Philosophical Introductions E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 331

Beschreibung

On the occasion of Habermas's 80th birthday, the German publisher Suhrkamp brought out five volumes of Habermas's papers that spanned the full range of his philosophical thought, from the theory of rationality to the critique of metaphysics. For each of these volumes, Habermas wrote an introduction that crystallized, in a remarkably clear and succinct way, his thinking on the key philosophical issues that have preoccupied him throughout his long career. This new book by Polity brings together these five introductions and publishes them in translation for the first time. The resulting volume provides a unique and comprehensive overview of Habermas's philosophy in his own words. In the five chapters that make up this volume, Habermas discusses the concept of communicative action and the grounding of the social sciences in the theory of language; the relationship between rationality and the theory of language; discourse ethics; political theory and problems of democracy and legitimacy; and the critique of reason and the challenge posed by religion in a secular age. The volume includes a substantial introduction by Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin, which offers a synoptic view of the development of Habermas's thought as a whole followed by concise accounts of his contributions in each of the areas mentioned. Together they provide the reader with the necessary background to understand Habermas's distinctive and original contribution to philosophy. Philosophical Introductions will be an indispensable text for students and scholars in philosophy and in the humanities and social sciences generally, as well as anyone interested in the most important developments in philosophy and critical theory today.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Preface

Notes

Introduction: The Work of Jürgen Habermas: Roots, Trunk and Branches: Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin

I. General Traits of Habermas’s Work

II. A Brief Overview of Habermas’s Introductions

Notes

1. Foundations of Sociology in the Theory of Language

2. Theory of Rationality and Theory of Meaning

I. Formal Pragmatics

II. Communicative Rationality

III. Discourse Theory of Truth

IV. On Epistemology

Notes

3. Discourse Ethics

I. Moral Theory

II. On the System of Practical Discourses

Notes

4. Political Theory

I. Democracy

II. The Constitutional State

III. Nation, Culture and Religion

IV. Constitutionalization of International Law?

Notes

5. Critique of Reason

I. Metaphilosophical Reflections

II. Postmetaphysical Thinking

III. The Challenge of Naturalism

IV. The Challenge of Religion

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Philosophical Introductions

Five Approaches to Communicative Reason

Jürgen Habermas

Introduction by Jean-Marc Durand-GasselinTranslated by Ciaran Cronin

polity

Chapters 1–5 first published in German in Philosophische Texte. Studienausgabe in fünf Bänden © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009. All rights reserved and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin

Introduction by Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin, 2018

This English edition © Polity Press, 2018

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0675-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Habermas, Jürgen, author.Title: Philosophical introductions : five approaches to communicative reason / Jürgen Habermas.Description: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017059698 (print) | LCCN 2018015509 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509506750 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509506712 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509506729 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, German--History--20th century. | Communication--Philosophy.Classification: LCC B3258.H322 (ebook) | LCC B3258.H322 E5 2018 (print) | DDC 193--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059698

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Preface

On the occasion of my eightieth birthday, Suhrkamp Verlag encouraged me to make a systematic selection of essays on the five main areas on which my philosophical work has focused. I found this initiative very opportune because I have not written any books on important topics to which my philosophical interests, in the narrower sense, are directed. As a result, the individual collections of texts could take the place of unwritten monographs on:

the foundations of sociology in the theory of language,

the formal-pragmatic conception of language and rationality,

discourse ethics,

political philosophy, and

the status of postmetaphysical thinking.

1

The ‘theory of communicative action’ is so complex that it needs to be defended simultaneously on many different fronts. The foundations of such a social theory are laid down in ‘preparatory studies’ on philosophical questions, which must not be confused with social scientific questions; rather, they must be respected in their distinctive character. In the highly diverse network of scientific discourses, philosophical arguments can be defended only in the specific contexts in which the associated problems arise. The edition of philosophical essays was intended to throw light on this independent systematic import of philosophical questions. On the other hand, even though these attempts at explanation have to stand on their own two feet as contributions to technical philosophical discussions, at the same time they preserve their status within the more comprehensive context of an ambitious social theory.

