Habermas' purge of pure theory: Critical theory without ontology?

Abstract

Reading J?rgen Habermas and his associates of the Frankfurt School of ide? ology critique more often than not leaves the impression that ontology is anath? ema to critical social theory. For ontology, in promoting a quietistic attitude of contemplation and mimesis in the face of a stable cosmic order, readily becomes a witting or unwitting ideological instrument for a politics of conservatism and ethics of conformity to the already given. But what if ontology took upon itself to describe the entire gamut of reality in the ways in which it is encountered and provokes us in our most concrete pursuits, so that the descriptive "is" of its givenness would eo ipso imply the prescriptive "ought" of immediate tasks? The world could then be interpreted as a direct invitation, if not to revolutionary ac? tivism, at least to rational change, thereby fulfilling the tacit ontological demand hidden in Marx's most familiar thesis on Feuerbach. The reciprocities involved here find a particularly telling formulation in the German: Die Welt ist uns nicht nur gegeben, sondern auch aufgegeben. Recent decades have witnessed a number of beginnings toward conceptualiz? ing such a task-structured reality as it presents itself to human endeavors. Hei? degger's explication of "the being for whom being is at issue" aims to elaborate the "perfect tense a priori," future as well as past, of the world in and through