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Pluralizing Universal “Man”: The Legacy of Transcendentalism and Teleology in Habermas's Discourse Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Stella Gaon
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Extract

The central claim of this article is that Habermas's program of discourse ethics fails to “detranscendentalize” the Enlightenment subject. On the contrary, tacit assumptions concerning a transcendental conception of reason and a subject that is teleologically predisposed toward its rightful end are the logical pillars of Habermas's two most crucial claims. First, unless Habermas presupposes an abstract and decidedly unencumbered moral discussant, he cannot maintain his claim concerning the rationality—and hence the unconditionality—of the moral principle he describes. Secondly, unless Habermas begs the question of the proper end of individual and collective development, he fails to support the claim that discourse ethics speaks to the emphatic dimension of moral reason.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , Fall 1998 , pp. 685 - 718
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1998

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References

1. See, among others, Wellmer, Albrecht, “Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgement in Kant and Discourse Ethics,” in The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans, by Midgley, David, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991);Google ScholarRehg, William, Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);Google Scholar and Benhabib, Seyla, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg–Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, ed. Benhabib, Seyla, and Cornell, Drucilla (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),Google Scholar as well as Joseph Heath's more recent, “The Problem of Foundationalism in Habermas's discourse ethics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 21, no. 1 (1995): 77–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Peter Dews, for example, notes that the implication of Charles Taylor's critique is that “Habermas's whole conception of a discourse ethics ultimately rests on specific, albeit culturally deep–rooted, commitments to freedom and autonomy”—commitments which “cannot be derived from the normative structure of the speech–situation as such.” See Dews's, , “The Truth of the Subject: Language, Validity, and Transcendence in Lacan and Habermas,” in The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 274.Google Scholar Compare Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 85.Google Scholar Compare also Christopher Zurn, who observes that William Rehg's contribution to communicative ethics implicitly privileges impartial reason over more contextualist forms of argumentation without adequately proving that there are no viable alternatives to the culturally specific, historical emergence of that post–Enlightenment ethos. See Zurn's, , “Review Essay: The intersubjective basis of morality,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22, no. 6 (1996): 115–19.Google Scholar

3. A case in point is Habermas's rebuttal to Charles Taylor's critique and his subsequent analysis of the shortcomings of Alasdair Maclntyre's approach. See Habermas's, , “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” in Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Cronin, Ciaran P., (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. 69–105.Google Scholar

4. Habermas defines “the” moral point of view as the impartial perspective in “Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel's Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Lenhardt, Christian, and Nicholsen, Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), p. 198.Google Scholar See also his “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” in Justification and Application, p. 118. For the sake of clarity, I retain Habermas's phrase (“the moral point of view”) throughout this essay. The definite article is occasionally emphasized to problematize the coincidence between morality and impartiality assumed in this formulation.Google Scholar

5. Benhabib, Seyla, “On Reconciliation and Respect, Justice and the Good Life,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23, no. 5 (1997): 104. Benhabib overviews the difference between the original Hegelian, and the contemporary Habermasian meaning of the terms morality and ethical life on pp. 103–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Seyla Benhabib takes issue with this claim, arguing that there can be universal, as well as culturally–specific goods; she offers the example of the good of human rights. Yet Benhabib herself is very clear that, when conceived as a good rather than exclusively in terms of what is just, the ethos of human rights is in part culturally constituted and, as such, is not strictly rational; it is, therefore, ethically contestable relative to other goods. Indeed, based on the argument that a universalist morality of human rights and liberal tolerance follows from the perspective of the third person legislator, and that this perspective, in turn, entails culturally specific, albeit thin, notions of the good, Benhabib accuses Rainer Forst of coming closer in some respects “to an ethnocentric communitarian position” than she herself does, insofar as Forst would limit himself to that standpoint alone. Since it is this very charge of ethnocentricism that the autonomy of the moral sphere is intended to refute, however, such a softening of the line between morality and ethical life as Benhabib proposes will not serve Habermas's theoretical purposes. I return to this issue in section 2, below. See Benhabib's, , “On Reconciliation and Respect, Justice and the Good Life,” esp. pp. 105–108,Google Scholar and Forst, Rainer, “Situations of the Self: Reflections on Seyla Benhabib's Version of Critical Theory,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23, no. 5 (1997): 79–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Peter Dews's solution to the problem of distinguishing sharply between justice and good coincides with Benhabib's. See his, “Morality, Ethics and ‘Postmetaphysical Thinking’,” in Limits of Disenchantment, p. 207.Google Scholar

