Cristina Lafont
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most significant contributors to the development of hermeneutics in contemporary philosophy. Although his work is generally situated within the critical theory tradition associated with the Frankfurt School, his specific approach to critical theory is heavily indebted to the hermeneutic conception of language. As Habermas indicates in the preface to the second edition of On the Logic of the Social Sciences, the appropriation of hermeneutics during the 1960s is one of the key influences behind his effort to turn critical theory away from the paradigm of mentalism and toward communication theory—an effort that culminated in his masterwork Theory of Communicative Action.1 At the same time, his appropriation of hermeneutic philosophy also led to a significant and fruitful transformation of the latter into an interesting alternative framework that is often referred to as critical hermeneutics. In what follows, I highlight the basic features of that approach through an analysis of the main philosophical issues at the center of Habermas’s sustained engagement with Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.2
The hermeneutic model of a linguistically articulated lifeworld that makes mutual understanding possible is the key conceptual resource that enabled Habermas to break with the paradigm of mentalism that was predominant in the work of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists. As he points out in an interview with Peter Dews, within their theoretical framework “there was no room for ideas of the life-world or of life-forms … So they were not prompted to look into the no-man’s-land of everyday life” (Dews 1986, 196). Consequently, they were not interested in linguistic communication as the distinctive mode of lifeworld reproduction. As early as 1967, in an article titled “The logic of the social sciences,”3 Habermas explicitly underscores the superiority of the hermeneutic view of language over two other alternatives, the phenomenology of the lifeworld articulated by A. Schutz from a Husserlian point of view and the “positivist analysis of language” that, at the time, he took to be exemplified by the early and later Wittgenstein. Whereas the latter conceptions share an instrumental view of language as a mere tool for communication, the hermeneutic conception articulates a constitutive view of language as world-disclosive.4 According to Habermas, the crucial methodological difference between these conceptions is that the Husserlian and positivist approaches rely on the possibility of adopting an external perspective from which language can be objectified, whereas hermeneutics recognizes the impossibility of adopting such a perspective. As Habermas (1980, 191) indicates, “hermeneutics has taught us that we are always a participant as long as we move within a natural language and that we cannot step outside the role of a reflective partner.” At the same time, however, Habermas is clearly aware of the difficulty that this claim poses for any attempt to combine the internal perspective of a participant in a linguistically articulated lifeworld with the external perspective of a social critic that the project of a critical theory requires. The methodological difficulty of integrating hermeneutics and critical theory is precisely what motivates Habermas’s criticism of the hermeneutic claim to universality, which is the main target of his article. We can distinguish two slightly different problems within this crucial methodological sticking point, problems he had already identified in his early work and which he continued to elaborate in the following decades. One is descriptive, the other normative.
At the descriptive level, there is an unavoidable explanatory limitation built into the hermeneutic approach because speakers, as participants in a shared cultural lifeworld, do not have access to the type of external empirical knowledge that reconstructive sciences provide. Hermeneutic self-reflection, as Habermas indicates, “throws light on experiences a subject makes while exercising his communicative competence, but it cannot explain this competence.”5 This explanatory deficit is not only obvious with regard to the reconstructive sciences that Habermas discusses in this context, such as linguistics and developmental psychology, but also with regard to most of the causal knowledge provided by the empirical sciences, including the social sciences. In particular, as Habermas argues in his Theory of Communicative Action, systemic mechanisms that affect the lifeworld from the outside are inaccessible from a participants’ perspective. Access to them requires the social theorist to adopt an external perspective, as articulated in the broad tradition of functionalism by authors such as Marx, Parsons, or Luhmann. From this point of view, when Habermas criticizes the structural blindness of hermeneutics toward the material (social and economic) circumstances of the reproduction of the lifeworld, it echoes the main arguments against Heidegger’s approach marshaled by members of the first generation of critical theory in the 1930s.6 Of course, recognizing the need to integrate the hermeneutic and the functionalist perspectives is one thing, and providing a coherent account of society as constituted by both self-sufficient systems and the lifeworld is another. But I will not focus on the difficulties related to this question here, as that would involve aspects of critical theory that are only tangentially related to the hermeneutic approach. Instead, I focus on another difficulty: the normative difficulty that arises in an attempt to integrate hermeneutics and critical theory.
