The Theory of Communicative Action

Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of Functionalist Reason, Volume 2

Jürgen Habermas, Thomas McCarthy

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745607702
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

This study offers a systematic reconstruction of the theoretical foundations and framework of critical social theory. It is Habermas' "magnum opus", and it is regarded as one of the most important works of modern social thought. In this second and final volume of the work, Habermas examines the relations between action concepts and systems theory and elaborates a framework for analyzing the developmental tendencies of modern societies. He discusses in detail the work of Marx, Durkheim, G.H. Mead and Talcott Parsons, among others. By distinguishing between social systems and what he calls the "life-world", Habermas is able to analyze the ways in which the development of social systems impinges upon the symbolic and subjective dimensions of social life, resulting in the kind of crises, conflicts and protest movements which are characteristic of advanced capitalist societies in the late-20th century.

V

The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action

In the Marxist reception of Weber’s theory of rationalization, from Lukacs to Adorno, the rationalization of society was always thought of as a reification of consciousness. As I have argued in Volume 1, the paradoxes to which this conceptual strategy leads show that rationalization cannot be dealt with adequately within the conceptual frame of the philosophy of consciousness. In Volume 2 I will take up the problematic of reification once again and reformulate it in terms of, on the one hand, communicative action and, on the other, the formation of subsystems via steering media. Before doing so I shall develop these basic concepts in the context of the history of social theory. Whereas the problematic of rationalization/reification lies along a “German” line of social-theoretical thought running from Marx through Weber to Lukacs and Critical Theory, the paradigm shift from purposive activity to communicative action was prepared by George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim. Mead (1863– 1931) and Durkheim (1858–1917) belong, like Weber (1864–1920), to the generation of the founding fathers of modern sociology. Both developed basic concepts in which Weber’s theory of rationalization may be taken up again and freed from the aporias of the philosophy of consciousness: Mead with his communication-theoretic foundation of sociology, Durkheim with a theory of social solidarity connecting social integration to system integration.

The ideas of reconciliation and freedom, which Adorno—who in the final analysis remained under the spell of Hegelian thought—merely circled around in a negative-dialectical fashion, stand in need of explication. They can in fact be developed by means of the concept of communicative rationality, toward which their use by Adorno points in any case. For this purpose we can draw upon a theory of action that, like Mead’s, is concerned to project an ideal communication community. This Utopia serves to reconstruct an undamaged intersubjectivity that allows both for unconstrained mutual understanding among individuals and for the identities of individuals who come to an unconstrained understanding with themselves. The limits of a communication-theoretic approach of this sort are evident. The reproduction of society as a whole can surely not be adequately explained in terms of the conditions of communicative rationality, though we can explain the symbolic reproduction of the life world of a social group in this way, if we approach the matter from an internal perspective.

In what follows, I will (1) examine how Mead develops the basic conceptual framework of normatively regulated and linguistically mediated interaction; he arrives at this point by way of a logical genesis, starting from interaction mediated by gestures and controlled by instincts, and passing through the stage of symbolically mediated interaction in signal languages. (2) In the transition from symbolically mediated to normatively guided interaction, there is a gap in the phylogenetic line of development which can be filled in with Durkheim’s assumptions concerning the sacred foundations of morality, the ritually preserved fund of social solidarity. (3) Taking as our guideline the idea of a “linguistification” [Versprachlichung] of this ritually secured, basic normative agreement, we can arrive at the concept of a rationalized lifeworld with differentiated symbolic structures. This concept takes us beyond the conceptual limitations of the Weberian theory of action, which is tailored to purposive activity and purposive rationality.

