Modernity as an unfinished project: is the campaign against the French critics of reason a defense of the Enlightenment, or a systematic misreading of thinkers you declined to read closely?

Jürgen Habermas, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The critique of reason cannot be total, because it must be conducted somewhere. Whoever offers grounds for the claim that reason is nothing but a mask for power, and expects those grounds to persuade, has already stepped onto the ground he means to destroy. Nietzsche saw this and took the aesthetic exit; his successors want the critique and the exemption together, and there is no such position.1

Foucault's genealogies are presented as value-free and are unintelligible except as indictments, which is cryptonormativism: holding a standard one has officially abolished. What follows is not a defense of the Enlightenment as it stands. Modernity is unfinished. The differentiation of science, morality and art into autonomous spheres is an achievement; the pathology is that they have drawn away from a lifeworld impoverished by their absence, and the remedy for a one-sided rationalization is not less reason.2345

Sources

  1. The Normative Content of Modernity I The radical critique of reason exacts a high price for taking leave of modernity. In the first place, these discourses can and want to give no account of their own position.
    The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 289
  2. Now, of course, the entire weight of the problematic rests on the basic concept of power that lends both the archeological prospecting and the genealogical disclosures their dimension of being a critique of modernity. Nietzsche's authority, from which this utterly un-sociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.
    The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 220
  3. The ill fate of surplus production that at first still served celebratory and sovereign exuberance, but then uses up ever more resources for the purpose of just raising the level of productivity, culminates in this way: Extravagance changes into productive consumption and removes the basis for creative, self-transcending sovereignty.
    The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 103–104
  4. In any case, they cannot validate for their knowledge any superiority according to standards of truth claims that would transcend local agreements. Thus, the attempt to preserve genealogical historiography from a relativist self-denial by means of its own tools falls short.
    The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 245–246
  5. In the hour of Pan the day holds its breath, time stands still — the transitory moment is wed to eternity. Nietzsche owes his concept of modernity, developed in terms of his theory of power, to an unmasking critique of reason that sets itself outside the horizon of reason.
    The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 97–98

Where the argument is made

  • The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1985
  • Lawrence trans. 1987), especially the lectures on Nietzsche as turning point, on Horkheimer and Adorno, on Heidegger, on Derrida and the leveling of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature, and the two lectures on Foucault
  • "Modernity — An Unfinished Project" (1980, the Adorno Prize address)
  • Postmetaphysical Thinking (1988)

How the argument was received

The most polemical book in the authorship and the one that damaged Habermas's standing among readers of the thinkers it attacks. The Derrida lecture in particular is widely held — including by scholars sympathetic to Habermas — to have engaged Derrida through secondary literature rather than the primary texts. That Habermas and Derrida later made common cause is usually read as a retraction; Habermas has never described it as one.