Adorno and Habermas: Two varieties of post-metaphysical thinking

This essay asks how much of Adorno is present in Habermas’s theory of communicative reason and how far Adorno anticipated Habermas in his linguistic-philosophical reflections. Despite all their differences, Adorno and Habermas agree that a contemporary philosophy must be conceived as a critique of metaphysics, which they develop with different theoretical means. For Adorno’s anti-idealist philosophy of negative dialectics, the ‘fall of metaphysics’ is irresistible, but he continues to reflect whether philosophy must still take account of the need for metaphysics. For Habermas, a modestly reconceived post-metaphysical philosophy, whose genealogy he reconstructs in his late work Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, is a placeholder for a theory of practical reason. As a hermeneutic science, philosophy also continues to pursue the task of contributing to human beings’ understanding of themselves and the world. Its role as an interpreter also crucially includes the attempt to translate the unsatisfied semantic elements of religious traditions into secular conceptions. This intention is in line with Adorno’s postulate that theological elements can only be sustained if they are transformed into this-worldly language.