In order to render this context transparent, I wrote an introduction to each of the five thematic volumes. In no other place have I attempted to provide an ‘overview’ of my philosophy, if I may speak in such terms, as a whole. For several decades I have had the vexing experience that, as our discipline becomes inexorably more specialized, my publications are no longer read as attempts to develop a philosophical conception as a whole. Rather than being read as a generalist’s contributions to certain aspects of the theory of rationality or the theory of action, political theory or the theory of law, moral theory, language pragmatics or, specifically, social theory, they are interpreted in ‘fragmented’ form. This is why the synoptic view provided by these ‘introductions’ is close to my heart, without wishing to misrepresent their reference to a specific occasion of publication.

Publishing a series of introductions without the texts to which they refer is, of course, an imposition on the reader, who will if necessary have to track down these texts using the references.2 Therefore, I am grateful to Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin for fulfilling my all but impossible request to repair this deficiency. He supplements the introductions, which always refer to specific texts, with a masterful account of my approach from the perspective of a capable French colleague from across the Rhine.

Starnberg, December 2016Jürgen Habermas

Notes

1.

Jürgen Habermas,

Philosophische Texte

, 5 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009).

2.

Citations of the texts discussed in the introductions are printed in

bold

.

IntroductionThe Work of Jürgen Habermas: Roots, Trunk and Branches

Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin

The purpose of the present text is to introduce a collection of five essays by Jürgen Habermas, each of which originally served as an introduction to a thematic collection of philosophical articles on a single area of his work. To celebrate his eightieth birthday, Suhrkamp, Habermas’s main German publisher, offered him the opportunity to devote a collection of articles to each of the most salient developments in his extremely prolific theoretical writings.1 The volumes covered, in turn, the foundation of sociology in the theory of meaning, the relationship between rationality and the theory of meaning, discourse ethics, political theory and, finally, the critique of reason. Thus, the five introductory essays collected here offer an unusually rich and unparalleled overview of Habermas’s theoretical construction and, taken together, provide an indispensable guide to the interpretation of his work.

However, these introductions also exhibit four characteristics that are apt to present difficulties for the reader, quite apart, of course, from their very rich intellectual content. The first and second difficulties are bound up with the fact that these are thematic introductions as well as being philosophical introductions in a rather academic sense of the term. Thus, they divide up Habermas’s work along clear and fairly classical institutional lines. However, this is at odds with the fact that, on the one hand, his work developed in a more organic way out of a central core and, on the other, its methodological point of departure was more interdisciplinary than this institutional division would suggest. A further difficulty is that Habermas tends to present results or developments and elucidations without explaining the underlying research process. Finally, the fourth difficulty is a direct implication of the first three: the introductions discuss articles that stem either from the 1970s (in a very few cases)2 or from the 1980s to the present day (the majority), hence from a period when Habermas’s social theory had already been worked out.3

In addition, I will try to throw light on these five thematic introductions by first (I) addressing the following four questions: To what extent do these texts refer to branches emanating from a single trunk or, alternatively, only to a single part of the trunk? In what sense was this trunk more interdisciplinary than these primarily philosophical and thematic surveys would suggest? In what ways, moreover, are the constituent problems and highly original intellectual forms that shaped the formulation of its major theoretical axes essential for understanding the Habermasian project? And, finally, to what extent does one part of the trunk, together with the roots, belong to the 1960s and even the 1950s? Then, in a second stage (II), I will discuss each of the introductions in turn, situating them within this project and its global dynamics of construction and elucidation.

I. General Traits of Habermas’s Work

In this section I will sketch in very broad strokes Habermas’s work as a whole and its theoretical construction since its inception.

A. Background, intentions and project

1. In order to comprehend the roots of the tree, several contextual elements must be borne in mind simultaneously. Here we must begin by connecting some of the contextual and historical elements which, for reasons of thematic presentation, occur separately in the different introductions where they are discussed for the most part in a preliminary way.

