Habermas, Lyotard,

Wittgenstein: Philosophy at the

Limits of Modernity
Paul Redding
Introduction
The recent exchange between Jurgen Habermas and Jean-Francois
Lyotard is of interest for a number of reasons. We find here not only an
exchange between the, perhaps, two most influential neo or post
Marxist directions in social and political analysis-Frankfurt School
Critical Theory and French Poststructuralism-but also the appropriation of the thought of a philosopher. Ludwig Wittgenstein (the
later Wittgenstein), whose impact on the analytic tradition of
philosophy has not so far been generally repeated within other traditions,
particularly within the more Hegelian and Marxist derived strands of
Continental European philosophy. We might therefore see this dispute as
the opening of a site within which three different discourses can start to
come into contact.
It is against the background of the appropriation of Wittgenstein by
Habermas and Lyotard that I wish to examine their dispute here because
both employ, I believe, the same questionable interpretation of Wittgensteins later though. Ironically, it is an interpretation which is symptomatic of a philosophical position which both claim to be following
Wittgenstein beyond. When one re-interprets the Wittgenstein embedded in their accounts, the terms of their dispute must, naturally, change.

Modernity, the Crisis

of Wittgenstein

of

Legitimation,

and the Relevance

In contrast to the relatively ahistorical and theoreticist orientation

of most analytic philosophers, both Habermas and Lyotard see their own
activity as operating within an historically particular situation and as
ultimately addressing practical problems within that situation. Both
describe that situation and its historical genesis in terms which, to vary9

ing degrees, draw on the resources of two classical accounts: Marxs

description of modern western society and culture in terms of the
dynamics of capitalism and an account, deriving more from Nietzsche
and Weber, focusing on the dynamics and nihilistic potential of our
distinctly modern society and culture. Yet both greatly transform these
accounts in the process.

The title of a work by Habermas from the early seventies, Legitimation Crisis, neatly sums up the intersection of these two classical strands
of thought and provides a place of entry for our discussion. As Marx
had suggested, there is something about the internal dynamic of the
modern, western, capitalist world we inhabit which makes crisis a recurrent and inevitable factor. However, while Marx focused on crisis
mechanisms in predominantly economic terms, in a fashion
characteristic of his Frankfurter intellectual origins, extends the notion
of crisis to the political and, especially, cultural spheres. Late capitalism
faces, in particular, a crisis of the cultural values necessary to sustain its
own existence, a crisis whose structure was diagnosed at the close of the
19th century by Nietzsche in terms of the notion of nihilism and whose
dynamics and evolution were subsequently charted by Weber in terms of
the notions of the rationalization and disenchantment of the modern
world.
For both Habermas and Lyotard, this cultural crisis has included the
delegitimization of the tradition of western philosophy itself: a tradition
whose very task had been to provide legitimations or rational foundations for the various domains of our culture: our knowledge, our morality, our political institutions, aesthetic judgments and so on. Subsequently, all those solutions to the practical problems of modernity (Marxs included) which were in someway dependant on that tradition have
themselves been called into question. The later philosophy of Wittgenstein is important at this very point. Both Habermas and Lyotard find
here an analysis and critique not only of the dominant philosophical conception behind modern philosophy, representationalism, but also of the
overall shape of the philosophical project of modernity, foundationalism.
All this derives from Wittgensteins radicalization of the twentieth
century linguistic turn in philosophy to the point of undermining a central presupposition of the modern philosophical tradition. This is the
conception of knowledge as the possession of representations of the
world, representations whose capacity for truth resides in their ability to
correspond to the worlds constitutive facts. Breaking with his earlier
more Fregian approach which construed meaning in terms of the truth
10

value of propositions, Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations

