Abstract
Dear Chuck, I would like to take this opportunity to look back on our relationship. Not only to express my respect for your work and your enviable, unbroken level of productivity, but also extend a very special thank you for our long-standing friendship.
It is only a few years now before our first encounter will have occurred half a century ago. At the time, I traveled (on your invitation) from New York to Montreal – my first and last trip on a Greyhound bus – to visit a colleague who had become known for his book The Explanation of Behaviour. 1 I was excited by its cogent critique of behaviorism, so dominant back then, and also sensed an unexpected confirmation of my reflections on the logic of the social sciences. To me, this encounter was a personal and professional stroke of luck, as well as a surprise: I met a colleague who, having studied and taught in Canada, Oxford, and Paris, came from a very different academic background but had read more or less the same books, was influenced by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein, was as familiar with German and French philosophy as he was with the Anglo-Saxon variant, who exhibited an equally broad range of research interests, was well acquainted with both political science and philosophy – and was an engaged Labour Party supporter back home!
Nevertheless, it was not until a few years later, after we harangued you over several days of discussions at the Starnberg Institute, that I understood just how deeply you had immersed yourself in the German tradition of Hamann, Herder, Humboldt, and Hegel, all the way to Dilthey and Gadamer. I had never met someone able to combine the methodical approach of analytical linguistic philosophy with genuine insights of philosophical hermeneutics as convincingly as you – apart from Ernst Tugendhat, perhaps, who was with us at the time and had taken a similar philosophical path as your own, albeit from the opposite direction. This unusual link between the two traditions later enabled you to produce your first global success, through which you directed the Anglo-Saxon world’s attention to Hegel. Apart from a few colleagues like Dick Bernstein and Richard Rorty who had not forgotten American pragmatism’s Young Hegelian roots, your Hegel study meant a breakthrough for German Idealism in the Anglo-Saxon world of the mid-seventies, given the stubbornly upheld distinction between analytical and continental modes of thought at the time.
We continued to visit each other in Oxford and Frankfurt. Despite mutual criticisms in some systematic matters of linguistic philosophy and the conception of reason, I nevertheless felt we somehow pursued the same project side by side, while you had stronger ties to political science and I was familiar with social theory. That project, of course, was and still is the promotion of an enlightened philosophical self-understanding of modernity. By then, I had realized that your criticism of the procedural concept of reason entailed certain consequences for ethics as well – the argument over Hegel’s critique of Kantian moral theory had been, of course, somewhat of a family feud over the past two centuries between those who spend most of their lives oscillating between Kant and Hegel anyway.
Reading your second major volume on the Sources of the Self, 2 then, reaffirmed not just my admiration for your great theoretical design, but also made me aware of the dissent, which the rejection of Kantian morality necessarily implies for our understanding of modernity: what ought to have emerged – in good Aristotelian fashion – behind the normative self-understanding of modernity, which crystallizes around the notion of autonomy, was your substantial concept of a “modern good”! That said, these philosophical disagreements never drove us apart over the past 25 years – certainly not personally, but neither in scholarly terms.
There is a simple explanation for my undying interest in your continuously evolving philosophical work: in my view, we still pursue the same project, although perhaps from opposing vantage points by now. At any rate, we continue to be linked by the same topics, beginning with the “politics of recognition” in our multicultural immigrant societies up to the more profound historical and philosophical debate on religion as one of the still-living spiritual manifestations of the present age. Your third major book, A Secular Age, 3 has once again shown that you remain far ahead of my own thinking. Moreover, since 1996 I have not only understood the theoretical impact of your Catholic background much more clearly, but also the reason for our opposing perspectives: what from my point of view separates a secular from a religious self-understanding, namely the unreserved openness to fallibility and rational discourse across the board, appears to mean from your point of view a nongeneralizable element of just one among the many context-bound and incessantly competing worldviews.
If, however, as you believe, this pluralism of worldviews (which we can reasonably expect to remain unresolved) is precisely what characterizes the unabatedly particularistic self-understanding of modernity, then I imagine you can live with our amicable disagreements quite well. For the future, I wish you more of the same energy and clear mind you have shown as a philosophical wanderer thus far.