The emotional resonance of the first two – historical and political – elements is unequal, but they were both destined to play a leading role in Habermas’s intellectual development. The first was the profound impact of the Second World War, the revelation of the horrors of Nazism and the project of re-education. The second was the context of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) during the post-war period of strong, technocratic economic growth, with its extremely narrow political spectrum restricted, on the right, by the Nazi past and, on the left, by the confrontation of the FRG with the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Habermas, who was born in Düsseldorf in 1929, embraced the project of re-education from the outset4 and identified with the extra-parliamentary opposition and with the critique of the technocratic and Keynesian rationalization of the 1950s and 1960s. These two contextual elements combined from a very early date to imbue Habermas with a very stable system of suspicions and affinities concerning certain components of the German intellectual landscape of the 1950s and 1960s and, more generally, German intellectual history as a whole.

These suspicions and affinities would persist and receive initial confirmation within a specific academic context and through Habermas’s early formative readings. Thus, these first two historical and political elements should be seen in relation to three features of the intellectual context properly speaking – namely, the structure of the German philosophical field and its major currents before and after Nazism, Habermas’s reading of Karl Löwith’s book From Hegel to Nietzsche and, finally, his encounter with Karl-Otto Apel.

In fact, the continuity of the German philosophical field before and after the war, with its inherent polarities and historical resonances, constitutes the first element, because the structure and the philosophical oppositions that marked this same field in the 1920s and 1930s were repeated, although in a euphemized way, after the war. The euphemization of the post-war philosophical field was the combined effect of the taboo on Nazism, the project of re-education, the new, extremely stable institutional system of the FRG and its confrontation with the GDR. Three families of ideas must be mentioned in this context. The first comprises four currents representing certain continuities and profound ambiguities within German philosophy – which, with its authoritarian and elitist traits, was generally politically conservative – before, during and after the Nazi period: the decisionist and expressionist Hobbesianism of Carl Schmitt and his followers; the philosophical anthropology of Erich Rothacker (Habermas’s teacher in the 1950s), Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen; Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and its hermeneutic variant represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer; and Joachim Ritter’s Right Hegelianism. These were the dominant currents in German academe in the post-war period and hence during Habermas’s student years from 1949 to 1954.5 The second family of ideas comprises the liberal rationalism of the proponents of the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle who had been forced into exile, a current which was continued in a less rigid form by Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, the main representatives of the Vienna School having remained in the United States. Finally, the third family constituted by German Marxism, whose Hegelian and Weberian traits were deeply influenced by Georg Lukács, found a continuation in the context of virulent anti-communism, reinforced by the confrontation with the GDR, with the return of the Frankfurt School and its colourful figures and interdisciplinary research. Habermas, who had been profoundly influenced by his youthful readings of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, would slip into the legacy of this third family of ideas and adopt in part the criticisms it addressed to the first two – a point of departure thematized in the five introductions.

Although Habermas initially identified with the revival of the German Marxist tradition, the euphemization of these oppositions would prompt him from a very early date to seek positions that mediate between and combine these three currents, something which would have been unthinkable in the 1930s, or even in the late 1920s, because of the extremism that was also reflected in the philosophical field. Thus, in the early 1960s, Habermas was already borrowing from all sides, in particular from Popper, Gadamer and the philosophical anthropology of the late Max Scheler.

Later, his reading of Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche6 would establish one of the keys to his interpretation of the history of philosophy in which Hegel marks the major caesura: on one side, metaphysical thought with its strong conception of theory and contemplative idea of reason as something separate from practice; and, on the other side, postmetaphysical thinking thrown into history, language and action, which recognizes its own fallibility and develops beginning with the generation of the Young Hegelians in particular.7

