Habermas und Derrida
Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas

America and the World A Conversation with Jürgen Habermas

Letter to America

The Unrest is Growing: Habermas in Iran,Interview with Juergen Habermas on his visit to Iran

Ist Teheran ein neues Athen?' - Eine Entgegnung auf Habermas und Friedman


HABERMAS in TURKEY

Habermas and Rawls

Habermas calls Rawls’ strategy that of avoidance (Habermas, 1998b: 99) and his own strategy a ‘straightforward Kantian strategy” (ibid.). Habermas is right to the extent that Rawls does not justify Liberal political conceptions with reference to Liberal comprehensive doctrines (at least not directly and exclusively). Rawls as we have seen tries to situate Liberal political conceptions in a wide variety of religious and philosophical comprehensive doctrines including the Liberal comprehensive doctrine. Obviously situating a conception and embedding it within a wider spectrum of possible reasons increases the probability of its truthfulness and not the other way round. Why does it bother Habermas then that Rawls’s strategy is not straightforward and is that of avoidance?

Perhaps Habermas thinks that by treating different comprehensive doctrines at par Rawls obliterates the distinction between different levels at which different comprehensive doctrines might be true or false. My impression is confirmed by Habermas’ insistence that “autonomy is not just one value alongside others” (Habermas, 1998b: 99) implying that Rawls does not treat autonomy as the prime value. This is strange given Rawls’ insistence on the priority of liberty or first principle of justice throughout. Habermas is right to the extent that in PL Rawls only endorses the political conception of autonomy and does not argue for the moral conception of autonomy (at least directly). However it should be kept in mind that the political conception of liberalism is treated by Rawls as intrinsically moral and it conditions each and every comprehensive doctrine from behind and establishes its reasonableness. In that sense political Liberalism indirectly maintains the priority of Liberal comprehensive doctrine at least by making all other comprehensive doctrines succumb to its core insight. So I do not think it is right to criticise Rawls for being neutral towards “practical reason” (Habermas, 1998b: 100). Rawls is not neutral towards the conception of “practical reason”, however he realises that today Kantian conceptions cannot be justified in straightforward terms.

The reason why Rawls finds it hard to defend Liberalism in a straightforward way lies in the distance that separates him from Kant and his times. Rawls implicitly realises that the belief in Enlightenment as a comprehensive doctrine has waned beyond any salvaging. When Rawls admits that reasonable pluralism is a fact of Liberal constitutional democracies he implicitly admits that constitutional democracy can only be defended in a roundabout way. It is impossible today to justify Liberalism on its own terms. It must take detours (long detours) to have a semblance of conviction (see Dombrowski, 2001: 3-11). I believe that this is what Rawls tries to do. However from a Ghazalian perspective Rawls’ strategy is very dangerous and effective. Rawls has the humbleness of a theorist and the cunningness of a strategist. He tries to turn the weakness of Liberalism into its strength. As we shall see on the theoretical level the strategy is contradictory and without any justification. However on the practical level it is very dangerous and can be very effective.

On the other hand Habermas still thinks that Enlightenment can be defended on its own terms. He claims that Enlightenment philosophers were unable to do this job adequately because they were caught in what Habermas calls the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophy of subject. In an amazing stroke of generalisation he punishes with this stick philosophers from Hegel to Foucault and beyond. Habermas believes that with his principle of intersubjectivity and linguistically mediated communication he can arrive at the universally valid principles of communication and rationality (Habermas, 1987).

According to Habermas’ straightforward Kantian strategy:

There seems to be no way around the explanation of the moral point of view in terms of a procedure that claims to be context independent. Such a procedure is by no means free of normative implications . . . for it is intertwined with a concept of autonomy that integrates “reason” and “free will;” to that extent it cannot be normatively neutral. Freedom in general consists in the capacity to choose in accordance with maxims; but autonomy is the self-binding of the will by maxims we adopt on the basis of insight. Because it is mediated by reason, autonomy is not just one value alongside others” (Habermas, 1998b: 99, emphases in original).

Habermas rightly differentiates between freedom as a capacity and autonomy. Freedom is a capacity to choose. However autonomy is a particular choice and as any meaningful and controversial choice needs to be defended and cannot be presumed. The claim that since autonomy is mediated by reason it cannot be just one value among others is a claim without any proof. Again consider the following claim “A procedure that operationalises the moral point of view of impartial judgment is neutral with respect to arbitrary constellations of values but not with respect to practical reason itself” (ibid; 100). This is typical Habermas. We ask whether the notion of ‘practical reason’ already contains the notion of autonomy (presuppose it) or not? If ‘practical reason’ implies the notion of autonomy then defending autonomy through practical reason is tautological. It is no defence at all. If however ‘practical reason’ does not contain (imply) the notion of autonomy then ‘practical reason’ must be neutral towards it as well. But if autonomy defines practical reason in the first place as it seems it does here, then defending autonomy on the basis of practical reason is obviously circular. It is due to these reasons that Rawls leaves aside the notion of practical reason and turns back to a much diluted notion of public reason. To be sure Rawls still defends the notion of autonomy but in a roundabout way, which at least indicates a realisation on his part of the difficulty of defending Enlightenment and Kantian notions under postmodern conditions.