asserted that for a large class of cases ... the meaning (Bedeutung) of a
word is its use in the language.&dquo; Furthermore, by language here is
meant the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not ... some
non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm. In this pragmatic approach to
meaning, the grammar of our language is always ultimately instantiated
in the historical, concrete language-games of our community in which
patterns of words articulate with the patterns of our social practices or
forms of life.
Both Habermas and Lyotard hold that Wittgensteins later
language-game or pragmatic approach constitutes a decided break with
the metaphysical tradition and with Western thought in general.
Although the adoption of a Wittgensteinian approach has various consequences for their respective analyses, I focus here on just one: Wittgensteins later philosophy is seen as not only partaking in the general
delegitimation of the metaphysical assumptions of modern philosophy
but as also going beyond the generally positivist cultural orientation
which the delegitimation of metaphysics has left. It has allowed for the
return of some notion of knowledge and rationality not reducible to the
products and processes of the sciences.
In a language-game approach the notion of correspondence between
a sentence and a fact now must~get spelt out in terms of the sorts of
judgments made by the users of the language, an approach which ends
with a perspective on truth which looks something like the pragmatists
notion of warranted assertability. If one thematizes the contextually
located act of saying something rather than the abstracted sentential text
of what is said, then one sees the making of assertions as a kind of social
practice which can be done properly or wrongly. But this now lifts the
restrictions which the representationalist view of language typically
places on the sorts of sentences which can be true or which can embody
and convey knowledge. Speech communities warrant types of utterances of a far wider variety than those which, on the model of scientific propositions, are about the facts, for example, utterances concerning aesthetic or moral value. Thus Sabina Lovibond has described Wittgensteins as a homogeneous or &dquo;seamless&dquo; conception of language
which regards all language-games as being of equal value and which
construes moral and aesthetic discourses, no less than scientific
discourse, as being about reality.This levels up evaluation discourse
and reasoning to the scientific (or, for the pessimistic, levels down the
scientific to the evaluative).66
In the two sections which follow I first compare the accounts given
by Habermas and Lyotard of the genesis and nature of the general late11

modern crisis of

Wittgensteinian

legitimation and then examine the way each sees the

philosophy as able to provide a response to this

turn in

crisis.
The

of Modernity
For Habermas an important cultural transformation in the transition from pre-modern to modern societies has been the separation of the
value spheres implicit in the process of societal modernization. While
the cultural traditions of pre-modern societies-myths, legends,
etc.-unify descriptive accounts of the world, moral injunctions and
aesthetic values into single cultural creations, in modernity the cultural
areas of science, legality/morality and art have become separated from
each other into autonomous domains able to be independently institutionalized. Such a process had been described by Weber as cultural rationaiization. For Weber, such cultural rationalization was linked to
the increasing institutionalization of technically applicable knowledge
within the economy and the emerging modern state administrative structures : the process of social rationalization. With this process, the world
as known thus became increasingly construed as an object of technically
applicable scientific knowledge, bereft of all moral or aesthetic
significance. The thesis of the development and consequences of the
dominance of instrumental reason in modernity was, of course, charted
by Horkheimer and Adorna in Dialectic of Enlightenment.8
Lyotard portrays the cultures of pre-modern traditional societies as
marked the dominance of narrative forms of articulation and transmission. Traditional mythical and legendry narratives condense descriptive
with normative and aesthetic elements by their articulation of denotative,
deontic, and expressive language-games.9 Such narratives legitimate the
existing social institutions and serve as models for the induction of individuals into those institutions.
Narratives ... determine criteria of competence and/or
illustrate how they are to be applied. They thus define
what has the right to be said and done in the culture in
question, and since they are themselves a part of that
culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they
do what they do.I
For Lyotard as for Habermas, modern science has cut itself free
from all ethical and aesthetic elements. Scientific discourse is, accordingly, abstracted from the social bond and condensed into an institu:ion external to society.&dquo; With its isolation of descriptive or denotative
language-games, science now organizes these games around pragmatic
axioms which demand that the speaker provide evidence or proof for

Delegitimating Dynamic

12

what is said and refute any existing alternative accounts.2 Thus, while it
is the function of traditional narratives to provide legitimation, it is the
function of scientific language-games to demand and challenge
legitimacy, the legitimacy of existing beliefs.
In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas views the process of the modern
emancipation of the value spheres from tradition as ultimately contributing to the destabilization of the modern capitalist world itself. The
gradual breaking up of the remnants of pre-modern culture by the
crystallizing cultural domains of modernity has, in conjunction with
dysfunctional mechanisms in the economy, generated the types of
cultural crisis characteristic of the 20th century. Against the claims of
science, the descriptive claims of religious world views have been at a loss
to legitimate themselves. Detached from their former intrication with a
known world, ethical values have retreated to a subjective status. Premodern substantive ethical and legal structures have been replaced by the
purely formal structures of bourgeois law and a universal morality based
on principles.&dquo; Furthermore, philosophy itself has been stripped of any
metaphysical pretensions resulting in the domination of a generally scientistic outlook. Such genuine cultural expressions of bourgeois society-science, universal morality and formal law, and an autonomous, postauratic art-have, however, been unable to take over the functional role
maintained in early capitalism by the remnants of the dissolving premodern cultural forms:
Bourgeois culture as a whole was never able to
reproduce itself from itself. It was always dependent on
motivationally effective supplementation by traditional
world-views. 15
The ultimate result of this process has been the type of cultural crisis
recurrent in the West since the end of the last century-essentially the
6
phenomenon described by Nietzsche as nihilism.
However, having undermined the older religious world views,
science has continued to undermine even that generally scientistic
outlook it had itself produced: scientism sets standards by which it can
itself be criticized and convicted of residual dogmatism.~ Furthermore,
the universal conception of morality generated within the bourgeois
system and expressed philosophically by Kant was itself dependent on
certain ontological remnants of the old discredited metaphysics. It remained purely formal and was unable to articulate the process of rational will formation. Thus, late capitalist society has left us with a
culture organized into autonomous realms which are themselves inherently unstable and likely to lose their normative grip. Habermas
13

