalis, as Kant would say, following the
tradition), rather it is simple journalism. It is the newspaper
and the journal, and what Nietzsche calls their enslavery to
the ’tyranny of the moment’ that &dquo;cements the seams be-
tween all forms of life, all classes, all arts and and all sci-
ences, and which is as firm and reliable as newspaper is, as a
rule.’,47 There is in all this a constant system of exchange in
&dquo;the university engine of culture,&dquo; that monolith whose work-
19 ings Nietzsche aptly describes as &dquo;one speaking mouth, with
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 many and half as many writing hands.&dquo;48 It operates
ears

through passage from decentralized teacher-authorities to

a
students, those ’guilty innocents,’ as Nietzsche calls them,
but likewise guilty innocents in search of authorities.
The question is, what can break the system of levelings, of
endless, equivalent exchanges between disciplines, between
teachers and students, between, ultimately, the ’university
engine’ and ’the culture industry’ it
underwrites? For Nie-
tzsche’s analysis was too. The university has
powerful here,
become, he states, &dquo;an institution for teaching how to suc-
ceed in life&dquo;49 rather than an institution for teaching Bildung,
one which disregards &dquo;(t)he all too frequent exploitation of

youth by the State, for its own purposes.&dquo;5° Indeed, &dquo;(t)he

’bond between intelligence and property’ which this point of
view postulates has almost the force of a moral principle. ,51
Education takes on, thereby, the simple role of efficacity in the
era of decadence-that age in which Nietzsche says, &dquo;brutal-

ity, artificiality, and innocence (idiocy)&dquo; fill up the gap left by

the departure of truth.

If it is clear that isolated disciplines and their specialists can-

not fill this lack, the classical paradigm of the isolated savant
and his or her discipline having become myth, it is true as well
that there can simple substitution for the role that philo-
be no

sophia perenialis played in its matrix. This is Nietzsche’s

bow to the Bildung of the tradition, and neither Habermas nor
Lyotard have totally rejected this bow, if neither of them can
simply repeat it. What is now in question is the nature of that
classical role-whether there is to be a return to origins,
rejuvenation, and completion-or not. While Habermas has
convincingly argued for the former, Lyotard has hesitated. He
has introduced the philosophical question in the middle of
disciplines, rather than at their foundations, a move which
puts something like the priority of philosophia perenialis in
question, if not its existence, since there is no separate disci-
pline whose knowledge reigns independent of the proble-
matics and contexts, backgrounds and presuppositions, texts
and contexts in question. It is not a new recognition, if it is, as
well, ’post-modern.’ Even the first ’positivist,’ August Comte,
having proposed to &dquo;consolidate the whole of our acquired
knowledge into one body of homogeneous doctrine,&dquo; claims
as well that &dquo;it must not be supposed that we are going to
study this vast variety as proceeding from a single principle
and as subject to a single law.&dquo;53 Paradoxically enough,
granted the paradigm of knowledge that had ruled the
Enlightenment from Galileo to Newton, and ultimately, to
20 Kant,54 Comte was skeptical of Laplaces’ claim that all dis-
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 courses were commensurable with and reducible to physics.
The best he hoped for was a single method. This is a
homogeneity and immanence we no longer hope for either,
as Stephen Toulmin among others has suggested, claiming
that this demarcation manifests precisely the emergence of
post-modern science.55 Lyotard, as well, has surpassed the
hope for homogeneity in general. And, in so doing, he has
attempted to ’deconstruct’ something like philosophia per-
enialis, well aware at the same time of the naive hope of
simply substituting something else for it, e.g., a discipline, a
logic, a method. Rather, if there is a ’replacement’ here it is
the continual replacement of philosophy by the inevitable self-
surpassing which is, and has been, its own praxis. As
Lyotard has said in a recent article, &dquo;Thus understood,
postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but its nascent
state, and this state is recurrent. ,56

University of Notre Dame

NOTES

This paper was originally presented in a workshop on the University and

Social Cnticism at the 1982 session of the Society for Phenomenological
and Existential Philosophy.I would like to thank Professor Jean-Fran~ois
Lyotard for his helpful comments on the paper.
1. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Trans-
cendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Evanston Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1979).
2. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, tr. J. Viertel Boston: Beacon
Press, 1973), p. 254. Cited hereafter as TP.
3. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest, tr. Jeremy Shapiro
(Boston Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 301 ff. Cited hereafter as KI.
4. TP. p. 259.

5. Ibid., pp.262-263.
6. Ibid., p. 281. The emphases are mine In this text.

21 7. KI, p. 308ff.

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 8. KI, p. 317.

9. Ibid.

10. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," tr. Seyla Ben-

Habid, New German Critique Number 22, Winter, 1981, p. 9. This essay
was delivered first in Germany in September 1980 when Habermas was
awarded the Theodor W. Adorno prize by the city of Frankfurt.

11. Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 57.
12. Ibid., p. 8.
13. See, for example, Communication and the Evolution of Society, tr.
Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).

14. "A Reply to my Critics," tr. Thomas McCarthy Haber-

Jürgen Habermas,
mas : Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson, David Held (Cambridge,
Ma.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 227. Cited hereafter as ’Reply’.