Whereas the aforementioned explanatory limits reveal a clear deficit within the hermeneutic approach, which, when recognized, seems to call for the integration of empirical knowledge provided by the social sciences, the same cannot be said of the normative limits that the hermeneutic approach imposes upon the critical aims of the theorist. Recognizing that “we are always participants as long as we move within a natural language and that we cannot step outside the role of a reflective partner” poses a normative challenge to the authority claimed by the social theorist when she criticizes the prevalent societal understandings as “ideological.” As Gadamer pointed out in his famous debate with Habermas,7 in adopting an external perspective the social theorist engaged in the critique of ideologies breaks the symmetrical dialogue among participants and, in so doing, can only impose her own views about “the good society” upon the basis of a questionable self-ascribed epistemic authority that claims a privileged access to truth. Thus, the critical theorist becomes a “social technocrat” in disguise.8 In a critical theory of this type, the emancipatory interest of the critical theorist would simply collapse into the technical interest of a “social engineer” who prescribes without listening. In sharp contrast to this conception, Gadamer argues, the hermeneutic perspective of a symmetrical dialogue oriented toward understanding prohibits its participants from thinking that they possess superior insight into the “delusions” of other participants such that it would eliminate the need to validate their own views through dialogue with them. Seen from this perspective, the normative limitation of the hermeneutic approach poses a real challenge to the aspirations of critical theory. Any departures from the symmetrical conditions of dialogue among equal participants automatically raises questions concerning the legitimacy of the theorist’s criticisms as well as their right to impose their conception of the good upon others.
Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality presents two main strategies for confronting this challenge without giving up on the possibility of a critical theory. In fact, these two strategies constitute the original core of Habermas’s distinctive approach to critical theory. The first strategy concerns the very core of hermeneutics, namely, the view of language as constitutive of the lifeworld. Within the context of a short overview, I cannot offer a detailed analysis of Habermas’s own conception of communication,9 but I will very briefly indicate what I take to be the crucial point of departure vis-à-vis the Gadamerian hermeneutics, namely, the fact that Habermas’s approach can incorporate externalism in its account of linguistic communication.10
According to the hermeneutic approach, a shared linguistic world-disclosure (in Gadamer’s terminology, a “common tradition”) is the precondition for any understanding or agreement that speakers may bring about in conversation. Once this premise is accepted, however, it becomes unclear how speakers can ever question, criticize, or revise such a factually shared world-disclosure or communicate with those who do not share it. Despite Gadamer’s own protestations, without any additional conceptual resources our linguistic world-disclosure seems unrevisable from within and inaccessible from without. In order to avoid these counterintuitive consequences, Habermas rejects the hermeneutic claim that understanding is only possible on the basis of a factual agreement among speakers with a shared linguistic world-disclosure. Instead, he claims that understanding depends upon a “counterfactual agreement” that all speakers share simply in virtue of their communicative competence.11 This agreement is based on formal presuppositions and thus does not depend on shared content or a shared world-disclosure among participants in a conversation. According to Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, speakers who want to reach an agreement about something in the world have to presuppose the truth of what they are saying, the normative rightness of the interaction they are establishing with the hearer through their speech acts, and the sincerity or truthfulness of their speech acts. These three dimensions of validity (what Habermas calls “the validity basis of speech”) are the key heuristic cues that interlocutors have at their disposal in trying to understand each other’s speech acts, so that they can reach agreement about what they may treat as a fact, as a valid norm, or as a subjective experience. So long as this agreement is undisturbed, speakers can exchange and acquire information about the world with their respective speech acts. However, once any such agreement is successfully challenged by a speaker, communication is interrupted and can only be continued at a reflexive level in which the context of action is suspended so that participants can adopt a hypothetical attitude toward the problematic validity claims and try to reach an agreement on the basis of good reasons. The ability to engage in argumentative practices (what Habermas calls “discourses”) to repair the disagreements that unavoidably arise among interlocutors is a necessary condition to sustain communicative practices in general. Now, in order for interlocutors to be able to adopt a hypothetical attitude toward problematic validity claims, they must share the notion of a single objective world that is identical for all possible