Metaphysics (Sep 2010)
Pursuing the Emancipatory Purport of Subjectivity from Frankfurt to Paris
Abstract
This paper is devoted to investigating the philosophical place of Subjectivity in the contemporary thought. My justification for engaging in further study on this much-discussed concept is that three significant questions concerning subjectivity have remained insufficiently examined: What is the problem of philosophical foundation of modernity from Cartesian Cogito to the Kantian autonomous will and to the Hegelian subjectivity? Is there any possibility to overcome the proposed problem from an internal point of view and from the perspective of Jürgen Habermas? Whether the radical criticism of the Enlightenment idea of an autonomous subject by thinkers like Foucault and Derrida leads to loss of freedom or to the robust notion of freedom being deeply improved? This paper, accordingly, will examine the three above mentioned questions regarding subjectivity across three sections. I have argued, in the first section that the Enlightenment’s heritage is contradictory. On the one hand, the notion of subjectivity has generated a kind of emancipation. On the other hand, the subjectivity has enthroned a conception of reason and of method that can be interpreted as a new form of domination. In the second section, I have argued that Habermas’s answer to the philosophical dilemma of subjectivity is to accept the criticism of subject-centered reason but to find a basis for reason in communicative action. Habermas’s conception of subjectivity has been criticized by the help of some contemporary thinkers, in the third section of this paper, and it has been argued that based on his notions of modernity and subjectivity the marginalized populations of the World- namely the Other- can no longer expect intellectual and ethical support for their plight from Frankfurt and should immigrate to Paris in order to purse the emancipatory aspect of subjectivity.
