JAMES GLEDHILL
An ideal of intersubjective relations of community runs throughout John Rawls’s work. The publication of his undergraduate senior thesis, submitted at Princeton in 1942 and titled A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community, offers an important new perspective on this theme. The assurance with which the young Rawls declares that the “dichotomy between the individual and society which recent Western thought has puzzled over is really no dichotomy at all” suggests that we should reassess his mature work beyond the standard dichotomy of “liberalism” versus “communitarianism.”1 In particular, I will argue, his early religious concern with redemption through community was not so much abandoned in his mature work as reinterpreted within a nontheistic, but nonetheless not secular, philosophical framework.2
To bring out and evaluate this sense of redemption through community, I will consider it in light of the arguments made by two of Rawls’s most significant critics, G. A. Cohen and Jürgen Habermas. In particular, I will show how these three thinkers offer contrasting models of the creation of social harmony out of plurality that stand in complex relations to religious ideas of community. Following Cohen, I will refer to the sense of community involved as “justificatory community,” and show how such community is a communicative relation, one that either makes it possible for persons to say something to one another or itself consists in a reciprocal practice of communication.3
For purposes of comparison, I will focus on two analogies that Rawls employs in describing a well-ordered society, one with a symphony orchestra and the other with a well-constituted and well-played game. I will begin by comparing the analogy of a symphony orchestra with Cohen’s own analogy between socialist community and a jazz band, drawing upon Rawls’s senior thesis to show why he would reject Cohen’s model of justificatory community. I will then turn to Rawls’s analogy with a game and show how Stanley Cavell’s related critique of Rawls is more successful than Cohen’s in identifying both the aspirations and the limitations of Rawls’s approach. Finally, turning to Habermas, I will argue that Habermas’s discourse theory, which I present in terms of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s analogy between communication and play, is able to respond to what is valid in Cavell’s criticisms while maintaining fundamental commitments of Rawls’s model of justificatory community. To use the young Rawls’s distinction between communities formed by a vertical relation to God and those formed by horizontal relations to other persons,4 my overall story will be of a move from Cohen’s sense of a justificatory community involving individuals standing in vertical relations to principles of justice, to Rawls’s model of “conversion” in which vertical relations to principles of justice open persons up to horizontal relations of community with others, and finally to Habermas’s fully intersubjective model of justificatory community, consisting in horizontal relations of communicative justification that nevertheless preserve a moment of transcendence.
COHEN: SOCIALIST COMMUNITY AS A JAZZ BAND
Cohen describes the development of his socialist commitments as a move from the economic point of view of historical materialism to a moral point of view. Both points of view reject the political point of view adopted by Rawls, according to which achieving equality is a matter of constitution-making. Cohen takes Rawls’s view to founder on the fact that “we cannot make a constitution together unless and until we are already equals.”5 But, while Cohen remains committed to a socialist ideal of community as overcoming both distributive inequality and the alienated political idea of constitution-making between abstract legal persons,6 there is a change in the way in which he sees such community as coming about. From the point of view of historical materialism, this was a question of the teleological development of material productive forces independent of control by social structures and how this would create the material abundance that facilitates proletarian revolution.7 But in his normative theory of justice, Cohen abandons hope of such material abundance and instead views “rules of regulation” as teleological devices for promoting fundamental fact-independent principles of justice. Having given up the idea of a society beyond the circumstances of justice, Cohen turns to fundamental principles of justice understood as situated beyond facts about society. From this new moral point of view, community comes about through something like the Christian conception of “a moral revolution, a revolution in the human soul.”8
In order to understand the ideal of justificatory community that Cohen articulates in opposition to Rawls, it is helpful to look first at the model of community that Cohen thought would be facilitated by material abundance. According to this model, community is instrumental to the achievement of persons’ independently specified goals. It is a “concert of mutually supporting self-fulfilments, in which no one takes promoting the fulfilment of others as any kind of obligation.”9 As a way of picturing Marx’s idea of a society in which the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” Cohen draws an analogy with a jazz band.10 He asks that one
imagine a jazz band each player in which seeks his own fulfilment as a musician. Though basically interested in his own fulfilment, and not in that of the band as a whole, or of his fellow musicians taken severally, he nevertheless fulfils himself only to the extent that each of the others also does so, and the same holds for each of them.11
In discussing this model, Daniel Brudney offers a helpful twofold distinction for analyzing how individuals may share ends in community.12 First of all, Cohen’s jazz musicians may be said to have an externally oriented as opposed to an internally oriented shared end. The musicians share an end of playing jazz that each of them has as an individual, antecedently to engaging in cooperation with others. They do not share the end of playing together. Moreover, theirs is an overlapping rather than an intertwined shared end. The fact that each musician fulfills himself only to the extent that the others also do so is contingent upon factors that lie beyond their practice of cooperation and that lead their individual ends to overlap. In an intertwined end, by contrast, attaining the end with and through others is a necessary condition of realizing the end. I will return to this twofold distinction in analyzing the models of justificatory community offered by Rawls and Habermas.