Finally, Apel played a considerable role in Habermas’s intellectual development. Seven years his senior, a loyal friend and mentor and a conveyor of ideas, Apel introduced him to the European tradition of the philosophy of language, especially the hermeneutic tradition from Humboldt to Gadamer, but also to Wittgenstein, that is, to the linguistic turn. Finally, by familiarizing him with the American pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, Apel also introduced Habermas to a tradition with a special affinity with the democratic project at the very moment in the 1950s and 1960s when a wind of change was blowing across the whole of the FRG from America as a result of re-education, strong economic growth and the geopolitics of the Cold War.8 With this, the ‘three turns’ – the hermeneutic, linguistic and pragmatic turns – were already in place. In Germany and for Habermas, therefore, Apel played a major role in breaking down intellectual barriers and in formulating certain theoretical axes by reconciling traditions that had been separated by exile9 (a reconciliation also facilitated by the euphemization evoked above), thus through the theme of turns and their convergence, but also through the central theme of communication conceived as a Peircean pragmatist recovery of Kantian themes.10

2. Let us now examine how these five elements are connected and form positive and negative intellectual polarities – polarities which would undergo incessant ramification and justification in the development of Habermas’s work as a whole and which reflect, albeit in a modified way, the structure of the pre-war German philosophical field.

In the first place, we can identify critical polarities on two fronts. The first of these negative polarities is Habermas’s critique – as a self-declared ‘product of re-education’ – of all intellectual continuities between the periods before and after National Socialism and, more generally, of anything which seemed to be an identifiable component of the intellectual prehistory of Nazism.11 These include German Romanticism; the prophetic and aestheticizing posture; the esoteric and elitist style; the obsession with ancient Greece and thus, more generally, everything he would later subsume under the heading of the ‘German Platonic tradition’ with its ambivalence towards modernity;12 the authoritarianism and elitism that are at least in part expressions of this tradition; and thus also even more generally the forms of thought, both within and beyond Germany, that exhibit a family resemblance with this conservatism and Romanticism, in particular all forms of philosophical substantialism (concerning Being, the good, etc.) that remain wedded to metaphysics. Although Apel’s influence tempered the severity of this retrospective view,13 it provides the background for understanding Habermas’s criticisms of Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s young conservatism, of Gehlen’s authoritarian institutionalism and Ritter’s Right Hegelianism, not to mention Gadamer’s theory of understanding and prejudices and, finally, American neo-conservatism. But this retrospective view also informed the critiques he would later formulate of Hannah Arendt’s neo-republicanism, notwithstanding its affinity with his project, and of American communitarianism – the former because of its excessive reliance on the ancient model of republicanism, the latter because of its excessive indebtedness to Aristotle. Finally, it is also from this point of view that we must understand Habermas’s reticence concerning the aestheticizing and Romantic tendencies of Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin and concerning the French neo-structuralists. Underlying this are the conflicts with the ‘German Platonic tradition’ and its ambivalence towards modernity.

Moreover, Habermas was critical of positivism in its different forms because of its complicity with technocracy, its reduction of reason to calculation and its tendency to reduce practical reason to an instrumental dimension.14 This is a guiding principle which also informs his opposition to Popper’s rationalism (already apparent in the articles on the positivist dispute)15 and to the objectivism of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (although, for Habermas, the latter is also representative of paternalistic and technocratic conservatism) and, more recently, his opposition to the reductionism of neural materialism.

Secondly, we can identify a series of positive polarities. The first is the revival of the Hegelian and Weberian tradition in German Marxism initiated by Lukács and recast in Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary Marxism. Horkheimer himself was critical of the conservative regressions of ontologism, as he was of positivism and the reduction of philosophy to epistemology.16 Habermas also sought to revive the Kant of What is Enlightenment? and the Critique of Practical Reason and the Kantian notion of self-education through discussion, in opposition both to the aestheticism and Romanticism of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which found a partial continuation in Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse, and to substantialist and conservative ethical theories of the good. Another positive polarity was the revival of the pragmatism of Peirce, but also of Dewey, an emphatically democratic intellectual tradition, and, more directly, the antipositivist tenor of the building blocks of the theory of communicative action, including the later Wittgenstein, Searle, Toulmin, Schütz, Chomsky and Dummett, among others, for the theory of communication, and Weber and Parsons, among others, for social theory.

