Also a History of Philosophy, Vol. I: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking

In his magisterial, three-volume Also a History of Philosophy (AHP; German: Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 Vols., Suhrkamp 2019), Habermas sets forth an extended historical defense of central elements of Western modernity, specifically its commitment to ideals of moral egalitarianism, universal human rights, and constitutional democracy. Habermas argues that these commitments emerged from collective learning processes, which AHP reconstructs in detail, beginning in Volume I with the transition from mythical thought to the great religious-metaphysical systems that emerged in Eurasian cultures during the so-called Axial Age (c. 800-300 B.C.E.). Volumes II and III then trace the Western “discourse of faith and knowledge” from the encounter between Greek philosophy and Christianity, through the Middles Ages and into modernity, when philosophy declared its independence from religion. NDPR reviews of Volumes II and III are already available.[1] Here I review Volume I, which comprises three lengthy chapters. The preface and first chapter set forth the motivations, method, and assumptions that structure the “project” announced by the subtitle, “a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking”. Chapters II and III focus on the origins of religion in myth and ritual (II) and the Axial Age (III).

Motivations, Method, Assumptions. As Habermas makes clear in the first sentences in the preface, AHP is first of all a work motivated by the love of philosophy—“the pleasure in finally getting to read the many important texts I had previously neglected, and in rereading many other texts…” (xvii).[2] To be sure, a larger “meta-theoretical” question is at stake, namely, how ought we to understand “the task of philosophy today”? Behind that question lies Habermas’s fear that disciplinary specialization is killing the holistic character of the philosophical tradition, which from Plato through the great nineteenth-century philosophers engaged central questions of human existence, such…