Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Philosophy: Variations on a Kantian Theme

Abstract

There is widespread agreement now that the critique of reason can be carried on only in conjunction with historical, social, and cultural analysis. But there is sharp disagreement as to just what form that critique should take. Arrayed along one side of the main front are those who, in the wakes of Nietzsche and Heidegger, attack enlightenment conceptions at their very roots, and along the other side, those who, in the wakes of Hegel and Marx, attempt to recast those conceptions in sociohistorical terms. This paper defends a position analogous to Kant's: ideas of reason are both necessary to thought and persistent sources of illusion. In the first part it examines some of the problems encountered by thinkers who take only the negative tack. Though their emphasis on the particular, changeable, and contingent is an understandable reaction to the traditional preoccupation with the universal, timeless, and necessary, it is, I argue, no less one-sided for that, nor any less questionable in its practical implications. The conclusion I try to reach along this path is that socialpractical analogues to Kant's ideas of reason are so deeply embedded in our form of life as to make doing without them unimaginableand undesirable. In the second part, it examines various aspects of Habermas's attempt to develop a more balanced approach. Kant's ideas of reason reappear there as pragmatic presuppositions of communication, more specifically as idealizing suppositions we cannot avoid making while attempting to arrive at mutual understanding. In reconstructing these idealizing presuppositions of communicative reason, however, Habermas does not give sufficient weight to the sorts of ontological presuppositions that occupy deconstructionists under the rubrics of language, culture, Seinsgeschick, diffirance, power, and the like. This, I argue, is what lends his project the transcendental air that so exercises his critics. The last part of the paper argues broadly that deconstructive concerns can be integrated into the reconstructive project, and can serve there as antidotes to the deepseated tendency to hypostatize ideas of reason into completely realized or realizeable states of affairs. The key to this approach is a shift in the level of the critique of impure reason from the negative