7. See “A Reply to my Critics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. by Thompson, John, and Held, David (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), p. 240,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Lawrence, Frederick G., (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 339.Google Scholar

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9. “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” p. 123.Google Scholar

10. “A Reply to my Critics,” p. 235.Google Scholar And, even more strongly: “In contrast to the neo–Aristotelian position, discourse ethics is emphatically opposed to going back to a stage of philosophical thought prior to Kant” (see “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 206).Google Scholar

11. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 76.Google Scholar This particular essay is among Habermas's most recent and sustained attempts to clarify and correct his version of discourse ethics in light of critical objections from a variety of theoretical perspectives. It is therefore fair to say that this essay, along with, for example, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification” and “Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel's Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?” (both in Moral Consciousness), represents Habermas's considered word on his position.

12. “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 211.Google Scholar

13. See “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” p. 125.Google Scholar Similarly, Habermas elsewhere writes, “Even Marx set out his theory in such a way that he could perceive and take up the trial of reason in the deformations of class society. Had he not found in proletarian forms of life the distortion of a communicative form of life as such, had he not seen in them an abuse of a universal interest reaching beyond the particular, his analysis would have been robbed of the force of justified critique” (“A Reply to My Critics,” p. 221, first emphasis mine).Google Scholar

14. “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” in Justification and Application, p. 12.Google Scholar

15. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 76.Google Scholar

16. Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns, third edition. Trans. Ellington, James, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), Section II, par. 421.Google Scholar

17. See, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 51.Google Scholar

18. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” Moral Consciousness, p. 93.Google Scholar

19. Wellmer's argument is fully elaborated in “Ethics and Dialogue.”

20. “Ethics and Dialogue,” 149.Google Scholar

21. As Habermas writes, “As long as the isolated subject, in his role as custodian of the transcendental, arrogates to himself the authority to examine norms on behalf of all others, the difference between his supposition concerning a general will and an intersubjective agreement concerning a common will never comes to light… Once we abandon the metaphysical doctrine of two separate spheres of reality, subjects encounter each other as individuals who can no longer rely on [an] antecedent transcendental agreement” (“Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 51;Google Scholar compare “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 203).Google Scholar

22. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 81,Google Scholar and “Discourse Ethics,” p. 57f.Google Scholar

23. For Wellmer, the fact that discourse ethics requires an actual and not merely an ideal consensus means that Habermas is open to the charge that discourse ethics is nothing other than “the application of a general consensus theory of truth to the specific case of the concept of justice. To this extent (U2) is not a specific principle of justice at all” (“Ethics and Dialogue,” pp. 145–50,Google Scholar esp. 149). Wellmer's subscript here signifies that this is the second of four explications he offers for Habermas's principle (U). This explication reads, “(U2) A norm is equally in the interests of all those affected precisely when it can be accepted without coercion by all those affected as being equally in the interests of all those affected.”

24. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” pp. 29, 51.Google Scholar For this reason above all it is clear that Wellmer's proposal that Habermas discard the requirement of consensus is simply implausible. See his “Ethics and Dialogue,” p. 153f.Google Scholar

25. As Thomas McCarthy phrases it, “The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm.” Cited by Habermas, in “Discourse Ethics,” p. 67 (my emphasis).Google Scholar

26. Habermas, , Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 341.Google Scholar

27. Universal here is to be taken to mean, “among all concerned with or affected by the norm in question”; that is, the rightful participants in the moral discourse.

28. See Wellmer, , “Ethics and Dialogue,” pp. 164–65 and 245, n.52.Google Scholar

29. Habermas qualifies the “redemption” of a validity claim in terms of “the framework of a discourse which is sufficiently close to the conditions of an ideal speech situation for the consensus aimed at by participants to be brought about solely through the force of the better argument, and in this sense to be ‘rationally motivated’”. Cited in Wellmer, , “Ethics and Dialogue,” p. 166. I leave aside the obvious objection that the “better” argument in moral disputes is rarely transparently evident.Google Scholar

30. Benhabib, , “The Generalized and the Concrete Other,” p. 86.Google Scholar Significantly, while Benhabib is here treating Lawrence Kohlberg's theory in particular, there is no doubt that Habermas follows Kohlberg in this regard. He too characterizes the achievement of postconventional morality with its justice orientation—both socially and ontogenically—in terms of a catastrophic but natural break from a state of nature. See Habermas's “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” in Moral Consciousness, p. 126. I return to this in section 3 below.Google Scholar