The first novelty here by comparison with Horkheimer is the light Habermas casts on the positions he criticizes and defends from the perspective of the historical and intellectual caesura of the transition to a postmetaphysical era and of what took shape under Apel’s influence as the hermeneutic, pragmatic and linguistic turns, even before the difference was thematized in terms of the theory of communicative action per se. In addition, Habermas’s early reading of Löwith combined with Apel’s work of intellectual importation to conceptualize the delays of ontologism, philosophical anthropology, substantialism and positivism within the vast undertaking of the detranscendentalization of reason and, symmetrically, of the need for Critical Theory to adjust to this historical movement by adapting itself to the hermeneutic, pragmatic and linguistic turns, precisely what would be accomplished by the theory of communicative action. The assumed continuation of Hegelian and Weberian Marxism from Lukács to Adorno is thus connected with a veritable sequencing of the history of philosophy that would inform the classification of theoretical materials for Habermas’s own enterprise of a critical revival of German Marxism and for his critiques of the alternative positions: paradigm (philosophical ontology, modern philosophy of the subject, contemporary philosophy of language); turns (hermeneutic, pragmatic, linguistic); model (‘logocentric’ with the primacy of description, pluralistic).17

Viewed in a wider context, this sequencing of detranscendentalization must be related to the social theory that Habermas would develop during the 1960s and 1970s. The evolutionary process described by the theory of rationalization and of functional differentiation leads to the gradual emergence of distinct realms of social practice (science, politics, economics and art) supported by corresponding institutions (academies and universities, parliament and administrative bodies, the stock exchange and commercial courts, art schools, etc.) and inevitably transforms general and learned culture by differentiating intellectual disciplines (science and philosophy, science and theology, natural science and human science). Therefore, the delays or adjustments in the intellectual field also have a sociological meaning which is reflected in the Habermasian revival of the Marxist critique of ideology.

In addition to an immediate philosophical or intellectual dimension, therefore, the sequencing also has political overtones and a sociological correlate.

Finally, a second major difference from the first generation of Critical Theorists (which combines with detranscendentalization) is the communicative solution suggested by Apel’s reading of Peirce, which led Habermas to differentiate between two ‘paradigms’ (but no longer primarily in a historical sense), the paradigm of the subject and the paradigm of intersubjectivity. Under the heading of ‘logocentrism’ (loosely inspired by Derrida), Habermas would develop a more discreet but nevertheless quite decisive critique of the undue primacy accorded by many theoretical approaches to the epistemic dimension of reason and the assertoric proposition over the moral or expressive dimensions of language, a primacy that is all the more likely to appear reductive under conditions of a differentiated modernity.

The result is a whole system of ‘theoretical types’ which enabled Habermas to construct and understand his own position and those of his protagonists and underlies his extraordinary theoretical productivity.

3. This sequencing also informs a modus operandi which proceeds by identifying overlaps and convergences in the theoretical materials classified and selected in accordance with the sequence, a reflection of the fact that the postmetaphysical philosopher lacks any privileged intuitions or intellectual instruments of his or her own.18 The overlaps in question serve as hermeneutic and heuristic guides for construction in combination with standard conceptual and empirical arguments.19 Thus the theory of communicative action will both be inscribed in this sequence and embody this modus operandi. This applies, albeit in more or less explicit ways, to social theory, legal theory, ethics and the theory of reference.

The sequencing and modus operandi in question express within the philosophical field, each in its own way, the problem of German backwardness and that of a catch-up revolution. The latter term crops up throughout Habermas’s work: it can be found in his social theory and in all the developments on the theory of reason and truth, as well as in his moral theory and theory of law. Ultimately, it depicts the German case, with its National Socialist regression and the associated forms of legitimation, as one of arrested development and anti-modern regression.

But, as we shall see, Habermas would also have to find solutions for particular problems. This is why many of his texts take the form of problematized inventories of different theories classified according to their relevance for the movement of detranscendentalization and according to the answers they provide to problems formulated by Habermas within this movement.

