The Opening of the Discourse

In 1984, in one of the last courses he offered at the Collège de France, Foucault (1987a, 38) presented Kant as the one who opened the discourse of modernity. Kant was the first to focus on modernity in its own right, free from its usual contrast with the Ancients, and to conceive of the significance of his own work as a reflection on and analysis of the present. In the lecture course he held at the University of Frankfurt in 1983–84, Habermas (1987b, 43) by contrast submitted that the discourse of modernity was opened by Hegel. The modern age, of course, had already begun at an earlier point in time. Thus he would agree with Foucault that Kant represents modernity in so far as he emphasises that critical reason replaces the search for substantive truths about human nature, and that the breakdown of religion and metaphysics makes necessary not only a consideration of society, social bonds and moral action but also the mature acceptance of responsibility for the organisation of our own lives (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1987, 110). Yet, in Habermas’ view, Kant's successor Hegel was the first for whom modernity became a problem. In his work an explicit relation was for the first time established among modernity, the new time-consciousness and the problem of rationality. Kant was undoubtedly modern, but it was Hegel who initiated the discourse of modernity.

What both Habermas and Foucault have in mind when they refer to what Habermas often calls ‘the discourse of modernity’ is not the discourse of modernity representing the central object of study of the present book, however, but rather a partial aspect of it. Both men are concerned with what in Habermas’ (1985 and 1987b, title) more precise terminology is called ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’. Their object of attention, which is admittedly analysed in their own peculiar ways, is a particular semantics, namely a philosophical discursive semantics, that has been and is still being generated by the more encompassing practical discourse of modernity. The beginning of the discourse of modernity that is of interest here does not lie in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.