15. Reply, p. 276.

16. Ibid.

17. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris. Editions de

Minuit, 1979), p. 7.I am the translator of this work. Cited hereafter as CPM.
18. CPM, p. 71.

19. Hence, epistemology at the level of ’as if’ is no more satisfying within the
rationalist’s program than its predecessor. If Paul Feyerabend is right, then
from the strictly rationalist standpoint, it is not incumbent that we recognize
that the alternative to philosophy as strenge Wissenschaft is "anything
goes"; we need now to recognize how it is that the rationalist program itself
has failed, and why we still believe that not everything goes See Paul
Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books, 1978),
p. 40ff.

20. Reply, pp. 276-7.

21. Reply, pp. 153-4.
22. CPM, p. 106.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. See Maunce Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic, tr.

Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 226.
26. CPM, p. 106.
27. Ibid.

28. Jean-François Lyotard Au juste (Paris: Christian Bougois, 1979), pp.

88-89. I am the translator.

29. Ibid., p. 6.

30. Jean-François Lyotard, "Discussions, ou phraser, ’après Auschwitz,"’

Les fins de I’homme (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981 ), p. 308. I am the
22 translator.
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 31. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton (New York:
The Seabury Press, 1973), p. 361.
32. CPM, p. 108.
33. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pitts-
burgh : Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 194.
34. Ibid., see p. 201
The presentation of the face is not true, for the true refers to the non-true, its
eternal contemporary, and ineluctably meets with the smile and silence of
the skeptic. The presentation of being in the face does not leave any logical
place for its contradictory. Thus I cannot evade by silence the discourse
which the epiphany that occurs as a face opens, as Thrasymachus, irritated,
tries to do, in the first book of the Republic (moreover without suc-
ceeding) The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is
...

obligation, which no "intenonty" permits avoiding. It is that discourse that

obliges the entering into discourse, the commencement of discourse ration-
alism prays for, a "force" that convinces even "the people who do not wish
to listen" and thus founds the true universality of reason. Preexisting the
disclosure of being in general taken as a basis of knowledge and as mean-
ing of being is the relation with the existent that expresses himself; preexist-
ing the plane of ontology is the ethical plane.
35. Lyotard, Au juste. p. 133.
36. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Lewis White Beck
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956) p. 48. For a more detailed account of
Lyotard’s discussion of Kant and Levinas, one which resides in the tension
between Kant’s account of the will’s respect for the other as end in itself and
his attempt to ground practical reason in the will’s self-constitution, cf. his
"Logique de Levinas" in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. François
Laruelle (Pans: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1980).

37. "Prelimmary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren", tr. Thom-
as Repensek, October, Number 10, FAII, 1979, p. 59.
38. c.p. for example Martin Heidegger’s statement in Being and Time, tr.
John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962),
p. 191.
In such an interpretation, the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to
be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself, or the Interpretation can
force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of Being.

Such an analysis returns to the phenomenological viewpoint, but precisely

to grasp the nature of the underdetermination. Even in Husserl himself the
impossibility of adequation is strong enough that neither the onginality nor
the apodicticity of evidence is complete, ultimately decidable, or univocal, if
they are nonetheless related by correspondence, conditionally to the ’in-
terpretandum’. c.f. Cartesian Meditations tr. Dorian Cairns (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), p. 22f. In an early book Lyotard presents a summary
of this underdetermination of evidence in the phenomenological account,
one which, moreover, anticipated his own account of postmodern thought.

There is absolute truth, the postulate common both to dogmatism and

no

skepticism; truth is defined in its becoming, as the revision, correction and

surpassing of itself-a dialectical operation which always takes place within

23 the living present (lebendige Gegenwart).
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 Jean François Lyotard, La phenomenologie (P.U F., 1954), pp. 40-1.

39. Jacques Dernda, "Violence and Metaphysics" in Writing and Difference,

tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 120.
40. Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," p. 9.
41. CPM, p. 86.

42. Jean-François Lyotard, "Expédient dans la décadence," in Rudiments

Paiens (Paris: Union Generale D’Editions, 1977), p 129. I am the translator.
This article dates from 1976.

43. Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," p. 13.

44. "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel

Foucault," Telos, No. 55, Spring, 1983, p. 205.
45. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Future of our Educational Institutions, tr
J.M. Kennedy (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 39.

46. See, for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, "The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of
Enlightnment, tr. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
47. Nietzsche, p. 41.
48. Ibid., p. 126.
49. Ibid., p. 98.

50. Ibid., p. 31.

51. Ibid., p. 37.

52. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, tr. J.M. Kennedy (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1964). p. 14.

53. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, tr. C. Blanchard (New York.
AMS Press, Inc., 1974), p. 37.

54. See Evandro Agazzi, "From Newton to Kant: The Impact of Physics on
the Paradigm of Philosophy," Abba Salama, IX (1978).
55. See Stephen Toulmin, "The Emergence of Post-Modern Science" in
Current Developments in the Arts and Sciences (New York: Enclopedia
Bntannica, Inc., 1981 ), pp. 70ff.
56. Jean-François Lyotard, "Réponse à La Question. Qu’Est-Ce Que Le
", Critique No. 419, Tome XXVII, 1982, 365.
?
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