Habermas does not seem to realise this. He thinks that he can defend Enlightenment in a straightforward Kantian way! This involves him in the sort of bogus argumentation I have mentioned above. As Cynthia Kaufman perceptively writes, “(t)he notion of the force of better argument must always rely on the interpretive framework out of which a person is operating and there is no way to bridge the gap separating different positions using nothing but argumentation” (Kaufman, 1999:357). Thus the cogency of Habermas’ argument depends on the ‘interpretive framework’, which is presupposed by his argument. This is how minimum neutral rationality works. Habermas assumes that the interpretive framework of Enlightenment is universal. However as many commentators have noted, Habermas has not demonstrated that the Enlightenment interpretative framework is a universal framework. Habermas’ argument for the rationalisation of lifeworld is based on the key notion of ‘decentration’, a term which he borrows from Piaget and applies to understanding society. Roughly speaking ‘decentration’ is an ‘ability’ through which a child begins to differentiate between himself and his surroundings. It happens when children grow up. It is the symbol of expansion of and maturation of a child. Habermas applies this to society. But even if we give Habermas all his moves (which is a very charitable act anyway), it does not prove anything. The fact that a society is more capable of learning and differentiating does not prove that it is normatively superior. It is a simple category mistake on the part of Habermas. As Kaufman again writes perceptively, “It is not clear why we should interpret the fact that people in the so called modern world have more of a tendency to separate themselves off from the world than members of some other cultures as a sign of progress, rather than as a sign of how our worldview organizes experience”(Kaufman, 1999: 358, cf. Rizvi, 2003a).

In sum Habermas as against Rawls does not really appreciate the odds which one faces today in defending Enlightenment on its own terms. This is the reason he is more straightforward than Rawls and more blunt. Thus what he says on religion is not much different from Rawls but much more bombastic and less effective (Habermas, 2003a: 6ff, cf. Habermas, 2002, also see comments on Rushdie in Habermas, 1998: 224).
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Cynthia Kaufman (1999) “The Unforced Force of the More Familiar Argument: A Critique of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Rationality” Philosophy Today 43(4): 348-360.


Daniel A. Dombrowski (2001) Rawls and religion: the case for political liberalism Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press.


Jürgen Habermas (2002) “Das Bild von einer verstummten Gesellschaft passt nicht: Eindrücke von einer Reise nach Iran” [interview]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung June 2002, English translation entitled “The Unrest is growing” is available at [http://iona.ghandchi.com/Habermas/iran.htm accessed May 9, 2003).

Jürgen Habermas (2003) “Letter to America” The Nation [http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021216&s=habermas, accessed May 5, 2003].

Jürgen Habermas (2003a) “Intolerance and Discrimination” International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 1, Issue 1, January 2003: 2-12.


Jürgen Habermas (1998) The inclusion of the other : studies in political theory ; edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greif, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT PRess.

Jürgen Habermas (1998a) “Reconciliation through the public use of Reason” in Habermas, 1998: 47-73.

Jürgen Habermas (1998b) “Reasonable versus “True”, or the Morality of Worldviews” in Habermas, 1998: 75-101.

Jürgen Habermas (1987) The philosophical discourse of modernity : twelve lectures translated by Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge : Polity in association with Basil Blackwell.

Ali M Rizvi (2003a) “Reading Owen’s Between Reason and History, Habermas and the idea of Progress” (forthcoming).

Habermas and the universality of Enlightenment (some crucial pointers)

"As is well know, Piaget distinguishes among stages of cognitive development that are characterized not in terms of new contents but in terms of structurally described levels of learning ability. It might be a matter of something similar in the case of the emergence of new structures of worldviews. The caesurae between the mythical, religious-metaphysical, an modern modes of thought are characterized by changes in the system of basic concepts. With the transition to a new stage the interpretations of the superseded stage are, no matter what their content, categorically devalued. It is not this or that reason, but the kind of reason, which is no longer convincing. It is not this or that reason, but the kind of reasons, which is no longer convincing. A devaluation of the explanatory and justificatory potentials of entire traditions took place in the great civilizations with the dissolution of mythological-narrative figures of thought, in the modern age with the dissolution of religious, cosmological, and metaphysical figures of thought. These devolutive shifts appear to be connected with the socio-evolutionary transitions to new levels of learning, with which the conditions of possible learning processes in the dimensions of objectivating thought, moral-practical insight, and aesthetic expressive capacity are altered."

"The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1 : Reason and the Rationalization of Society, p. 68

Compare with the following:

"The religious forces of social integration grew weaker in the wake of a process of enlightenment that is just as little susceptible to being revoked as it was arbitrarily brought about in the first place. One of feature of this enlightenment is the irreversibility of learning processes, which is based on the fact that insights cannot be forgotten at will; they can only be repressed or corrected by better insights. Hence, enlightenment can only make good its deficits by radicalised enlightenment . . . ."