stresses, then, the necessity for a general reinterpretation of our culture

and its processes of rationality: a reinterpretation which turns, in part,
on a modified language-game approach to rationality.
Lyotard also sees the liberation of the scientific language-game from
the traditional legitimating narrative as setting the West on a coarse of
destabilization. While science serves to delegitimize the existing traditional narratives, there is nothing to prevent the question of legitimacy
being raised with respect to science itself. For Lyotard, the dilemma
posed by sciences reflexive application of the question of legitimacy onto its own practice is at the origin of the discourse of philosophy. This
cultural form has had, from the start, the task of providing a legitimation, a foundation, for science: The new language game of science posed
the problem of its own legitimation at the very beginning-in Plato. 18
Furthermore, once raised by science, the question of legitimacy now
becomes the general orientation assumed with respect to those other
dimensions of culture set free by the break up of the traditional narrative. The legitimacy demanded of science is also demanded of ethicopolitical and aesthetic practices and philosophy attempts to provide these
cultural areas with foundations. 19
Thus the philosophical language-game is seen as a transformation of
the old pre-modern narrative: it provides legitimations and, in so doing,
is self-legitimating. The most recent phase of this overarching and
legitimating philosophical discourse has been marked by two dominant
meta-narratives, both of which reflect the emergence and ascendancy
of the bourgeoisie in modern European society. These are the
speculative narrativg&dquo; of German Idealism, most clearly recognized in
Hegel, in which the self-realization of Absolute Spirit provides the nar-ative telos, and the narrative of emancipation in which the telos is prolided by the achievement of human freedom and moral autonomy.
While the speculative narrative conceives of its own discourse denotativey as a kind of meta-science, the narrative of emancipation conceives of
tself in terms of the deontic utterances (imperatives) of Kantian practical
eason. In this second form of narrative: knowledge has no final
egitimacy outside of serving the goals envisioned by the practical subect, the autonomous collectivity.2 In a way parallel to Habermass
liagnosis of the legitimation crisis affecting late capitalism, Lyotard
joints to the recent postmodern delegitimation of these two modern
iota-narratives.
Responses to the Crisis: Habermas
In Legitimation Crisis Habermas had indicated that the way out of
he dilemma of modern thought must utilize those aspects of bourgeois
14

culture proper to modernity. His solution has been to attempt a reinterpretation of the nature of the autonomous cultural spheres from a communicative perspective. In particular, it has involved the attempt to
recover something of the universalistic morality characteristic of
modernity by interpreting it in terms of the formal communicative or
argumentative conditions for the rational intersubjective recognition of
the validity of various claims raised in the course of social interaction.
Starting from the notion of language-games and the related concept
of the speech act taken from the work Austin and Searle, Habermas has
reinterpreted Webers account of that rationalization of modern society
which has resulted in the contemporary crisis of values.2 In Webers
neo-Kantian approach to the modern separation of the value spheres,
knowledge had been identified in a positivist way with science and
rationality with the instrumental rationality of the technical application
of knowledge for the realization of human ends (Zwecksrationalitat).22
This meant that Weber accepted the positivist de-cognitivization of the
other value domains and, importantly, had been left with a decisionistic
ethics and a concept of politics articulated entirely in terms of power.
Habermas argues that this position is undermined by the realization,
made explicit in hermeneutic and phenomenological thought as well as in
the later Wittgenstein, that the very possibility of rational action in the
sense of Zwecksrationalitat is dependent on the agents contextualization
within a lifeworld which is constituted intersubjectivly and given a form
in language. This in turn implies that we must accept a wider notion of
rationality than Zwecksrationalitat. Besides the instrumental or strategic
action thematized by Weber, Habermas posits a form of dialogical communicative action-communication oriented to understanding, aimed
at the maintenance and reproduction of the intelligible, intersubjectively
constituted lifeworld itself.23
Communicative action is pragmatically distinct from the strategic
action in which we try to realize some goal. In communicative action a
speaker raises a number of validity claims for acceptance by the hearer
considered as an equal discursive partner. Such equality implies that the
hearer can, if they so desire, challenge rather than accept any of the
claims raised. In such a case, the speaker is seen as committed to providing justifications, good reasons why the hearer should accept the
claim.&dquo;
Freges notion of the truth value of a sentence provides the model
for Habermass validity claim. To assert a proposition is to raise the
claim to its truth. But the truth values of true and false are here interpreted pragmatically in terms of the possible responses to the claim
15

