Does Hegels Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?
(vii) Habermas accepts that modernity involves the inescapable pluralism of “particular lifeworlds.” (viii) He also accepts that the pursuit of philosophy can never lead to a general answer to the question, “How should I (we) live?” (viii). Philosophers thus enjoy no superior perspective with a vantage point on the whole. At that point, we observe that postmodernists stop and abandon any further effort to find a universal or even universal-seeming concept of the right or the just. But McCarthy shows how Habermas goes forward in the face of the limitation of modernism. We recall the idea, derived from Dupre’, that modernity happened, is real, and is irreversible. Habermas seems to accept that view of the situation. Within that situation, he presses onward, searching for something that will approach the universal. As McCarthy describes it, we envision a kind of last-gasp effort to avoid the worst pitfalls of modernist pluralism and its postmodern consequences. While Habermas agrees that