Although Cohen presents his critique of Rawls’s model of justificatory community as an internal critique, it might rather be thought to presuppose his own conception of justice.13 On Cohen’s view, “something transcending human will must figure in morality if it is to have an apodictic character.”14 Fundamental principles of justice, for one, “transcend the facts of the world.”15 This sense of vertical relations to principles of justice might seem to stand in tension with the “interpersonal test” to which Cohen appeals in criticizing Rawls’s difference principle, which might appear to be a purely horizontal criterion of interpersonal justification.16 However, Cohen’s model of justificatory community can rather be seen as following from his own vertical conception of justice.
On Cohen’s view, for justificatory community to exist, all policies, and their attendant justifications, must be capable of a comprehensive justification. That is, any policy must pass an interpersonal test that “asks whether the argument could serve as a justification of a mooted policy when uttered by any member of society to any other member.”17 Cohen famously argues that the incentives argument often seen as permitted by Rawls’s difference principle fails this interpersonal test. When the rich argue in favor of material incentives, they present themselves in the third person: “they (the rich) will only work harder if they receive material incentives.” But when the argument is presented in the first person, justification breaks down: “We (that is, I and other rich people like me) won’t work harder without material incentives.” If everyone were to freely endorse true fundamental principles of justice, and follow them in their personal behavior, the interpersonal test would be met and comprehensive justification achieved. In his model of socialist community, where an egalitarian ethos obtains, individuals share the externally oriented end of acting in accordance with true fundamental principles of justice, not the internal end of establishing rules for living together. And since justice is fundamentally a matter of achieving the correct distributive pattern, the fact that all individuals must follow principles of justice in their personal behavior is a contingent means for bringing about an overlapping end, one made necessary by the fact that material abundance is not a realistic prospect.
There is some ambiguity as to how the interpersonal test that Cohen employs in his critique of Rawls relates to the socialist idea of community that he defends in Why Not Socialism? In the latter work, Cohen describes socialist community as achieving communal reciprocity, which might be taken to involve a commitment to an intersubjective model of community.18 But Cohen presents this idea of communal reciprocity in second-person-singular, “I-you” terms: I serve you because I find intrinsic value in doing so, as opposed to the instrumental value that motivates market relations, even if I also expect that you will serve me. Cohen’s moral model of socialist community thus remains a concert of mutually supporting self-fulfillments, in which no one takes promoting the fulfillment of others as any kind of obligation. For Rawls, as I will show, reciprocity is rather a matter of a first-person-plural perspective, of acting in accordance with reasons “we” can mutually acknowledge as free and equal citizens.
How does Cohen’s conception of justificatory community relate to religious ideas? In connecting his critique of Rawls with his reading of the Gospels, Cohen comments that Jesus would rightly have “spurned the liberal idea that the state can take care of justice for us, provided only that we obey the rules it lays down.”19 However, Cohen’s model of justificatory community might be more illuminatingly compared to the Jewish understanding of the relationship between justice and love articulated by Franz Rosenzweig. On Rosenzweig’s interpretation of the golden rule to love one’s neighbor as oneself, “the neighbor is only a representative. He is not loved for his own sake, nor for his beautiful eyes, but only because he just happens to be standing there, because he happens to be nighest to me. Another could easily stand in his place—precisely at this place nearest me. The neighbor is the other.”20
On this view, as on Cohen’s, the horizontal relations of justification in which one stands to the other result from, and can be used to test for, appropriate vertical relations to justice.21 Thus there are also Platonic resonances in the idea of a revolution in the human soul that achieves justice in the community as a whole, something that helps to explain why Cohen’s interest in fact-independent fundamental principles of justice is not a purely theoretical one, but serves a revolutionary socialist doctrine. As Habermas notes, for Plato “nothing is more practical than theory itself”: knowledge promises salvation.22 Put another way, unless faith that there exists a substantive truth about justice is maintained, justificatory community as Cohen conceives of it will be impossible.