(yes) or rejection (no).~ In place of any form of correspondence

theory of truth is a type of ideal consensus theory. An assertion would be
as true if it were to secure a rational consensus among the relevant speech community. The normative weight of rational here is spelt
out in terms of the conditions under which such a consensus could be

counted

brought about. In an ideal speech situation nothing would prevent the

claim or any of its supporting reasons from being brought into question
and made the subject of rational debate.26
But truth is only one validity claim. The claims as to the rightness of
an action determining imperative and the truthfulness of a selfexpression are able to be discursively questioned and rationally redeemed by the provision of reasons in a way parallel to the argumentative
redemption of the truth of assertions.&dquo; While the counterfactual idea
that raised validity claims could be ideally redeemed is seen as a formal
pragmatic presupposition of all communicative action, it is only with the
cultural rationalization of modernity that those autonomous cultural domains providing the spaces for argumentative discourses have become a

sociological reality.
Such a philosophy of language

now provides a basis from which a

reconstruction of Webers notion of rationalization can take place.
Habermass complex reconstruction, which sprawls across the two
volumes of Theorie des kommunikativen ~Iandelns, can hardly be done
justice here. Suffice it to say that the thesis of the separation of the value
spheres and the postulation of communicative action with its widening of
the conception of discursive rationality allows for the notion of rationalization to be taken beyond its positivist confines in Weber. It can
now be read as a process equally applicable to all the dimensions of the
lifeworld. This in turn allows for the criticism, drawing on Marx, of the
one-sided rationalization that has taken place in the West under conditions of capitalism.&dquo; Regardless of the elegance and value of this ambitious rereading of Weber and Marx however, the whole weight of
Habermass reconstruction rests on his theory of argumentation.29

Lyotard
For Lyotard the collapse of the legitimating meta-narratives of the
19th century has resulted in a generalized positivism. In the realm of
social theory this leads to the response found in systems theorists like
Niklas Luhmann for whom the abstract performativity of the social
system becomes the ultimate criteria of legitimation.3 There is an alteriative to this position however-the postmodern one found in the later
Wittgenstein. As we have seen, positivism or scientism is itself an
16

unstable cultural configuration. Lyotard turns positivism against itself: a

positivism in which science tries to ensure its self-legitimation by denying
the legitimacy of other forms of knowledge, in particular, narrative
knowledge, adopts a metaphysical attitude. The narrative gains acceptance by coming back into culture, as it were, through the back door. A
non-metaphysical position must simply accept the existence of the
pragmatically distinct language-games of science and narrative

knowledge.
First, drawing a parallel between science and nonscientific (narrative) knowledge helps us understand, or at
least sense, that the formers existence is no more - and
no less
necessary than the latters. Both are composed of sets of statements; the statements are &dquo;moves&dquo;
made by the players within the framework of generally
applicable rules; these rules are specific to each particular kind of knowledge, and the &dquo;moves&dquo; judged to
be &dquo;good&dquo; in one cannot be of the same type as those
judged &dquo;good&dquo; in another, unless it happens that way
by chance. It is therefore impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of
scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria
are different. All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the
diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species.&dquo;
In advocating the acceptance of narrative language-games
alongside scientific ones, Lyotard is not referring to the type of totalizing
and legitimating metanarratives whose demise he celebrates. He is rather
advocating the proliferation of petits recits which generate new
vocabularies and conceptual frameworks but which make no claim to
capture the essence of that which they describe. As his own discourse is
presumably to be taken as an example of such a small narrative, we
might gain some idea of what he means about this form by what he says
of his own discourse which makes no claims of being original,or even
true but which:
allows us to spotlight (though with the risk of excessive
magnification) certain aspects of the transformation of
knowledge and its effects on public power and civil institutions
effects it would be difficult to perceive
from other points of view. Our hypothesis, therefore,
should not be accorded predictive value in relation to
reality, but strategic value in relation to the question
raised. 32
-

