1. The question of rationality and the possibility of a more comprehensive
account brings us to Habermas’ understanding of the modern philosophy and its
role. In his magnum opus The Theory of
Communicative Action (1981), Habermas was concerned to present an
alternative account of rationality. He acknowledges that from its beginning
philosophy had been concerned to reflect upon reason and tried to explain the
whole in terms of reason. However, in modern times this traditional
philosophical quest had become problematic. Since Kant, philosophy had
developed a critical self-awareness. Recognising that consciousness had no pure
unmediated access to the whole or being, philosophy had been compelled to
direct its attention to the formal conditions of rationality (TCA2). This focus
on the knowing subject was compounded by the multiple 19th century insights of
historicism, Marxism, psycho-analysis and cultural anthropology which revealed
that the knowing subject was itself conditioned in myriad ways by historical,
economic, social, psychological and cultural factors. The old strategy of
constructing an ontology of being was abandoned once it was recognised that
philosophical reason could not consider itself above the fray, had no
unmediated access to the world but that, in fact, the world was always a
socially conditioned construct. Not only has philosophy lost its
self-sufficiency, it can no longer even defend its Kantian transcendental
understanding as a logical reconstruction of consciousness in general and therefore
to act as the judge of reason and arbiter of culture.
2. In the post Kantian cultural environment
philosophy must abandon all pretensions to play a foundational epistemological
role. It can only respond post festum
to developments within the now autonomous sciences. However, Habermas wants to
preserve philosophy's traditional affiliation with reason. It remains a
guardian of rationality in so far as it acts as an interpreter and translator
between the everyday world and the specialised spheres of cultural modernity.
Habermas explains this mediating, translator function as the product of
philosophy realising its full potential in changed historical conditions.
Recognising that it does not stand outside the world, philosophy must situate
itself in relation to sciences and other functional spheres in order to make
its own specific contribution. The aspiration to totality characteristic of
philosophy means that it nevertheless resists reduction to a purely functional
role. As Habermas says:
Were philosophy to correspond fully to one of these sharply defined functions based on a clear division of labour, then it would be robbed of its best, its anarchist heritage, namely the strength of a kind of untamed thinking that is neither channelled nor fixed by any particular method (T&J, p.286)
Philosophy, like the sciences, is concerned with truth but it also has a mediating and also transgressive connection to law, morality and art. So, on the one hand, it uses pre-theoretical commonsense knowledge to reconstruct and illuminate the significance of the sciences, while, on the other hand, it maintains the unity of an increasingly pluralised rationality of the various cultural value spheres by its capacity to both cross the boundaries between cultural language games and remaining attuned to holistic lifeworld contexts (T&J, p.287).
But Habermas insists that philosophy should
not disassociate itself from science or hanker after its own radical autonomy:
this is no longer an option. Today philosophy receives its problems from the
interface between these sciences and differentiated functional spheres and the
everyday lifeworld.
3. Today the reason to which philosophy orients itself is not the substantive concept inherited from the tradition associated with a particular cultural content but a formal or procedural notion. Habermas finds the roots of this procedural concept in everyday understanding and its social practices of justification. In everyday communication speakers make validity claims that transcend the specific conversational context. Here Habermas draws on developments in the philosophy of language associated with J L Austin and John Searle. The gist of these ideas is that language is not just communication but also a speech act. The importance of this pragmatic dimension of language is to emphasis that the pragmatic or illocutionary aspect or speech involves an action component where the speaker makes implicit claims or promises. So if I say: “I know that p” I am giving my word that p. Here we distinguish between the illocutionary and the rhetorical or perlocutionary dimensions. In other words, the action component of the speech act has a normative dimension that amounts to a claim that speakers can be expected to redeem, if required. In other words, in conversation we raise claims seeking agreement and expect to give reasons if challenged. The expectations raised in speech acts imply a set of implicit rules that circumscribe the meaning of a domination free dialogue that is undistorted by power. These implicit rules include mutual recognition, being prepared to include all interlocutors and allow them the time to convey their opinions, willingness to learn from others and be reflective about one’s own traditions. The communicative presuppositions of everyday language use, whether they are strictly adhered to or not, exemplify an exercise in rationality. They provide the roots of the traditional critical enterprise of philosophy and sustain its claim to still be the guardian of rationality. However, in the modern world philosophy exists in the differentiated domain of culture and cannot expect either to work alone or the act as sovereign commander.
