Martin Jay, “After the Eclipse: The Light of Reason in Late Critical Theory 03: From the Age of Reason to the Age of Reasons”
Thursday, 15 November 2012, 18:30 IDT
Mishkanot Sha’ananim Conference Center
POB 4572
Jerusalem 9104402
ISRAEL
Chaired by Dror Wahrman
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of History
This lecture series was published as Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2017).
Lecture Overview: Despite the still unresolved issues in his ambitious system, Habermas’s paradigm shift to a model of rationality stressing the role of intersubjective justification in what Wilfred Sellars famously called “the space of reasons” offers a plausible way to tap the still emancipatory potential in the rationalist tradition. Without depending on a vulnerable metaphysical notion of reason or an untenable universalism, he escapes the charge made by champions of reasons various “others” that reason necessarily excludes and stigmatizes what it cannot colonize and control. In his later work, he modifies his initial faith in a purely discursive model of justification and validity-testing, acknowledging the role of external reality in shaping the never-ending learning process that is made possible by communicative rationality.
Lecture Series Overview: Martin Jay tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? Applying the tools of intellectual history, he examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term “reason” over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason.
After surveying Western ideas of reason from the ancient Greeks through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay engages at length with the ways leading theorists of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and most extensively Habermas—sought to salvage a viable concept of reason after its apparent eclipse. They despaired, in particular, over the decay in the modern world of reason into mere instrumental rationality. When reason becomes a technical tool of calculation separated from the values and norms central to daily life, then choices become grounded not in careful thought but in emotion and will—a mode of thinking embraced by fascist movements in the twentieth century.
Is there a more robust idea of reason that can be defended as at once a philosophical concept, a ground of critique, and a norm for human emancipation? Jay explores at length the communicative rationality advocated by Habermas and considers the range of arguments, both pro and con, that have greeted his work.
Martin Jay, the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Prof. of History at UC-Berkeley gave the sixth series of George L. Mosse Lectures at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on November 13, 15, 17, 2012. The well attended lectures, based on Prof. Jay’s current research on the Frankfurt School and its legacy are a continuation of the work he began with his groundbreaking book “The Dialectical Imagination” published in 1973.