But this means that Cohen fails to provide a genuinely intersubjective model of justificatory community. Indeed, his rejection of Rawls’s political point of view of constitution-making extends to a wholesale rejection of internally oriented ends. In particular, he rejects the idea of socialization into a shared internally oriented end that he acknowledges Karl Marx relies upon in his early writings, but which, he argues, Marx’s later historical materialism repudiates. On an alternative humanist interpretation, however, Marx’s model of community can be seen as involving an internally oriented and intertwined end. On this view, a shared internally oriented end is a matter of establishing a general will, and the maintenance of a general will depends upon its being an intertwined end: persons’ interests as citizens do not exist atomistically, but only as a result of internal relations between persons acting as integral parts of the community they constitute.23 It is just such a conception of justificatory community that is articulated by Rawls.
RAWLS: A WELL-ORDERED SOCIETY AS A SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
When describing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of a well-ordered society along with his own model of how social harmony is created out of plurality, Rawls draws an analogy with a symphony orchestra. Specifically, he compares the idea of a well-ordered society to a “group of musicians every one of whom could have trained himself to play equally well as the others any instrument in the orchestra, but who each have by a kind of tacit agreement set out to perfect their skills on the one they have chosen so as to realize the powers of all in their joint performances.”24 Rawls’s classical musicians commit themselves to a joint performance and therefore have an internally oriented shared end. In the terms of theories of collective intentionality, a symphony orchestra is not simply an aggregation of “I intentionality,” but a matter of “We intentionality.” As John Searle puts it, “If I am a violinist in an orchestra I play my part in our performance of the symphony.”25 This analogy suggests that Michael Sandel is mistaken to admonish Rawls for forgetting that “when politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”26 Moreover, unlike a contract for mutual advantage, the internally oriented end that Rawls’s musicians share is an intertwined end. This means that they can only fulfill their individual ends in and through a collective end.27 By rejecting ideas of justificatory community that depend upon the socialization of individuals into adopting a shared point of view and transcending individualism, Cohen reduces eligible conceptions of community to a dichotomy between self-interested bargaining and a shared commitment to an external end.28 Like Sandel, Cohen does not consider that among internally oriented ends, intersubjective relations can take the form of intertwined ends, rather than simply overlapping ones.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls claims that the “public realization of justice is a value of community.” In a note, he elaborates on this as follows: “persons need one another since it is only in active cooperation with others that one’s powers reach fruition. Only in a social union is the individual complete.”29 By contrast, on Cohen’s Marxian view of full communism, “if we were musicians we might want to take turns playing all the instruments in the orchestra.”30 Rawls recognizes that on a Hegelian interpretation, Marx might be seen as endorsing the orchestra model, but he tends to follow a more revolutionary, utopian interpretation of Marx, claiming of it that “a society in which all can achieve their complete good, or in which there are no conflicting demands and the wants of all fit together without coercion into a harmonious plan of activity, is a society in a certain sense beyond justice.”31 In such a society, persons would no longer have to act from a sense of justice, which develops only in response to the factual circumstances of justice. Of course, Cohen considers it impossible to move “beyond justice,” since he understands justice to consist in a patterned egalitarian distribution, however this is produced.32 But Rawls’s point still holds against Cohen’s normative theory of justice. By denying that justice is a virtue of citizens, and thus rejecting both a Marxian idea of socialization and the Humean idea of benevolence as vehicles for the realization of justice, Cohen’s egalitarian ethos is an externally oriented, overlapping end, and not a matter of intersubjective virtues of social cooperation.