"The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, p. 84

And also note the following:

My thesis is] that anyone who has grown up in a reasonably functional family, who has formed his identity in relations of mutual recognition, who maintains himself in the network of reciprocal expectations and communicative action, cannot fail to have acquired moral intuitions of the kind articulated in propositions such as that of James.* The maxim asserts the reciprocal dependence of socialization and individuation, the interrelation between personal autonomy and social solidarity, that is part of the implicit knowledge of all communicatively acting subjects; it does not merely express a more or less subjective opinion concerning what some person believes is the good life. That proposition articulates an intuition we acquire in various different contexts on the condition that we grow up in surroundings that are not completely undermined by systematically distorted communication."

Justification and Application, p. 114

* The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual, the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community - William James.

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Note in the quote above the presupposition of functional family and also (and more importantly) note an illicit move from "individuation" to "personal autonomy." See further my post on Habermas on Rushdie and Fundamentalism


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"I think the crucial point in this debate is whether we must take account of an asymmetry that arises between the interpretive capacities of different cultures in virtue of the fact that some have introduced "second-order concepts" whereas others have not. These second-order concepts fulfil necessary cognitive conditions for a culture's becoming self-reflective, that is, for its members' adopting a hypothetical stance toward their own traditions and on this basis grasping their own cultural relativity. This kind of decentered understanding of the world is characteristic of modern societies. What the argument is about, therefore, is whether such cognitive structures represent a threshold that demands similar processes of learning and adaptation of any culture that crosses it"

Justification and Application, p. 157
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This is a crucial passage in understanding Habermas' whole argument about the superiority of modernity over all other systems of thought, so I shall buttress this by two concrete examples Habermas gives.

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"Only once did I experience what you could call a barrier among the people I was talking to. A young mullah who graduated in Montreal had traveled from Qom, the old pilgrimage center where the central university for the Shiite clergy is based. He turned up for our meeting with a young son, three fellow-believers -- including one American -- and an interesting question. The latter related to my proposal to translate the semantic content of religious language into a philosophical, also secular language. He said this was all well and good, but would this not cast the world itself in a religious light?

The mild tone of our discussion took a turn when I asked him a question of my own. Why does Islam not rely solely on its own medium of the Word, why doesn't it abandon political means of coercion? The mild, ascetic guest opposite me replied quite brusquely to my request for a religious explanation. It was a moment when the veil appeared to lift for a second, revealing a dogmatic rock of granite. At the end of the discussion, after listening in silence to his pupil, the old ayatollah made an attempt at appeasement by giving me a book -- a textbook he had written that was translated into English by a Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts in the United States. I later discovered that it really does read like a medieval text."

Unrest is growing

And finally have a look at this:

“As the Rushdie case reminded us, a fundamentalism that leads to a practice of intolerance is incompatible with constitutional democracy. Such a practice is based on religious or historic-philosophical interruptions of the world that claim exclusiveness for a privileged way of life. Such a conceptions lack an awareness of the fallibility of their claims, as well as a respect for the “burden of reason” (Rawls). Of course, religious convictions and global interpretations of the world are not obliged to subscribe to the kind of fallibilism that currently accompanies hypothetical knowledge in the experimental sciences. But fundamentalist worldviews are dogmatic in a different sense: they leave no room for reflection on their relationship with the other worldviews with which they share the same universe of discourse and against whose competing validity claims they can advance their positions on the basis of reasons. They leave no room for “reasonable disagreement.”

Habermas on Rushdie and Fundamentalism

Freedom and bondage

"As historical beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured life-world. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property: no one possesses exclusive rights over the common medium of those communicative practices we share intersubjectively. No single participant can control the structure, or even the course, of processes of reaching understanding and self-understanding. How speakers and hearers make use of their communicative freedom to take yes or no position is not a matter of their discretion. For they are free only in virtue of the binding force of the justifiable claims they raise toward one another. The logs of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the subjectivity of speakers."

Jurgen Habermas, "The Moral and the Ethical: A reconsideration of the issue of the Priority of the Right over the Good""Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment:Essays for Richard J. Bernstein pp. 38-39

"Flirting with fascism - or 'flirting' with Habermas?"

"At the beginning of September, Sloterdijk published an extraordinary letter (Die Zeit, 2 September) accusing Habermas of agitating against him. The tone of the letter is petulant: `you have talked about me with numerous people, never with me.' It appears that Habermas - who has not published anything on this affair - did, however, write letters and make phone calls to criticize the Elmau address. Sloterdijk also accuses him of sending copies of the text to ex-students working in the press, marked with instructions on how to misinterpret it. All of this is summed up in the claim that Habermas `objectifies' Sloterdijk. Habermas's criticisms position Sloterdijk `as a mechanism, not as a person'. This makes Sloterdijk feel free to vent his own spleen: `You belong to the inhuman heirs of the ideology critique style of thought.... You are, in this, only an average supporter of a problematic habit that one once glossed over with the honorary office of critique.' All very entertaining. The letter rises to its hyperbolic finale in which - on the grounds that Habermas chose to discuss his speech among colleagues and not directly with him - Sloterdijk accuses Habermas of performatively contradicting the premisses of his own discourse theory. If Habermas (of all people) achieves his polemical goals in such an underhand fashion, then what remains of the inheritance of the tradition of Frankfurt Critical Theory. Not much, says Sloterdijk.