observers. As Habermas points out in The Theory of Communicative Action, “actors who raise validity claims have to avoid materially prejudicing the relation between language and reality, between the medium of communication and that about which something is being communicated.” This alone makes it possible for “the contents of a linguistic worldview [to become] detached from the assumed world-order itself” (Habermas 1984, 50–51). Obviously, if participants in communication are to evaluate whether things are the way they think they are or are as someone else believes, they cannot dogmatically identify their own beliefs with the way the world is. This is why communication oriented toward understanding requires that the participants distinguish, however counterfactually, between everyone’s (incompatible) beliefs and the assumed world-order itself. Put in Habermas’s own terms, they have to form “a reflective concept of world” (Habermas 1984, 50–51). The formal presupposition of a single objective world is simply a consequence of the universal claim to validity built into the speakers’ speech acts. It is an expression of the communicative constraint that makes rational criticism and mutual learning possible, namely, that when there are two opposed claims only one can be right. Thus, the formal notion of world and the three universal validity claims constitute a system of coordinates that guides the interpretative efforts of the participants in communication toward a common understanding, despite their differences in beliefs or worldviews. This formal framework allows interlocutors to assume that they are referring to the same things even when their interpretations differ.12 As a consequence, they can adopt the externalist attitude that is necessary for disagreement and criticism without ever having to leave their shared communicative situation behind. To the extent that such an externalist perspective is equally accessible to all participants in communication, Habermas can reject Gadamer’s claim that the critical theorist, in order to carry out her critique, has to break the symmetry of communication oriented toward understanding and become a “social technocrat” in disguise.
In the Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas remarks that “in thematizing what the participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in principle open to all participants” (Habermas 1984, 130).
In this remark, we can already discern the other major strategy that Habermas has followed to confront the hermeneutic challenge. By identifying the possibility of adopting an externalist perspective as a structural element of any communication oriented toward understanding, Habermas can reject the charge of paternalism that Gadamer had raised against his approach to critical theory back in the 1970s. At the same time, however, it becomes clear that this strategy is based upon accepting the criterion of legitimacy that underlies the charge, namely, that the ultimate criterion of validation for any criticism or proposal recommending social change is the actual dialogue among all participants involved. Thus, no matter how superior the empirical and theoretical knowledge of the critical theorist may be, she must situate herself as a discourse participant among equals in order to validate her criticisms and proposals through actual dialogue. As Habermas puts it in Between Facts and Norms, “in discourses of justification there are in principle only participants” (Habermas 1996, 172).13
This is indeed the most distinctive element of Habermas’s own approach to critical theory. On this approach, the critical theorist is not supposed to base her criticisms of current societies on her particular conception of the good society, but is rather supposed to leave space for the citizens themselves to determine and develop their different collective and individual life projects.14 With this proposal, Habermas’s approach to critical theory definitively breaks with the paternalistic tendencies of the Marxist tradition and emphasizes the normative importance of citizens’ self-determination. In so doing, however, he does not give in to the hermeneutic temptation to cede to the participants and their traditions the only say about the significance of the social practices they engage in. The theoretical reconstruction of the communicative and social conditions under which any political proposals could be validated or falsified by citizens themselves provides the critical theorist with a powerful criterion for measuring current social conditions and criticizing those responsible for the perpetuation of domination and injustice. At the same time, insight into the validity of such a criterion does not derive from any epistemic authority or privileged access to truth possessed by the critical theorist, but is instead anchored in the communicative practices that discourse participants already share. Consequently, this kind of criticism is not only open to all participants, but is also publicly addressed to them. Needless to say, it remains an open question whether the Habermasian approach to critical theory can succeed in its goals. The scope of the theory of communicative rationality on which it is based is breathtaking, so it is too early to say whether future research will validate or undermine the numerous claims upon which the success of the whole approach depends. However, it is hard to deny that the Habermasian approach offers an attractive and fruitful model of critical hermeneutics.