In our last study of Habermas’ thought we concluded with Habermas’ movement from the paradigm of consciousness to the paradigm of language and his emphasis on communicative action:
that the human species maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities of its members and this coordination is established through communication.
Indeed, fundamental to Habermas’ thought is that there are three types of reason:
- Instrumental reason, which consists of finding means to ends.
- Strategic reason, which aims at practical success.
- Communicative reason, which aims at reaching agreement through the presentation of valid arguments.
Habermas’ optimism is such that he believes that the application of communicative reason would solve the evils of the contemporary world – evils that are not the result of modernity but of its distortion.
Habermas argues that the development of instrumental reason has held back the potential of reason to liberate society from such evils. There is what Habermas calls the system, basically the government and the economy, which function via money and power. There is also the lifeworld, the beliefs, values, norms and expectations that are shared and largely taken-for-granted in society. The lifeworld is maintained and reproduced through communication. So, as Abdelkader Aoudjit summarises: “the system is the domain of control and efficiency, the lifeworld is the domain of mutual understanding.”
According to Habermas, it was during the 17th century that the system was separated from the lifeworld and became more and more indifferent to the norms, values, meanings and everyday preoccupations of individuals. Along with this religion lost its prestige, authority and power. Against the backdrop of competing conceptions of the good, a shift occurred from considerations of what a good life is to considerations of what ir right to do and how to accommodate difference and diversity.
But still further fragmentation has occurred within society. For there used to be a time when society was characterised by a comprehensive worldview which incorporated and integrated cognitive (intellectual), normative (moral), and expressive-aesthetic (artistic) spheres of life. These spheres split apart and became independent of each other. Habermas is largely supportive of the preferment of rational discussion over adherence to stifling religion and tradition. Placing his full dependence on reason he opines:
When the power of tradition is broken… modern reason must create normativity out of itself by relying on nothing more than the force of the better argument.
Habermas is highly critical of capitalist society, believing that it has completely killed off the kind of public sphere “in which citizens debated issues of public interest freely, openly, and according to the standards of critical reason” (Aoudjit), something he says flourished in the coffee houses, salons, clubs and newspapers of 18th century Germany, France and Britain. Along with this he contends that capitalism has also eliminated true democracy. Instrumental reason predominates because the system (the demands of the market, industrial production and bureaucracy) has increasingly taken over all aspects of life (a process Habermas calls colonization). Consequently, “political questions that ought to be settled through public and rational argument, have become technical and bureaucratic matters handled by experts” (Aoudjit). The populations of capitalist societies are no longer guided by norms but by the ways by which technical and bureaucratic elites find to depoliticise, manipulate and dominate the majority of the population.
The key to rescuing the lifeworld from the system and realising the potential of modernism to liberate society is to replace instrumental reason with communicative reason.
I will leave it to a later post to indicate how Habermas sees communicative reason working to effect this.
See Abdelkader Aoudjit, “Habermas & Lyotard” in Philosophy Now (Feb/Mar 2010) 10-14
Posted March 21, 2011
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