The thorn of radical alterity: Critical theory and the transcendence of the Other.

摘要

The critical theory of the contemporary Frankfurt School, as exemplified in the writings of Juergen Habermas and Axel Honneth, is widely considered to be the legitimate inheritor of the emancipatory heritage of Hegelian social philosophy. Taken together, Habermas's stated ambition to "redeem the Hegelian aspiration by Kantian means" and Honneth's programmatic attempt to rehabilitate "Hegel's original idea" of a recognition based approach to the moral architectonics of social conflict both center on the possibility of salvaging a degree of intramundane transcendence in the sphere of intersubjective communication. At the same time, however, this common project to renew the emancipatory core of Hegelian thinking hangs on the assumption that it is indeed possible to rescale the social philosophical framework of the latter in order to accommodate the postmetaphysical social and ontological parameters both Habermas and Honneth presuppose. In this dissertation I challenge this assumption and, in doing so, offer a critical reconsideration of the feasibility of the project to renovate the emancipatory heritage of Hegel within the boundaries of postmetaphysical reasoning alone. By employing the critical and constructive tools furnished by an ethical theory of radical alterity, largely inspired by dialogical thinkers such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I call for a radically ethical turn in critical social theory. Such an ethical turn, as I fashion it, hinges on the proposition that the immanent normativity that inheres prescientifically in the medium of factical interaction can be social-theoretically retrieved only with a proper moral phenomenological perception of the communicatively concrete transcendence of the Other---a perception, to be sure, entirely precluded by the obfuscatory lenses of postmetaphysical social thinking.;Two primary analytical tasks are undertaken with the purpose of achieving this endeavor. Firstly, I ethically deconstruct the normative theories of communication advanced by Habermas and Honneth in order to expose residua of reification emergent from their common naturalization of certain components of postmetaphysical social ontology. Secondly, I ethically reconstruct a theory of interhumanism grounded in the subtending ethical architectonics of radical alterity. In the end, recovering the emancipatory heritage of Hegel, I claim, involves the recuperation of an ethically ballasted historical materialism that redeems intramundane transcendence in an evolving interhuman space of communicative freedom.