Cohen may well be right to hold that justice cannot be adequately understood as a matter of Christian charity or Humean benevolence. However, he does not explore in any detail how Rawls follows the lead of Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, who, both reinterpreting Christian ideas, understand justice as an intersubjective relationship between free and equal persons. Indeed, Rawls’s rejection of models of justificatory community such as Cohen’s that appeal to vertical relations to external ends can be traced back to his senior thesis. There the contrast I have employed between externally oriented and internally oriented ends is echoed by Rawls’s distinction between “natural” and “personal” relations: while natural relations are relations to objects, personal relations are relations to other persons. In Rawls’s words, “proper ethics” involves not natural relations to the Form of the Good, Truth, or God, but “the relating of person to person and finally to God.”33
Indeed, it is striking how much of the structure of the young Rawls’s religious model of community finds its way into his mature work.34 In his senior thesis, Rawls suggests that “the chief problem of politics is to work out some scheme of social arrangements which can so harness human sin”—which Rawls understands in terms of egoism and pride—“as to make the natural correlates of community and personality possible.”35 In his mature work, the process of reflective equilibrium can be seen as directed toward discovering a shared “incipient if latent sense of community waiting to be brought to light, elaborated, and self-consciously strengthened through reflection.”36 A political conception of justice appeals to a sense of justice that persons share as citizens, the difference principle requiring persons to pursue their own conceptions of the good only on terms consistent with the common good. Rawls acknowledges that Cohen’s socialist ideal of equality is incompatible with this understanding of the difference principle. He writes that, on Cohen’s view, “no one can be required”—that is, required by coercive rules—“to benefit himself only in ways that contribute to others’ well-being,” since this would be to encroach on persons’ freedom to direct their own labor.37 From this, Cohen concludes that the commitment to principles of justice must be a free individual choice. But the difference principle testifies to Rawls’s alternative, Rousseauian strategy of elevating humankind by “curing the malady from within,”38 redirecting individuals’ particular ends in such a way that they contribute toward the common good. In other words, as a principle of reciprocity, the difference principle realizes the shared intertwined end of the good of a well-ordered society.
The end toward which Rawls looks in his senior thesis is the “reconciliation between person and community,” the “personal relations” of person to person and finally to God.39 The problem of political liberalism that he raises in his later work is that of whether citizens who hold a plurality of comprehensive doctrines can achieve reconciliation by public reason. There are limits to reconciliation by public reason, of course, the most crucial being the fact that “comprehensive doctrines are, politically speaking, unreconcilable.”40 But, while the differences between citizens that result from their differing comprehensive doctrines cannot be reconciled, citizens can be reconciled to conflicts produced by differences in status, class position, and occupation or in ethnicity, gender, and race, when they accept a reasonable political conception of justice and know that their social institutions conform to it. In Rawls’s senior thesis, God restores man to community, for man must wait for God to speak to him before he can communicate with the “other” in community.41 In his later work, holders of comprehensive doctrines undergo a nontheistic but structurally similar process of conversion, since only by accepting a political conception of justice can they deliberate in accordance with shared public reasons. In reconciliation by public reason, we become reconciled to our social world, affirming reasonable pluralism as constitutive of social freedom.
Rawls develops the idea of an overlapping consensus as part of a Kantian “defense of reasonable faith in the real possibility of a just constitutional regime.”42 Seeing such consensus as achieving the intertwined end of a well-ordered society avoids some of the misleading connotations that he sought to correct by emphasizing that a reasonable overlapping consensus achieves “stability for the right reasons.” Far from seeking to challenge religious views, political liberalism is better understood as relying upon the transformation of the transcendent ends of comprehensive doctrines in the “conversion” experience of wide and general reflective equilibrium, through which an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice is formed. Indeed, in Rawls’s model of overlapping consensus there are resonances of the “dialectical quality” of conversion he emphasizes in his senior thesis, a process that he describes as “a being burst in upon and being bent back” through which persons are “not lifted out of the earthly community,” not “abstracted from [their] fellow men and assumed into heaven,” but “planted more firmly into that earthly community.”43 Ultimately, I think it is difficult to understand the possibility of an overlapping consensus in Rawls’s sense without recognizing that it demands such a “leap of faith” on the part of citizens who hold comprehensive doctrines, as they accept the very great value of the good of political community.44
I have argued that political liberalism has a conception of justificatory community structurally similar to Rawls’s senior thesis. The integration of personality into community involves a vertical relation—whether to God or to a political conception of justice—but this is required and ultimately justified by the horizontal relations with others that it facilitates. That being said, the vestiges of Rawls’s religious conception of community that remain in political liberalism render the idea of an overlapping consensus problematic from the point of view of an intersubjective conception of justificatory community. This may be illustrated by returning to his orchestra analogy. The intersubjective relation formed in a symphony orchestra, like Rawls’s model of a “social union of social unions,” is a harmony between harmonious sections. Musicians have a place at a desk as a member of the strings, brass, woodwind, or percussion section, and they cannot coordinate their playing with all other members of the orchestra. A conductor is required to coordinate the performance. While not a member of the orchestra, the conductor determines the overall shape of how the piece will be played and the nature of the contributions of the players. In a performance, the “We intentionality” of a symphony orchestra depends to a significant degree upon the higher-level “I intentionality” of the conductor.