Viewed as a whole, therefore, these elements mark out an emotional, intellectual and philosophical framework which Habermas would spell out progressively over a period of more than thirty years between the 1950s and the 1980s and within which the construction of his original project of a critical revival of the Frankfurt heritage must be situated.

4. Habermas’s work in Frankfurt, where he was recruited as Adorno’s research assistant in 1956,20 was initially concerned with the political opinions of students.21 Already in the introduction to this collaborative study he evokes a combative conception of the public arena and civic participation. Thus, the critical question of depoliticization through technocratic politics and of the historical and intellectual substance of democracy tended to supplant Adorno’s problem of conformism at the top of the young Habermas’s intellectual agenda, reflecting his primary affiliation with critical Marxism coupled with his experience of re-education which marked the generational difference from the older representatives of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, Habermas felt that, from the end of the 1950s onwards, the first generation had not developed the necessary theoretical means to comprehend the normative substance of democracy and hence the historical relevance of the project of re-education.22 Moreover, this generation had failed to produce a genuine sociological and philosophical theoretical framework for its enterprise, with the result that the interdisciplinary work had ultimately become peripheral or subordinate, with Adorno and Horkheimer developing their thought in an aphoristic and personal style.23

Thus, Habermas wanted to reconstruct the theoretical core of Horkheimer’s Hegelian and Weberian Marxism taking the public sphere and public opinion as his guide and by drawing on materials whose theoretical force and historical and hermeneutical relevance he was beginning to conceptualize and justify based on his reading of Löwith and the perspectives of Apel, as well as on perspectives borrowed from the protagonists of an intellectual field which had been pacified in part (Gadamer, Popper). The realization of this project would be his main preoccupation from the late 1950s until the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action. It constitutes the base of the trunk from which the tree would grow and subsequently branch out.

B. Problems, materials and solutions

1. For Habermas it was imperative to make a detailed preliminary analysis of the aspects of history to which Marx’s theory was blind and hence which preprogrammed both the failure of Marxist predictions and the pessimism of the entire Hegelian and Weberian Marxist tradition from Lukács to Adorno, not to mention the brutality of Leninism. What was called for, therefore, was a different history of modernity from that of Marxism which would highlight the latter’s theoretical blind spots. Here we can see all the developments mentioned above taking shape together with the philosophical problems with which Habermas would have to deal.

This alternative history was developed in Habermas’s book on the transformation of the public sphere,24 a continuation of the study on the political attitudes of students that was written under the supervision of Wolfgang Abendroth.25 In this work, Habermas develops a genealogy of democratic institutions by tracing their organic links with the emergence of the public sphere and the associated forms of sociability based on critical discussion. Democratic life depends on the degree of commitment and participation by the citizens in public deliberations.26 It was initially promoted by the rise of the educated urban bourgeoisie discussing issues related to art and economics in clubs, cafés and salons, and it inspired certain central institutional reforms of the revolutionary period including that of parliament. Then, as democracy became generalized in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was confronted with the question of education and of the electoral franchise, and subsequently, from the final third of the nineteenth century up to the present day, with the rise of conformist mass culture and the technocratic state. Each of these factors contributed in its own way to reducing the democratic potential of the public arena and gave rise to a specific form of anomie whose main symptom is depoliticization.27

The blind spots are also illuminated by a history of social philosophy whose task is to show what Marx inherited.28 Here we can see how Habermas tried to combine the requirement of fallibility with the hermeneutic dimension, while remaining true to his critical intention, in a kind of programmatic encompassing of Popper’s and Gadamer’s positions, starting from social theory and from the historical caesura between metaphysics and postmetaphysics underlined by Löwith.29 Thus, Marxism appears to have worked with a model of social action that is too close to instrumental action. This perspective can be traced back at least as far as Machiavelli and is at the root of the inability of Marxism to account for how democracy combines with the redistribution facilitated by technological progress to stabilize capitalism from the final third of the nineteenth century onwards. And this same model explains the Leninist tendencies towards brutality within the Marxist movement. Marx failed to take advantage of the byways pursued by Vico, who criticized the subsumption of human practice under the model of natural science, or to learn from the eighteenth-century Scottish, or later the Kantian, philosophy of public opinion.30 Moreover, Marx had an excessively positivistic understanding of his own work, being incapable of attaching a specific epistemological status to this project of a theory that seeks to emancipate practice.

