Habermas and Pragmatism

Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman, and Cathy Kemp, Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman, and Cathy Kemp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415234597
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135641399
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

There are few living thinkers who have enjoyed the eminence and reown of Jürgen Hamermas. His work has been highly influential not only in philosopy, but also in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection dedicated to exploring the connections between his body of work ahd America's most significant philosophical movement, pragmatism.

Habermas and Pragmatism considers the influence of pragmatism on Habermas's thought and the tensions between Habermasian social theory and pragmatism. Essays by distinguished pragmatists, legal and critical theorists, and Habermas cover a range of subjects including the philosophy of language, the nature of rationality, democracy, objectivity, transcendentalism, aesthetics, and law. The collection also addresses the relationship to Habermas of Kant, Peirce, Mead, Dewey, Piaget, Apel, Brandom and Rorty.

Part I

TRANSCENDENTALISM AND REASON

1
REGARDING THE RELATIONSHIP OF MORALITY, LAW AND DEMOCRACY

On Habermas’s Philosophy of Law (1992) from a transcendental-pragmatic point of view¹

Karl-Otto Apel

Introduction

In his recent major work Faktizitat und Geltung² (in the following noted as FuG) Jürgen Habermas has for the first time presented a “philosophy of law,” and has tried to determine its relationship to moral philosophy and theory of democracy within the framework of his long-standing discourse philosophy. In this context, however, a novel “architectonics” of discourse differentiation has resulted, which from my point of view is very problematic. The problematic features, in my opinion, concern two points:

1 In his Tanner Lectures of 1986,³ the preliminary stage of FuG, Habermas still pleaded for the foundational priority of morality to law, but in FuG he introduced a new top position in his “architectonics”: the foundational principle of the whole of “practical philosophy” is now to be constituted by a discourse principle that is “morally neutral” (FuG, 138), rather than by the principle of “discourse ethics.” The “principle of morality” (Moralprinzip) and the “principle of law” (Rechtsprinzip) are now considered to emerge “equiprimordially” (gleichursprünglich) with regard to their normative status from the morally neutral “discourse principle” – analogously to their historical differentiation out of “substantielle Sittlichkeit” (in the sense of Hegel) (FuG, 138).

2 The second problematic point of the novel architectonics of discourse differentiation concerns the following circumstance: the principle of law – which is said to be equiprimordial to the principle of morality, according to Habermas – is at the same time “identical with” the “principle of democracy,” the latter being the normatively foundational principle of politics (FuG, 136ff.). For Habermas, this normative equation obviously results from the following implication of his discourse theory: in an ideal form of democracy, the discourses of free and equal citizens can ensure by their procedures that the legislators both make and submit to the laws; or, in other words, that the human rights of citizens can be guaranteed by these same citizens as autonomous legislators (FuG, 122ff.).

In FuG the scheme of a normatively founded discourse differentiation turns out to be as shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 Architectonics of branching

Now what is problematic about this branching architectonics?

I have worked out an extensive commentary on Habermas’s FuG in my book Auseinandersetzungen (1998) under the subtitle Third attempt at thinking with Habermas against Habermas, together with two similar attempts in other essays.⁴ Given this, I should say something in advance about my long-standing relationship to Habermas in order to clarify the motives and perspective of my comments on FuG.

On the early history of “discourse philosophy”

Since about 1970, Habermas and I have been developing a foundation for practical philosophy and the critical social sciences via a conception of communicative or discourse rationality which we developed in a constant exchange of thought. Until recently we both used the term discourse ethics as a designation for the basic discipline of practical philosophy⁵ But despite strong common concerns, there were also differences between our approaches from the beginning, differences which appeared as early as 1976 when we published the basic conceptions of our approaches in a discussion volume, Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie.⁶ In this volume we each took up John Searle’s elaboration of speech act theory (and inspirations from Noam Chomsky), but Habermas used the title “Universalpragmatik” and kept close to social science and generative linguistics,⁷ whereas I used the title “Transzendentalpragmatik” in an attempt to continue a project of the “transformation of transcendental philosophy” which I first propagated in 1973.⁸ What is the significance of this difference?

Common to us both is a certain – positive and critical–transformative – connection with Kantian philosophy: for example, a transformation of Kant’s philosophy of the “transcendental subject” or “consciousness” in terms of a philosophy of language and intersubjectivity. In this respect we each take up the “pragmatic turn” of language-analytic philosophy. However, Habermas distances himself not only from metaphysics in general (as I do), but also from transcendental philosophy (which he does not distinguish from metaphysics). Following the tradition of the Frankfurt School, he does not accept a principled (foundational) difference between philosophy and critical-reconstructive social science. And this means that all philosophical propositions are considered to be empirically testable and thus fallible, as indeed are propositions of general linguistics (e.g. Chomsky’s “innateness” thesis). This holds even for the necessary (unavoidable) presuppositions of argumentation, which according to “universal pragmatics” as well as “transcendental pragmatics” are the four “validity claims”: meaning (ability to be understood), truth, truthfulness (veracity), moral rightness, and the claim to possible discursive consensus with regard to these validity claims. Although for Habermas these presuppositions of argumentation are conditions for the possibility of empirical testing, they are said to be subject to empirical testing and are thus considered to be contingent; they could change, according to Habermas, since they belong to social forms of life. Thus there is no transcendental apriori.