31. The concept of a generalized other signifies the abstract, public persona of modern moral and political thought—it is based, notably, on the male head of the bourgeois household, and suggests the standpoint of “formal equality and reciprocity.” The standpoint of the concrete other, in contrast, is based on the private world of personal and domestic life. This standpoint “requires us to view each and every rational being as an individual with a concrete history, identity, and affective–emotional constitution” (“The Generalized and the Concrete Other,” p. 87).Google Scholar

32. Ibid., pp. 88–89.

33. Ibid., p. 89.

34. Ibid., p. 90.

35. “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” p. 131.Google Scholar

36. Ibid.

37. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” p. 66; my emphasis.Google Scholar

38. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 58;Google Scholar emphasis mine. Elsewhere Habermas writes: “If actors do not bring with them, and into their discourse, their individual life–histories, their identities, their needs and wants, their traditions, memberships, and so forth, practical discourse would be robbed of all content” (“A Reply to My Critics,” p. 255).Google Scholar

39. Forst, Rainer, “Situations of the Self: Reflections on Seyla Benhabib's Version of Critical Theory,” pp. 93, 94.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., p. 92.

41. See, for example, “Discourse Ethics,” esp. pp. 75–76.Google Scholar

42. As Romand Coles notes, “In the idealizing supposition of a consensus open to criticism, the possibility of diverse voices on a given issue is not repressed, but rather the very condition of possibility for the legitimacy of the agreement” (“Identity and Difference in the Ethical Positions of Adorno and Habermas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. White, Stephen K., [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], p. 25).Google Scholar Compare also Habermas's own comment: “Discourse ethics prefers to view shared understanding about the generalizability of interests as the result of an intersubjectively mounted public discourse” (“Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 203).Google Scholar

43. Benhabib, , “The Generalized and the Concrete Other,” p. 93.Google Scholar See also her “Afterward: Communicative Ethics and Current Controversies in Practical Philosophy,” in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Benhabib, Seyla, and Dallmayr, Fred (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 349, 350.Google Scholar Forst notes that this move seems to reflect an Hegelian–influenced vision of reconciled life which is not itself supported by the theory. See his “Situations of the Self,” esp. pp. 79–81,Google Scholar as well as Benhabib's response, “On Reconciliation and Respect, Justice and the Good Life.” For further criticism of Benhabib's suggestion, see also Nagl-Docekal's, Herta “Seyla Benhabib and the Radical Future of the Enlightenment,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23, no. 5 (1997): esp. pp. 70–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Taylor, , Sources of the Self, p. 88.Google Scholar

45. Interview with Nielsen, Torben Hviid in “Morality, Society, and Ethics,” Justification and Application, p. 154.Google Scholar

46. “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” p. 128f., esp. pp. 129–130Google Scholar (my emphasis). On the principle of appropriateness, this would seem to be Albrecht Wellmer's view as well. See his “Ethics and Dialogue,” pp. 202, 203,Google Scholar wherein it emerges that, insofar as Wellmer presupposes there can be only one correct interpretation of a given situation, questions of appropriateness raised by the application of norms in concrete situations lend themselves to the moral point of view. Compare Habermas's “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” in which he claims, “Interpreted from the perspective of discourse ethics, practical reason does indeed require practical prudence in the application of rules. But use of this capacity does not restrict practical reason to the parameters of a specific culture or historical period. Learning processes governed by the universalistic substance of the norm being applied are possible even in the dimension of application” (pp. 181–82; emphasis mine). If I understand him correctly, Habermas is here saying, once more, that the prudential question of appropriateness can be answered impartially—eventually—as well. This interpretation is supported in the interview with Nielsen, Hviid (“Morality, Society, and Ethics,” p. 172).Google Scholar

47. See “Discourse Ethics,” p. 104.Google Scholar

48. “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 199.Google Scholar

49. “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” p. 119.Google Scholar

50. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” pp. 75–76.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., p. 81.

52. See, for example, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 83 (emphasis mine).Google Scholar

53. “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” p. 125.Google Scholar

54. “Philosophy as Stand–in and Interpreter,” in Moral Consciousness, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

55. “Ethics and Dialogue,” pp. 151–152.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., pp. 120–21,122.

57. “Morality and Ethical Life,” pp. 198, 203.Google Scholar

58. Ibid., p. 202.

59. See “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” pp. 68, 92.Google Scholar

60. Ibid., p. 100.

61. Ibid., pp. 100–101.

62. “Ethics and Dialogue,” 152.Google Scholar

63. “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 199.Google Scholar On this point, see also Habermas's, , “Moral Development and Ego Identity,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans, and intro. McCarthy, Thomas, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).Google Scholar

64. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” p. 109.Google Scholar

65. “Discourse Ethics,” pp. 102, 100.Google Scholar

66. Habermas says that “the normative reference point of the developmental path that Kohlberg empirically analyzes is a principled morality in which we can recognize the main features of discourse ethics” (“Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” p. 117).Google Scholar

67. Ibid; last emphasis mine. Significantly, the claim that all moral views can be contained within the same formal structure holds only insofar as Kohlberg can be said to have achieved a plausible account of human—and not just western, middle class, white, male—development. Against this claim, Carol Gilligan's research—while not definitive—introduces the possibility of a fundamentally different, yet equally plausible, moral scheme. The possibility of a different moral voice casts serious doubt on the genuine universality of the Kohlbergian program. See Gilligan's, , In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

68. See Wellmer's, Albrecht “Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Bernstein, Richard, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 58.Google Scholar

69. This Kohlbergian version of psychic development has remained a consistent feature of discourse ethics. As recently as 1996 Habermas formulated the motivational dimension of his universalist ethic in the following terms. “A principled morality [which] views everything through the powerful but narrow lens of universalizability … facilitates a knowledge that is meant to orient one's action but does not thereby dispose one to act rightly.” Significantly, however, he continues, “Sublimated into knowledge, this morality is, like all knowledge, represented at the cultural level… A morality thus withdrawn into the cultural system maintains only a virtual relation to action as long as it is not actualized by the actors themselves…. A principled morality thus depends upon socialization processes that meet it halfway by engendering the corresponding agencies of conscience, namely, the correlative superego formations [my emphasis]. … Such a morality becomes effective for action only through the internalization of moral principles in the personality system.” Thus, notwithstanding the arguable partiality of the Kohlbergian agent, Habermas is clearly still identifying Kohlberg's version of principled morality as the “normative reference point”—indeed, as the rightful telos—of psychic development. See Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. Rehg, William, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 113.Google Scholar

70. “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” p. 126; emphasis mine.Google Scholar

71. Ibid., p. 127. See also “Morality and Ethical Life,” where Habermas claims, similarly, “Moral universalism is a historical result” (p. 208).Google Scholar But compare Habermas's remark that moral intuitions are acquired in a “quasi-natural manner through socialization,” in “Discourse Ethics,” p. 98; my emphasis.Google Scholar

72. “Discourse Ethics,” p. 95.Google Scholar

73. See “Morality and Ethical Life,” pp. 202, 203.Google Scholar Elsewhere he writes, “With the validity claims raised in communicative action, an ideal tension is imported into social reality itself, which comes to conscious awareness in participating subjects as a force that explodes the limits of the given context and transcends all merely provincial standards.” (“Morality, Society, and Ethics,” pp. 164–65). Again Habermas's point is that procedural morality bears a normative or moral force which links universal claims of justice to (all) particular notions of the good.Google Scholar

74. “Ethics and Dialogue,” p. 158.Google Scholar

75. “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 197.Google Scholar

76. Ibid., p. 208.

77. Benhabib, , Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 12.Google Scholar Asher Horowitz makes a more elaborate version of this charge in the course of a discussion of Habermas's use of the concept of performative contradiction. Horowitz writes, “The Subject does not at all disappear within the philosophy of language. The Subject becomes language, or, better, the form of the forms of objectivity given in language.” (“Like a tangled mobile': Reason and reification in the quasi–dialectical theory of Jürgen Habermas,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, no. 1 [1998]: 19).Google Scholar

78. “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 210.Google Scholar

79. Between Facts and Norms, p. 113, my emphasis.Google Scholar

80. “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo–Aristotelianism,” p. 127.Google Scholar

81. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” in p. 80.Google Scholar

82. “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” p. 12; my emphasis.Google Scholar

83. “Morality, Society, and Ethics,” p. 155;Google Scholar“Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” pp. 87–88.Google Scholar

84. “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” pp. 16, 17 (emphasis mine).Google Scholar

85. “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 207.Google Scholar

86. “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Multiculturalism, ed. and intro. Gutmann, Amy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 124 (emphasis mine).Google Scholar

87. Ibid., p. 125.

88. Ibid., p. 126.

89. “Morality and Ethical Life,” p. 209.Google Scholar