Recovering Ethical Life

Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory

Jay. M Bernstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136160462
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Reading across the whole range of Habermas' work, this book traces the development of the theory of communicative reason from its inception to its defence against postmodernism. Bernstein's analyses are always problem centred and thematic rather than textual, making this a major contribution to the critical literature on Habermas.

1

CRITICAL THEORY – THE VERY IDEA

Reflections on nihilism and domination

The name ‘critical theory’ was not used to define the theoretical programme promoted by the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), originally set up in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1923, until 1937 in an article appearing in the Institute's journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, by its second director, Max Horkheimer. In his article ‘Traditional and critical theory’, Horkheimer attempts to elaborate how the interdisciplinary research programme of the Institute is to be distinguished from the ‘traditional’ paradigm of scientific knowing as a theoretical representation of a wholly independent object domain – the paradigm then dominant in both the sciences and philosophy.¹ According to traditional theory, scientific knowledge involves the subsumption of given facts under a conceptually formulated scheme; this scheme can either be a hypothesis that is experimentally tested against the facts or a correlation of the facts themselves. Overturning this paradigm requires denying that theory, the conceptual scheme, and fact, the world of objects, are fundamentally distinct existences belonging to forever diverse universes of discourse: ‘The facts which our senses present to us are preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ.’² Horkheimer regards the socio-historical preformation of subject and object as the consequence of social labour: the synthesizing, cooperative activity of all labouring subjects.

Even this minimal statement of the purpose of Horkheimer's article provides us with some hints as to the meaning of the term ‘critical theory’. It is not just more or better knowledge of the world that critical theory seeks, rather it portends a different form of knowing, a different sense of what human knowing is and does. Hence, at its most fundamental level, critical theory requires an engagement with central problems in epistemology and the philosophy of science. However, its treatment of this question, displacing the synthetic activities of the knower by social labour, immediately displaces the purity of the philosophical issue and submits it to historical accounting and reflection. Hence, a critical theory of society is one in which philosophical reflection and social scientific knowing are joined. This assumes that the most fundamental categories which shape human existence are themselves subject to social and historical formation and determination. Conversely, if fundamental categories of human existence are historically formed, then representational construals of social science, directing themselves solely at social facts, structures and patterns, inevitably suppress the self-reflective dimension of both its object and its activity. The idea of joining a historically informed philosophy with a reflectively self-aware and self-implicating social science was meant to engender a body of knowledge that was both critical and practical, both about society and immanently action-guiding.

All the leading critical theorists deny subject-object dualism as an ontological premise for all theory, and search for an alternative to the traditional representational conception of knowledge that follows upon it; all equally cast doubt on the rigid duality between philosophy (which, at least in modernity, is a coded term for the knowing subject) and social science (representing the object known), and thus intrigue an account of their entwinement or mutuality or interdependency; in denying, at least, the hegemonic legitimacy of traditional theory, all are concerned to demonstrate how theory can be critical and, more tenuously, emancipatory and practical. Underwriting and driving these abstract characterizations of critical theory lies a shared concern for social justice, and a belief that contemporary industrialized societies all suffer from pervasive injustice. Characterizing the source(s) and mechanisms reproducing this injustice is more difficult: in the first instance, Horkheimer views this question in classically Marxist terms as a matter of domination and exploitation; yet, even before the focus on class struggle began to wane, critical theory drew upon conceptions of modern societies that figured them as alienating, rationalized and reified. If we regard these last items as interrelated, then we might say that critical theorists typically fuse a concern for justice with a concern for ‘meaning’, or, said otherwise, following on from an understanding of the young Marx or the Marx of Capital conjoined with Nietzsche (mediated through Weber), they perceive a connection between the problem of domination and the problem of nihilism, where the terms ‘domination’ and ‘nihilism’ themselves recall the dual provenance of critical theory in social science and philosophy. These broad concerns and orientations certainly do not define a critical theory of society, but then neither would any alternative accounting, say one that highlighted the themes of materialism (construed either in Marxist terms, or as an antidote to philosophical idealism, or as referring to the significance of suffering and happiness as ground issues, or as designating the priority of the object over the knowing subject, etc.) or the attempt to integrate psychoanalysis into social theory.

