The philosophy of Habermas does not seem to posses a category for emotion, or emotional sociality - for example that captured in the Hegelian and Marxian concern with alienation, Marx's discussion of species being, the critical empathy of Adorno, and the psychoanalytic concern with the fate of instinctual life in Freudian thought. I struggle even to understand how his thought could be regarded as critical theory.
Perhaps emotionality and instinctuality may be lurking in the performative contradiction, or in the depths of his osseous discourse ethics, or possibly sublated into arbitrary system rationality. When you think about what kind of experience of reality is being characterised in this work, in all seriousness, I think we must regard it as psychopathic.
Habermas turned the emotional Adorno upside down, and found that the source of societal ills was the weight of subjectivity on objectivity. Even in Luther’s theology, emotionality was central in the understanding of the human - the sinfull passions of the flesh, and the doctrine of compassion and conscience.
The work of Habermas strikes me as profoundly dissociative - and it emerges in a cultural context of increasingly dissociative subjectivity. In no way can I begin to accept Habermas as a full account of the human - I think it is a profoundly inhuman doctrine, and the mystery is how broadly appreciated it is. It smacks of super-ego to me.
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