Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Weber, Habermas and the Methodological Disputes in German Sociology

George McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138512689
• eBook ISBN: 9781351326063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Issues important to the philosophy of social science are widely discussed in the American academy today. Some social scientists resist the very idea of a debate on general issues. They continue to focus on behaviorist and positivist criteria, and the concepts, methods, and theories appropriate to a particular and narrow form of scientific inquiry. McCarthy argues that a new and valuable perspective may be gained on these questions through a return to philosophical debates surrounding the origins and development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German sociology. In Objectivity and the Silence of Reason he focuses on two key figures, Max Weber and Jurrgen Habermas, reopening the vibrant and rich intellectual dispute about knowledge and truth in epistemology and concept formation, logic of analysis, and methodology in the social sciences. He uses this debate to explore the forms of objectivity in everyday experience and science, and the relations between science, ethics, and politics.

McCarthy analyzes the tension in Weber's work between his early methodological writings with their emphasis on interpretive science, subjective intentionality, cultural and historical meaning and the later works that emphasize issues of explanatory science, natural causality, social prediction, and nomological law. While arguing for a value-free science, Weber was highly critical of the disenchanted and meaningless world of technical reason and rejected positivist objectivity. McCarthy shows how Habermas attempted to resolve tensions in Weber's work by clarifying the relationship between the methods of subjective interpretation and objective causality. Habermas believes that social science cannot be silent in the face of alienation, false consciousness, and the oppression of technological and administrative rationality and must adopt methodologies connected to the broader ethical and political questions of the day.

Drawing deeply on the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition that contributed to the development of Weber's method, Objectivity and the Silence of Reason demonstrates the crucial integration of philosophy and sociology in German intellectual culture. It elucidates the complexities of the development of modern social science. The book will be of interest to sociologists, philosophers, and intellectual historians.

Part 1
Methodological Disputes in the Nineteenth Century: Neo-Kantianism, Existentialism, and the German Historical School

1
Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity: Kant and Rickert

Around the turn of the twentieth century the nee-Kantian movement was taking hold in universities in the southwest corner of Germany (Strassburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg) and at the University of Marburg. In Marburg, the neo-Kantians were working in the area of the philosophy and logic of science. Important work was being done by Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Franz Staudinger, Rudolf Stammler, and Karl Vorländer to integrate the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant with the political theory of Karl Marx. Kant could provide Marx with a deeper appreciation of the moral ideals of social development. The neo-Kantians believed that the full expression of practical reason and the categorical imperative occurred only within a socialist community. Only in socialism do you get the full empowerment of the individual through the realization of a kingdom of ends and human emancipation.¹ The Southwest or Baden School of neo-Kantian thought focused its attention on issues of epistemology and methodology within the social sciences. Its members included Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Richard Kroner, and Max Weber. It was Kant's critique of pure and practical reason that held these individuals together and provided the inspiration for their expansion of Kantian philosophy into social theory and methodology of the social sciences. This chapter will focus on the contributions of the Southwest School to the methodological dispute (Methodenstreit) in nineteenth-century Germany.

Kant's Theory of Knowledge and the Critique of Reason

The key concepts and philosophical framework that ground twentieth-century discussions on the logic and method of history are provided by Kant's major work, Critique of Pure Reason (1781).² To appreciate fully the writings of Rickert and Weber, we must first examine in detail Kant's epistemology and critical method. It was David Hume, according to Kant, who awoke him from his famous "dogmatic slumber."³ Having rejected the metaphysics and epistemology of Cartesian rationalism, Hume contended that all knowledge and ideas must ultimately be reducible to sense impressions in order to be true. In his articulate defense of empiricism, he also included a nominalist rejection of universals, a separation of values and facts, a copy theory of truth, a correspondence between rational concepts and empirical reality, a theory of conceptual realism and metaphysical objectivity, and a defense of the epistemological passivity of the mind and the moral indifference of reason. The issue begins very simply as the uncovering of the relationship between the world of sense impressions and the concepts we have about nature. Hume argued for a direct relationship between the external world and our ideas, based on the former being reflected in the latter. This ocular metaphor became the foundation for modern empiricism, and any move beyond the world of perception and sensibility undermined the truth claims and validity of our ideas about it. The world of metaphysics and rationalism lay in wait upon the unsuspecting mind to ensnare reason in unreflective superstition, religious fears, and popular prejudice.⁴ The beginning and end of all knowledge rested in the empirical and our ability to reflect that world in consciousness. Reason was passive and indifferent to the impressions imprinted on the mind; it had no other role than simply to reflect what was offered to it. Hume rejected Descartes's notion that truth consisted of mathematics and innate ideas, since, for him, experience alone could be the arbiter of all valid forms of knowledge.