Critical theory is not a theory of society or a wholly homogeneous school of thinkers or a method. Critical theory, rather, is a tradition of social thought that, in part at least, takes its cue from its opposition to the wrongs and ills of modern societies on the one hand, and the forms of theorizing that simply go along with or seek to legitimate those societies on the other hand. The oppositional movement of critical theory is refined as it engages with its philosophical (Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche) and social scientific (Marx, Weber and Freud) sources, finding and transforming a tradition of thought for itself, and then, at a later stage, self-consciously transformatively reworking its own history.³ Critical theory makes the reflective self-understanding of the theorist a central moment in theory; considering critical theory a contested tradition of social thought underwrites and furthers this continuously reflective dimension of its activity. Tradition, as here conceived, is inseparable from critical and self-critical elaboration; in forwarding a tradition, its guiding ideas and concerns are historically re-counted and theoretically analysed. Through the continuous interplay of historical and critical reflection a tradition is sustained. Throughout his career, Jürgen Habermas has sought to develop his own brand of critical theory in just this way, consistently engaging with the history of modern philosophy, modern social theory, and the first generation of critical theory itself.⁴ My essays on Habermas proceed in this same fashion, guided by the belief that his critical engagements with, above all, the philosophies of Hegel and the leading exponent of first-generation critical theory, T.W. Adorno, however timely, however necessary if critical theory was to survive in changed political and cultural situation, are not decisive. A return to those sources seems to me to be now necessary and philosophically justifiable. But a return to those sources cannot be done directly, without, that is, going through their displacement by Habermas, and even more important, making that return necessary through a reading of Habermas's version of critical theory. That latter ambition defines the explicit aim of this volume.

In saying this, there is a large presupposition, namely, that the tradition of critical theory itself possesses a theoretical depth that makes its project deserving of continuing reconstruction, which is itself to claim that there is more in the project and tradition of critical theory than what can be extracted from the inevitably flawed character of any one of its explicit elaborations. Traditions, of course, are more than their component parts; but making a claim for a tradition of thought without supporting some explicit version of it must seem a peculiar undertaking. Nonetheless, such a risky venture is worth doing both for its own sake, as a form of self-clarification, and because it will provide a ‘frame’ of sorts for or a theoretical horizon within which my dialogue with Habermas can be placed. Persisting with a discussion of Horkheimer for a moment, I want to attempt formally to outline the requirements that a critical theory of society should satisfy, hoping to indicate thereby the scope of its project, and then link that formal set of criteria to the more substantive entwinement of the problem of domination and the problem of nihilism, hence demonstrating how critical theory's formal structure and substantive aims mesh and support one another. Along the way, I attempt to clarify critically what has been a constant sore point for critical theory, namely its apparent failure adequately to link theory and practice, and I signal some of the dominant themes to be interrogated in the essays that follow.

CRITIQUE AND PRAXIS

There is a familiar Marxist flavour to the argumentative strategy of Horkheimer's ‘Traditional and critical theory’.

But the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment. To put it in broad terms, the theory says that the basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism.⁵

At first glance, it is difficult to distinguish the theoretical assumptions at work here from the account of the ‘fettering’ of the forces of production by the relations of production in the Preface to Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). This line of thought, reading domination wholly in terms of class domination, which is itself construed in economic terms, gains further support when Horkheimer claims that ‘the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class’, which entails that ‘his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change…’⁶ From these and like lines, we might conclude that ‘critical theory’ is but another term for Marxist materialism: ‘critical’ theory is the ‘critique’ of political economy.

Against Horkheimer's scheme a range of questions arise to which it would be all but impossible for it to provide answers. Why should we believe that all forms of domination are grounded in economic and class domination? Even if we concede that relief from economic domination provides a necessary condition for the joint overcoming of bureaucratic, sexual, racial and religious forms of domination, why should changes in the relations of production be conceived as providing the sufficient conditions for overcoming these latter since they each contain a specificity that is definitionally extra-economic? How, without returning to the suspect Lukacsian idea that identification with the cause of the proletariat provides the theoretician with an epistemologically privileged position, are we to conceive of the ‘dynamic unity’ between theoretician and the oppressed class? How is the specialist knowledge achieved by the theoretician to be transformed into action-guiding norms?

While Horkheimer's early writings contain no answers to questions like these, they nonetheless do contain internal tensions that reveal a more complex theoretical vision. One set of tensions relates to the role assigned to philosophy within the programme. Consider, first, the following:

The fruitfulness of knowledge indeed plays a role in its claim to truth, but the fruitfulness in question is to be understood as intrinsic to the science and not as usefulness for ulterior purposes. The test of the truth of a judgment is something different from the test of its importance for human life.⁷

Why, one might naturally ask, should a Marxist wish to distinguish truth from ‘importance to human life’ since it is, at least in part, traditional theory's conception of the indifference of truth to its ‘importance to human life’ that forms a central plank in critical theory's critique of it? In hearing what Horkheimer is saying here, one must hear in his criticism of pragmatism the Kantian, ‘critical’ distinction between Verstand (understanding) and Vernunft (reason).