1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of Communication

Early in the twentieth century, the subject-object model of the philosophy of consciousness was attacked on two fronts—by the analytic philosophy of language and by the psychological theory of behavior. Both renounced direct access to the phenomena of consciousness and replaced intuitive self-knowledge, reflection, or introspection with procedures that did not appeal to intuition. They proposed analyses that started from linguistic expressions or observed behavior and were open to intersubjective testing. Language analysis adopted procedures for rationally reconstructing our knowledge of rules that were familiar from logic and linguistics; behavioral psychology took over the methods of observation and strategies of interpretation established in studies of animal behavior.¹

Despite their common origins in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, these two approaches to the critique of consciousness have gone their separate ways and have, in their radical forms, developed independent of one another. Moreover, logical positivism and behaviorism purchased their release from the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness by reducing the traditional roster of problems with a single coup de main—in one case through withdrawing to the analysis of languages constructed for scientific purposes, in the other by restricting itself to the model of the individual organism’s stimulus-induced behavior. The analysis of language has, of course, freed itself from the constrictions of its dogmatic beginnings. The complexity of the problematic developed by Peirce has been regained along two paths—one running from Carnap and Reichenbach through Popper to postempiricist philosophy of science, the other from the early Wittgenstein through the late Wittgenstein and Austin to the theory of speech acts. By contrast the psychological theory of behavior has, notwithstanding occasional moves for liberalization, developed within the bounds of an objectivistic methodology. If we want to release the revolutionary power of the basic concepts of behavior theory, the potential in this approach to burst the bounds of its own paradigm, we shall have to go back to Mead’s social psychology.

Mead’s theory of communication also recommends itself as a point of intersection of the two critical traditions stemming from Peirce.² Although Mead took no notice of the linguistic turn in philosophy, looking back today one finds astonishing convergences between his social psychology and the analysis of language and theory of science developed in formal-pragmatic terms. Mead analyzed phenomena of consciousness from the standpoint of how they are formed within the structures of linguistically or symbolically mediated interaction. In his view, language has constitutive significance for the sociocultural form of life: “In man the functional differentiation through language gives an entirely different principle of organization which produces not only a different type of individual but also a different society.”³

Mead presented his theory under the rubric of “social behaviorism” because he wanted to stress the note of criticism of consciousness. Social interactions form symbolic structures out of sentences and actions, and analyses can deal with them as with something objective. There are however two methodological differences separating Mead’s approach from behaviorism. The model from which he starts is not the behavior of an individual organism reacting to stimuli from an environment, but an interaction in which at least two organisms react to one another and behave in relation to one another: “We are not, in social psychology, building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a given social whole of complex activities, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it.”⁴ Mead rejects not only the methodological individualism of behavior theory but its objectivism as well. He does not want to restrict the concept of “behavior” to observable behavioral reactions; it is to include symbolically oriented behavior as well, and to allow for the reconstruction of general structures of linguistically mediated interactions: “Social psychology is behavioristic in the sense of starting off with an observable activity—the dynamic, ongoing social process, and the social acts which are its component elements—to be studied and analyzed scientifically. But it is not behavioristic in the sense of ignoring the experience of the individual—the inner phase of that process or activity.”⁵ In comparison with the aspect of behavior, the meaning embodied in social action is something nonexternal; at the same time, as something objectivated in symbolic expressions, it is publicly accessible and not, like phenomena of consciousness, merely internal: “There is a field within the act itself which is not external, but which belongs to the act, and there are characteristics of that inner organic conduct which do reveal themselves in their own attitudes, especially those connected with speech.”⁶

Because Mead incorporated a nonreductionist concept of language into behaviorism, we find combined in him the two approaches critical of consciousness that otherwise went their separate ways after Peirce: the theory of behavior and the analysis of language. His communication theory is not restricted to acts of reaching understanding; it deals with communicative action Linguistic symbols and languagelike symbols interest him only insofar as they mediate interactions, modes of behavior, and actions of more than one individual. In communicative action, beyond the function of achieving understanding, language plays the role of coordinating the goal-directed activities of different subjects, as well as the role of a medium in the socialization of these very subjects. Mead views linguistic communication almost exclusively under these last two aspects: the social integration of goal-directed actors, and the socialization of subjects capable of acting. He neglects the achievement of mutual understanding and the internal structures of language. In this respect, his communication theory stands in need of supplementary analyses of the sort carried out since in semantics and speech-act theory.⁷