Kant accepts Hume's argument that all knowledge begins with experience, but moves beyond him in maintaining that it is not limited to the senses. He also accepts Hume's beliefs that science is based on universal and necessary connections of causality between the objects of experience and that neither rationalism nor empiricism, neither traditional logic nor experience were philosophically able to confirm or ground these relationships. According to Hume's critique of traditional foundationalism in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), rationalism is incapable of determining in an a priori fashion the underlying causes or effects of an action simply by reflecting upon them. No amount of reflection on the movement of a billiard ball will determine a priori which direction it will go after impact with other balls. Thus causal connections cannot be established through the logical analysis of action itself. Examining the concept of a billiard ball does not aid us in deducing its effects from the movement of a billiard ball. Reason is incapable of discovering the laws of cause and effect in the concept of the objects themselves.

Empiricism, on the other hand, is caught in a vicious logical circle since it can only justify the relationships of continuity between the past and the future based on the presuppositions of inductive logic, which is the very thing it wishes to justify in the first place. Thus the proposition, "The sun will rise tomorrow," would be true only if acquired experience and induction are assumed to be true from the start. But no amount of empirical evidence can justify this matter of fact statement from experience itself. Science grounded in experience and inductive logic falls prey to basing one's argument on the very thing one is attempting to validate. To justify the inductive reasoning of natural science on the conformity of the future to the present is to assume the validity of induction in order to prove its logical validity.⁵ Hume is forced to retreat to the assumption of a subjective necessity and general utility—custom or habit—in order to explain these inferences from experience. The psychological predisposition to think in terms of necessary connections, continuity and resemblance of occurrences, and customary associations forms the underlying justification of natural science. According to Kant, this failure of Hume's mental geography to transcend the immediacy of experience leads to a "censorship of reason." "This censorship must certainly lead to doubt regarding all transcendent employment of principles....For while subjecting to censorship certain principles of the understanding, he makes no attempt to assess the understanding itself, in respect of all its powers..."⁶ It leads to a skeptical and indifferent reason which rejects all a priori propositions and produces a contingent and empirical foundation without reason, that is, without universality and necessity. Reason turns into an illusion of metaphysical thinking. This explains Kant's rejection of Hume's skepticism and turn toward a critique of pure reason.

Kant starts his own transcendental theory of knowledge by beginning with Hume's discussion of impressions and by accepting his skepticism about the difficulties of epistemological justifications. In response to both Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism, he formulates a new method of epistemological analysis called Kritik to reestablish the conditions for the possibility of knowledge—the foundations of objectivity, experience, and science. He takes it upon himself to deconstruct Hume's theory of impressions in order to reconstruct transcendentally and logically the universal and necessary, that is, the a priori foundations of experience and knowledge. By examining the sources of knowledge, he seeks access to the formation of the objects of experience and, in turn, to the objective validity of concepts. By analyzing and unpacking the prior conditions of knowledge, he views the foundations of experience no longer in the subjective consciousness reflecting on innate ideas or in the sensible world impressing itself on a receptive mind. Rather, the Copernican revolution in philosophy occurs when Kant integrates subjectivity and objectivity, the knower and the known, in one comprehensive view of epistemology. And it is this one insight that will have time-resounding effects on German and American social theory, especially on the theories of historical knowledge and experience found in the writings of Weber and Habermas.

The phenomenal world of appearances (Erscheinungen) is created by the knower who is never able to see the real world as it truly is in itself beyond the categories of the mind, Kant privileges neither ideas nor impressions, but builds a theory of knowledge that emphasizes how the impressions are formed through the filtering process of the human mind. And the method of critique unpacks our faculty of knowledge in order to determine the transcendental nature of our concepts. Kant turns Hume's criticisms of metaphysics against both rationalism and empiricism as being one-sided and narrow formulations of epistemology. Is the mind a reflecting mirror that casts back the original image as the empiricists would argue, or is the mind an autonomous agent which examines its own innate ideas as the rationalists contend? Is knowledge independent of experience, or is it a reproduction of that experience? Kant rejects the dogmatism and metaphysics of both positions as inadequate to an understanding of objectivity and experience, since both claim to have an independent source of knowledge in either the senses or the mind. However, he does incorporate important aspects of each into his own method of transcendental or subjective idealism.

