The Bounds of Reason

Habermas, Lyotard and Melanie Klein on Rationality

Emilia Steuerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134596294
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Bounds of Reason: Habermas, Lyotard & Melanie Klein on Rationality is a highly original yet accessible study of the debate between modernity and postmodernity. Emilia Steuerman clearly explains the modernity/postmodernity dispute by examining the problem that has driven the whole debate: whether the use of reason is an emancipatory or enslaving force.

Steuerman clearly sets out this debate by critically examining the arguments of two of its key proponents, Jurgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard. She clearly explains Habermas' defence of modernity and his attempt to salvage Enlightenment ideas of truth, justice, and freedom through the use of reason. She contrasts this with Lyotard's postmodernism and his scepticism about the use of reason, and its claims to universalism and objectivity. Throughout, Steuerman contrasts the Habermas-Lyotard debate with important insights from psychoanalytic theory, and shows how Habermas' notions of intersubjectivity and a community of shared language users can be compared and contrasted with Melanie Klein's theory of object relations.

1
THE CRITIQUE OF REASON:
HABERMAS AND LYOTARD

The big debate between the modernist and the postmodernist is a continuation of the old controversy about rationality. In general, the postmodernists claim that reason, being situated rationality, can no longer aspire to certainty. They also argue that the modern defenders of rationality can no longer maintain that truth is an objective idea. One of the possible corollaries of this position is the belief in reason as an instrument of control and domination. According to this view, Western rationality, claiming to speak in the name of truth, has, in fact, furthered totalitarianism and terror.

In the 1980s, Jean-François Lyotard made popular the idea that modernity is a reign of terror. In The Postmodern Condition he polemicized: ‘We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for the slackening and for the appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality.’⁵

Not surprisingly, the old Marxist idea that reason (and especially reason’s highest achievement, science) can bring about enlightenment and emancipation, has been disputed. The old Marxist opposition between science and ideology, where the latter was the veil that covered the truth that science could reveal was, at best, forgotten and, at worst, became the symbol of the way Marxism provided the ‘ideological’ tools to legitimize political terror.

The belief in reason’s capacity for enlarging our ideas of truth and freedom produced a tremendous concern with knowledge of the history of ideas. Philosophy as theory of knowledge has been one of the defining trends of modern philosophy, irrespective of the different ways of approaching the topic. Both the empiricist tradition, which questions the possibility of ever providing a rational grounding for knowledge, and the Cartesian view, which, whilst recognizing the doubts that assail rational knowledge, nevertheless seeks to provide a foundation to support it, are epistemological traditions, in the sense that their primary concern is with the grounds for knowledge.

The contradictions and problems of these projects have produced a variety of solutions and new questions. The main problem, however, springs from an approach to reason as a faculty that can be abstracted from its context. Reason as ‘the mind’, separated from both the body and the world of emotions, beliefs and values that surround it, cannot survive. In other words, rational knowledge, when abstracted from the individual subject’s history and from the historical tradition which produces its self-understanding, is a myth that creates insoluble questions. In a sense, this dilemma is present in Descartes already, in so far as, in the Meditations, the only possible justification for rational knowledge is to be found in his (irrational) belief in God and the order He created. Reason in the end requires that which it is not, that which it is supposed to overcome and replace.

The reason the debate has become so interesting is the acknowledgement, in the rationalist-modernist camp, that reason is not a neutral instrument to achieve knowledge and truth. When Lyotard, the opponent of rationality, questions, in his famous book The Postmodern Condition, the role of knowledge in contemporary societies, it is Habermas, best known for his paper on the ‘ideological’ role played by technology and science in advanced capitalist societies, who answers him. Habermas’s reply, ‘Modernity: an Unfinished Project’, was a speech given when he accepted the Adorno Prize.⁶ It is as a disciple of Adorno and as belonging to the tradition of the Frankfurt School that Habermas speaks.