Critical theory is, on this Second of September, dead. She was long since bedridden, the sullen old woman, now she has passed away completely. We will gather at the grave of an epoch, to take stock, but also to think of the end of an hypocrisy. Thinking means thanking, said Heidegger. I say, rather, thinking means to heave a sigh of relief. (Die Zeit, 9 September)

Even if we take Sloterdijk's letter seriously, it is still a source of surprise that the author of The Critique of Cynical Reason is overcome in the face of the outrage his own provocation has caused. Manfred Frank (Die Zeit, 23 September), himself no fan of Habermas, dismisses Sloterdijk's claims as a `pointless flirtation with embarrassing material'. Ernst Tugendhat, in his contribution, says Sloterdijk's claims are `rubbish', asking `what have things come to when critique must always first obtain the consent of the author?' If significance is to be granted this exchange then perhaps it could be found in elaboration of Sloterdijk's failure to live up to his own call for bold, kynikal, provocation ?" ["more here"

". . . empirical, evaluative, and moral statements differ in terms of the category of reasons that are in each case appropriate for justifying the statements in question. And the type of reasons differentiates the sense of validity of the corresponding utterances, that is, their illocutionary meaning"

"Truth and Justification, p. 320

The category of reason is defined by the type of 'evidence.'?

Habermas at Purdue soon"The Kantian Project of Cosmopolitan Law"

"Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse and the Resources of Solidarity and Resistance by John Brady"

"via wood s lot"

"FUNDAMENTALISM AND TERROR:A Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas"

"The ontological illusion of pure theory . . . promotes the fiction that Socratic dialogue is possible everywhere and at any time. From the beginning philosophy has presumed that the Muendigkeit posited with the structure of language is not anticipated but real. It is pure theory, wanting to derive everything from itself, that succumbs to unacknowledged external conditions and becomes ideological. Only when philosophy discovers in the dialectical course of history the traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to unconstrained communication does it further the process whose suspension it otherwise legitimated: mankind's evolution towards Muendigkeit"

"Knowledge and Human Interests, pp. 314-315"

"Analytic insights intervene in life, If I may borrow this dramatic phrase from Wittgenstein . . . . But [rational reconstruction] has no practical consequences. By learning logic or linguistics I do not thereby change my previous practice of reasoning or speaking"

"Theory and practice, p. 23"

"Marx established in what sense the category of labour is a universal concept applicable to all societies. He shows that only to the extent that the capitalist mode of production has become established are the objective conditions fulfilled that allow him, Marx, access to an understanding of the universal character of this category ‘labour’.

With regard to . . . a theory of communication, one must use the same method to clarify how the development of late capitalism has objectively fulfilled conditions that allow us to recognize universals in the structures of linguistic communication, providing criteria for a critique which can no longer be based on the philosophy of history."

"Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews With Jurgen Habermas, p. 99"

Unconditonality and context transcendence

"For Habermas, the concept of unconditionality is primary, and this can in turn (if successful) ground his conception of context transcendence, in the sense of 'shooting' each and every context. I remain sceptical however that the idea of universality as agreement on the validity of claims, in the double sense of the term universal mentioned earlier, can be salvaged even by means of this strategy.

To understand this conception of unconditionality we need to recognise the key idealist premises and presuppositions that Habermas continues to cleave to even after the linguistic turn and detranscendentalisation. Habermas holds fast to the fundamental idealist premise that empirical order and rational order are mutually exclusive. Habermas' claims about the detranscendentalisation of the subject and reason, and his claim that reason is a 'thing of this world,' does not in any way mean that he has given up the fundamental idealist belief mentioned above. Rather what he does, in his own words, is to bring down the idealisation “from transcendental heaven to the earth of the lifeworld. The theory of communicative action detranscendentalizes the noumenal realm only to have the idealizing force of context transcending anticipation settle in the . . . heart of ordinary, everyday communicative practice.” (BFN: 19). Habermas does not aim to abolish the noumenal realm; so much as to bring it back to the earth."

Ali Rizvi, Validity claims, Unconditionality, Universality and Modernism in Habermas: A reappraisal, (forthcoming).

Naturalistic Fallacy:

"In the view of the delicate relationship and . . . the complimentary relationship between rational reconstruction and empirical analysis, there is a danger of the naturalistic fallacy . . . Piaget tends to assimilate his approach to system theory. The concept of equilibrium, which points to a relative stability of problem-solving processes and is measured in terms of the internal criterion of the degree of reversibility, carries connotations of the successful adaptation of a self-maintaing system to a changing environment . . . . Every attempt to view that superiority of higher-level achievements, which are measured in terms of the validity of problem-solving attempts, in strictly functional terms places the specific achievement of cognitivist development in jeopardy. If what is true or morally right could be adequately analysed in terms of what is necessary for the maintenance of system boundaries, we would not need rational reconstruction.”

"Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 34-35"

Idealistic Fallacy:

“As long as we cast the issue in transcendental terms, we have to distinguish sharply between the hermeneutic approach of a rational reconstruction of the structures of the lifeworld, which we undertake from the perspective of participants, and the observation-based causal analysis of how these structures naturally evolve. Only the idealistic fallacy of inferring an ontological difference between mind and body (or Being and beings) from a methodological distinction misleads us into locating the transcendental conditions of objective experience in a transmundane realm of the intelligible – or of the history of Being. Conversely, the naturalistic fallacy is but the other side of the same coin; without considering the aporia of self referentiality, and project them onto a scientifically objectified realm.”

