In his introduction to Volume 1 of Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action Thomas McCarthy explains how Habermas responds to what he calls “the decline of the paradigm of consciousness” by making a shift to “the paradigm of language.” What does he mean by this?
Philosophical thought in the early modern period has been dominated by the Cartesian paradigm of the solitary thinker (solus ipse). We are familiar with Descartes’ famous dictum “I think therefore I am.” This is what McCarthy appropriately dubs “methodological solipsism” or a “monological approach.” This way of approaching the basic problems of thought and action with a thinking “I’, forces various dichotomies, namely “subject versus object”, “reason versus sense”, “reason versus desire”, “mind versus body”, “self versus other”, etc. The Cartesian approach to rationality is highly subjectivist.
But others sought to develop other ways of understanding consciousness and rationality. Examples include the following:
- Hegel demonstrated that the structures of human consciousness are intrinsically historical and social in nature.
- Marx rejected the idea that the mind shapes nature, insisting that the opposite was the case: nature shapes the mind. For Marx the fact that we live in bodies means that consciousness itself is essentially embodied and is therefore shaped according to our social needs and always reflects existing social realities, unless these are in conflict with the forces of production. So he reasoned that men began to develop the consciousness that they were different from animals as soon as they began to produce their means of subsistence.
- Darwin represents yet another approach to understanding consciousness and rationality, linking these with self-preservation.
- American Pragmatism follows in this train with its functionalist conception of reason.
- Nietzsche and Freud focused attention on the unconscious at the heart of consciousness and showed how concepts presuppose that which is preconceptual and nonconceptual.
- Historicism demonstrates that rationality is subject to historical and cultural variability, with considerable differences in categories of thought and principles of action across time and cultures.
Husserl resurrected the Cartesian model but a stream of antimodernist thought spells the “twilight of subjectivity”, following its exposure as being “infiltrated with the world” and as being but the “rootless rationalism” which finds expression in “the anthropocentric, egoistic, possessive, and domineering aspects of Western individualism.”
Habermas sees all of the above approaches to consciousness and rationality as representative of the paradigm of consciousness and believes they all involve a “disempowering of philosophy.”
Habermas’ approach to rationality involves moving the spotlight away from consciousness and concentrating the beam on communication. His basic assumption here is:
that the human species maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities of its members and this coordination is established through communication.
At all levels, for communication to be effective in bringing about social coordination, it must involve rationality and especially in those spheres of life that aim at reaching agreement. Not only such social coordination but also the reproduction of the species requires satisfying the conditions of this rationality that is inherent in communicative action. It is this that Habermas has in mind as he replaces the paradigm of consciousness with the paradigm of language, that is, of language-in-use, of speech, of communicative action.
Posted August 31, 2010
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