The ambiguous position of the conductor of a symphony orchestra recalls the ambiguous role of Rousseau’s figure of the “lawgiver.” Rawls describes this figure, “the mechanic who invents the machine,” as a deus ex machina required to explain the origins and stability of the social contract.45 Rousseau appeals to the figure of the lawgiver in response to a problem of utopianism, a problem of constitutional founding that generates a political circle:
For a nascent people to be capable of appreciating sound maxims of politics and of following the fundamental rules of reason of State, the effect would have to become the cause, the social spirit which is to be the work of the institution would have to preside over the institution itself, and men would have to be prior to laws what they ought to become by means of them. Thus since the Lawgiver can use neither force nor reasoning, he must of necessity have recourse to an authority of a different order, which might be able to rally without violence and to persuade without convincing.46
Rawls observes that principles and institutions may be introduced for different reasons than those that later generations have for accepting them. Rousseau’s social contract could come about in a way similar to that in which after the Wars of Religion religious toleration was accepted as a modus vivendi.47 From the point of view of his own conception of the social contract, Rawls describes how a modus vivendi might develop into a constitutional consensus, and from there into an overlapping consensus.48 Since he does not appeal to a Hegelian teleological philosophy of history, however, the problem remains of how exactly the social contract of an overlapping consensus may come about and of the authority to which a political conception of justice that offers the promise of realizing an overlapping consensus can appeal.
Rousseau asks how citizens can obey when no one commands. He answers: “It is to law alone that men owe justice and freedom. It is this salutary organ of the will of all that restores in [the realm of] right the natural equality among men. It is this celestial voice that dictates the precepts of public reason to every citizen, and teaches him to act in conformity with the maxims of his own judgement, and not to be in contradiction with himself.”49 On Rousseau’s view, it would require gods to give men such laws. It is hard not to conclude that Rawls’s political conception of justice for the basic structure of society, which gives the content of public reason, must also appeal to “an authority of a different order” so as to “persuade without convincing.”50 That is, Rawls’s political conception of justice presupposes, but cannot reflexively justify, the authority of a perspective beyond the rules of social institutions required to bring about the intersubjective relationship of an overlapping consensus. In pursuing these issues further, it is worth turning to Cavell’s critique of Rawls.
THE RULES OF THE “CONVERSATION OF JUSTICE” LANGUAGE GAME
Cohen’s “interpersonal test” concerns the utterances that persons are able to make to one another. Like Cohen, Cavell considers what citizens in a Rawlsian well-ordered society are able to say to one another—what he calls the “conversation of justice” in Rawls’s work—and criticizes Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society, in favor of an ethic of personal behavior.51 However, Cavell’s critique offers a very different view of the aspirations and limitations of Rawls’s model of justificatory community.
Cavell focuses on the relationship between two standpoints and what persons can say to one another when acting from these two different standpoints. The first standpoint is that of the original position in which parties agree upon principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Rawls says of the principles of justice chosen in the original position that they are those such that, when realized in institutions, persons “can say to one another that they are cooperating on terms to which they would agree if they were free and equal persons whose relations with respect to one another were fair.”52 The second standpoint is that of deliberative rationality, from which persons pursue their conceptions of the good. When discussing this standpoint, Rawls argues that the “parties cannot agree to a conception of justice if the consequences of applying it may lead to self-reproach should the least happy possibilities be realized. They should strive to be free of such regrets.” In the words Cavell focuses on, in the society of justice as fairness we could act from the point of view of deliberative rationality so as to ensure that our conduct is “above reproach.”53
As Cavell recognizes, the problem is not so much that Rawls thinks that focusing on the basic structure as the primary subject of justice allows individuals to pursue their own ends without being concerned about justice, but that Rawls sees the constitutive rules of social institutions as serving a utopian function. Where Cohen finds an excess of realism in Rawls’s focus on the basic structure, Cavell finds an excess of utopianism. In the realistic utopia of a society well-ordered by the principles of justice as fairness, the intersubjective relations of Kant’s kingdom of ends are realized as a democratic realm of ends in our social world. We achieve a society that we could give our consent to once and for all, and are thus reconciled to our social world.
