ABSTRACT
Subject-centred reason is the reason and rationality of the transcendental subject; it is the reflexive reason of the philosophies of consciousness of Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Habermas's theoretical procedure for analysing modernity in this way, and the theoretical gains which follow from the adoption of this procedure, are threefold. Johann Amason has defined romanticism as 'the defence of meaningfulness against subsumption under the meaning-destroying mechanisms of an Enlightenment geared towards the expansion and rationalization of power and embodied in the reified economic and political structures of the modern world'. Habermas's criticism works to position Castoriadis between the Scylla of the Heideggerian happening of the event of disclosure, thereby squandering human autonomy; and the Charybdis of a Fichtean absolute ego that returns praxis to a speculative philosophy of consciousness. Dual-axis conceptions of language, by counterpointing the pull of the world to the claims for intersubjective justification, undermine the idealizations that Habermas attributes to communicative rationality.