The paradigm shift prepared by Mead’s social psychology interests us here because it clears the way for a communication concept of rationality, to which I shall return later. In this section I want (A) to characterize the problem that serves as the point of departure for Mead’s theory of communication, in order (B) to show how he explains the transition from subhuman interaction mediated by gestures to symbolically mediated interaction. (C) The results of Mead’s theory of meaning can be rendered more precise by drawing upon Wittgenstein’s investigations of the concept of a rule. (D) I would like then to show how language is differentiated in respect to the functions of mutual understanding, social integration, and socialization, and how this makes possible a transition from symbolically mediated to normatively guided interaction. (E) A de-socialized perception of things, a norming of behavioral expectations, and a development of the identity of acting subjects serve as the basis for a complementary construction of the social and subjective worlds. Mead did not develop the basic concepts of objects, norms, and subjects from a phylogenetic perspective—as he did the basic categories of the theory of meaning—but only from an ontogenetic perspective. This gap can be closed by drawing upon Durkheim’s theory of the origins of religions and ritual.

A.

—Mead sets himself the task of capturing the structural features of symbolically mediated interaction. What interests him here is that symbols that can be used with the same meaning make possible an evolutionarily new form of communication. He views the conversation of gestures found in developed vertebrate societies as the evolutionary starting point for a development of language that leads first to the signal-language stage of symbolically mediated interaction and then to propositionally differentiated speech. Mead uses the term ‘significant gesture’ for simple, syntactically unarticulated symbols that have the same meaning for at least two participants in the same (i.e., sufficiently similar) contexts, for he regards such symbols as having developed from gestures. Examples would be vocal gestures that have taken on the character of languagelike signals, or the one-word utterances with which the child’s acquisition of language begins, but which are usual among adult speakers as well, albeit only as elliptical forms of linguistically explicit utterances.

Calls such as “Dinner!” or “Fire!” or “Attack!” are context-dependent, propositionally nondifferentiated, and yet complete speech acts, which can be used only quasi-imperatively, quasi-expressively. One-word utterances are employed with communicative intent, but as syntactically un-articulated expressions they do not yet permit grammatical distinctions among different modes. Thus “Attack!” is a warning when, for example, the context is such that enemies have turned up suddenly and unexpectedly; the same call can be a command to confront an enemy that has suddenly appeared in this way; it can also be an expression of alarm at the fact that the unexpected enemy is threatening one’s own life or the lives of close relations, and so on. In a way, the exclamation signifies all of these at once; in cases such as this we speak of a “signal.”

Signals or one-word utterances can be used only situation-dependently, for singular terms by means of which objects could be identified relative to a situation and yet context-independently are lacking.⁸ Signals are embedded in interaction contexts in such a way that they always serve to coordinate the actions of different participants—the quasi-indicative meaning and the quasi-expressive meaning of the utterance form a unity with the quasi-imperative meaning. Both the warning statement of the fact that enemies have suddenly and unexpectedly turned up and the express of alarm at the threat posed by their sudden appearance point to the same expectation of behavior—and this is given direct expression in the command to offer resistance to the unexpected enemy For this reason there is an unmistakable relation between the meaning of a signal—in all its modal components of signification—and the sort of behavior that the sender expects from the addressee as an appropriate response.

Linguistic signals can be replaced by manufactured symbols (such as drumming or the tolling of a bell) that are languagelike without being linguistic. Likewise, the beginning of a significant action can take on signal functions (as when a leader demonstratively reaches for his weapon). In such cases we are, however, already dealing with signs that have a conventional meaning; their meaning no longer derives from a naturelike context. It is characteristic of the stage of symbolically mediated interaction that the language community in question has at its disposition only signals—primitive systems of calls and signs. For analytical purposes, Mead simplifies the situation by disregarding the fact that the meaning of a symbol holds for all the members of a language community. He starts from the situation in which two independent participants can employ and understand the same symbol with the same meaning in sufficiently similar circumstances. To be sure, the condition that meaning conventions be fixed in the same way for a plurality of participants holds only for genuine signal languages and not for the gesture languages that are found at the subhuman level.