"Truth and Justification, p. 28."

"Religious Tolerance—The Pacemaker for Cultural Rights Jürgen Habermas"

“What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expressed unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus. Taken together, autonomy and responsibility constitute the only idea we posses a priori in the sense of the philosophical tradition.”
"Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 314"

Contrast the above with a recent formulation:

". . . weak naturalism contents itself with the basic background assumption that the biological ednowment and the cultural way of life of Homo sapiens have a "natural" origin and can in principle be explained in terms of evolutionary theory."

"Truth and Justification, pp. 27-28"

“Some twenty years ago Jürgen Habermas introduced his idea of a critical social theory that would be empirical and scientific without being reducible to empirical analytic science, philosophical in the sense of critique but not of presuppositionless “first philosophy,” historical without being historicist, and practical in the sense of being oriented to an emancipatory political practice but not to technological-administrative control.”

Translator's introduction to "Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. vii"

“The type of social theory we first find developed by Marx is characterised by the fact that the theory is doubly reflexive. Historical materialism is intended to offer an explanation of social evolution which is so comprehensive that it extends to the conditions of the possibility of the rise of the theory itself as well as to the conditions of its application. The theory specifies the conditions under which the self reflection on the history of mankind has become objectively possible and it also specifies exactly who will be able with the help of the theory to gain enlightenment about themselves and about their potentially emancipatory role in the historical process. As a result of its reflection on the conditions of its own appearance and application, theory understands itself as a necessary catalytic moment within the very nexus of social life which it is analysing. Indeed, it analyses this as an integral nexus of constraints from the point of view of its potential Aufhebung. The theory thus covers a double relation between theory and praxis: on the one hand, it investigates the historical conditions for the constitution of a constellation of interest to which, as it were, the theory can itself influence through the way it orients action. On the one hand, it is concerned with social praxis which, as social synthesis, makes knowledge possible; on the other hand, it is concerned with a political praxis which is consciously directed toward overturning the existing institutional system. Through its reflection on the conditions of the possibility of its own appearance, critique is to be distinguished both from science and from philosophy. The sciences ignore the constitution of their objects and understand their subject matter in an objectivistic way. Philosophy, conversely, is too ontologically sure of its origin as a first principle. Through its anticipation of the conditions of its possible application, critique is to be distinguished from what Horkheimer called the traditional theory. It understands that its claim to validity can only be vindicated in successful processes of Enlightenment, and that means in the practical discourse of those concerned. Critical theory renounces the contemplative claims of theories which are constructed in monologic form and sees, moreover, that all previous philosophy, in spite of the claims it has made for itself, has never had a purely contemplative character.”

"Theory and practice, pp. 1-2"

“Speculative is to be understood here in its Hegelian sense as opposed to positive, that is, as opposed to that which may be defined by virtue of certain presuppositions which remain implicit. The elucidation of these presuppositions can only be accomplished through an experience which relates the positive to the presuppositions which was the conditions of its definition. This experience is the transgression of the limit between the positive and its condition. It is precisely by virtue of what is articulated through speculative experience that the discourse of the speculative proposition is to be distinguished from theoretical enterprises which are content to bring together different positive fields, and to pass from one to another by a transference (metaphora) which produces a synthesis in the metaphor and not in the concept.”

"Metacritique: The Philosophical Argumetn of Jürgen Habermas, pp. 27-28."

“ Not all of those who have abandoned the subjectivist or mentalist paradigm have identified language as that which must replace the subject. But all of them, at least to a certain degree, were or still are convinced that the self is not autonomous but determined by external forces over which it only has very limited control, be they language (hermeneutic philosophy, Lyotard), social and economic forces (Marxism of various kinds), the unconscious (Freud), or ‘discursive formations’ (Foucault). Even in the case of the Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas and his collaborators and followers, there is evidence of a strong anti-subjectivist tendency. In some ways this is surprising because it would seem that any social and political form unnecessary coercion must attribute a considerable amount of autonomy to individual agents. Nonetheless, second-generation Critical Theorists have been concern because they believe that the focus on subjectivity can and must give way to a focus on language and intersubjectivity.”

"Dieter Freundlieb: Dieter Henrich and Contemporary Philosophy: The Return to Subjectivity, p. 2"

" . . . my position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science in the same boat - a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. All scientific findings, all scientific conjectures that are at present plausible, are therefore in my view as welcome for use in philosophy as elsewhere."

"Natural Kinds," in Ontological relativity,: And other essays, p. 126-127.

The best Habermas site on internet (in English at least) Habermasonline

Speech by Juergen Habermas on Biotechnology

Speech by Juergen Habermas on Biotechnology
Juergen Habermas is a well-known German philosopher who was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association on October 14,2001. He speaks of faith and knowledge in a secular society within the context of what happened on September 11th.