17

While The Postmodern Condition is ostensibly an epistemically

oriented work, it has a crucial ethico-political subtext. Lyotard is, like
Habermas, denouncing the ethical and political consequences of accepting the positivist response to the delegitimation of metaphysics: the
response found in functionalists like Luhmann. Like Habermas Lyotard
jraws an ethical point from the pragmatic structure of science. The
;cientific language-game is based on pragmatic rules which prescribe a
ype of dialogical reciprocity, the suppression of which is described as a
.orm of terrorism.33 But equally terroristic is the exclusion of individual
language-games by others. The recognition of the heteronomous nature
3f language-games implies a renunciation of terror, which assumes that
hey are isomorphic and tries to make them so.34
The ethical perspective of Lyotards thought emerges more explicitly
n the work Le differend.35 Lyotard is here concerned with those discur;ive situations in which the hegemony of the existing vocabulary makes it
mpossible for the victim of an injustice to formulate a complaint
coherently. Where such complaint finds a voice, it cannot be assessed on
he model of a litigation as there is no way of formulating complaint and
iefence in commensurable terms.6 It is here that one sees the ethical raionale behind Lyotards espousal of the proliferation of petits recits and
iis affirmation of revolutionary science and modernist art. His
7eyerabendian vision of science as the continuous proliferation of new
paradigms blends with his resolutely modernist aesthetic of continual
)verthrow of existing forms of representation to give a model of
perpetual conceptual revolution. As there is no metalanguage within
vhich all complaints can be voiced and justice achieved, at any particular
ime the interests of those currently without a voice demands the overhrow of current conceptual schemes. Lyotard refers to his version of
reconstruction as parology and sees this as the only source of legitimaion in postmodernity.11
Fhe Lyotardian Critique of Habermas
We have seen the basis for the Lyotardian criticism of Habermas.
For Lyotard, Habermass reconstruction of Critical Theory is yet
another version of the second of the two modern meta-narratives. Not
only have all forms of meta-narratives, as had the traditional
egitimating narratives of pre-modernity, been delegitimated by the exstence of science, but also the very establishment of any meta-narrative
vhich legitimates a particular language-game is seen as involving a
~eciprocal terroristic delegitimation of all others. In concrete terms this
s spelt out in terms of a criticism of the central role given to consensus in
18

Habermasian pragmatics. This consensual collective subject who

emerges at the end of the ideal day of discursive evaluation of validity
claims is none other than the people . This abstract knowing and willing
subject of modernity, in reality, a terrorizing agency, is always defined in
contrast to the plurality historically concrete peoples and the plurality of
historically concrete language-games. 38 Habermass emphasis on consensus, even as an ideal in the various realms of culture, operates in opposition to the notion of unending conceptual revolution.&dquo; The continuing
struggle to give a voice to that which is presently unexpressible means
that any convergence towards consensus must be continually shattered
by the proliferation of new forms of expression and representation.
... a~nd the Habermasian Critique of Lyotard
In a number of ways Lyotards criticisms of Habermas align with
those of the more conservative critic, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who has
stressed the ethical necessity of positing a degree of irreducible difference
between the horizons of human agents. 40 It is, then, not surprising that
the position held by Lyotard is criticized by Habermas as being essentially conservative. Lyotards unwillingness to admit a position for rationality outside that which is defined by the facticity of our current languagegames has, for Habermas, potentially disastrous ethico-political consequences. One needs normative grounds for the criticism of current social
relationships. In practice, this means that one must choose from the two
existing sources for such grounds: from the remnants of those rapidly
dissolving pre-modern cultural forms or from those cultural products
that bourgeois society has produced. This is why the communicative
transformation of the modern-bourgeois idea of universal morality is so
important. Undercut this and one is left with an espousal of elements of a
pre-modern substantive morality (eg. Gadamer), or a positivist capitulation to the power dynamics of the present (eg. Luhmann), or, worst of
all, an aestheticist abandonment of rationality. Lyotards Nietzschianism
is the mark of the third position, that of the aestheticist youngconservative.,&dquo; Habermass critique of the real lack of any ethical or
political dimension to Lyotards postmodernism does seem to find its
mark. As we have seen, it is the prescriptive language games which
command the least attention in Lyotards account. One is left with the
feeling that one can only hope that justice will somehow follow in the
wake of scientific and particular aesthetic innovation. Selya Benhabib
rightly points to the politically rather limp call for the democratization of
computerized information with which The Postmodern Condition concludes.4Z
19