All this sounds quite plausible to most prominent philosophers today. For, along with surmounting “transcendent” (Kant) metaphysics, “de-transcendentalization” (Richard Rorty) is also demanded,⁹ but for me this latter demand ultimately entails a step into the nonsensical. Thus, for example, the unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation (which cannot be denied without committing a performative self-contradiction) cannot be fallible and subject to empirical tests, because in case of falsification they would simultaneously be presupposed in their transcendental function.¹⁰ For the same reason it makes no sense, I suggest, to imagine that one fine day the presuppositions of argumentation could change, for the question would be: from where – i.e. under which presuppositions – could we think of these presuppositions as being contingent? Habermas may try to think this from a historico-sociological perspective, and in doing so he may understand himself as a modest and self-critical philosopher. But I would assert that he simply forgets to reflect on his own necessary presuppositions of argumentation and thereby falls back to “transcendent” metaphysics, for he takes, as it were, a divine point of view outside the world, from which (he tries) to conceive of everything, including transcendental conditions of thought, as being just contingent – that is, as historical facts.

From these remarks it may have already become clear why I could not follow Habermas and the Frankfurt School in abolishing the difference between empirical social science and philosophy; why I insisted instead on the post-metaphysical function of transcendental philosophy as a transcendental pragmatics of argumentative discourse.

For the same reason I always held on to the possibility of, and need for, an ultimate transcendental foundation of discourse ethics. Due to the undeniable presuppositions of argumentation (even according to Habermas’s original conception of “universal pragmatics”), there must be a dimension of “moral rightness” in acts of argumentation as acts of communicative action. In my transcendental-pragmatic interpretation this means primarily that in serious argumentation we have always necessarily acknowledged that all possible members of the argumentation community have equal rights in using speech acts in proposing validity claims, and they have equal co-responsibility for identifying and solving morally relevant problems of the lifeworld.

(This comprises the primordial solidarity of the discourse partners as such.) Now for me it makes no sense to think that the necessary acknowledgment of these fundamental moral norms, which are the conditions for the possibility of serious discourse and thus for all justifying and criticizing of material norms, could change. And this reflection, I suggest, points to the possibility of an ultimate transcendental foundation of ethics as discourse ethics. So, the first main point of the difference between Habermas and myself centers on the status of the transcendental, and this difference is highlighted in the changes in Habermas’s “architectonics” of discourse differentiation in FuG.

In this book Habermas not only disputes, as he has done before, the possibility of an ultimate foundation of ethics, but for the first time he explicitly denies the immediate implication of the principle of morality by the discourse principle. This principle is now called “morally neutral” (although it is still considered to be normatively foundational), thereby making discourse ethics no longer the basic discipline of practical philosophy. The claim to “moral rightness” obviously no longer belongs to the necessary presuppositions of argumentation as a form of communicative action, for it is said to be not yet thematizable on the level of the primordial discourse principle (see Figure 1.1). Thereby the original conception of “universal pragmatics” has also been abandoned. But for me, above all, the possibility of an ultimate transcendental–pragmatic foundation of ethics by reflective recourse to the undeniable presuppositions of argumentation has been lost (and for me no other foundation of ethics is possible at all, as still must be shown).

In order to assess the significance and bearing of this point we have to try to understand the motives behind Habermas’s new architectonics of branching. First there is a problem that is surely shared by Habermas and myself: the norms of law must be distinguished from the norms of morality in a specific way. Historically both types of norm emerged equiprimordially from “substantielle Sittlichkeit” (in the sense of Hegel); normatively they must be foundable, precisely with regard to their essential differences, by discourse philosophy. Thus far I can easily agree with Habermas. But for me the question arises: does it follow from the fact that moral norms and norms of law must be different that they must be (or even can be) derived from, i.e. grounded by, a primordial discourse principle that is “morally neutral?” This claim – prima facie, perhaps – seems to be a consequence of the assumption that otherwise the principle of positive law must be derived from that very principle of morality from which it has differentiated itself in the course of history. This is indeed an old aporia of the philosophy of law which, I think, Habermas rightly tried to avoid in his new approach.

On the other hand, however, after the emancipation of positive law from the metaphysical doctrine of “natural law,” there was and still is the intuitional belief that law somehow must be grounded by morality, lest it be surrendered to political power interests. Habermas previously, and still in the Tanner Lectures, obviously shared this latter intuition. However, how can it be made compatible with the insight into the necessary difference between the norms of law and the norms ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I. Transcendentalism and Reason
• PART II. Law and Democracy
• PART III. Language and Aesthetic Experience
• PART IV. Comparative Studies
• Response
• Relections on pragmatism
• On John Dewey's The Quest for Certainty
• Index