This is where Rawls’s second analogy is relevant. Essential to the idea of justice as fairness is the idea that principles of justice for a well-ordered society are like the rules of a well-constituted and well-played game. Rawls describes a shared end, “the common desire of all the players that there should be a good play of the game,” that “can be realized only if the game is played fairly according to the rules, if the sides are more or less evenly matched, and if the players all sense that they are playing well. But when this aim is attained, everyone takes pleasure and satisfaction in the very same thing. A good play of the game is, so to speak, a collective achievement requiring the cooperation of all.”54 Cavell’s analysis of the “conversation of justice” in A Theory of Justice builds upon his earlier critique of the understanding of rules Rawls presents in “Two Concepts of Rules.”55 There Rawls considers rules from two standpoints that parallel his later discussion of the standpoints of the original position and of deliberative rationality: first from the standpoint of the role of rules in constituting social practices, and then from the standpoint of the following of rules within a practice. For Cavell, Rawls’s mistake is to assimilate the two standpoints, by assimilating “actions in accordance with rules to actions determined by rules.”56 That is, Rawls thinks that the rules that define a practice also determine how one must act within the practice. But, Cavell argues, the practice of promise-keeping with which Rawls is concerned is not adequately explained by claiming that the rules of the practice of promising determine that promises ought to be kept; promising is not akin to a contractual act. And Cavell points out that Rawls’s analysis of the practice of promise-keeping in “Two Concepts of Rules” problematically reappears in the context of his discussion of political obligation in A Theory of Justice. There he mistakes the rules that frame politics (determined from the standpoint of the original position) for those governing our behavior in politics (in deliberatively pursuing our conceptions of the good).57 For Cavell, this constitutes Rawls’s utopianism.
Intriguing support for the view that Rawls understands games in this way is provided by a letter in which he describes why baseball might be regarded as “the best of all games.” There he describes how in baseball “the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise.”58 This idea of calling human skills into complementary and graceful exercise is just the idea that is present in Rawls’s symphony orchestra analogy. To mix metaphors, the conductor of the orchestra is required to establish the “rules of the game” that determine the shared end that makes a well-ordered society.
Cavell thus draws attention to a utopian aspiration for transcendence in Rawls’s work. Rawls’s aspiration that we be able to conduct ourselves in a manner that is above reproach is reflected in the unrealistic demands that he makes of the rules of social practices. I will now proceed to consider a third model of justificatory community, that offered by Habermas, which conceives of justificatory community in a way that can avoid these criticisms.
HABERMAS: TRANSCENDENCE FROM WITHIN LANGUAGE GAMES
Habermas is known as a critic of Gadamer. However, while he rejects the conservative implications of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, he takes inspiration from its model of linguistic intersubjectivity. Of particular relevance in the present context is the analogy between language and playing a game. Gadamer describes the shared end that takes place in language as the ongoing playing of a language game in which “all playing is a being-played.”59 This analogy becomes for him a way of examining the relationship between faith and understanding. While initially this might appear to be an unlikely analogy, what is essential to it is the idea of a movement of a whole that transcends individual subjectivity. As Gadamer puts it,
The back and forth movement that takes place within a given field of play does not derive from the human game and from playing as a subjective attitude. Quite the contrary, even for human subjectivity the real experience of the game consists in the fact that something that obeys its own set of laws gains ascendency in the game. … The back and forth movement of the game has a peculiar freedom and buoyancy that determines the consciousness of the players. … [T]he individual self, including his activity and his understanding of himself, is taken up into a higher determination.60
As Habermas explains, instead of seeking a “meta-theory” beyond existing practices that can unify divergent ends, Gadamer seeks to preserve “the unity of reason in the pluralism of languages” by appealing to “the tendency to self-transcendence that is inherent in the practice of language.”61 In learning our native language we also learn how to learn languages in general. Similarly, in learning a rule we learn how to interpret, and not merely apply, that rule.