One of the main themes of this tradition was the Weberian recognition of modernity as an ‘iron cage’, where rationality, as means-end rationality, transforms thought and culture into meaningless operations aimed solely at success and efficiency. Thus, rationality becomes instrumental rationality and the realms of social, political and even artistic life are reduced to questions of the efficiency of experts in achieving certain ends. The dimension of meaning and the issues of quality of life and humanity have disappeared in a world dominated by criteria of efficiency and success, measured quantitatively, generally in financial terms. Weber had noted this transformation of time into units of production and how the division of the clock into quarters of an hour was to be considered a development of capitalism. He stressed that ‘modern man in his professional life…has no time, and even for instance—as Goethe was already doing in his Wanderjahren— measure[s] the extent of capitalist development by the fact that the clocks strike the quarter hours (as Sombart also says in his Kapitalismus’.⁷ Even art, which for Adorno embodied the possibility of freedom, can become ruled by these criteria as, for instance, when music becomes controlled by the ‘art’ industry or the record companies. Marcuse, in his analysis of mass culture, described how the apparent choices of consumerist societies disguised the banality of what is in effect always the same. In One-Dimensional Man, he commented on the pseudo-choices the great number of American radio stations seemed to give, when, in fact, they did not, for as he moved from one station to the other, he discovered they were all the same. Still, it is as part of the tradition of the Frankfurt School and its critique of rationality that Habermas defends the modernist project of reason as emancipation.

Moreover, by using another dispute, the eighteenth century French literary querelle between the ‘Anciens’ and the ‘Modernes’ as the epitome of the formation of modernist consciousness, Habermas has been able to show how the identity of the modernists was formed against the idea of atemporal canons and rules of beauty. The querelle opposed, in the French Academy, the ‘Anciens’, led by Boileau, to the ‘Modernes’, led by Perrault. Boileau supported the classical rules of beauty and composition as laid down by tradition, whilst Perrault defended the invention and creation of new rules.⁸ In other words, the modernist camp asserted that consciousness is formed in time and shaped by history. The modernist awareness of time does not deny the need for criteria and rules, rather, it reminds us that the need for criteria and rules follows from the questioning of the once absolute and atemporal canons of tradition. Habermas’s retelling of the querelle as the epitome of the modernist consciousness shows that the historicity and contextuality of reason, generally associated with the postmodernist critique, is actually a central tenet of the modernist camp. Indeed, what Habermas is saying is that the acknowledgement of culture and history is not postmodernist challenges to rationality, but rather the greatest rational challenge that reason ever posed itself.

Another way of recognizing this challenge is to turn to Baudelaire’s definition of modernity. In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire stresses that modernity is the ephemeral and the contingent. This definition, however, in Baudelaire’s own words, is only a half, the other half being the eternal and the immutable: ‘La modernité c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art dont l’autre moitie est l’eternel et l’immuable’.⁹ Indeed, the purpose of the querelle was not to deny the need for criteria, but to recognize the unavoidable striving for eternal ideas whilst emphasizing that these eternities are ephemeral. The eternal exists in the ephemeral, but the contingent longs and calls for the absolute.

Nevertheless, it was a certain response to this challenge that has crystallized in our minds as the typical modernist identity. This response has denied reason’s fragility and limitations, and transformed the recognition of the ephemeral into an ode to the absolute. The best example of this fatal mistake for anyone who lived the hopes and disappointments of socialism has to be the work of Marx.

The relevance of Marxism has always been stressed in terms of its capacity for offering a scientific blueprint for the revolutionary transformation of the world. The fact that this revolution did not come about or, when it did, it disastrously eradicated the basic principles of freedom it sought to install, has produced deep suspicion of Marxism. It is important to stress, however, that what Marxism also purported to offer was an idea of freedom and transformation which, whilst eminently rational, acknowledged the irrational in it. Indeed, what Marx claimed, and which later Freud at an individual level also acknowledged, was that the consciousness of ourselves and of our times was determined by what he called ‘objective relations’ that pre-existed and shaped these ideas.