The Shared Interpretation of Wittgenstein

As in any debate, a certain consensus is presupposed here. The consensus concerns the relevance of assuming a Wittgensteinian languagegame perspective in order to escape from the discredited foundationalist
philosophy of modernity. Certainly, in contrast to Lyotards affirmation
of the nominalism of the language-game approach, Habermass appropriation of Wittgenstein is conditioned by the need to find languagegame universals. But both share the same interpretation of Wittgenstein
and it is this interpretation which is disputable. A more adequate reading
of the notion of language-game would, I believe, go some way towards
what Rorty describes as splitting the difference between the two an-

tagonists.&dquo;
Early in the reception of Wittgensteins later writings within the
analytic philosophical world, Stanley Cavell argued against interpreting
the notion of language-game in a way which construed them as if they
in some sense constituted rules in the way that the rules of a game
be thought of as constituting or defining that game. Any emnumeration of rules only makes sense against a background of a practice:
One may explain the difference between, say, contract
and auction bridge by &dquo;listing the rules&dquo; but one cannot
explain what playing a game is by &dquo;listing rules.&dquo; Playing a game is &dquo;part of our [that is, we humans] natural
history&dquo; (S25), and until one is an initiate of this human
form of activity, the human gesture of &dquo;citing a rule&dquo;
can mean nothing. And we can learn a new game
without ever learning or formulating its rules {S31)9 not,
however, without having mastered, we might say, the
concept of a garner
Lyotard appears to accept such an axiomatic view of languagegames being criticised here.
What [Wittgenstein] means by this term is that each of
the various categories of utterance .can be defined in
terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to
which they can be put - in exactly the same way as the
game of chess is defined by a set of rules determining the
properties of each of the pieces, in other words, the proper way to move them.45
It is Lyotards axiomatic view of language-games which leads him to
a type of incommensurability thesis. With such a view, argument and
reason is seen as strongly language-game relative; reasons are immanent
in particular, definable language-games. With such a conception, the
were

can

20

choice must be one between the current game as it is played and its
radical transgression, a transgression which cannot be argued for or
reasoned about. The only alternative to the conservatism of entrapment
within our current language-games is the strategy of permanent concepttual or linguistic revolution. Lyotard can make some sort of case for this
in terms of science and aesthetics but it is difficult to see how he can
bring this schema to bear, in a productive way, on an ethical notion like

justice.
this difficulty in the Lyotardian position. He
accept our language-games as they are, we
will be somehow caught inside them, trapped by the historically contingent rules constituting them. This is why some point outside the actual
rules of historically given language-games must be found. It is why he
makes the transition from the modern bourgeois notion of a universal
morality to the idea of a set of universal pre-conditions required for the
playing of language-games per se: a set of pragmatic meta-rules immanent in all communicative action which just happened to have been set
free for explicit development by the historical circumstance of the
modern separation of theWertspfiaren. A genuinely universal morality
presupposes that agreement about the rightness or wrongness of actions
is not given by tradition but rather is rationally grounded in those formal
communicative conditions which would allow an unforced consensus.
However, the model of practical rationality or argument presupposed by both Lyotard and Habermas rests on their shared axiomatic
reading of the notion of a language-game. Just as he has contested this
interpretation of language-game, Cavell has contested the conception of
moral argument which accompanies it. Cavell shares the Hegelian view
found in Habermas that the type of morality and moral discourse found
in modernity has different features from the strongly sittlich forms
typical of traditions societies.46 The difference between traditional Sittlichkeit and modern Moralitat is usually attributed to the greater role
that abstract principles play in the latter. Habermas translates this in his
communicational model in terms of the idea that when challenged, one
will invoke a general maxim, a general rule, in terms of which the action
can be justified But this is exactly the type of model of moral argument
that Cavell argues against. According to this model, our moral life
appears as the playing of some rule constituted game in which appeal to
shared rules can decide the outcome of a dispute. For Cavell, recourse to
maxims in moral argumentation is, rather, part of an act of a descriptive
identification of the action or situation. Conflict over how to describe
actions stems from the fact that actions are, as Anscombe has pointed
out/8 always open to a variety of descriptions.
Habermas focuses

on

too shares the idea that if

we

21

What you

are

said to do

can

have the most various

descriptions; under some you will know that you are doing it, under others you will not, under some your act
will seem unjust to you, under others not. 49.
Given that descriptions of actions in our language-games are typically
couched in evaluatively thick vocabularies, it is not suprising that:
we might feel that any argument about the morality of
the act will turn upon