4. This is why Habermas resuscitates Horkheimer’s idea of an inter-disciplinary harnessing of philosophy with the reconstructive social sciences. What is required is a new relationship between philosophy and science where philosophy employs the sciences to test its hypothetical universality claims while the autonomy of modern science is constrained by the need for a philosophical explanation and justification of its everyday significance. In this configuration, philosophy maintains a crucial cultural role as the translator or interpreter between the specialised cultural spheres and everyday life without suffering from any delusions that that it should either hand down wisdom to the man in the street or dictate prescriptive rules to the practice of science. It understands the specialised vocabulary of the various sciences but it has not abandoned the everyday idiom of the street and is able to compel these sciences to confront issues from which they are normally quarantined by specialisation.
5. The story that Habermas tells about critical theory is one of painfully learned lessons of limitation and the bursting of illusions. Despite Marx’s will to an immanent theory, his critical theory was the bearer of a philosophy of history that could not be sustained under modern epistemological conditions. Neither the totalising aspiration of critical theory as it expressed itself in relation to the historical future nor its immediate will to praxis can be sustained. Of course, for Habermas the idea of an immanent theory and the need for a link between theory and practice remains very important. He remains attached to an enlightenment project of a maturing humanity with a historicizing dimension. The Enlightenment ideals of rationality and individual autonomy are not given in nature; their realisation is a historical achievement. This project cannot rely on the assistance of external agents like God or nature. Modernity can rely only on self-foundation, on the immanent historical achievements of existing human beings and their own maturing self-understanding and values. This is the basis of the need for an immanent critical theory. However, today Habermas talks more about philosophy than critical theory. This may suggest his desire to detach his theory from the illusions of Marxism but it does not mean the repudiation of a theory with a practical dimension. He reaffirms the interdisciplinary aspirations of the early Horkheimer but with the philosopher occupying a more modest role. No longer the possessor of a confirmed epochal diagnosis of the present—Horkheimer’s “existential judgement”-- that it might deliver to the masses or its avant garde, the philosopher takes on a truly democratic role as translator between the everyday and the sciences.
6. However, if Habermas presents us with a more chastened view of philosophy and a much more mediated conception of its practical role, he has certainly not abandoned it. Along with its connection to reason, philosophy holds on to one aspect of its totalising aspiration: that is its anarchist untamed thinking. This means that it transcends mere functionality and cannot be contained by any single specialist role. Habermas aligns philosophy with the role of the modern public intellectual. Philosophy can play a role in the modern cultural division of labour as expert knowledge in certain narrow contexts, in questions of methodology in the critical evaluation of competing expert opinions and on normative questions concerning ecology, medicine or genetics. It may also have something to offer to a personal philosophy of life as long as it acknowledges the pluralism of modern forms of life and limits its therapeutic role to encouraging people to live their life consciously and does not succumb to the temptation to play the prophet. The era of a single “good life” is long since past and this means that philosophy cannot make the choices for modern individuals. Greener philosophical pastures lie outside the twin domains of special expertise and therapeutic culture. The greatest opportunities for the philosopher to give their work a practical dimension lies in the role of pubic intellectual. As we have seen, the public sphere or spheres is that loose configuration of formal and informal debates and discussions whereby modern societies come to a better self-understanding across the dynamic range of issues and gradually form democratic will on a range of public issues. In a decentered modern world increasingly dominated by quasi-autonomous subsystems that are guided by their own logics and attempt to externalise all problems, the public space provides the best sounding board for macro social problems and an outlet for the discussion of significant failures and risks. While all interested parties may make contributions to these debates, Habermas argues that the public intellectual acquires a certain authority on the basis of a reputation for considering “in each case all relevant points of view impartially” and taking “all interests involved equally into account” (T&J, p289-290).