Kant formulates his critical theory of knowledge as the systematic inquiry into the faculty of human reason in order to determine the limits of the application of its concepts. By defining the limits of concept formation he hopes to uncover the relationships between experience and knowledge, reason and metaphysics. In this way he proposes to lay the foundations and justifications for Newtonian physics. The critical method examines the sources and determinate limits of the use of mental principles or categories in the formation of the objects of experience. It reveals the a priori principles and structure of the mind in the process of acquiring these objects. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, "It [critique] is a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself. But at the same time it marks out the whole plan of the science, both as regards its limits and as regards its entire internal structure."⁷

Kant transforms the whole epistemological landscape of objectivity (external world of experience) and subjectivity (consciousness). There is no longer an autonomous physical world indifferent to the principles of reason. This has been replaced by a continuous interaction and forming of phenomenal experience through the concepts of the mind. We know only an objectivity as it subjectively appears to us. By replacing a correspondence theory of truth with a constitution theory, Kant argues that a universal consciousness is actively engaged in the creation of the very objects of experience. He also shows how the universal and necessary forms of causality and other principles of reason are the result of the a priori concepts of the understanding. They are not qualities or relationships existing between the objects themselves, nor are they the result of accumulated psychological habit. The creation of objectivity, the structure of subjectivity, the relationship between concepts and reality, and the objective validity and applicability of rational concepts are all part of the elaborate Kantian metatheoretical foundations of both experience and science.

The limits to the a priori concepts of the mind lie in experience itself. Kant examines the intimate relationship between the faculty of the mind that acquires the un-formed and disconnected raw material of intuition, which he calls the "manifold of intuition" and the formal principles of consciousness that organize this material into a coherent experience of objectivity. There is an appearance of "something" here and now through the senses and feelings of perception (Anschauung). The categories of the understanding provide the organizing principle that shapes the information provided by the senses through universal and necessary concepts that exist in the mind prior to experience. The central issue for Kant is an examination of these a priori preconditions for the formation of objectivity. In part one of Kant's critical theory, in the section entitled "Transcendental Aesthetic," he details the importance of the categories or pure intuitions of time and space for the act of perception, and in part two, on the "Transcendental Analytic" and "Deduction," he outlines the issues of the concepts of the understanding and experience, appearances and thing-in-itself, and consciousness and reality.

Knowledge occurs not when the mind conforms to the objects of experience as in conceptual realism. As Copernicus revolutionized the world by claiming that the earth was no longer the center of the universe, Kant transforms epistemology when he writes that "objects must conform to our knowledge."⁸ The phenomenal world revolves around us, conforms to the structures of our mind, and reflects the form of our concepts. Neither sensations (Empfindungen) nor innate ideas were to be privileged in his new system. Reason was not to remain indifferent to objectivity, nor was it to act in dogmatic obedience to concepts. Concepts would no longer reproduce empirical reality or express its inner essence. With this new way of looking at the world, experience must conform to the a priori constructions of the mind and the faculty of the understanding. With Kant, human reason or subjectivity would play a central and vital role in the creation of the objects of experience and knowledge. "For experience is itself a species of knowledge which involves understanding; and understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, and therefore as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform, and with which they must agree."⁹ The result would be Kant's own revolution in a philosophy of knowledge which would provide the foundation for the later neo-Kantian schools of thought in Germany.

The break with Hume's theory of impressions and the objects of knowledge and the turn toward a concentration on the mode of knowing is Kant's contribution to a transcendental critique of the a priori structure of reason. The representation of the appearances is formed through the categories of substance, force, divisibility, etc., which give objects an appearance of permanence, unity, and order. The thing-in-itself, on the other hand, is a chaotic, meaningless, and irrational world without concepts and language to give it any semblance of being or purpose.¹⁰ The concepts and propositions of mathematics and physics are offered as examples of a priori reasoning. Statements such as 7 + 5 = 12, the law of the conservation of mass, and Newton's third law of action are presented as a priori judgments. Also offered as a justification for a priori statements is the logic of experience and science. Since universal certainty and necessary principles cannot be derived from experience itself as Hume had argued, they must exist prior to it in the mind. For Kant, there must be a priori principles, which provide the foundation for knowledge and judgment outside of the contingent and particular world of sensation. Only this could explain the possibility of Newtonian physics. This, in turn, leads to a transcendental philosophy, with its critical method outlining these a priori principles of pure reason that make objectivity and science possible. Though sometimes giving the impression that the understanding is a separate function of the mind that becomes involved only in creating judgments and thoughts about the relations of objects, Kant is more consistent when arguing that the spatial and temporal forms of intuition, as well as the categories of the mind (causality, substance, possibility, etc.) are both part of the process of forming the obje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Social Construction of Methods: Rethinking Social Science with Weber and Habermas
• Part 1: Methodological Disputes in the Nineteenth Century: Neo-Kantianism, Existentialism, and the German Historical School
• Part 2: Methodological Disputes in the Twentieth Century: Rationalism, Hermeneutics, and Critical Theory
• Index