Ep. 391: Habermas Defends Modernity (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Continuing on on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Ch. 1, 2, and 5 with guest John Ganz. We further discuss Habermas' characterizations of Hegel's take on modernity and eventually get to Adorno and Horkheimer, whose dismissals of modernity Habermas thinks go too far.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is the partially examined life episode 391 part two. |
| 0:11.0 | We've been talking about Habermas' the philosophical discourse of modernity. |
| 0:16.0 | We've given the basic thesis, what his idea of modernity is, how he thinks Hegel maybe had |
| 0:23.2 | some good ideas that he wants to tell us about in the second lecture, how in the fifth lecture |
| 0:28.0 | he is objecting to the critique that Horkheimer and Adorno in the dialectic of enlightenment |
| 0:34.0 | had against it, you know, all of this in favor of, don't give up a modernity, |
| 0:39.2 | don't give up on enlightenment. We need more reason. We need just, you know, you just need to have |
| 0:42.8 | communicative action. You need to have something social and not merely an expanded individual |
| 0:48.0 | conception of reason or something like that. We had finally gotten into the text itself. Yeah, |
| 0:54.0 | what, Dylan, you had us about |
| 0:55.4 | page 17 in the clarification of what subjectivity means for Hegel in the context of modernity. |
| 1:03.9 | Yeah, what else do we want to point at in this first lecture here? I mean, his definition of modern |
| 1:07.9 | art is very interesting because it's a little bit more capacious than what we might think of it. |
| 1:13.0 | It's not just like modernism, like cubism or whatever. |
| 1:16.4 | Modern art reveals its essence and romanticism and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of romantic art. |
| 1:24.6 | Expressive self-realization becomes a principle of art bearing as a form of life. By according to the principle of forest, I live as art. Expressive self-realization becomes a principle of art bearing as a form of life. |
| 1:29.5 | By according to the principle of forest, I live as artists when all my action utterances for me |
| 1:33.7 | only on the level of mere semblance and assumes a shape was wholly in my power. Reality |
| 1:39.4 | attains the status of artistic expression only through the subjective refraction of the sensitive |
| 1:45.1 | soul is a mere appearance due to the eye. I mean, that does describe, I would say, the pretensions, |
| 1:53.2 | perhaps of modern artists to kind of be these world disclosing figures and producing themselves in this very radical way. |
| 2:03.1 | I think that principle holds up pretty much until the present. |
... |
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