For Habermas, the clarification of the dimension of the understanding of practice called for a richer model, or models, of social action which take up the ideas of Vico and the philosophy of public opinion, using the new theoretical tools imported notably by Apel (Peirce and the later Wittgenstein). Only in this way could both the stabilization of capitalism and its specific pathologies (depoliticization, mass culture and technocracy) be comprehended, but without renouncing the scientific standard of fallibilism. Moreover, the original epistemological profile of Marxism also had to be rethought in order to clarify the status of a predictive science whose characteristics presuppose both the explanation of the tendencies exhibited by its object and the interested understanding of its possible emancipation.

These constitute the two axes of the project of construction that took shape in the early 1960s. They correspond to separate publications but nevertheless form a loop.31

2. In On the Logic of the Social Sciences and Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,32 which correspond to the first axis, Habermas collects theoretical materials and sketches the overall physiognomy of his future theory, but without reaching satisfactory solutions, something he would arrive at only in the early 1970s.

In the first text, which in typical Habermasian fashion takes the form of a problematized inventory (see I.B.3), Weber’s theory of ideal types, Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, G.H. Mead’s social behaviourism, Alfred Schütz’s social phenomenology and Talcott Parsons’s functionalism (that is, the schema comprising the four functions Adaptation, Goals, Integration and Latency [abbreviated in what follows as ‘AGIL’] and the epistemology of frames of reference) are cited as theoretical means for addressing the comprehensive dimension of practice without renouncing the predictability requirements of fallibilism, and hence also as the means of avoiding an instrumental opposition between theory and practice. Thus, there emerges, in a kind of theoretical combination, a historically informed functionalist programme that deals with communicative practice and its lived and critical or emancipatory dimensions. But it remains impossible to specify precisely what role is played by this communicative practice in history and society.

In the second text, the dualistic character of social theory (instrumental and strategic action, on the one hand, and communicative action, on the other, typified as in Weber) is projected onto the scale of universal history with the respective extension and development of these two types of action in the three phases of humanity (also typified) – namely, primitive society, traditional hierarchical society and modern society. Taking primitive society as his point of departure, Habermas hypothesizes that instrumental and strategic action were at first only weakly developed within the context of a pervasive, enveloping mythology. Then he describes a kind of gradual expansion of instrumental and strategic action, but still within the limits of a sufficient legitimation of traditional forms of statutory hierarchy. And, finally, during the modern era, the extension of instrumental action and the erosion of myth call for a higher level of communicative coordination, as is shown by the emergence of the public sphere. However, this form of coordination is impeded by the simultaneous development of technocratic rationality and mass culture.

We will come across the combination of these materials with this dynamic outline again, but in a more satisfactory and more developed form, in the interdisciplinary studies from Habermas’s tenure at the Starnberg Institute between 1971 and 1981. But in order to achieve this synthesis, he would first have to develop a satisfactory theory of communication.

In Knowledge and Human Interests,33 which corresponds to the second axis, Habermas presents the historical part of his epistemological project of founding the different types of discourse in distinct anthropological interests. He distinguishes three types of interests (instrumental, hermeneutic and critical) corresponding to three types of scientific knowledge (nomological, historical and critical). And to this corresponds the dichotomy of the types of actions: the nomological sciences informed by an instrumental interest refer to instrumental or strategic action, whereas the hermeneutic and critical sciences both refer to interaction. In this way Habermas shows how, from Kant to Freud, via Dilthey, Peirce and Mach, the various philosophies of knowledge sought to elaborate such a plural epistemology, but failed to do so because of the unitary or positivist presuppositions of their respective theoretical frameworks. Habermas would abandon this project in the early 1970s when the first axis absorbed the second, in particular, as we shall see, through his reconstructive epistemology.