7. As Habermas sees it, philosophy has some real advantages in such public debate where the job description involves the capacity to consider all relevant points of view and interests. We have already seen the intimate connection between the philosophical project and a rational self–reflexivity. From the time of Kant, the auto-critique of reason has been at the centre of philosophical self-understanding as has the concern for the totality. This later interest also comes into play in the public sphere where the capacity to think in terms of the whole, to speak the idioms of both specialised scientific discourse and those of ordinary language is vital to illuminating the multiple dimensions of the bureaucratic and economic systems’ colonisation of the modern life world. The final element of the elective affinity between philosophy and the public intellectual resides in the latter’s long historical and conceptual connection to democracy. Philosophy puts a premium on the anarchy of unconstrained thinking. It relies on the freedom of communication best ensured by democratic constitutional arrangements in precisely the same way that democracy stands in need of a discourse that focuses on the normative issues of a just and well-ordered society and therefore ensures the cultural present of reflective rationality.
8. Finally I want to consider a possible objection to Habermas that strikes at the most abstract level of his theorisation. I have just recounted Habermas' account of the story of philosophy's treatment of rationality. He maintained that since Kant modernity has focused not on substantive rationality but the formal conditions of rationality. While this is taken as the starting point of his own theory of communicative action, it is clear that this theory is guided by a vague idea of more comprehensive notion of rationality that has its roots in the tradition and which underpins his whole theory. How is this notion to be justified? It seems that Habermas’ underlying orientating concept echoes past substantive concepts of reason like those embodied in the Marxian notion of socialism and the Hegelian concept of spirit. Yet, Habermas repudiates this sort of teleology as a return of discredited notions of the philosophy of history. His alternative is to view his own standpoint in a quasi-Hegelian fashion as the outcome of the evolutionary historical processes of cultural rationalisation. This process has no concrete bearer in the sense of Hegel's spirit or Marx's proletariat. For Habermas, it is a theoretical construct of his universal pragmatics, ie. a theory of language. He argues that the process of cultural rationalisation gives us access to the immanent general formal pragmatic structures of language as a set of procedural rules for the guidance of both scientific discourse, and even more importantly, democratic dialogue and decision-making. In following the process of cultural differentiation which has allowed for the unfolding of distinct value spheres with their distinct validity claims of truth, rightness and authenticity we have unlocked the key to the logic of a mode of domination-free communication that is the originary function and structural potential inherent within language. Yet to maintain this communicative dimension is the originary function of language is far from an uncontested claim. It would be rejected by thinkers as different as Benjamin or Heidegger and seems hard to reconcile with the fact that language as always had multiple dimensions not reducible to a single function.
3. Today the reason to which philosophy orients itself is not the substantive concept inherited from the tradition associated with a particular cultural content but a formal or procedural notion. Habermas finds the roots of this procedural concept in everyday understanding and its social practices of justification. In everyday communication speakers make validity claims that transcend the specific conversational context. Here Habermas draws on developments in the philosophy of language associated with J L Austin and John Searle. The gist of these ideas is that language is not just communication but also a speech act. The importance of this pragmatic dimension of language is to emphasis that the pragmatic or illocutionary aspect or speech involves an action component where the speaker makes implicit claims or promises. So if I say: “I know that p” I am giving my word that p. Here we distinguish between the illocutionary and the rhetorical or perlocutionary dimensions. In other words, the action component of the speech act has a normative dimension that amounts to a claim that speakers can be expected to redeem, if required. In other words, in conversation we raise claims seeking agreement and expect to give reasons if challenged. The expectations raised in speech acts imply a set of implicit rules that circumscribe the meaning of a domination free dialogue that is undistorted by power. These implicit rules include mutual recognition, being prepared to include all interlocutors and allow them the time to convey their opinions, willingness to learn from others and be reflective about one’s own traditions. The communicative presuppositions of everyday language use, whether they are strictly adhered to or not, exemplify an exercise in rationality. They provide the roots of the traditional critical enterprise of philosophy and sustain its claim to still be the guardian of rationality. However, in the modern world philosophy exists in the differentiated domain of culture and cannot expect either to work alone or the act as sovereign commander.