Speech by Juergen Habermas accepting the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association
Paulskirche, Frankfurt, 14 October 2001

Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 15 October 2001 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/aktuell/sz/artikel86740.php
[translated from German by Kermit Snelson]

When current events become so overwhelming that they rip the choice of topic out of our own hands, so to speak, the John Waynes among us intellectuals are of course greatly tempted to compete instead as to who can be the quickest to shoot from the hip.

Only a short time ago the spirits moved us to discuss the question of whether and how far we should subject ourselves to genetic technology for self-instrumentation or even for pursuing the goal of self-optimization.

Our first steps along this path were beset by controversy between the advocates of those two great rival faiths: organized science and organized religion. One side feared obscurantism and the revival of atavistic suspicion against science. The other accused the scientistic belief in progress of a crude naturalism that undermines morality.

But after 11 September, the tension between secular society and religion exploded in an entirely different way. As we know from Atta's testament, these suicidal murderers, who turned civilian means of transport into living missiles against the capitalist citadels of Western civilization, were motivated by religious convictions. For them, those symbols of globalizing modernism were the embodiment of the Great Satan.

But we too, the universal eyewitnesses to these "apocalyptic" events, were moved to Biblical imagery by what we saw on the TV screen. The language of retribution used at first (and I repeat, at first) by the US President in reaction to the events resounded with Old Testament overtones. Synagogues, churches and mosques filled up everywhere, as if the blind attacks had struck a religious chord deep within the innermost core of secular society. This subterranean symmetry did not, however, go so far as to lead the religious memorial gathering at the New York Stadium three weeks ago to a symmetric display of hate.

Despite its religious language, fundamentalism is, as we know, an exclusively modern phenomenon. What struck us immediately about the Islamic perpetrators was the imbalance between their ends and their means. This reflects an imbalance that has emerged in the perpetrators' home countries between culture and society in the wake of an accelerated and radical modernization.

What under more fortunate conditions might have been considered a process of creative destruction offers these countries no prospect that can adequately compensate for the suffering caused by the collapse of traditional ways. The prospect of improved material living conditions is merely one of these. What is decisive is that the prospect of spiritual freedom, which finds its political expression in the separation of church and state, has been impeded there by feelings of humiliation.

Even in Europe, where centuries have been spent trying to work out a sensible accommodation with the Janus head of modernity, "secularization" is still accompanied by highly ambivalent feelings, as evident in the controversy over biotechnology. There are obdurate orthodoxies in the West as well as in the Middle and Far(ther) East, and among Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. Those who wish to avoid a "clash of civilizations" must therefore keep in mind the still-unresolved dialectic inherent in our own Western process of secularization.

The "war against terrorism" is no war, and in terrorism is expressed also -- and I emphasize the word "also" -- the ominously silent collision of worlds that must find a common language beyond the mute violence of terrorism against military might. Instead of a globalization that consists of a market without boundaries, many of us hope for a return of the political in another form. Not in the original form of a global security state, tied to the spheres of the police, intelligence services and now even the military, but instead as a world-wide, civilizing power of formation.

At the moment we don't have much more to work with than a pallid faith in rationality and a little self-awareness, because this lack of language has also divided our own house against itself. The risks of disruptive secularization elsewhere may be addressed only when we are clear on what secularization means in our own post-secular society. So with this aim in view, I return today to an old topic, Faith and Knowledge. But don't expect a polarizing Sunday sermon that causes some to leap out of their pews while others remain seated.

First of all, the word "secularization" has a juridical meaning that refers to the forcible appropriation of church property by the secular state. This meaning has since been extended to the emergence of cultural and societal modernism in general. Since then, the word "secularization" has been associated with both of these opposed judgments, whether it is the successful taming of ecclesiastical authority by worldly power that is being emphasized or rather the act of unlawful appropriation.

According to the first interpretation, religious ways of thinking and living have been replaced by reason-based and consequently superior equivalents. According to the second, modern modes of thinking and living are to be regarded as the illegitimate spoils of conquest. The "replacement" model lends a progressive-optimistic meaning to the act of deconsecration, whereas the "expropriation" model connotes theoretically-conceived corruption of a rootless modernity.

But I think both interpretations make the same mistake. They both consider secularization as a kind of zero-sum game between, on one hand, the productive powers of science and technology harnessed by capitalism and, on the other, the tenacious powers of religion and the church. This image no longer fits a post-secular society that posits the continued existence of religious communities within a continually secularizing society. And most of all, this too-narrow view overlooks the civilizing role of democratically enlightened common sense, which proceeds along its own track as an equal third partner amid the murmurs of cultural conflict between science and religion.

From the standpoint of the liberal state, of course, religious communities are entitled to be called "reasonable" only if they renounce the use of violence as a means of propagating the truths of their faith. This understanding stems from a threefold reflection on the role of the faithful within a pluralistic society. First of all, the religious conscience must handle the encounter with other confessions and other religions cognitively. Second, it must accede to the authority of science, which holds a social monopoly on knowledge. Finally, it must participate in the premises of a constitutional state, which is based on a non-sacred concept of morality. Without this reflective "thrust," monotheisms within ruthlessly modernizing societies develop a destructive potential. The phrase "reflective thrust," of course, can give the false impression of being something that is one-sided and close-ended. The reality, however, is that this work of reflection in the face of any newly emerging conflict is a process that runs its course through the public spaces of democracy.