This is another way of bringing out the limits of Rawls’s understanding of rules as an external determining framework that brings about an ideal shared end. Focusing on the idea of play highlights how rules establish a space or field of play that enables individuals to pursue their ends in a manner that cannot be externally predetermined or consciously controlled by the individual players. Rather than the rules of the game defining a shared end, a shared end develops in and through playing the game.62
Crucially, while Habermas’s idea of communicative rationality can be seen as adopting a Gadamerian understanding of language, he rejects the idea that discourse has a substantive higher end into which individuals are taken up. This is reflected in his nuanced view of the relationship between postmetaphysical reason and religion.63 Thuss, with Habermas as with Rawls, a model of intersubjectivity and the transcendence of individuality through justificatory community stands in a complex relationship with religious ideas. Yet Habermas’s alternative model succeeds in maintaining an idea of transcendence without raising the problems that Rawls’s model does.
In reflecting upon the significance of Rawls’s senior thesis, Habermas identifies parallels between Rawls and Kant. He remarks that the history of Rawls’s work “exhibits a philosophical reshaping of religious ideas comparable to that first undertaken by Kant”:
The principal features of the religious ethics of community could be sublimated into secular deontology because the triadic pattern of relations we find in monotheistic communities remains intact in the “kingdom of ends.” … In this case members do not stand in a direct relation to each other either. Instead all interpersonal relations are mediated by the relation of each to the authority of an impartial “third,” namely that of the moral law. The relation of the individual to the single transcendent and unifying God is now replaced by the moral point of view from which all autonomous actors deliberate equally on how they shall behave in cases of conflict.64
For Kant the moral law takes the place of God. What does Rawls put in place of the impartial third point of view of Kant’s moral law? He rejects Kant’s metaphysics and lacks the reassurance of Hegel’s teleological philosophy of history. Yet, he takes it to be possible for citizens to adopt an impartial, public point of view beyond their particular ends because of the sense of justice they share in sharing a social world. To mediate interpersonal relations by a political conception of justice therefore presupposes a transcendent point of view. Viewing Rawls’s project from Habermas’s perspective, one can question whether Rawls fully sublimates a religious ethic of community into a secular deontology.
In his debate with Rawls, Habermas argues that the way in which Rawls establishes the “rules of the game” of constitutional democracy through the original position represents an external limitation upon the political autonomy of citizens. Rawlsian citizens, he argues, “cannot reignite the radical democratic embers of the original position in the civic life of their society.”65 Habermas’s alternative view of constitutional democracy puts him in a position to respond to concerns, such as those expressed by Cavell, about the utopian role of the original position. He rejects the view that political obligation derives from seeing democracy as a current counterpart to a promise of the Founding Fathers. Echoing Cavell’s criticism of Rawls’s use of a contractual model of promising in his account of political obligation, he emphasizes that promises are illocutionary acts which establish interpersonal relations, and that it is a consequence of persons’ autonomy that the duties they generate can have only a specific content and not the binding character of obligation as such.66 Habermas therefore rejects Rawls’s dualistic model of the rules that define a social practice and those that govern moves within that practice, the model that originates in Rawls’s analysis in “Two Concepts of Rules” and is maintained in his view of the relationship between the point of view of parties in the original position and that of citizens in a well-ordered society. To redeem the idea of “E pluribus unum” in a radical-democratic practice of collective self-legislation, it is not enough to alternate between moments of constitutional reconstruction and a normal politics of pledging allegiance to “one nation under God.” Instead, it is necessary to maintain the performative standpoint of “we the people” in the ongoing procedures through which the shared end of justificatory community is reproduced.67
Habermas’s communicative model of intersubjectivity does not face Rawls’s problem of understanding a process of “conversion” from a subjective to an intersubjective perspective. The way in which Habermas draws upon this idea of intersubjectivity as the basis for an alternative model of justificatory community is most clearly evident in his reconstruction of George Herbert Mead’s approach.68 On Mead’s model, persons are seen as individuated through being socialized, and the reproduction of social order is then seen as dependent upon the intersubjective actions of individuals. This provides a way of understanding how the unity that is preserved through language is a unity of differentiated selves. In Habermas’s words, “Rousseau’s universalized public and Kant’s intelligible world are rendered socially concrete and temporally dynamic … by Mead; in this way, the anticipation of an idealized form of communication is supposed to preserve a moment of unconditionality for the discursive procedure of will formation.”69 In practical discourse, as Mead puts it, we construct an “ideal world, not of substantive things but of proper method.”70 This is fundamental to why Habermas is able to present his communicative philosophical paradigm as occupying a conceptual space “between naturalism and religion.” While an idea of transcendence is maintained in postmetaphysical thinking, it is an idea of “transcendence from within” that does not subsume the perspective of individuals. Habermas describes this simultaneously contextual and context-transcending status of communicative validity claims as follows:
