In essence, modernity has rested upon the belief that the exercise of reason can inform progressive development towards individual and societal self-realization. It is an articulation of the confident claims of the Enlightenment; the replacement of myth and religion by science and reason; the replacement of tutelage to superstition and irrationality by self direction through the exercise of reason; the displacement of the cyclical fatalism of human existence by the promise of evolution and progress; the expectation that reason and philosophy could be married to (indeed, could only be realized in), the requirements of practical, sensuous life. For Habermas, the more optimistic Enlightenment thinkers »had the expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces, but would also further understanding of the world and of the self, would promote moral progress, the justice of institutions, and even the happiness of human beings«. This is an optimism which »the twentieth century has shattered«.2 Even the keenest advocates of the project of modernity (including Hegel and Marx) recognized that its realization might be difficult. But there also exists, alongside and almost as longstanding as the project of modernity itself, a more deep seated questioning of its most fundamental premises - that is a belief that the claims of reason to inform progressive development towards individual and societal self-realization were not just difficult to vindicate in practice but indeed profoundly mistaken in intent. The anti-modernists refute the claimed association between reason and emancipation that modernity shares with the Enlightenment. Their counter-argument is that the relationship between the practical application of (Western, instrumental) reason and emancipation is precisely the opposite of that indicated by the Enlightenment. The meta-narratives of Reason and of modernity do not foster self-realization; they do not disclose but rather mask the exercise of power - so that »Reason itself destroys the humanity it first made possible«.3 For Habermas, the coming of Nietzsche signifies a decisive formalization of this anti-modernist sentiment and the origins of something like a post-modernist position. Habermas’s ambition is to show that these criticisms of modernity (from Nietzsche to Foucault) are mistaken. He suggests that the development of modernity has been one-sided and does display many of the weaknesses which its critics very effectively isolate. He accepts that the project of modernity has in some sense been distorted. However, these weaknesses and distortions are seen not to be intrinsic to the project of modernity itself. The drastic conclusions of the opponents of modernity - that the project of modernity should be abandoned - are not justified by their critique. Broadly, Habermas’s claim is that, suitably reconstructed, the project of the Enlightenment/Modernity can still be progressive and realizable. Habermas sets out to defend this claim through a consideration of the historical development of the philosophical discourse of modernity and the parallel discourse of counter-modernity. He argues that the project of modernity had (and still has) an authentically emancipatory potential, but insists that this has been substantively suppressed by a number of »wrong turns« in its philosophical and historical development. Most fundamentally is this weakness to be retraced to the experience of Hegel and Marx. Habermas speculates that »the discourse of modernity took the wrong turn at the first crossroads before which the young Marx stood when he criticized Hegel«.4 Indeed, the parallels between Hegel and Marx are striking. In their youth, both thinkers hold open the idea of using the idea of uncoerced will formation in a communication community existing under constraints of cooperation as a model for the reconciliation of a divided bourgeois society. But later on, both forsake the use of this option.5 For Marx, the alternative was to embrace the paradigm of production, in which, echoing Habermas’s earlier work, it is suggested that the category of intersubjectivity is subordinated to the generalized category of labour. Habermas is centrally concerned »to trace how the transformation of the concept of reflection ends up in the concept of production, how the replacement of 'self-consciousness' by 'labor' ends up in an aporia within Western Marxism«, as, indeed, within the historical project of modernity more generally.*^ For Habermas, the key to this (and subsequent) 'wrong turns' lies in the unsatisfactory resolution of the philosophical problem of the 'paradigm of consciousness' or 'the philosophy of the subject'. Habermas insists that this problem of the self-constituting and self-contradictory subject had been recognised throughout the discourse of modernity, (and was not simply unearthed by its more recent critics). But he also maintains that the philosophers of modernity never satisfactorily resolved the challenge posed by 'the philosophy of the subject'. This is both the point of agreement between Habermas and the post-modernists, but also the perspective from which he criticizes them. Thus the one point in the critique of modernity that Habermas endorses is that »the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness is exhausted«.7 But he entirely rejects the conclusions to which this insight is said to give rise. For Habermas, the recognition of this difficulty is as old as the philosophical discourse of modernity itself and can be responded to in terms of a reconstruction of the philosophy of modernity, built upon a reversing of those 'wrong turns' taken at strategic points in its development. In essence, this means replacing the model of subject-centred reason with the model of unconstrained consensus formation in a communication community standing under cooperative constraints...[an orientation] to communicatively structured lifeworlds that reproduce themselves via the palpable medium of action oriented to mutual agreement.8 Here we return to Habermas’s familiar claims about universal pragmatics and the ideal speech situation. Communicative reason finds its criteria in the argumentative procedures for directly or indirectly redeeming claims to propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and aesthetic harmony...This communicative rationality recalls older ideas of logos, inasmuch as it brings along with it the connotations of a noncoercively unifying, consensus-building force of a discourse in which the participants overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement. Communicative reason is expressed in a decentred understanding of the world. For Habermas, the advocates of postmodernity have made the mistake of identifying the limitations of a particular form of (subject-centred) reason as a limitation of all forms of reason. Habermas’s claim is to have reconstituted the traditional but problematic claims of the supporters of modernity by purging this tradition of its association with an (exhausted) subject-centred reason and redeeming it through the appeal to the claims of intersubjective or communicative reason. The philosophical discourse of modernity is seen always to have been concerned with its relationship to political praxis. Habermas is insistent that his own recasting of modernity in terms of the suppressed element of communicative reason has just such practical implications in terms of our understanding of the contemporary problems of the »social-welfare-state-project«. Just like modernity, the welfare state is seen to have been a »disappointment« for these who were its keenest proponents. Habermas argues that the architects of the welfare state project, (primarily social democratic parties and trades unions), were principally motivated by the desire to enhance opportunities for the self-realization of workers by freeing them from the most oppressive aspects of commodification. The post-war welfare state was a part of »the Utopian project of labor«.10 But while their ambition lay in the emancipation of labour, the day-to-day practice of the welfare state has increased the colonization of the life-world and expanded the control of external forces over the individual and her/his free development. Thus Habermas sees the action of the founders of the welfare state being almost exclusively directed towards »the taming of capitalism, and this primarily through the use of state power which they (mistakenly) regarded as neutral or 'innocent'. In fact, in the promotion of 'welfare legislation programmes...an ever tighter net of legal norms, and of governmental and supporting bureaucracies has been drawn over the everyday existence of potential and actual clients'. The intention was to liberate the lifeworld from subjection to commodification, but the outcome has been the subordination of the lifeworld to both commodification and (state) bureaucratization. Habermas concludes: In short, inherent in the project of the social state is a contradiction between goal and method. Its goal is the establishment of forms of life which are structured according to egalitarian standards and which at the same time open up arenas for individual self-fulfillment and spontaneity. But apparently this goal cannot be achieved directly through a legal and administrative transformation of political programmes. 11 Consequently, the programme of the social welfare state...is losing its capacity to project future possibilities for a collectively better and less endangered way of life.«12 This may be related directly to the traditional constitution of modernity which has operated with the twin construct of economy/commodification and state/bureaucratization. If the emancipatory purpose of the welfare state project is to be realized, this requires the promotion of a third strand - a sphere oriented around the generation of solidarity and meaning, defence of the integrity of the lifeworld, and sustained through intersubjective, discursive will-formation. If the project of the social welfare state were not simply carried on or abandoned, but rather continued at a higher level of reflection, as Habermas recommends that it should be, it would need to become reflexive to a certain extent and aim at taming not just the capitalistic economy, but the state itself.13
Christopher Pierson
No comments:
Post a Comment