Jurgen Habermas and communicative reason

Horkheimer was suspicious of Habermas from the start. He was extremely critical of Habermas’s Students and Politics research project, a piece of work he undertook with Christoph Oehler and Friedrich Weltz soon after becoming an associate of the Institute in 1956. As Horkheimer saw it, some of the critique Habermas institutes in this work implies that, for a people ‘held in the shackles of bourgeois society by a liberal constitution’, violence is the only alternative. ‘It is simply not possible’, Horkheimer wrote to Adorno (in Wiggershaus 1994, p. 554), ‘to have admissions of this sort in the research report of an Institute that exists on the public funds of this shackling society’. In the end, the study did not appear in the Institute’s own series Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology but was brought out by a different publishing house. This, Wiggershaus claims, was very much to the detriment of the Institute.

The Institute of Social Research, whose identity Horkheimer saw as being threatened by Habermas, remained virtually anonymous in the book, and thus denied itself in the very publication that was to become the most successful empirical study the re-established Institute ever produced. (Wiggershaus 1994, p. 555)

There is something ironic in Horkheimer’s reading violence into Habermas’s text. As Rundell observes:

Habermas’ work is fuelled by a simple idea. In the context of ‘a modernity at variance with itself, he is preoccupied with the public and non-violent strength of the better argument, which he terms rational practical discourse …

Habermas’ notion of politics, at its most minimal and anthropological, simply means a non-violent inter-subjectivity in the making, where words —more strictly, sentences or speech acts—rather than rituals or weapons, are the form of social intercourse that counts. (1991, p. 133)

Habermas’s next project was an analysis of the changes that had taken place within the bourgeois ‘public sphere’. This he proposed as his Habilitation thesis at Frankfurt. It was rejected. Many authors attribute its rejection to Adorno but, according to Wiggershaus, it was Horkheimer who blocked the way. Adorno, says Wiggershaus (1994, p. 555), was proud of Habermas and wanted to see the thesis proposal accepted. The upshot was that Habermas removed his project from the Institute and completed his thesis under the supervision of Marburg professor Wolfgang Abendroth. While engaged in this post-doctoral work, he became professor of philosophy in Heidelberg.

Horkheimer, and not Adorno, may have been the villain in the piece but the two were closely linked. Habermas may well have felt that Adorno should have done more on his behalf. Indeed, Wiggershaus refers in this connection to ‘Horkheimer’s hostility and Adorno’s weakness’ (1994, p. 566). Perhaps we should not be surprised at Habermas being so absolute and trenchant in his criticism of Adorno’s negative dialectics.

Be that as it may, the issue of ‘reason’, so central to negative dialectics, lies also at the heart of Habermas’s relationship to the tradition of the Frankfurt School he joined in 1956. That tradition had come to level an increasingly radical challenge to the hegemony that it saw instrumental reason assuming in the development of Western society. Horkheimer and Adorno depict Western society as a social and political economy, at once capitalist and bureaucratic, which reduces all social relations to the level of objectified and commodified administered systems. As they see it, the development of this form of society springs from the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason as instrumental rationality. This is an understanding that decisively splits subject from object and looks, above all else, to gain control over nature and render it predictable. On the basis of this understanding, Horkheimer and particularly Adorno make refutation and rejection of identity thinking pivotal to their critique of capitalist society.

Habermas has never shared the radically anti-capitalist stance of Horkheimer and Adorno. Nor does he want to reject reason as wholeheartedly as he believes Adorno has done. Adorno accepts of dialectics that, ‘being at once the impression and the critique of the universal delusive context, it must now turn even against itself; indeed, it ‘lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself (1973, p. 406). Such affirmations lead Habermas to conclude that Adorno has really abandoned immanent critique for ‘total’ critique, leaving no way out.

