Dialogic Foundations 283on itself. Thus, what Hegel calls dialectical ‘is the reconstruction of...recurrent
experience and its assimilation by the subject’ (Habermas in Baynes et al. 1993: 300).
Most Kantians and Hegelians still hold to subject-based reason as a supremely eman-
cipatory and illuminating device. For Habermas, this sets off neo-Kantians, such
as Popper, from the likes of Feyerabend, or Horkheimer and Adorno from Fou-
cault. He notes that Popper, Adorno, and Horkheimer ‘still saysomethingabout the
indispensable conditions of claims to the validity of those opinions we hold to be jus-
tified, claims that transcend all restrictions of time and place’ (Habermas in Baynes
et al. 1993: 304). However, with Nietzsche, ‘the criticism of modernity dispenses for
the first time with its retention of an emancipatory content’. Nietzsche even ‘bids
farewell’ to the dialectic of the Enlightenment. (Habermas 1998: 94).^10 In Nietzsche
subjectivity turns totally against itself. In my own reading, this process comes to
fruition in thinkers such as Lyotard. For Habermas, after Nietzsche, the philosophy
of the subject was taken up, with a vengeance, by postmodernists. The postmod-
ernists focus exclusively on their own subjectivity and its contingency, regardless of
any social utility, solidarities, or emancipatory concerns. Politics, for such writers,
becomes merely a supplementary concern. Some philosophers have tried to over-
come this dilemma. Habermas, for example, sees strong intimations of an alternative
in Hegel’s early writings on love. However, ultimately, he sees that the later Hegel still
‘conceives the overcoming of subjectivity within the boundaries of a philosophy of
the subject’ (Habermas 1998: 22).^11 For Habermas, in sum, beginning with isolated
or atomized subject—mournfully examining its own inwardness—is bogus. In this
mode of subject-based thinking—within postmodernists such as Derrida, Bataille,
and Foucault—Habermas sees the total exhaustion of the philosophy of the subject.
However, in attacking the philosophy of the subject, Habermas is not falling into
the embrace of an older foundationalism. He is convinced that philosophy has lost its
authoritative position in the human and social sciences. Neo-Kantian philosophy, for
example, particularly, has frequently posed ‘as the highest court of appealvis-à-visthe
sciences and cultures as a whole’ (Habermas in Baynes et al. 1993: 298). For Habermas,
it is now clear, though ‘that philosophy has no business playing the part of the highest
arbiter in matter of science and culture’ (Habermas in Baynes et al. 1993: 308–9). More
rigorous neo-Kantianism is simply wrong. Yet, Habermas does not accept the contin-
gencies built into the postmodern rejection of rationalist philosophy. It is crucial to
realize that a critique of older foundationalist arguments does not entail a total rejec-
tion of foundationalism. We can, he thinks, learn from the mistakes of earlier concepts
of modernity. In many ways, Habermas can therefore be seen as navigating a middle
course between the potential irrationalism of the postmoderns and the naïve univer-
salist foundationalism of many neo-Kantian thinkers. He thinks that philosophical
thought can still be—as he calls it—a ‘stand in interpreter’ and ‘guardian of ration-
ality’. Thus, there are universalistic elements to Habermas’s thinking (reminiscent of
the older foundationalist claims), however, these are then given a more ‘fallibilistic’
rendering. Reason is historically situated and premised ultimately in everyday pro-
cesses of communication and understanding. However, for Habermas, as indicated
in the ‘knowledge spheres’—qua human interests—discussion, there are different