Habermas naturalized Kant’s transcendental conditions into empirical species history.

Evidence

According to Habermas (departing here from Kant), these transcendental conditions for the scientific relation to the world had arisen under empirical conditions. The basis for these lay in the natural history of the human species', which sustained its existence through work and language, and was shaped by relations of power. As linguistic beings, Habermas argued, human beings had been raised above nature. The structure of language was an anticipation of emancipation. As linguistic beings, it was possible for us to recognize a priori an interest in autonomy and responsibility. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.’ Language embodied a form of reason' which simultaneously means the will to reason’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2443

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures Habermas’s central move of historicizing Kantian transcendentalism via the natural history of the human species.
• XREF: Links to Habermas’s linguistic turn and the utopian ideal of unconstrained consensus that later critics (including his own later work) problematized. — connects to: Habermas’s early large studies embodied a materialist theory promoting radically democratic thought — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2330; Habermas sought to justify critical social theory through an epistemological reconstruction of positivism’s prelude. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2679
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2443