According to Habermas, while Adorno (as well as Horkheimer and Marcuse) generated a critique of modern society from the ground of the deformations and transvaluations of enlightenment thinking, he was, because of his own reading of reason, largely immune to its meaning and grounding in any positive sense whatsoever. (Rundell 1991, p. 135)

The Frankfurt School, Habermas believes, rests its notion of immanent critique on Marx’s theory of history. This spurs him to a further elucidation of the Marxian origin of critical theory. He moves beyond the position on Marx and Marxism that he upheld in his first years with the Institute, arguing now that a praxis-oriented philosophy of history cannot be soundly grounded in Marx’s theoretical framework. He wants to establish a new basis for such philosophy of history. The immanent critique proposed by the Frankfurt School theoreticians is not up to the task, because ‘bourgeois consciousness has become cynical’ (Habermas 1979, p. 97). By this he means that people can no longer recognise as their own the truths and values to which immanent critique directs them.

Habermas is seeking to do what he believes the later Frankfurt School has proved unable to do, that is, provide a normative basis for critical theory. To this end, he develops a positive concept of reason in contradistinction to what he regards as an utterly negative concept of reason in Horkheimer and especially Adorno. This he does in Knowledge and Human Interests, which he published in 1968, four years after returning to Frankfurt to take up Horkheimer’s chair in philosophy and sociology. In this book Habermas revisits Marxian theory and engages in a fresh critique of it. The method of argument Habermas employs is that of an internal investigation of philosophy itself and has some affinity with Adorno’s immanent critique.

Unlike Adorno, however, Habermas uses the method to build up a positive theory by examining earlier positions from within, exposing their limitations, building on their strengths, moving on to later positions and repeating the process in order to arrive at a more comprehensive and satisfactory position. (Roderick 1986, pp. 51-2)

Concluding that Marx’s focus on production is an inadequate base on which to ground a socially and historically developing rationality, Habermas posits a distinction between labour as instrumental action and social interaction as communicative action. These two forms of action, together with the exercise of power and domination (an issue that has, of course, preoccupied him from the start), constitute the basis for his well- known threefold typology of human knowledge. In establishing this typology, Habermas is drawing on his central epistemological tenet: that human beings constitute their reality and organise their experience in terms of cognitive (or ‘knowledge-guiding’) interests. Thus, the empirical sciences are led by a technical interest in predicting and controlling objectified processes. This is the realm of instrumental action. Secondly, the historico-hermeneutic sciences—that is, the cultural or human sciences—are guided by a practical interest in achieving intersubjective understanding. This interest is styled ‘practical’ because of the crucial importance to human beings of securing and developing mutual understanding in the everyday conduct of life. Then there are the critical sciences (Habermas includes here psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology), which are governed by the intent to bring about emancipation from the relations of dependence that ideology in particular has set in place and that come to appear to us as natural. In other words, ‘the specific viewpoints from which we can apprehend reality as such in any way whatsoever’ are an orientation ‘toward technical control’, or an orientation ‘toward mutual understanding’, or an orientation ‘toward emancipation’ (Habermas 1972, p. 311).

Habermas ‘s treatment of this issue is already set very firmly in the context of language. He has avidly embraced the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy (referred to above in our discussion of hermeneutics). In On the Logic of the Social Sciences, first published in 1967, Habermas (1988, p. 117) describes language as ‘the web to whose threads subjects cling and through which they develop into subjects in the first place’. He concludes, ‘Today the problem of language has taken the place of the traditional problem of consciousness’. A year later, in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972, p. 314), he continues this theme: ‘What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us’.

This emphasis on language, and thereby on communicative action, grows even more marked in the later works. It is precisely in communication that he hopes to find a foundation for his critical social theory.

