Volume 45, Issue Supplement, 2007
Spindel Conference September 28–30, 2006
Klaus Erich Kaehler
Pages 178-186
Comments on Merold Westphal’s “The Prereflective Cogito as Contaminated Opacity”
The intention of my comments is mainly to draw attention to a necessary distinction between that prereflective cogito of post-metaphysical subjectivity that is analysed in Westphal’s paper and the subject of the cogito that can be identified and verified as the very principle of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hegel, namely, as the subject of reason. This means first of all to step back from the conviction, taken as self-evident, that the subject of reason—and thereby the truth claims of that entire philosophical epoch—are illusionary, that is, without any right of their own. Instead we should be ready to ask how it is brought about philosophically that the subject is “shattered,” “humiliated,” “declared forfeit,” etc. My thesis is that post-metaphysical subjectivity with its contaminated opacity can be made understandable in principle out of the endogenous crisis of the fully developed “absolute” subject of reason, if this crisis is carried out and decided as the transformation of the subject from its absolute to its decentered status.