Files

Abstract

This dissertation explores some of the more prominent attempts by German and French intellectuals to cope with the disorientation of a disenchanted twentieth century and to navigate an intellectual horizon in which no lodestar of meaning, order, or sense readily presented itself. My point of departure is Max Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt). Weber described this process as rationalization’s erosion of the wonder of life through dis-integrating analysis and categorization, resulting in the destruction of the organic whole, the fragmentation of life into an endless array of essentially meaningless phenomena and individuals, lacking any unifying ground or telos. I examine the attempts of numerous imbricated twentieth-century thinkers to develop an integrated philosophical and political answer to this problem of disenchantment. These thinkers are Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Carl Schmitt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French structuralists, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I attempt to show that this seemingly diverse group of thinkers addressed common problems of linguistic and existential meaning, humanity and subjectivity, teleology, and foundation. The distinct manner in which each theorist treated these problems reflects differing philosophic-political responses to the challenge of disenchantment. My approach is primarily philosophical, but the stakes are nothing less than the possibility of a compelling and universal political justification. To this end, I engage critically with some of the epistemological, ontological, hermeneutic, and semiological claims upon which various thinkers have grounded their political thought in the supposedly post-metaphysical twentieth century, an age putatively without recourse to theological or Platonic foundations. Moreover, this dissertation can be correctly understood as a work treating the postwar intellectual history of the Federal Republic and the question of German normality. I hope to show that this question takes on a level of redundancy when viewed against the backdrop of disenchantment and its offspring of postmodernism and postmodernity. Hence, the two chapters devoted to twentieth-century French thought serve as something of a counter-example to the German case and a rejoinder to German exceptionalism. I conclude that no epistemic or ontological ground offers itself as a point from which one can definitively under-stand the entire affair of human existence, including political existence. No single proposition or set thereof can impose a final word. No method provides a way out. The ubiquity of interpretation permeates and forms us. The best we can do is to approach the task of understanding with an appreciation for its openness. Liberal democracy and an open-ended humanism, I contend, offer the best means of doing this among existing political systems and ethical alignments.

Details

Actions

PDF

from
to
Export
Download Full History