4. This is why Habermas resuscitates Horkheimer’s idea of an inter-disciplinary harnessing of philosophy with the reconstructive social sciences. What is required is a new relationship between philosophy and science where philosophy employs the sciences to test its hypothetical universality claims while the autonomy of modern science is constrained by the need for a philosophical explanation and justification of its everyday significance. In this configuration, philosophy maintains a crucial cultural role as the translator or interpreter between the specialised cultural spheres and everyday life without suffering from any delusions that that it should either hand down wisdom to the man in the street or dictate prescriptive rules to the practice of science. It understands the specialised vocabulary of the various sciences but it has not abandoned the everyday idiom of the street and is able to compel these sciences to confront issues from which they are normally quarantined by specialisation.
5. The story that Habermas tells about critical theory is one of painfully learned lessons of limitation and the bursting of illusions. Despite Marx’s will to an immanent theory, his critical theory was the bearer of a philosophy of history that could not be sustained under modern epistemological conditions. Neither the totalising aspiration of critical theory as it expressed itself in relation to the historical future nor its immediate will to praxis can be sustained. Of course, for Habermas the idea of an immanent theory and the need for a link between theory and practice remains very important. He remains attached to an enlightenment project of a maturing humanity with a historicizing dimension. The Enlightenment ideals of rationality and individual autonomy are not given in nature; their realisation is a historical achievement. This project cannot rely on the assistance of external agents like God or nature. Modernity can rely only on self-foundation, on the immanent historical achievements of existing human beings and their own maturing self-understanding and values. This is the basis of the need for an immanent critical theory. However, today Habermas talks more about philosophy than critical theory. This may suggest his desire to detach his theory from the illusions of Marxism but it does not mean the repudiation of a theory with a practical dimension. He reaffirms the interdisciplinary aspirations of the early Horkheimer but with the philosopher occupying a more modest role. No longer the possessor of a confirmed epochal diagnosis of the present—Horkheimer’s “existential judgement”-- that it might deliver to the masses or its avant garde, the philosopher takes on a truly democratic role as translator between the everyday and the sciences.
6. However, if Habermas presents us with a more chastened view of philosophy and a much more mediated conception of its practical role, he has certainly not abandoned it. Along with its connection to reason, philosophy holds on to one aspect of its totalising aspiration: that is its anarchist untamed thinking. This means that it transcends mere functionality and cannot be contained by any single specialist role. Habermas aligns philosophy with the role of the modern public intellectual. Philosophy can play a role in the modern cultural division of labour as expert knowledge in certain narrow contexts, in questions of methodology in the critical evaluation of competing expert opinions and on normative questions concerning ecology, medicine or genetics. It may also have something to offer to a personal philosophy of life as long as it acknowledges the pluralism of modern forms of life and limits its therapeutic role to encouraging people to live their life consciously and does not succumb to the temptation to play the prophet. The era of a single “good life” is long since past and this means that philosophy cannot make the choices for modern individuals. Greener philosophical pastures lie outside the twin domains of special expertise and therapeutic culture. The greatest opportunities for the philosopher to give their work a practical dimension lies in the role of pubic intellectual. As we have seen, the public sphere or spheres is that loose configuration of formal and informal debates and discussions whereby modern societies come to a better self-understanding across the dynamic range of issues and gradually form democratic will on a range of public issues. In a decentered modern world increasingly dominated by quasi-autonomous subsystems that are guided by their own logics and attempt to externalise all problems, the public space provides the best sounding board for macro social problems and an outlet for the discussion of significant failures and risks. While all interested parties may make contributions to these debates, Habermas argues that the public intellectual acquires a certain authority on the basis of a reputation for considering “in each case all relevant points of view impartially” and taking “all interests involved equally into account” (T&J, p289-290).