some agreement about how the

act is to be described..
In its concern with the descriptive capture of a particular act or situation
rather than with some general principle covering an otherwise unproblematically described act or situation, and in its medium of a
normatively thick vocabulary, ethical reasoning would thus seem to be
a good example of the narrative type of thinking to which Lyotard

alludes.
Such a re-interpretation of the nature of moral discourse which
follows from the Cavellian reading of Wittgenstein has implications for
the positions of both Habermas and Lyotard. Cavells Wittgensteinian
approach captures what is important in the difference between Sittlichkeit and Moralitat without

getting caught up in the Kantian myth of

self-legislating consciousness.

For us, that is, in the context of our

moral and legal language-games, Oedipus act is not simply describable
as patricide because of the facts that he killed x and x was his father. The
interpretative question about how to describe acts is part and parcel of
the acts evaluation. But Cavell, rightly I think, stresses that for such
disputes there can be no criterial resolution, no resolution achieved by
looking up the rule book. Nor can some ultimate (even ideal) consensus
be assumed in such forms of argument. This is because the degree of
choice involved in descriptions of actions reflects the increase in choice
available in modernity concerning the type of moral identity we can
choose to have; who we choose to be: What alternatives we can and
must take are not fixed, but chosen; and thereby fix us. 5 This does not,
however, end in the decisionism Habermas fears as there is still a clear
conception of the nature of discursive moral reasoning and moral
knowledge. For Cavell, the point of moral argument is to determine the
positions we are assuming or are able or willing to assume responsibility
for and it is necessary because our responsibilities, the extensions of our
cares and commitments, and the implications of our conduct, are not obvious, because the self is not obvious to the self.52 Such discourse is rational but its rationality is not grounded in pre-given criteria. Cavells
a

22

The irony of the shared interpretation of Wittgenstein found in

Habermas and Lyotard is that such an interpretation reflects something
of the delegitimized metaphysics they see him as having overcome. We
might think of the idea that practices are made up of formulable rules as
the equivalent, from a practical point of view, of the idea which, from a
theoretical point of view, sees the world as made up of picturable facts. It
construes our practices as essentially formulable by rules in a way
analogous to that in which representationalist epistemology construes the
notion of the nature of the moral judgment involved here is much
closer to that of Kants third critique than his second.
This idea of moral argument as the struggle over competing narrative
interpretations of acts, situations, complaints and so on, would appear
to be precisely what Lyotard, in his advocacy of the permanent conceptual revolution, is searching for. Lyotard seems to believe, however, that
a decisive and total break with the bourgeois notions of morality (and the
narratives it informs) is necessary because the rules of the game are so set
up that each move within the game is somehow covered by the concepts
of its constitutive rules. Yet, just as the application of the rules of a game
require the prior grasp of the (non-formulable) concept of a game, we
might say that the application of the argumentative rules presupposes the
prior grasp of the concept of morality. Habermas is right when he insists
that we must take this concept seriously and when he stresses that the
bourgeois notion of universal morality is, if somehow divested of its
purely formal and individualist (monological) interpretation, still an extant resource for the identification and condemnation of structurally
produced injustices. Only a discredited metaphysics would lead us to
believe that we can abandon it and come up with a totally new and better
concept by pure reason alone and the only substantive models we have
come from the types of traditional societies with precisely the sorts of
non-contestable injustices that enlightened thought is unwilling to
tolerate. Lyotards over-emphasis on the continual deconstruction of existing forms of accounting for the world which models itself on a modernist aesthetics makes finding a moral standpoint sound too much like a
process of invention. These considerations should not, however, lead us
to miss Lyotards important insight concerning the structural differences
of narrative (and hence moral) reasoning and the relevance this has for
critical thought. Habermass idea of the ideal discursive community is
still too tied to the scientistic ideal of grounded scientific knowledge to
be able to accommodate the sorts of narrative reasoning espoused by
Cavell.
23

world

being essentially picturable by propositions. Furthermore, it

types of generalizations in the imperative form,
which
generalizations
practically determine particular actions in a way
to
the
analogously
way theoretical generalizations determine objects of
Both
these
ideas exemplify what the Poststructuralists
knowledge.
refer
to as the metaphysics of presence or what
following Heidegger
Adorno referred to as identity thinking as both think of reality as being
such that it can be presented to consciousness in some type of symbolic
as

construes rules as

formulation.