Mead illustrates the latter with examples of gesture-mediated interactions between animals belonging to the same species, such as a fight between two dogs. The interaction is set up in such a way that the beginnings of movement on the part of one organism are the gestures that serve as the stimulus eliciting a response on the part of the other; the beginnings of this latter movement become in turn a gesture that calls forth an adaptive response on the part of the first organism: “I have given the illustration of the dog-fight as a method of presenting the gesture. The act of each dog becomes the stimulus to the other dog for his response. There is then a relationship between these two; and as the act is responded to by the other dog, it, in turn, undergoes changes. The very fact that the dog is ready to attack another becomes a stimulus to the other dog to change his own position or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this than the change of attitude in the second dog in turn causes the first dog to change his attitude. We have here a conversation of gestures.”⁹

Interaction between animals that is mediated through gestures is of central importance in genetic considerations if one starts, as Mead does, with the concept of objective or natural meaning. He borrows this concept of meaning from the practice of research into animal behavior. Ethologists ascribe a meaning to a certain pattern of behavior that they observe from a third-person perspective, without supposing that the observed behavior has this meaning (or indeed any meaning) for the reacting organism itself. They get at the meaning of behavior through the functional role that it plays in a system of modes of behavior. The familiar functional circuits of animal behavior serve as a foundation for these ascriptions of meaning: search for food, mating, attack and defense, care of the young, play, and so on. Meaning is a systemic property. In the language of the older ethnology: meanings are constituted in species-specific environments (von Uexküll), they are not at the disposition of the individual exemplar as such.

Mead traces the emergence of linguistic forms of communication using as his guideline the step-by-step transformation of objective or natural meanings of systemically ordered mean-ends relations between observed behavioral responses into the meanings that these modes of behavior take on for the participating organisms themselves. Symbolic meanings arise from a subjectivizing or internalizing of objective struc- turcs of meaning. As these structures are mainly found in the social behavior of animals, Mead tries to explain the emergence of language through the fact that the semantic potential residing in gesture-mediated interaction becomes symbolically available to participants through an internalization of the language of gestures.

Mead distinguishes two steps in this process. At the first stage, a signal language emerges that converts the objective meanings of typical behavior patterns into symbolic meanings and opens them up to processes of reaching understanding among participants in interaction. This is the transition from gesture-mediated to symbolically mediated interaction, and Mead studies it from the standpoint of meaning theory as a semanticization of natural meanings. At the second stage, social roles make the natural meaning of functionally specified systems of behavior—such as hunting, sexual reproduction, care of the young, defense of territory, status rivalry, and the like—not only semantically accessible to participants but normatively binding on them. For the time being I shall leave this stage of normatively regulated action to one side and concentrate on the stage of symbolically mediated interaction. I want to elucidate how Mead understands his task of “explaining,” by way of reconstructing the emergence of this early stage of languagelike communication.

He begins with an analysis of gesture-mediated interaction because he finds there the beginnings of a process of semanticization. A certain segment of the meaning structure embedded in the functional circuit of animal behavior is already made thematic in the language of gestures: “Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relation between certain phases of the social act; it is not a psychical addition to that act and it is not an ‘idea’ as traditionally conceived. A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, arc the relata in a triple or three-fold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism, and of gesture to sub...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Translator’s Preface
• V The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action
• VI Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld
• VII Talcott Parsons: Problems in Constructing a Theory of Society
• VIII Concluding Reflections: From Parsons via Weber to Marx
• Notes
• Index
• Analytical Table of Contents