As agents of communicative action, we are exposed to a transcendence that is integrated in the linguistic conditions of reproduction without being delivered up to it. … Linguistic intersubjectivity goes beyond the subjects without putting them in bondage [hörig]. It is not a higher-level subjectivity and therefore, without sacrificing a transcendence from within, it can do without the concept of an Absolute.71
Rawls rejects Habermas’s approach because he sees it as a comprehensive Hegelian doctrine. On Rawls’s interpretation of Habermas,
once the form and structure of the presuppositions of thought, reason, and action—both theoretical and practical—are properly laid out and analyzed by his theory of communicative action, then all the alleged substantial elements of those religious and metaphysical doctrines and the traditions of communities have been absorbed (or sublimated) into the form and structure of these presuppositions.72
But, if anything, it is Rawls who follows a Hegelian approach in which philosophy absorbs and sublimates the substantial elements of religious and metaphysical doctrines. Habermas distinguishes “rationalist approaches that (in the Hegelian tradition) subsume [aufheben] the substance of faith into the philosophical concept, from dialogical approaches that (following Karl Jaspers) adopt a critical attitude toward religious traditions while at the same time being open to learning from them.”73 To be sure, Habermas asks whether the Wars of Religion could have been “brought to an end if the principle of tolerance and freedom of belief and conscience had not been able to appeal, with good reasons, to a moral validity independent of religion and metaphysics.”74 But postmetaphysical philosophy for Habermas “neither announces the absence of consolation in a world forsaken by God, nor does it take it upon itself to provide any consolation.” The idealizing presuppositions of the communicative use of reason offer a glimmer of an ideal of justificatory community, but this is not “filled in as the totality of a reconciled form of life and projected into the future as a utopia.”75
Whereas Rawls’s model of justificatory community involves a substantive internally oriented, intertwined end, then, Habermas’s model of intersubjective communication involves a procedural internally oriented, intertwined end. That is, whereas Rawls constructs a substantive conception of justice for a well-ordered society that seeks to determine the shared end of the practice of social cooperation between citizens, Habermas reconstructs the idealizing presuppositions of procedures oriented toward establishing shared ends through which the practices of morality and constitutional democracy are reproduced.
CONCLUSION
Rawls, Cohen, and Habermas offer three models of justificatory community that stand in different relationships to religious ideas of redemption. Because of the way Cohen and Habermas both criticize Rawls’s model of justificatory community as an overlapping consensus for grounding principles of justice in factual contingencies, it is easy to overlook the profound differences between the alternative models of justificatory community that they offer. Both object to Rawls’s aspiration for reconciliation to our social world, but whereas for Cohen Rawls succumbs to excessive realism, I have argued that, properly interpreted with the aid of Cavell, from a Habermasian perspective Rawls’s model of justificatory community is excessively utopian.
While Cohen argues that vertical relations to external substantive principles of justice are a prerequisite for horizontal relations of interpersonal justification, Habermas rejects any appeal to external substantive principles of justice, denying any conceptual space for an external perspective beyond intersubjective communicative practice. His model of justificatory community maintains an idea of transcendence, but of transcendence from within the facts of this world—it therefore abandons the utopian aspiration for a reconciled form of life. While Rawls’s intersubjective procedure of the original position remains dependent upon, while “sublimating,” the transcendent orientations of comprehensive doctrines toward substantive ideas of the good, the intertwined end that Habermas sees as established through language and law is purely procedural. As Habermas insists, this is necessary in order to vindicate the idea that the constitutional democratic state does not depend upon a prepolitical idea of the good, but is rather capable of reproducing the motivations on which it depends from its own secular resources.76
Notes
I am grateful to the editors and to Stephen Mulhall for helpful comments, and to the participants at the “Between Rawls and Religion” conference held at LUISS University and John Cabot University in December 2010, and particularly Sebastiano Maffettone, for helpful discussion.