Habermas’s entire project, from the critique of contemporary scientism to the reconstruction of historical materialism, rests on the possibility of providing, an account of communication that is both theoretical and normative, that goes beyond a pure hermeneutics without being reducible to a strictly empirical-analytic science. (McCarthy 1984, p. 272)

It is in this vein that we find Habermas elucidating the notion of ‘systematically distorted communication’, expounding a ‘theory of communicative competence’, and setting forth the conditions for the ‘ideal speech situation’ (1970a, 1970b). The ideal speech situation is one that is free from systematic distortion, allows unimpaired self­presentation by participants, and is characterised by mutuality of expectations rather than one-sided norms. In such a situation, discourse is ‘unrestrained and universal’ and enables an ‘unconstrained consensus’ to emerge whereby the idea of truth can be analysed (Habermas 1970b, pp. 370-2). For Habermas, as Anthony Giddens observes:

The ideal-speech situation, held to be immanent in all language use, provides an energising vision of emancipation. The more social circumstances approximate to an ideal-speech situation, the more a social order based on the autonomous action of free and equal individuals will emerge. (1991, p. 213)

Habermas goes on to set forth a theory of discourse and a consensus theory of truth (1973). Discourse is distinguished from communicative action. The latter is the interaction that takes place in everyday life and in it claims to validity are more or less naively accepted. Discourse, on the other hand, constitutes an unusual form of communication in which the participants subject themselves to the force of the better argument, with the view of coming to an agreement about the validity or invalidity of problematic claims. In discourse the beliefs, norms and values that are taken for granted in everyday interaction are expressly thematised and subjected to critique. And, according to Habermas, discourses become institutionalised for certain domains, one such domain being that of practical questions and political decisions. ‘It should be obvious that it is the institutionalization of this last type of discourse (practico-political) that is the guiding light of Habermas’s critical social theory’ (McCarthy 1984, p. 293).

In 1976 Habermas published Communication and the Evolution of Society, which contains his essay ‘What is universal pragmatics?’. Here his thought has moved to a broader understanding of communicative action and focuses more sharply on moral reasoning. He is arguing the case for a cognitive—indeed, a communicative—ethics as the normative basis of critical theory. Where there is consensus about norms that is free from constraint and representative of the common good, Habermas is ready to accord it universality. Moreover, this normative principle of universalisation is, for him, the stepping stone to social critique, which is always his ultimate goal. He accepts the need to ground this principle and finds a basis for it in the general presuppositions of communication. He argues that competent speakers raise invariable and universal validity claims. As Habermas puts it, ‘the general and unavoidable—in this sense transcendental—conditions of possible understanding have a normative content’ (1979, p. 2). The project of discovering and articulating these general presuppositions of possible understanding is what Habermas refers to as ‘universal pragmatics’.

Habermas’s work on universal pragmatics .. . represents a much stronger attempt to provide a normative foundation for social theory through an examination of communicative competence, understood in terms of the ability of a speaker to master the rules for embedding utterances in speech acts. Such an examination, in the form of a universal pragmatics, attempts to uncover the general and unavoidable presuppositions of communication by identifying and reconstructing the universal conditions of possible understanding. Habermas attempts to synthesise the work of Chomsky, Hymes, Austin and Searle in the framework of a general theory of social action. (Roderick 1986, p. 97)

As the tide of his 1976 work attests, Habermas is addressing not only communication (in his universal pragmatics) but also social evolution. He sees the evolution of society proceeding by way of processes of learning that go on within it and adaptations that occur at every level of learning to accommodate the learning processes. Most importandy, there are always contingent forces at work to induce new learning levels. Habermas makes much of the systems problems that occur in any given society. These create crises and demand a response. The systems problems, along with the learning processes that emerge in response to them, provide the dynamism for social development.

There are two dimensions to these processes of learning: they involve moral-practical knowledge (developments in the relations of production) and empirical-analytic knowledge (development in the forces of knowledge). This sounds Marxist enough and, in fact, Habermas sees his theory of social evolution as a reconstruction of historical materialism. The analysis of developmental dynamics’, he writes (1979, p. 123), ‘is “materialist” in so far as it makes reference to crisis-producing systems problems in the domain of production and reproduction; and the analysis remains “historically oriented” in so far as it has to seek the causes of evolutionary changes in the whole range of . . . contingent circumstances’.