As soon as an existentially relevant question, such as biotechnology, becomes part of the political agenda, the citizens, both believers and non-believers, will press upon each other their ideologically impregnated world-views and so will stumble upon the harsh reality of ideological pluralism. If they learn to deal with this reality without violence and with an acceptance of their own fallibility, they will come to understand what the secular principles of decision-making written into the Constitution mean in a post-secular society. In other words, the ideologically neutral state does not prejudice its political decisions in any way toward either side of the conflict between the rival claims of science and religious faith. The political reason of the citizenry follows a dynamic of secularization only insofar as it maintains in the end product an equal distance from vital traditions and ideological content. But such a state retains a capacity to learn only to the extent that it remains osmotically open, without relinquishing its independence, to both science and religion.

Of course, common sense itself is also full of illusions about the world and must let itself be enlightened without reservation by the sciences. But the scientific theories that impinge on the world of life leave the framework of our everyday knowledge essentially untouched. If we learn something new about the world and about ourselves as beings in the world, the content of our self-understanding changes. Copernicus and Darwin revolutionized the geocentric and anthropocentric worldviews. But the destruction of the astronomical illusion that the stars revolve around the earth had less effect on our lives than did the biological disillusionment over the place of mankind in the natural order. It appears that the closer scientific knowledge gets to our body, the more it disturbs our self-understanding. Research on the brain is teaching us about the physiology of our consciousness. But does this change that intuitive sense of responsibility and accountability that accompanies all of our actions?

If we join Max Weber and turn our attention to the beginnings of the "disenchantment of the world," we see what is at stake. Nature is depersonalized to the extent that it is made accessible to objective contemplation and causal explanation. Such a world of scientifically-researched nature is far removed from a social framework of persons who ascribe motive and intent to each other. But what would become of such persons, we may ask today, if they subject themselves and each other to similarly scientific processes of description? Will common sense in the end allow itself not only to be instructed by the counterintuitive discoveries of science, but altogether consumed by them?

The philosopher Wilfred Sellars answered this question in 1960 (in a famous lecture on "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man") with the scenario of a society in which the old-fashioned language games of everyday life are overthrown in favor of the objectifying description of conscious processes. The point of departure for this naturalization of the spirit is a scientific image of man that also thoroughly desocializes our self-conception. Of course, this can succeed only if the intentionality of human consciousness and the normativity of our behavior in such a self-description disappears without a trace. Such a theory must explain, for example, how people can obey or disobey rules -- whether grammatical, conceptual or moral.

Sellars's students misunderstood their teacher's aporetic thought-experiment as a research program, and they are pursuing it to this day. The application of a scientific modernization of our everyday psychology has even led to attempts at a semantics that postulates a biological explanation for the very content of our thoughts. But even these most advanced theses still appear unable to explain that difference between Is and Ought that comes into play whenever we disobey rules.

When one describes how a person has done something that he didn't mean to do and also shouldn't have done, then that person is not being described as natural science would describe one of its objects. This is because in the description of persons there is a silent moment of pre-scientific self-conception of what it is to be a subject capable of language and behavior. When we describe a phenomenon such as a person's behavior, we know for example that we're describing something not as a natural process, but as something that can be justified if necessary. Behind this is an image of personhood, persons who can hold each other accountable, who at home and away are involved in normatively regulated interactions and who encounter a universe of public fundamentals.

This perspective that accompanies everyday life explains the difference between the language games of justification and pure description. In this dualism, non-reductionistic strategies of explanation also encounter a limit. The concept of individual accountability is the core of a self-conception that develops only the perspective of a participant and not that of an observer. The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy. Moreover, no science will take away from scientifically enlightened common sense the ability to judge how we are to deal with its effects on human life, as we do, for instance, the descriptions of molecular biology that make possible genetic intervention.

Common sense is thus concerned with the consciousness of persons who are able to take initiative, make mistakes and correct those mistakes. It asserts against the sciences a stubborn perspectival structure. With this consciousness of autonomy which cannot, I think, be grasped naturalistically, common sense on the other hand asserts also the perspective of a religious tradition whose normative rules to which we equally assent.

Certainly, the democratic common sense of the citizenry has, when so desired, taken its place among the reason-based constructions of the democratic constitutional state. The idea of egalitarian law based on reason also has religious roots. But this reason-based legitimation of law and politics drinks from long-profaned springs. Religion therefore contests democratically enlightened common sense for reasons that are acceptable not only to those who are members of a religious community. This naturally also awakens suspicion among the faithful that Western secularization may be a one-way street that leaves religion standing on the curb.

The reverse side of religious freedom is actually a pacification of ideological pluralism that has unequally distributed consequences. After all, the liberal state has so far imposed only upon the believers among its citizens the requirement that they split their identity into public and private versions. That is, they must translate their religious convictions into a secular language before their arguments have the prospect of being accepted by a majority. Today's Catholics and Protestants do this when they argue for the legal rights of fertilized ova outside the mother's body, thus attempting (perhaps prematurely) to translate the "in the image of God" character of the human creature into the secular language of constitutional law.

