2012: Martin Jay, “After the Eclipse 02, Reason Eclipsed: Reason Regrounded: Habermas’s Gamble”
Martin Jay, “After the Eclipse: The Light of Reason in Late Critical Theory 02: Reason Regrounded: Habermas’s Gamble”
George L. Mosse Distinguished Lectures
https://mosselectures.wisc.edu/program/
Tuesday, 13 November 2012, 18:30 IDT
This lecture series was published as Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2017).
Mishkanot Sha’ananim Conference Center
POB 4572
Jerusalem 9104402
ISRAEL
Chair: Dan Diner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of History
Lecture Overview: The most creative member of the Frankfurt School’s second generation, Jürgen Habermas, attempted to establish a new ground for a critical notion of reason, albeit one that was explicitly postmetaphysical. His alternative involved the following departures from the earlier Frankfurt School’s emphatic alternative: 1) the desubstantialization of reason 2) the detranscendentalization of reason 3) the linguistification of reason, 4) the desublimation of reason 5) the pluralization of reason 6) the proceduralization of reason 7) the temporalization of reason as a future project. 8) the “as if“ narrativization of reason as an evolutionary standard by which to measure the potential realization of that future.
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.
His most recent book, Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Reenchantment of the World (University of Chicago Press, 2025), connects the philosophical and aesthetic traditions of the medieval and modern worlds. Focusing on the intellectual movement of the European Middle Ages to reject platonic philosophy in favor of Aristotelian nominalism, Jay’s work demonstrates the “disenchantment” of the visual artistic world as a result of the new theoretical paradigm and positions photography as a medium for “re-enchanting” the modern world.