In 1981 Habermas once more returned to Frankfurt. He had left Frankfurt for Stamberg ten years earlier to become director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Living Conditions in the Scientific and Technical World. His return to Frankfurt coincided with the publication of his two-volume The Theory of Communicative Action, which encapsulates the program for an interdisciplinary social theory he had developed over the decade spent at Stamberg.

It was intended to provide the normative basis and the fundamental conceptual framework for the programme, sketched out at the close of the two volumes, for an updated critical theory of society: a programme of interdisciplinary research into the selective patterns of capitalist modernization that had led to the collision between the imperatives of the economic and political system, on the one hand, and the original communicative structures of the life-world, on the other. (Wiggershaus 1994, p. 658)

What Habermas begins in The Theory of Communicative Action he continues in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, originally published in Frankfurt in 1985. The focus remains on what Wiggershaus has termed a collision between economic and political imperatives and the communicative stmctures of the lifeworld. Against a backdrop of political and ethical concerns, which he elaborates more expressly in still later writings, Habermas analyses two ways of considering reason. First, there is the understanding of reason that comes to us in modernity. Here the question of reason is framed, as Rasmussen (1990, p. 4) points out, ‘within the philosophy of consciousness with its concern for the development of a subject’. What modernity seeks is a justification of subject-centred reason. Over against that project, however, another endeavour has emerged. The contemporary philosophy of language repudiates the subject so central to the project of modernity, ‘finding whatever reason there is within the confines of linguistic usage’ (1990, p. 4). These are two quite different agendas. From them arises the question whether the dilemmas of modernity can be reformulated under the rubrics of a philosophy of language centred on a theory of communication. This, in fact, was ‘the question which is at the core of the post-1981 Habermasian reflection’ (1990, p. 4).

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, as Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional theory and critical theory shows, sought from the start emancipation from the tyranny of instrumental reason. This was carried out in terms of a philosophy of consciousness and Habermas himself engaged in this enterprise in his earlier work. Now, by situating the issue within a philosophy of language instead, he looks to achieve what he sees earlier critical theory failing to achieve. He also looks to achieve what he sees postmodernism failing to achieve. Thus, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity critiques Nietzsche and especially Heidegger, as a lead-in to a critique of Foucault and Derrida. For Habermas, postmodernism, ‘having placed itself under the Heideggerian banner, represents a certain moral vacuity, an absence of the proper place for the normative question’ (Rasmussen 1990, p. 109).

What, then, is Habermas’s answer to the question that has just been posed? Can the dilemmas of modernity be reframed in terms of a philosophy of language and a theory of communication? Clearly, Habermas’s answer is in the affirmative. For him, communicative reason is not the same as subject-centred, instrumental reason. The very structure of communicative discourse is emancipatory because ‘embedded within the linguistic paradigm, under the rubric of communication, one finds the fundamental assertions of the project of modernity in their reconstructed form, as essentially scientific claims’ (Rasmussen 1990, p. 6). Undoubtedly, ‘the project of modernity can be redeemed’ (1990, p. 5).

Reason. Language. Communication. A normative foundation for social critique. These have been constants throughout most of Habermas’s intellectual history. Not that it is easy to track the course that these elements of his thought have taken. Habermas’s thought never stands still. Yet pursuing such a quarry is well and truly worth the effort. Highly theoretical as his thought may be, it needs to be remembered that theory for Habermas ‘is a product of and serves the purpose of human action’ and ‘is essentially a means to greater human freedom’ (Craib 1984, p. 206). Writing of the historical and theoretical work done in the cause of radical theory, Roderick (1986, p. 173) points up the eminendy practical and essentially democratic purposes Habermas has in mind. ‘Habermas’s own work, read as a supplement to Marx and not as a replacement, also contributes to this continuation of radical theory by forging a link between Marxism and a radical democracy in which all political decisions are subjected to the discussion of a reasoning public’

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.