Habermas replaced the reconciliation-with-nature ideal with a language-based ideal of emancipation

Evidence

It did in fact remain characteristic of Habermas that he thought the demand for a form of enlightenment that was in command of itself could be fulfilled if the blind constraints of nature were no longer extended into the domination of man by man, and if, instead, human beings, as beings capable of speech, associated with one another free from domination, while at the same time disposing over nature even more successfully than ever. … By making language the basis of a utopian potential, Habermas declared talk of the `oppression’ of external nature, with which of course we cannot speak, to be an inaccurate paraphrase of a normal, unavoidable state of affairs; and he declared the idea of emancipation, of the dissolution of social relations of domination through unconstrained communication, to be a normative potential that was anchored in the structure of language. The problem of the dialectic between the effects of internal and external nature, which had again and again led the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment into ambiguity and contradiction, fell by the wayside in Habermas’s suggestion that the idea of reconciliation with nature could be replaced by the idea of emancipation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2451

Categorization

• XREF: The Habermas/Adorno split on nature grounds the entire trajectory of second-generation Frankfurt School critical theory; connects to later Habermas texts on communicative rationality and the linguistification of the sacred. — connects to: Habermas grounded critique in language itself to escape historical relativism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2445; Habermas’s theory of communicative action replaced Adorno’s philosophy of the subject. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2746; Replacing one essentialist subject with another leaves inverted essentialism intact

Broader Connections

• Habermas’s theory of communicative action replaced Adorno’s philosophy of the subject. #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2746
• Replacing one essentialist subject with another leaves inverted essentialism intact #complicates (0.75)