Without wanting to get into the nowadays scholastic discussion of the role of determination and freedom in the young and the old Marx,¹⁰ it is important to underline the fact that Marx and the left in general were struggling with an idea of reason and knowledge that affirmed the possibility of freedom, but which, by the same token, also recognized the unknown dimension in itself. By realizing that unknown factors (call them class, call them economic relations, call them ideology) were part of reason, Marx was opening up an abyss where critique itself could be shaped by factors unknown.

One of the ways in which Marx and subsequent theorists attempted to solve the problem was by distancing themselves from the fundamental insight into the unknown dimensions of the process of critique. An arbitrary line could thereby be drawn between ‘false’, i.e. ideological knowledge, permeable to distortions and manipulations by the ruling classes, and ‘true’, i.e. scientific knowledge, which was protected from the world of uncertainties by the armour of Dialectic Materialism and the unquestionable guarantee of speaking in the name of the people.

Marx failed to pursue fully the idea that our understanding of the factors that distort knowledge could itself be shaped by unknown factors. His desire for a type of knowledge that would stand over and above these distortions is at the heart of the failures of Marxism. It also denies the radically new understanding of knowledge and reason that he himself proposed. The failure is, of course, central to the abuses of power ‘in the name of the people’ that happened when Marxist ideology came into power. In Latin America, it is part of the problems of some of the old left wing groups which, for years, struggled heroically underground. Now, as established legal parties, with real possibilities of power, the legacy of their certainty of possessing the truth is the main factor in their difficulties in participating in the creation of a democratic space.

The awareness of our time as a historical time is one of the central features of modernity. This awareness produces the modernist necessity of creating new criteria to ground modernity in itself. This task is impossible, in so far as an absolute grounding is ruled out by the very awareness of time brought about by modernity. If the stress is on the eternal, on the absolute, then the idea of time, and with it the recognition of history, disappears. Habermas has argued that Hegel, the philosopher who recognized the historically of the new, modern age, in the end denied the very insight of the historicity of our times.¹¹ Indeed, when Hegel opts for an understanding of the Spirit as the Absolute, History becomes fate, and reason as self-reflection denies the problems it has created. If, however, on the other hand, the eternal disappears, the ephemeral becomes trivial and loses its meaning. It is important to bear this other side of the problem in mind. Indeed, we are so painfully aware of the mistakes of the quest for an absolute grounding that we are, if anything, more prone to err on the other side, the ‘politically correct’ postmodern relativism. The postmodern attack on modernity’s longing for the absolute, for foundations and for criteria forgets that without this longing (which can never be fulfilled), language and art lose their significance. Modernity, as Baudelaire understood it, is the awareness of the present as a meeting-point between time and eternity.¹²

The problem that underlies this discussion is an old one, the theme of which has been played over in many variations, from Parmenides and Heraclirus to the Romantics and the Enlightenment. It is the problem created by an understanding of reason that acknowledges change and time, and which, in modern times, recognizes the irrational and the emotional which underlie reason’s capacity for self-understanding.

Recently, this discussion has become popular as the opposition between relativism and objectivism.¹³ This takes the form of questioning whether it is possible for reason to overcome the cultural, historical and individual differences created by our various forms of life. Reason becomes a possible language, relative to a certain context. The gap between the various contexts, which reason seeks to bridge, becomes the incommensurable abyss between untranslatable languages. Even the most basic moral and political norms, such as the right to life and freedom, become questionable ideas, relative to the Judeo-Christian tradition which has flourished in the West. Without such universal values, however, the possibility of justifying one’s condemnation of the Holocaust, for example, disappears, as its perpetrators could claim that they saw it against their own background of values and norms, which did not recognize the humanity of Jews, Communists and other ‘inferior’ forms of life.

In our contemporary multicultural societies, we see the conflicts generated by this multiplicity of views. The option of a rational quest for universal values is a difficult one, generally associated with the most ‘conservative’ of ideals, the perpetuation of the domination of Western values. Any defence of the particular has to involve, somehow, however, the idea of the universal. The recognition of the differences in multicultural societies involves universal rights, irrespective of— or because of—each individual or cultural diversity. Without this recognition, the statement that all forms of life are relative to a certain context becomes itself of relative value, thus losing its point. The recognition of the inevitable universalistic dimension of political and moral values in general is not sufficient, however, to justify the validity of any specific right as, for instance, in the case of abortion and the conflict between the sometimes contradictory rights to life of the mother and those of the unborn child. General laws need to be seen against their specific backgrounds, where no answers are given once and for all. On the other hand, a radical relativism, which does not seek to universalize its own position, is also impossible to sustain.