But the search for reasons that aspire to general acceptance need not lead to an unfair exclusion of religion from public life, and secular society, for its part, need not cut itself off from the important resources of spiritual explanations, if only the secular side were to retain a feeling for the articulative power of religious discourse. The boundaries between secular and religious reasons are, after all, tenuous. Therefore, fixing of this controversial boundary should be understood as a cooperative venture, carried on by both sides, and with each side trying to see the issue from the other's perspective. Democratically enlightened common sense is not a singularity, but is instead the mental constitution of a public with many different voices. Secular majorities must not reach a conclusion without first having given a hearing to the objections of opponents who believe their religious convictions to have been injured; they must also make an effort to learn something from them.

Giving due consideration to the religious heritage of its moral foundations, the liberal state should consider the possibility that it may not be able to meet the completely new challenges it faces simply by relying on the formulations it developed earlier to meet those attending its origins. Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference. The social bond, however, is based on mutual recognition and cannot be reduced to the concepts of contract, rational choice and the maximization of utility.

For this reason, Kant did not intend his categorical imperative to be sucked into oblivion by the undertow of enlightened self-interest. He extended the concept of freedom to autonomy and thus provided the first great example of a completely secularizing, yet at the same time redeeming, deconstruction of the truths of faith. In Kant we find the authority of divine command reestablished in the unconditional validity of moral duty. In this we hear an unmistakable resonance. With his conception of autonomy, Kant certainly destroyed the traditional conception of being "a child of God." But in doing so, he also avoided the banal consequences of a simply vacuous deflation through his critical transformation of the religious stance.

Secular languages that simply eliminate what was once there leave behind only irritation. Something was lost when sin became guilt. The desire for forgiveness is, after all, still closely connected with the unsentimental wish to undo other injuries as well. We are rightfully disturbed by the irreversibility of past suffering, the injustice that has been committed against the innocently mishandled, debased and murdered, injustices that exceed every human power of redemption. The lost hope of resurrection has left behind a palpable emptiness. Horkheimer's justified skepticism of what I consider to be Benjamin's indomitable faith in the redemptive power of human thought -- "The killed really were killed," said Horkheimer -- does not of course deny that impotent impulse to undo what has already been done. (This correspondence between Benjamin and Horkheimer dates from early 1937.)

Both factors, validity of this impulse and its impotence, continued after the Holocaust in the equally necessary and futile practice of a "redemption of the past" (Adorno). Disguised, as I perhaps should say from now on, this same impulse is expressed in the ever-growing lament over the inadequacy of this practice. The unbelieving sons and daughters of the modern age appear in such moments to believe themselves more obliged to each other, and to be in greater need, as if the religious tradition were accessible to them in translation, and thus as if its semantic potential were not yet exhausted.

However, this ambivalence can also lead to the reasonable position of keeping one's distance from religion without at the same time excluding its perspective. This position could well lead the self-enlightenment of a civil society, ridden with cultural conflict, in the right direction. Moral sentiments, which until now could be expressed only in a rather exclusionary way through religious language, might find general resonance as soon as they find a redemptive formulation for what has been almost forgotten, but is still implicitly missed.

This approach very seldom succeeds, but sometimes it does. A secularization that does not annihilate is brought about as a kind of translation. That is what the West, as the great secularizing force in the world today, can learn from its own history. Otherwise the West will either appear simply as another crusader on the behalf of a competing religious faith, like the Arab world, or as the travelling salesman of an instrumental reason that subjects all meaning to itself.

Allow me to close by illustrating the concept of non-annihilating secularization with an example. In the controversy over the use of human embryos, many voices still allude to Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him." It is not necessary to believe that God, who is Love, created Adam and Eve as free beings like Himself in order to understand what "in His own image" means. Love cannot exist without knowledge of another, nor can freedom exist without mutual recognition.

Consequently, the "opposite stance" inherent in the nature of humanity must remain free to repay this gift of God. Despite his nature as a creature "in the image of God," this "otherness" can itself be considered a creation of God. The created nature of "in His own image" expresses an intuition that has something to say even to those who have no ear for religion, among whom I count myself. God remains a "God of free men" only as long as we do not erase the absolute difference between the Creator and the created. In other words, only as long as the gift of a divine form to man is taken to mean that no hindrance be placed on man's right of self-determination.

This Creator, because he is both Creator and Redeemer in one, need not operate as a technician according to the laws of nature, nor as a computer scientist according to the rules of code. The voice of God, which calls to life, operates from the outset within a morally tangible universe. God can thus in a sense "govern" man, in that He at once both releases and compels man to freedom.

Now, it is not necessary to believe in these theological premises in order to understand their consequences. A completely different, causally reimagined subjection would come into play if the difference inherent in the concept of creation were to disappear and a peer were to take the place of God -- if, for instance, somebody were to impose his own preferences on the coincidence of parental chromosomes without being obligated at least counterfactually to assume a consensus with the others affected. This way of stating the issue brings us close to a question that I have considered elsewhere. Did not the first person who subdued another person according to his own purposes destroy exactly that freedom which exists among peers in order to guarantee their difference?