7. As Habermas sees it, philosophy has some real advantages in such public debate where the job description involves the capacity to consider all relevant points of view and interests. We have already seen the intimate connection between the philosophical project and a rational self–reflexivity. From the time of Kant, the auto-critique of reason has been at the centre of philosophical self-understanding as has the concern for the totality. This later interest also comes into play in the public sphere where the capacity to think in terms of the whole, to speak the idioms of both specialised scientific discourse and those of ordinary language is vital to illuminating the multiple dimensions of the bureaucratic and economic systems’ colonisation of the modern life world. The final element of the elective affinity between philosophy and the public intellectual resides in the latter’s long historical and conceptual connection to democracy. Philosophy puts a premium on the anarchy of unconstrained thinking. It relies on the freedom of communication best ensured by democratic constitutional arrangements in precisely the same way that democracy stands in need of a discourse that focuses on the normative issues of a just and well-ordered society and therefore ensures the cultural present of reflective rationality.
8. Finally I want to consider a possible objection to Habermas that strikes at the most abstract level of his theorisation. I have just recounted Habermas' account of the story of philosophy's treatment of rationality. He maintained that since Kant modernity has focused not on substantive rationality but the formal conditions of rationality. While this is taken as the starting point of his own theory of communicative action, it is clear that this theory is guided by a vague idea of more comprehensive notion of rationality that has its roots in the tradition and which underpins his whole theory. How is this notion to be justified? It seems that Habermas’ underlying orientating concept echoes past substantive concepts of reason like those embodied in the Marxian notion of socialism and the Hegelian concept of spirit. Yet, Habermas repudiates this sort of teleology as a return of discredited notions of the philosophy of history. His alternative is to view his own standpoint in a quasi-Hegelian fashion as the outcome of the evolutionary historical processes of cultural rationalisation. This process has no concrete bearer in the sense of Hegel's spirit or Marx's proletariat. For Habermas, it is a theoretical construct of his universal pragmatics, ie. a theory of language. He argues that the process of cultural rationalisation gives us access to the immanent general formal pragmatic structures of language as a set of procedural rules for the guidance of both scientific discourse, and even more importantly, democratic dialogue and decision-making. In following the process of cultural differentiation which has allowed for the unfolding of distinct value spheres with their distinct validity claims of truth, rightness and authenticity we have unlocked the key to the logic of a mode of domination-free communication that is the originary function and structural potential inherent within language. Yet to maintain this communicative dimension is the originary function of language is far from an uncontested claim. It would be rejected by thinkers as different as Benjamin or Heidegger and seems hard to reconcile with the fact that language as always had multiple dimensions not reducible to a single function.
Lecture 10/11 2015 Foucault (1926-1984)
1. Foucault's biography is typical of the French intellectuals of this century. The son of a provincial bourgeois family and a father who was a surgeon, he attended the Ecole Normale just after the war. In retrospect, Foucault speaks of Heidegger and Nietzsche as his major influences but we should also add the major figures of French philosophy of science, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and his teacher at the Ecole Normale, Louis Althusser. As a young man, he experienced difficulties coming to terms with his own homosexuality and this led to a number of attempts at suicide. After early training in psychology, he lectured at the University of Uppsala in Sweden for several years and spent brief episodes as a cultural attach to French diplomatic missions while completing his dissertation. After a series of famous philosophical/historical studies in the sixties, he became a Professor at the new university of Vincennes before being elected to the College de France in 1972 (the most prestigious academic appointment in France) where he taught until his death from AIDS in 1984. From the seventies, Foucault became an international figure. He was active in a series of radical social and political causes around prisoner’s action, anti-psychiatry and human rights. In retrospect, Foucault viewed the events of May 68 as a historical watershed. Although he was not in Paris at this time but teaching in Tunisia, these events seemed to confirm the political bankruptcy of the French Communist Party as vehicle for radical social transformation and the need to rethink the vocabulary of radical politics. Briefly a member of the Communist party in the early fifties, Foucault was, however, never a Marxist.2. Foucault's interest in the oppressive dimensions of modern rationality and its institutions has deep roots in his biography. As a homosexual in the era of Gay Liberation, he personally experienced a sense of marginality and this was compounded when he began with his initial training in psychology. This training, which included some first hand experience of practice in contemporary psychiatric hospitals, engendered his distaste for institutional medicine and aroused his scepticism regarding the scientific pretensions of the human sciences. Out of this interest flowed a series of philosophic-historical works that explored the history of the modern human sciences--psychiatry, medicine, psychoanalysis, linguistics and political economy. What distinguishes Foucault's account from the more orthodox historians of science are two things: his interest in discontinuity (his assertion that scientific advance was not a matter of smooth progress but of disjunction and new paradigms) and his fascination with the dark side of this purported triumph of human reason. He reveals the ways in which the human sciences function as instruments of power, social control, discipline and exclusion. He argues they are complicit in the radically new modern configuration of power/knowledge. He warns us against the humanist ideology of progress and sees behind a white coat of “objectivity” domination, governmental paternalism and talk of rehabilitation, health and welfare. He wants to dramatise the frightening completeness of this unacknowledged oppression. His theme is the 'the madness lying at the very heart of reason’.
