MA Social and Political Thought – Text and Critique (946M1) – 50655
How has Jürgen Habermas developed his mature theory through anengagement with hermeneutics?
The essay is structured as follows: (1) a general account of Habermas's arguments in
Knowledge and Human Interests
, with particular attention to his treatment of Dilthey and the practical interest, thenpsychoanalysis and 'depth hermeneutics'; (2) an account of the Habermas-Gadamer debate and theprincipal issues involved, discussing the revisions in Habermas's programme as a result; and finally (3) aconclusion.
Habermas's
Knowledge and Human Interests
Knowledge and Human Interests
is
for Habermas a turn away from the form of historical narrative hefamously presented in
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
in 1962. In this work Habermas isbuilding upon the contemporary debate within German sociology now known as 'the positivist dispute', inwhich Habermas himself made a number of interventions (alongside Theodor Adorno). The primary objectiveof
Knowledge and Human Interests
is the tracing of “the pre-history of modern positivism”
,in order tocriticise the scientism that he sees as present in the then current dominant forms of theorising. Habermasreads this emergence in terms of an abandonment of reflection; that is, Habermas reads positivism as abody of thought that has forgotten its origins (thus the need to reconstruct its history of emergence) and also,crucially, has forgotten the conditions of its possibility. “That we disavow reflection
is
positivism”
.For Habermas this project requires a return to epistemological issues, as opposed to what we can call theattempt to surpass or overcome them. He interprets what may be considered the Marxist project – of whichhe can be said to identify – not as the rejection of traditional epistemology in favour of the study of politicaleconomy, the 'natural science of man', which Habermas insists is a misunderstanding (admittedlyperpetrated by Marx himself); but, rather, as the radicalization of epistemological reflection through social
1KHI p.vii2KHI p.vii
Page 15
MA Social and Political Thought – Text and Critique (946M1) – 50655theory. In short, Habermas is seeking here to find a 'materialist' basis for a radical critique of knowledge,which he claims is necessary for a critique of the dominant forms of theorising in social science, those whichreduce philosophy to methodology. (Habermas consistently reads the thinkers he covers in the book – Kant,Hegel, Marx, Peirce, Dilthey, Freud – in a double movement: first, he identifies a critical potential in their thought, according to the aims of Habermas's project, but then, second, and especially in terms of the lastfour, he gives an account of the positivist or 'scientistic' self-misunderstanding that these thinkers had of their own work.)Habermas goes about his project by equating positivism in the social sciences with a false 'objectivism',which he wants to account for by looking back over the abandoned stages of reflection in epistemologicalinquiry, or to be far more specific, the 'communicative' preconditions for what can count as objectiveknowledge. In contrast to the objectivist social investigator who seems to presume her own absoluteseparation as a subject from the object of inquiry itself, Habermas wants to reconstruct a transcendentalframework of what he calls the particular 'cognitive interests' in knowledge, that is, to reconstruct thosepreconditions for the establishment of objective understanding. This deliberately Kantian transcendentalframework, whereby these cognitive interests determine the aspect under which reality can be made anobject for us, is 'anchored' by Habermas not in the individual subjective consciousness (the Kantiantranscendental ego), but
intersubjectively –
meaning, here, in those processes which govern thedevelopment of the 'natural history' of the human species. Habermas's strategy is to combine the realm of the transcendental with the realm of the empirical, founding a uniquely 'quasi-transcendental' theory of knowledge that seeks to reconstruct the a priori conditions of knowledge as they are rooted in the “logicalstructures that materialize under empirical conditions”; that is, in “specific fundamental conditions of thepossible reproduction and self-constitution of the human species”
. Habermas reverses the German Idealisttradition of conceiving interest in reason, seeing instead reason as inhering in interest
.The three quasi-transcendental cognitive interests themselves are: 1) the technical interest, 2) the practicalinterest, and 3) the emancipatory interest. For our purposes, it is the second and third of these that are of
3KHI, p.194-64Habermas writes “The proposition that interest inheres in reason has an adequate meaning in reason has an adequatemeaning only within idealism, that is only as long as we are convinced that reason can become transparent to itself by providing its own foundation. But if we comprehend the cognitive capacity and critical power of reason asderiving from the self-constitution of the human species under contingent natural conditions, then it is reason that
Page 15
MA Social and Political Thought – Text and Critique (946M1) – 50655most importance, since it is in their concrete differentiation from the first that allows Habermas the theoreticalbasis to dispute the reduction of Reason
tout court
to the exclusive claim of the first category. Habermasemploys hermeneutics precisely in order to argue that reason is also essential to successful socialinteraction, operative through the practical interest, and not simply in the scientific/technical manipulation of nature. Yet, even within the account of the technical interest – which Habermas builds through his particular reading of Peirce's pragmatism – Habermas already works to undermine positivism, by looking at the ways inwhich the real-world operation of empirical-analytic inquiry presupposes social communication (within thecommunity of natural scientists) cannot itself be grasped conceptually within the framework of empirical-analytic science. “The dimension in which concepts, methods, theories and so forth are discussed andagreed upon” is in actual fact grounded in symbolic interaction, in a “framework of shared meanings, norms,values and so on”
.Habermas's principal engagement with traditional hermeneutics comes, in his formulation of the practicalinterest, in his appropriation of Dilthey's work. Habermas distances himself from Dilthey's self-understandingof his own project, as the 'psychologistic' setting up an alternative objective methodology
,in order to providean understanding of that dimension of intersubjectivity that provides the basis for mutual understanding anddiscussion between people. This basis is found – in an observation of the utmost importance for Habermas'smature work – in ordinary language communication. In this move, Habermas sees Dilthey as grounding thetheoretical basis for hermeneutical investigation 'naturalistically', in everyday human practice. Diltheyconstructs what may be termed a holistic understanding of language and practice – in the 'community of lifeunities' – whereby social communication is considered through three particular classes of 'life expressions',where each are integrated with and mutually interpret one another. These 'life expressions' are, firstly,linguistic expressions; secondly, actions; and, thirdly, non-verbal experiential expressions (such as gestures,nervous glances, blushing etc.)Dilthey's point here is that the meaning of communication, broadly conceived,
cannot
be reduced to theformal rules of language, that is, ordinary language “does not obey the syntax of a pure language”; it
inheres in reason” -- p.KHI p.2875McCarthy, p.696McCarthy writes: “Dilthey's psychologistic approach to Verstehen – as a self-transposition into the life of the author or agent – eliminated its practical relation to life in favour of a contemplative model of scientific objectivity” (p.170)
Page 15
Search History:
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
p.
Recommended
habermas+heidegger
1075 Reads
More From This User
Notes
Load more
