|
The Jürgen Habermas
by Steve Robinson |
|
|
The Jürgen Habermas
by Steve Robinson |
At the center of Habermas's controversial project, as it is outlined in his written work, are the contested and problematic areas of universality and rationality. Of his theoreitcal intent and his debt to important German sociologists like Marx and Weber, Jefferey Alexander notes:
To restore universality to critical rationality and to cleanse the critical tradition from its elitism, Habermas seeks to return to key concepts of Marx's original strategy ("Habermas and Critical Theory" 50).In many ways, Habermas is engaged in the restoration of philosophical and sociological work which has been descredited or harshly criticised. Among these are theorists such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Lukacs, Sigmund Freud, G. H. Mead, and Talcott Parsons (Foss, et. al. 241) as well as contemporary critics such as Stephen Toulmin and Jean Piaget.
Habermas has no shortage of critics. His work is routinely criticized by postmodernists, poststructuralists, and feminists. A particularly damning dismissal of the political nature of contemporary critical theory is given by Edward Said, who uses Habermas as a spokesman for theory's anti-political stance.
This distinction between public and private parallels, but is not identical to, the distinction he draws between system and lifeworld. On the one hand, action in the modern world is coordinated by sytems which function according to means-end rationality; the market is a paradigmatic example of such a system... On the other hand, actions are coordinated primarily by communicatively mediated norms and values, and by the socially defined ends and meanings which constitute the fabric of the lifeworld (6-7).Mehan further states that Habermas sees the differentiation and structure of the public and private spheres as "essential to the character of modernity" (Femnists Read Habermas 6).
In Moral Consciousness and Communicatative Action Habermas defines the concept of communicative action:
Communicative action can be understood as a circular process in which the actor is two things in one: an initiator, who masters situations through actions for which he is accountable, and a product of the transitions surrounding him, of groups whose cohesion is based on solidarity to which he belongs, and of processes of socialization in which he is reared (135).Central to this social notion of language and human reason is the concept that Habermas terms validity claims, the idea by which he connects speech acts to the idea of rationality.
The primary sticking point for all of us in this class will be the last category, the univeral or what Habermas refers to as U. Central to his concept of discourse ethics is the domain Habermas terms practical discourse, which owes much to the work of Stephen Toulmin and the "informal logic" movement in philosophy.
The occasion of the essay aligns Habermas with Adorno; yet the content of the lecture aligns him with precicely that rationalist tradition in Enlghtenment of which Adorno was enormously sceptical. Here, as in his later work of the 1980s, Habermas sees the possibility of salvaging Enlightenment rationality. The project of modernity done by eighteenth-century philosophers 'consisted of their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic', their aim being, according to Habermas here, 'the rational organization of everyday social life.' (Postmodernism 95).Habermas appears to be the only contemporary theorist willing to defend the tradition of modernity, and he is frequently called to do so in debates with theorists like Lyotard, Gadamer, and Foucault. As Victor Vitanza's English 5352 syllabus demonstrates, rhetoricians often cast Habermas as the modernist in a debate over modernity. His course, entitled "Major Figures in Rhetoric: Habermas, Lyotard, and the problem of the Ethical Subject," explores the problems of ethics and postmodernism.