The interest in following Habermas’s defence of the rationality project lies precisely in the way in which he situates himself at the heart of a discussion of values. The modernity project as a defence of rationality was, from the very beginning of Habermas’s work, an attempt to ground the idea of freedom. Habermas belongs to a tradition that sees in reason the possibility of emancipation, although he has also been careful to point out that this tradition does not imply a foundationalism in the strong sense of absolute groundings. In fact, one could say that to follow Habermas’s philosophical development is to become acquainted with the necessary reworkings of the rational tradition, once it acknowledges that reason does not rule alone, outside its historical context.

Habermas, born in 1929, grew up in Nazi Germany, an experience that shaped the lives of most of the very influential thinkers of his time. The Frankfurt School group went into exile (Habermas became an assistant to Adorno in 1956), whilst Heidegger’s thought and career were tainted by his sympathy for Nazism. Habermas has vigorously attacked the idea that one could excuse Heidegger’s complicity as a weakness or as a naïvety that might beset geniuses, too busy with their own thoughts to be aware of worldly matters. For Habermas, thought is not outside reality; theory and practice, philosophy and politics are inextricably entangled. In fact, his critique of Heidegger argues that the latter’s mystical understanding of Being created the space for the idealization of Nazism (Habermas, 1983, 1987b). For Habermas, therefore, philosophy is necessarily a critical theory of society, a reflection that should further and promote the ideal of emancipation from any form of domination.

Habermas’s philosophical turns are not just exemplary of the main changes in modern philosophy. They also illustrate the road philosophy must take if it wants to remain politically committed to the ideas of freedom and emancipation. Thus, he moved from a concern with knowledge and epistemology—a concern too heavily involved with the notion of an autonomous subject of knowledge—to language and the intersubjective world of communication. This move has given him the background for developing a rational discussion of norms and values, his present discourse theory of ethics and law. The strength of Habermas does not lie in his style, heavy and sometimes too informed by disciplines of thought unknown to his readers; rather, it rests on his ability to learn from his opponents and to propose new readings of rationality that offer solutions to leading moral and political problems. Interestingly enough, the failures he faced in his three big projects, which I would call the epistemological, the linguistic and the moral, have similarities that might point to the weaknesses of these projects. In this sense, it is worth going into the details of his development, as they illuminate the pitfalls of a defence of rationality.

The interest in choosing Lyotard as the champion of postmodernity is more than the obvious argument of the authorship of a book that represents this critique (Lyotard, 1986). Indeed, the very ideas of an author and of representation have been strongly questioned by other philosophers such as Derrida (1977), who are likewise very suspicious of the claims of reason. The interest in the confrontation of Habermas and Lyotard lies in the fact that Lyotard too is looking for norms and working on the idea of political and moral judgement. On a number of occasions, Lyotard has provocatively turned the tables on his modernist opponent by implying that Auschwitz, the epitome of irrationality, the event which calls for general and universal outrage, is the best example of modernity.¹⁴ Lyotard is, however, more of a champion of modernity than he would actually acknowledge, in the sense that his development, like Habermas’s, points to the need for a reworking of the philosophical tradition. The move from a philosophy of the subject to the intersubjective world of language opens the way for a discussion of the meaning of ethics and judgement. Like Habermas, Lyotard moves from epistemology to language and from language to ethics, though in so doing he is always on the opposite side...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE CRITIQUE OF REASON: HABERMAS AND LYOTARD
• 2: HABERMAS’S LINGUISTIC TURN
• 3: LYOTARD’S LINGUISTIC TURN
• 4: FREUD AND KLEIN
• 5: THE MOVE TO ETHICS: HABERMAS
• 6: THE MOVE TO ETHICS: LYOTARD
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY