Marx and Habermas - Research Paper Example

?Running Head: MARX AND HABERMAS Marx and Habermas [The [The of the Marx and Habermas A belief or theory may producesuccessful predictions, as in the case of Newtonian mechanics, and yet not be true; that is, rationally justifiable in the long run. Indeed, Thomas Kuhn's study of scientific revolutions, which Habermas cites, indicates that the most basic propositions of a scientific theory are worked out in advance of evidential confirmation. This happens in conversations between scientists about what counts as a pressing problem, how such a problem ought to be conceptualized, and so forth. Such propositions are irreducible to empirical predictions. For it is only when they are taken in combination with one another that they yield testable hypotheses. Consequently, their truth would have to be captured in terms of an ideal consensus. Thus, true propositions are those which anyone would agree to in the long run, given sufficient time for rational reflection. (Deborah 2004) The fact that scientific truth presupposes the existence of a communicative community leads Habermas to consider the categorical framework in which intersubjective meaning, value and validity are constituted. It is obvious how predictive science is related to the context of instrumental action. (Allen, 2009) It is also obvious that the anthropological usefulness and transcendental validity of science resides in its successful satisfaction of a technical interest. However, it is unclear what, if any, interest is satisfied by communication. Equally unclear is the relationship between communication and those sciences of man associated with history, literature, cultural anthropology, etc. Nevertheless, Habermas will argue that the kind of textual interpretation preferred by these sciences is essentially related to communication. The latter, in turn, will be shown to satisfy a practical interest in procuring intersubjective agreement, regarding shared norms and values. This is a necessary condition, not only for the creation and maintenance of personal and social identity, but also for the achievement of individual freedom. Peirce provided the necessary link connecting the logic of causal explanation to Marx's notion of labor as an activity underlying self-realization and world constitution. (Moore and Robin, 1964) Dilthey provides a similar link connecting communication and symbolic understanding to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. This dialectic shows how one's identity is defined and confirmed through recognition by other. For Dilthey, this dialectic is as essential to the methodological grounding of history, philology, and literary criticism-sciences concerned with understanding the spiritual life of humankind—as causal explanation is to the methodological grounding of the natural sciences. The method of understanding grounding the human sciences is none other than the circular interpretation of textual wholes in terms of their parts, and the interpretation of these parts in terms of more inclusive wholes. This circular dialectic also encompasses the interpreter. The interpreter is responsible for much of the meaning contained in the text. At the same time, the text is responsible for opening up new meaning for the interpreter. Stated somewhat paradoxically, text and interpreter mutually constitute one another as meaningful identities. This activity of symbolic reproduction, Habermas will argue, is capable of advancing moral knowledge. Yet, it can do so only to the extent that the dialectic between text and interpreter assumes the form of a simulated dialogue. (Habermas, 1872) According to Dilthey, the understanding of the past, or the interpretation of an ancient text, is an elaboration of the sort of retrospective self interpretation that an individual continually engages in, while reconstituting the continuity of his or her life history--the very substance of one's unique identity. (Hodges. 1944) To begin with, the generation and maintenance of a stable, personal identity involves assigning one's life experiences with a meaning related to the intersubjectively recognized norms and concepts of a broader linguistic community. (Allen, 2009) This reiterates Hegel's point in the master-servant dialectic that our certainty, regarding our own identity as free subjects, depends upon recognition by others for confirmation. (John, 2005) And this is mainly accomplished by communicating with others: saying no to their commands, learning to see ourselves in light of their descriptions of our behavior, participating in the same social and cultural institutions as they do, and so on. It is at this point, Habermas notes, that everyday communication reveals an interpretative structure. The three classes of "life expressions" as distinguished by Dilthey--verbal utterances, actions, and nonverbal expressions --"interpret" each other in a circular manner. This is similar to the way in which sentences, paragraphs, and narratives interpret each other in the part/whole dialectic of textual interpretation. Linguistic understanding is either textual or contextual. To say that understanding is interpretative is just to say that it can never be completed. The hermeneutic circle is a never-ending process of contextual cross-referencing which yields indefinite possibilities for new understanding. One way to view the Frankfurt School's reception of Marxism is in light of the theory/practice problem which Marx inherited from the Enlightenment. In rejecting the scientistic interpretation of Marx, typical of orthodox and revisionist schools, they found themselves returning to the philosophical heritage of German idealism. The need to integrate philosophy and science was made clear by the problem of ideology. By fashioning an interdisciplinary research program uniting philosophy, law, economics, history, and psychology they thought that a realistic assessment of the truth value of cultural ideas could be made, one that would render them functional for guiding critique. The Frankfurt School's attempt to remedy the anti-individualistic and antidemocratic tendencies in orthodox Marxism will have to address the problem of community and its peculiar form of communicative practice. (Pieter, 2003) "Traditional and Critical Theory" provided the basic model for Habermas's first major work, Knowledge and Human Interests. (Rolf, 1975) Habermas accepts its outline of the methods and aims of critical theory. Horkheimer's critique of objectivism, and his argument that the critique of knowledge must become social critique, is taken up by Habermas. In particular, there are two important ideas that Habermas appropriates from Horkheimer. (James 2005) These are the distinctions between three types of knowledge, in accordance with their underlying methods and aims, and the conception of critical theory as an interdisciplinary program combining understanding of meaning and causal explanation, philosophical reflection and scientific objectification. (Andrew, 2003) Thus, one can read Knowledge and Human Interests as an attempt to clarify in further detail the peculiar unity of theory and practice envisioned by Horkheimer. However, Habermas goes well beyond Horkheimer in trying to show how these distinct types of knowledge are necessarily and universally—that is to say, transcendentally--implicated in the "natural history" of the human species. For one thing, Horkheimer does not claim that the experimental method represents an irreversible achievement that articulates a feature of the human condition that has remained constant from the beginning of human evolution. In Horkheimer's opinion, this method articulates a rule of experience--the anticipation of future events based upon observed causal regularities--that is largely an expression of a particular historical reality, bourgeois society. For Habermas, on the contrary, this "rule of experience" is deeply entrenched in a universal, "natural" disposition, the interest in achieving given ends through application of efficient means. (Peter, 1999) This disposition is not only factually expedient for human survival, but it also designates a type of action--the trial and error feedback acquired in the course of intervening instrumentally in nature--that is transcendentally necessary for the causal ordering of a coherent and meaningful world of objects. By tracing a peculiar form of knowledge back to necessary and universal presuppositions that "transcend" historical contingencies, Habermas shows himself to be much more Kantian than his predecessor. Secondly, Habermas feels that Horkheimer's method of ideology critique, which proceeds immanently, by showing how particular cultural ideas contradict themselves, is too relativistic. One cannot assume that the contents of tradition always contain a kernel of truth. Horkheimer himself sometimes suggests that the universal goals, in terms of which particular traditions are to be critically appropriated, must be derived from something that transcends such traditions, such as a general scheme of historical progress. Because of the ideological distortion affecting all tradition, Habermas will also appeal to a broader conception of historical progress. However, unlike Horkheimer, he will argue that the universal goals of historical progress, and therewith the ideal standards of critique, must be drawn from a more universal and permanent, "historically invariant" (Hodges. 1944) set of orientations--in this case, the necessary conditions for the possibility of spoken communication. Despite the critical value of positivistic science, Habermas points out that it is uncritical of its own philosophical presuppositions, especially those pertaining to its false, objectivistic theory of knowledge. Positivistic science claims to be disinterested and value-neutral. In reality, scientific knowledge is justified only because it fulfills practical interests. Anthropologically, knowledge furthers values deemed factually necessary for "survival." (Farid, 2004) Transcendentally, knowledge furthers values requisite for realizing the emancipatory conditions underlying its very possibility. If the objectifying methodology of natural science is validated at all, Habermas claims, it is by efficiently advancing an anthropologically and transcendentally deep-rooted interest in technological control. This interest, however, is but one of the basic orientations securing self-preservation and freedom. (Carlo 2010) The others include an interest in communicative intersubjectivity and an interest in emancipation. These interests achieve satisfaction through fundamentally different types of knowledge, and therefore dictate different methodological strategies. Habermas insists that a critical social science guided by an emancipatory interest is necessary for guaranteeing the objectivity, or intersubjective validity and usefulness, of knowledge generally. (Carlo 2010) For, only, it can determine whether a claim, about which needs ought to be met and which interests ought to be pursued, is ideological or not. Positivistic science can expose the ideological basis of descriptive claims that pretend to be factually true, but are not. It cannot, however, accomplish the same task with respect to prescriptions. For what the latter putatively assert are not true facts, but "true" value-judgments. For these thinkers, reflection on the logic of causal explanation and textual interpretation reveals the life-preserving and freedom-enhancing activities and interests underlying two types of knowledge: technically useful and morally binding knowledge. Peirce provides an important link between Marx and Hegel, on one hand, and modern science, on the other. The reader will recall that Marx and Hegel transformed Kant's notion of reason from synthetic activity occurring in the privacy of each individual's mind to social activity embodied in mental and physical labor. For Kant, the synthetic power of the mind produces causal unity in the world. The discovery of causal regularities, he argues, occurs only in the course of instrumental interventions in nature. It is only by actively trying to bring about certain events, through effecting changes in our environment that we isolate, by trial and error, real from apparent causes. Especially significant for Habermas is the fact that causal knowledge acquires its original meaning and validity with respect to a prescientific, or methodologically unsophisticated, context of feedback-monitored, habitual behavior. (James 2005) The three operations mentioned above--abduction, deduction, and induction--correspond to more primitive behaviors which evolved in response to organic changes in the species. The need to adapt to changing conditions of scarcity, combined with the assumption of an upright posture, the development of opposable thumbs, and so forth, produced certain reflex responses to outer stimuli, which took the form of instrumental interventions. Changing one's environment in order to satisfy one's wants--in short, working for one's livelihood--could be successfully satisfied only by learning to anticipate the typical effects of one's behavior. Yet such predictions remained unreliable prior to the discovery of a procedure for isolating true causes from apparent causes. This lack was remedied by the discovery of the experimental method in the sixteenth century. In Habermas's opinion, not only the meaning of descriptive statements and objective observations, but also their power to convince others, is grounded in the categorical framework of possible measuring operations (Carlo 2010). So closely does Habermas tie objectifying technology and science to human nature that he notes that technological development is but a self objectification in the terminology of Marx and Hegel of the subject's natural powers, In other words, technology and science can be understood as processes by which the human species unburdened itself of its own organic functions. Habermas's discourse ethic did nothing else but show that we are provisionally obligated to engage in, and encourage the proliferation of, democratic discourses, that in itself would be a considerable achievement. Yet, for many persons, it might not be enough. For that reason alone, it is important that we bear in mind some other ethical implications that Habermas's discourse ethic has. Three come to mind: First, the discourse ethic can function as a regulative idea guiding the economic, political, social, and cultural reform of society. Second, it can serve to establish a very general warrant for adopting a moral point of view, which in turn warrants the recognition of basic rights and obligations. Finally, it can provide both a warrant and a procedure for ideology critique. As a regulative idea, the discourse ethic seems to imply a non-specific goal to be achieved. The goal--the establishment of a just society—cannot be defined in advance of actual historical struggles revolving around the reform of specific institutions. Yet, it does seem to suggest that the general direction of reform--the democratization of society--would, perhaps, require greater equality in the distribution of resources, skills, and opportunities necessary for including everyone as full, equal participants in democratic discourses. This goal may not be as specific as even Marx's vague idea of a communist society. It may even be less utopian, in that it may not necessarily require the abolition of all classes, the passing away of the state bureaucracy, or the implementation of a particular distribution of wealth. Still, it does capture the idea of social justice and solidarity, which Marx's ideal was aiming toward. Habermas's discourse ethic is also intended as a deep justification and interpretation of the moral point of view. That is to say, it shows why we ought to regard the interests of others as possessing a weight equal to our own; and it shows how this equal consideration of interests is best captured by democratic procedures ensuring justice and solidarity. This use of the discourse ethic is important because Habermas wants to stake out a sphere of individual rights and obligations that is less immune to acceptance or rejection based on contingent consequences. If basic rights and obligations were contingent on actual agreements regarding shifting constellations of "need interpretation," they would forfeit their universality and unconditionality. According to Habermas, the process of rationalization involves an "uncoupling of life world and system." (Deborah 2004) Marx, he notes, was correct in holding that contradictions or crises in the economic and political system provide the stimulus for evolutionary advances. However, Weber was justified in arguing against Marx that evolutionary advances in the economic and political system presuppose the attainment of moral and cognitive competencies at the level of culture requisite for implementing economic and political changes. In Habermas's opinion, the rationalization of the life world makes possible the expansion of civil law in the private sector and constitutional law in the public sector. This legal formalization of communicative interaction serves as the normative, legitimating basis for market economy and bureaucratic state, respectively. (Pieter 2003) Family and public realm are primarily located in the life world, where individuals intentionally coordinate their actions through norms agreed upon in communication. State and economy, by contrast, are located in self-regulating systems which are functionally integrated by wholly impersonal and anonymous exchange relationships. These relationships are mediated by money and power. Unlike mass-communication media, money and power enable persons to coordinate their activities strategically and monologically, through a purely instrumental calculation of rewards and punishments. Habermas maintains that the distinction between life world and system is essential to understanding the sorts of social pathologies which figure predominantly in current debates about modernity. At first glance, it does indeed appear as if the rationalization of the life world is paradoxical: the formalization of communicative rationality through the medium of civil and constitutional law makes possible the growth of economic and administrative subsystems that threaten to turn back and devour the very life world which lends them legitimacy. (Pieter 2003) Administrative regulations threaten to strangle democratic initiative and create bureaucratic dependency, while moral incentives get eclipsed by the unbridled pursuit of power, pleasure, and wealth. Habermas has serious reservations about the unchecked growth of the system. Like Marx, he diagnoses the problem in terms of the objective lawfulness of forces, which have escaped the rational control of social agents, and now confront them with a natural fate to which they must submit. Although he thinks that some uncoupling of life world and system is rational-- he doesn't place much credence in a perfectly transparent, stateless community of the sort envisaged by Marx--he feels that it has gone too far. References Allen, Amy (2009). Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation: The Foucault/Habermas Debate Reconsidered. Philosophical Forum 40 (1):1-28. Andrew, Bowie (2003). Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas. Blackwell Pub. Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (2010). Can Democracy Emancipate Itself From Political Theology? Habermas and Lefort on the Permanence of the Theologico-Political. Constellations 17 (2):254-270. Deborah Cook (2004). Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. Routledge. Farid Abdel-Nour (2004). Farewell to Justification: Habermas, Human Rights, and Universalist Morality. Philosophy and Social Criticism 30 (1):73-96. Habermas, Jurgen: (1872) Knowledge and Human Interests: Beacon Press Hodges. H. A. (1944) Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction. Oxford University Press. James Gordon Finlayson (2005). Habermas: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. John Grumley (2005). Hegel, Habermas and the Spirit of Critical Theory. Critical Horizons 6 (1):87-99. Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Orbach Bookman & Cathy Kemp (2002). Habermas and Pragmatism. Routledge. Moore E. and R. S. Robin, eds., (1964) Studies in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce, Second Series, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 1964, pp. 486–514. Peter Dews (1999). Habermas: A Critical Reader. Blackwell. Pieter Duvenage (2003). Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason. Blackwell Pub. Rolf Ahlers (1975). How Critical is Critical Theory? : Reflections on Jurgen Habermas. Philosophy and Social Criticism 3 (2):119-136. Read More