3. The solution to the problem posed in On the Logic of the Social Sciences is presented in the Christian Gauss Lectures, which Habermas delivered at Princeton in 1971.34 This is why it appears as the first chapter of the first volume of the Studienausgabe: it provides the foundation on which everything else is built. In these lectures, Habermas addresses what seemed to him to be the solution he had sought in vain in On the Logic of the Social Sciences – namely, a theory of linguistic communication that makes it possible to understand both the symbolically structured character of the lifeworld and its reproduction over time, and how social agents can thematize and provide a partial, critical elucidation of this lifeworld in reasoned discourse.

In order to develop such a theory, Habermas had to show that verbal communication represents a specific competence involving speech acts (Searle), the observance and comprehension of rules (Wittgenstein), argumentative resources (Toulmin) and a lived dimension (Schütz), using a reconstructive Chomskian epistemological model transposed to the level of universal pragmatics that is able to describe the rules of agreement. Reasoned discourse relates to one of the segments of the lifeworld and provides a local clarification of this segment in the rules of verbalized agreement. Hence this clarification presupposes that the partners obey rules of acceptability as a precondition for reaching agreement. In other words, if they did not respect these rules, they would not be able to take seriously the reasons they invoke to justify their respective claims to validity. The claims to validity implicitly raised by the different types of speech acts in everyday interaction have to be explained and justified with reasons when, in the absence of automatic accord, agreement must be restored through discussion.

To this corresponds a consensual theory of truth, according to which truth is the claim to validity raised by a constative speech act in the context of its justification, that is, in discourse. Habermas would draw on Dummett’s theory of justified assertability in particular, integrating and generalizing it to all claims to validity and the corresponding speech acts, starting from the case of assertoric propositions, in order to provide a kind of discursive, postmetaphysical version of Kant’s three Critiques.35 Then he would have to construct a whole grammar of the use of personal pronouns to account for learning and the rule-governed mobilization of reasons to support our claims to validity.36

In fact, this reconstructive epistemology would both complicate the project of Knowledge and Human Interests – because the level of the claims to validity of speech acts is difficult to reconcile with the more transcendental level of the constitution of object domains defended by the project of cognitive interests – and render it superfluous – because the reconstructive epistemological model seems sufficiently ambitious to be able to dispense with an additional anthropology of knowledge interests. It also became superfluous as a result of the waning influence of what had originally been its main adversary, namely the positivist paradigm (Quine, Kuhn, etc.). This was also the moment at which Habermas developed a progressively more systematic critique of his own tradition. Knowledge and Human Interests now seemed to him to be too wedded to the pathos of the philosophical anthropology that had marked his philosophical training and to defend too strong a notion of self-reflection, understood as the activity of a subject on the scale of a people or a social class, and of the theorist, understood accordingly as a kind of psychoanalyst of this subject writ large. These are the most important reasons why Habermas abandoned this project.37

4. At the same time, what is striking about these two projects, even before Habermas thematized it himself in the early 1980s, is that they share the same modus operandi and mode of theorizing, which resonates profoundly with the rejection of any privileged philosophical intuition, with its prophetic connotations and affinities with the German Platonic tradition. Thus, both projects involve a problematized inventory of theoretical materials coupled with a hermeneutic tracing of these same materials over a given period and the cutting and pasting justified by a local debate involving detailed discussion while at the same time aiming to produce a comprehensive theory.

C. Puzzle of the frame of reference, complementary hypotheses, critical fronts

1. In the early 1970s, around the time he left Frankfurt for the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, therefore, Habermas was in a position to extend the construction of the frame of reference, which he had merely outlined in Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie, to enable him to take account of the dialectic of the public sphere, starting from the solution he developed in the Gauss Lectures.