NOTES
1.J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy (London: Heinemann 1976.)
2.While Habermas uses the actual term legitimation predominately in the sense of
political legitimation, I will follow Lyotards more general use in referring to the
legitimation of any normative values.
3.L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1958), S 43.
4.Ibid, S108.
5.S. Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p.25.

6.Ibid,
p.42.
7.J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action 1: Reason and Rationalization
of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), ch.11. This is a
translation of the first of the two volumes Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).
8.M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. J. Cumming,
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
9.J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester Unity Press, 1984), p.20.
10.Ibid, p.23.
11.Ibid, p.25.
12.Ibid, pp.23-24.
13.Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p.80.
14.Ibid, p.86.
15.Ibid, p.77.
16.Ibid, p. 122.
17.Ibid, p.84.
18.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.28.
19.Ibid, p.8.
20.Ibid. p.36.
21.While the communicative infrastructure of this reconstruction was developed in the
works of the mid 70s, such as What is Universal Pragmatics in J. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, (London:
Heinemann, 1979), the application of this perspective is in the massive Theorie des
kommunikativen Handelns.
22.Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Ch 11, section. 2.
23.Ibid, pp.14-18 and 286-95.
24.Ibid, pp.22-42 and 295-319.

25.Ibid, p.296.
26.Ibid, p.25.
27.1 cannot address here the substantial question of the

24

coherency

of the extension of a

truth value approach to other dimensions of linguistic meaning, an extension I

believe to be highly problematic.
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Bd 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen
28.
Vernunf, Ch.VIII.
29.For problems in Habermas discursive reconstruction of cultural rationalization see
T. McCarthy, Reflections on Rationalization in the Theory of Communicative Action, in R.J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity Press,

1985), pp.177-91.
30.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp.45-47. Luhmann is, of course,

a long time
opponent of Habermas. His functionalism is where Webers positivistic concept of
social rationalization is seen as leading C.F. Habermas Theorie des kommunikativen

Handelns, Bd 2, Ch.VII, 1.

31.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.26.

32.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.7.
33.Ibid, p.63. Habermas notion of the ideal reciprocity of communicative action
allows him to characterize actual communicative situations as being systematically
distorted by externally imposed relations of domination. See, for example, Habermas early work on pragmatics, On Sytematically Distorted Communication,
Inquiry, 13 (1970), pp.205-18.
34.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.64.
35.J.F. Lyotard, Le differend, (Paris: Mimuit, 1983).
36.Ibid, pp.16-19.
37.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp.60-61.
38.Ibid, pp.30-31.
39.Ibid, pp.65-67.
40.H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel (London: Sheed and
Ward 1975), pp.322-33. For Gadamers criticisms of Habermas see On the Scope
and Function of Hermeneutic Reflection in H.G. Gadamer, Philosophical
Hermeneutics, trans. D. Linge, (Berkley: University of California Press 1976).
An Incomplete Project, in H. Foster (ed), The Anti41.J. Habermas, Modernity
Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, (Washington: Bay Press, Port Townsend
1983), p. 14 and The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-reading Dialectic of Enlightenment, New German Critique, 26 1982, pp.27-30.
42.S. Benhabib, Epistemologies of Postmodernism, New German Critique, 33 1984,
pp. 123-24.
43.R. Rorty, Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity, in Bernstein (ed.), Habermas
and Modernity, pp.161-75.
44.Cavel, The Availability of Wittgensteins Later Philosophy, in his Must We Mean
What We Say?, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p.49. The
references are to Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. The point that the
associated notion of form of life always functions in Wittgenstein as a nonthematic background concept is made by L.R. Baker in On the Very Idea of a Form
of Life Inquiry, 27 (1984), pp.277-89.
45.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.10. See also his Presentations, A.
Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), p.123. Admittedly, Lyotard also says that for Wittgenstein: the concept of a game cannot be mastered by a definition, since definition is already a
lanauage game. Ibid, p.88 fn.33. However, this seems to mean to Lyotard that
Wittgenstein is avoiding metaphysics by deconstructing his own concepts in the process of using them. But Wittgenstein is not deconstructing his concept of language
—

game here because he

never uses

it in this axiomatic way.

46.S.

Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy,

(Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 1979), pt.3, Knowledge and the Concept of Morality.
47.Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, p.302.
48.G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), pp.11-12.
49.Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p.324.
50.Ibid, p.264. On the notion of evaluatively thick descriptive concepts see B.
Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (London: Fontana, 1985),
pp.140-45.
51.Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p.324.
52.Ibid, p.312.
25