3. We have seen how the Frankfurt School constructed their theory of modernity, of the “totally administered society” from the perspective of the missed revolution. For Foucault "Revolution" is also a vital theme. However, he drastically transforms the meaning of this concept. His question is how are we to think revolution after the demise of revolutionary Marxist politics and its emancipatory view of history. This theme runs throughout Foucault’s work and emerges even in his final lectures where he views the revolutionary militantism of the 19th century as another instance of the ‘aggressive, constant and endless battle to change the world’ that had first emerged with the ancient Cynics as an ascetic version of a philosophical ‘care of the self ‘ that had been emphasised by Socrates as the central philosophical task (CT, 286). However in Foucault’s early work, this questioning is marshalled as radical historical scepticism. Against the Frankfurt School's pessimistic reversed philosophy of history premised on crushed humanist hopes, he announces not the "end of the individual" but the "death of man": this slogan proclaims Foucault's view that the idea of man was a cultural/scientific construct of the recent past(the post classical period, from 1800) that is now in crisis and that humanist values need to be treated sceptically and their complicity in pervasive modern discourses and practices of domination exposed. However, in terms of revolutionary hopes and prospects, he suggests that today is no better nor worse than any other time. In place of what he will call the ‘empty shell of universal revolutionism’, he prefers to reach back to the ancient notion of the “care of the self’ in the shape of the project of an ethico–spiritual transformation and experimentation on limits: ‘to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’(W is E? Pol of Truth) p114.
4. To begin to appreciate the radicalism of Foucault's standpoint we need to elaborate a little more his critique of humanism. I already mentioned that with him the slogan of the “decline of the individual” is replaced by “the death of man”. We have seen that for the Frankfurt School with the disappearance of revolutionary social forces, the emancipatory possibilities of modernity rest on the shoulders of the modern bourgeois subject now in decline. This subject was the bearer of the Enlightenment faith in rationality and morally autonomy. However, the momentous historical crisis that brought about monopoly capitalism has undermined the social conditions that underpinned this form of subjectivity. With Foucault, the critique is deeper. Gone is the nostalgia for this declining bourgeois species: it is replaced by sceptical unmasking of former illusions. The slogan “death of man” signifies the rejection of the idea of history as a unitary emancipatory process wherein the posited subject creates itself according to a predetermined essence. Foucault renovates Nietzsche’s critique of humanism viewing humanity in general as an ascetic and repressive ideological fiction. He utterly rejects the essentialist idea of the subject common to both empiricist and rationalist streams of modern philosophy. According to Foucault, these traditions presuppose the subject was unified and invariant. Foucault wants to explore the “otherness” that he views as being both internal and foreign to the subject, that determine ‘their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them’. (OTxiv) He argued that philosophy had to begin from things that positively exist, what the empirical sciences reveal about life, labour and language. The subject has to be placed within this context and the emphasis will be focused on how the subject is determined by outside elements. (F&IR.p188) Because he believes that discourse and its practices is such a complex reality with numerous levels, he rejects the phenomenological approach that ‘gives absolute priority to the knowing or observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity, which…leads to a transcendent consciousness’. (OTxiv)
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