For Kant the understanding provides us with causal knowledge of the world; this is the very same subsumptive knowledge that Horkheimer identifies as ‘traditional’. The sort of knowledge delivered by the understanding is instrumentally useful, providing the means for human control over nature that permits us to satisfy our wants and needs. Hence, it is the understanding that secures knowledge that possesses ‘importance to human life’. Central to the Kantian project is deciphering a form of reasoning different from this, a form that concerns the whole of human life rather than contingent ‘parts’, and that informs us about ends as well as means, hence challenging the hegemony of the understanding's instrumental knowing which both classical empiricism and rationalism embraced as the whole of reason. Reason, as opposed to the understanding, is assigned both tasks: it is holistic, seeking the unconditioned, and normative, specifying the ends of human action.

Kant hence inverts our usual comprehension of theoretical knowing: pure, representational cognition, with its correspondence theory of truth, is in fact not ‘pure’ but subjective and instrumental, bound to the project of mastery over nature within and without; while only a reason relieved of the task of control can attain to unconditioned or disinterested truth. Our natural outlook, inherited from Descartes and Hobbes, is that the end-indifference of scientific knowing mirrors nature's own indifference to human ends; hence human ends can only be of subjective significance, while causal knowing is objective. This judgment, Kant avers, suppresses the fact that causal reasoning is still reasoning, hence reflective of the immersion of the human subject in the natural world, and hence bound to a necessary, which is to say non-optional, anthropologically grounded interest in the natural world. Causal reasoning itself is blind to its own conditioning, and as a consequence all the more subjective, lacking as it does a reflective self-comprehension. To reflectively comprehend causal reasoning involves revealing its conditioning and specifying its role in relation to human reasoning as a whole. But these reflective accomplishments are themselves unavailable to the understanding. Practical cognition is thereby objective in a way that scientific knowing is not and cannot be. Making good in materialist terms this Kantian inversion of the relation between theoretical and practical reason, which is to say, giving Kant's Copernican turn a materialist twist by replacing the transcendental unity of apperception by collective social labour, hence forms an essential ingredient in the contrast between traditional and critical theory since unless the Kantian inversion is accomplished theory remains caught in the toils of unreflective objectivism and metaphysical realism.

Horkheimer's distinguishing of traditional and critical theory is as much inspired by and beholden to Kant's ‘critical’ separation of understanding from reason as it is by the ‘critique’ of political economy. Indeed, it is not a mistake to regard Horkheimer's original idea as just the entwining of these two notions of ‘critique’. Although construed from the Hegelian perspective in which Kantian reason is falsely tied to the demands and subjective outlook of the understanding, reason has an analogous role in Herbert Marcuse's complementary essay ‘Philosophy and critical theory’: ‘Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical thought, the only one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny.’⁸ Of course, Horkheimer makes the Kantian transition from part to whole, conditioned to unconditioned and means to ends through immersion of science's instrumental knowing in the historically productive social labour of the species: society, figured as socially cooperative human labouring, is the transcendental subject and so the source of the powers of reason.⁹ This way of accomplishing the materialist appropriation of the Copernican turn, derived from the Marxist reading of Hegel, is clearly inadequate since the cognitive dimension of social labour is not obviously or unproblematically formally different from causal reasoning. On the contrary, one very natural way of reading the cognitive dimension of social labour is to see its primitive forms as directly adumbrating the abstractive achievements of modern science. Hence, insofar as it is the paradigm of social labour that forms the unity of Kantian understanding and reason for Horkheimer, then the movement from understanding to reason, from subjective to objective reason, is reversed back into the understanding through the very gesture by means of which the priority of reason was to be established.

The second tension in Horkheimer's early writings relates to the role of culture.¹⁰ In his inaugural lecture, ‘The state of contemporary social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research’, Horkheimer begins specifying how it is that multidisciplinary research can relate to the basic questions of social philosophy.

It is not a fashionable question, but one which presents an actualized version of some of the most ancient and important philosophical problems: the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychological development of its individuals and the changes within specific areas of culture to which belong not only the intellectual legacy of the sciences, art and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, entertainments, lifestyles, and so on. The intention to study these three processes presents merely an updated version by way of contemporary methodologies and the present state of our knowledge, of the ancient question as to the relation of particular existence and universal reason, of the real and the ideal, of life and spirit – adapted to a new problematic.¹¹

Horkheimer's scheme for research depends upon relating three distinct domains of social life: the economic, the psychological, and culture. Even if we accept the dubious separation of the economy from its legal social form (private ‘ownership’ over the means of production) on the grounds that we can analytically distinguish power relations from their normative legitimation, Horkheimer urges the domain of culture as both functionally and normatively significant: culture mediates between the economic struc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Critical Theory – The Very Idea: Reflections on Nihilism and Domination
• 2 Liberty and the Ideal Speech Situation
• 3 Self-Knowledge as Praxis: Narrative and Narration in Psychoanalysis
• 4 Moral Norms and Ethical Identities: On the Linguistification of the Sacred
• 5 The Generalized Other, Concrete Others
• 6 The Causality of Fate: On Modernity and Modernism
• 7 Language, World-Disclosure and Judgment
• Notes
• Index