For Heidegger, the world is phenomenological; that is, it is approached as one finds oneself in it, not as one might theorize from outside (being what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a cosmotheoros). The world allows Heidegger to talk about the problem of being, since the world is not some kind of pretheoretical superentity but (as he puts it in Being and Time, p. 63) “an ontological concept [that] designates the structure of a constitutive factor of being-in-the-world.” To be, for Heidegger, is to experience and create a world with the other. Arendt finds a similar transformation of ontological questions to relational ones in the work of Augustine (who she wrote her 1929 doctoral thesis on). For Augustine, love of God is love of the neighbor; we create a world through our action of loving God and, equivalently, loving one another. Here, too, the questions of being — “Who am I?”; “Who is God?” — become questions that can only be answered by the other through a common act of world-making.

The preoccupation with community would abide with Arendt for the rest of her life. Indeed, it is the crux of her analysis of rights. For Arendt, rights are not possessions but rather, as Lida Maxwell puts it, “part of political projects of creating certain kinds of political worlds.” To have rights in this sense is like having a party, not having a bicycle: you must participate in making a world where rights-claims can be heard from everyone. This re-reading of rights-claims resembles the transformation of ontological to relational questions. 

Aliosha Bielenberg

'Work thus creates a world distinct from anything given in nature, a world distinguished by its durability, its semi-permanence and relative independence from the individual actors and acts which call it into being. Humanity in this mode of its activity Arendt names homo faber; he/she is the builder of walls (both physical and cultural) which divide the human realm from that of nature and provide a stable context (a “common world”) of spaces and institutions within which human life can unfold'.

IEP

Lifton

Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of "life unworthy of life," coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the killing of "impaired" children in hospitals; and then the killing of "impaired" adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to "impaired" inmates of concentration and extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings in the extermination camps themselves.

Robert Jay Lifton

Han

The new human type, standing exposed to excessive positivity without any defense, lacks all sovereignty. The depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself—and it does so voluntarily, without external constraints. It is predator and prey at once. The self, in the strong sense of the word, still represents an immunological category. However, depression eludes all immunological schemes. It erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able [nicht mehr können kann]. First and foremost, depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability [Schaffens- und K.nnensmüdigkeit]. The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.

The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination [Herrschaftsinstanz] forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. It is lord and master of itself. Thus, it is subject to no one—or, as the case may be, only to itself. It differs from the obedience-subject on this score. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement.3 Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished. Such self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that abruptly switches over into violence because of the compulsive structures dwelling within it. The psychic indispositions of achievement society are pathological manifestations of such a paradoxical freedom.

Byung-Chul Han

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Baudrillard_Animals.pdf

Clotilde Nouët: In his habilitation thesis, Habermas insists on the fact that the revolution takes hold of the critical dimension of public space: the capacity of members of civil society to constitute themselves into a collective body produces a critique of absolutist power, because it requires for the State reason to be subjected to the exercise of a collective practical reason. It is this critical dimension, which, according to him, is the springboard for an indefinite politicization of civil society and its claim to exist as an autonomous instance from the State.

Luc Foisneau: Why do you say “indefinite”? One could imagine that once deliberative representative institutions have been put in place, the practice of criticism would take on forms that are different from revolutionary forms. What is Habermas’ position on the articulation between forms of critical discursivity within political institutions and the intervention of the people in the streets?

 

Clotilde Nouët: This idea of an indefinite politicization is a central aspect: the critical process set in motion with the raise of public opinion can indeed produce institutions —deliberation then takes place in formal instances, for example in parliaments. But radical democracy is found where an anarchic public space remains, which is likely to challenge institutions. Habermas therefore proposes a model with a double trigger, consisting both in a parliamentary pole, and an extra-institutional pole. He uses Hannah Arendt’s idea of power to think a constituent communicational power that persists outside representative democracy11, and which the latter cannot absorb.

Luc Foisneau: Is it desirable that representative and deliberative democracy can absorb this remainder? Or is this anarchic public space, this residue that cannot be assimilated by representative democracy, constitutive of democracy for Habermas? If it were, would it not constitute a limit to Habermas's communicational democracy, since organized communication constitutes the horizon of democratic practice there? In other words, what relationship do you see between deliberative democracy and radical democracy?

 

Clotilde Nouët: It seems to me that the very concept of democracy points to a fundamental inadequacy between the political people and what we might call its sociological figures. Hence, there is a permanent tension between the institutions that aim to represent the people and the manifestations of a surplus that cannot be assimilated by representation. This is why the existence of a public space outside the institutional public space is a specificity that is properly democratic. But this does not go without raising difficulties: first of all, the question of its legitimacy, but also difficulties linked to the modalities of construction of such an extra-institutional space, notably by bodies that escape the control of the political actors themselves. This space is taken over by the media, which contribute to its public visibility, but which can also play a significant role in the formulation of problems. Deliberative arenas do not always have the spontaneous and self-piloted character they should have. Not to mention the function of legitimizing public opinion in the context of welfare states, which Habermas showed in the 1970s to be particularly affected by legitimation crises12.

Freedom of Speech

Luc Foisneau: This distinction is indeed very important. We can see that it is at the heart of the current debate: there is growing suspicion about the public space that is being covered by the media, and this questioning is not without impact on the way in which we conceive of the constitutional right to freedom of expression. Could you clarify how you understand the extension and limits of freedom of expression within the current political context, which is characterized by a tension between an official public space and an anarchic public space, a tension that is expressed on social networks, on traffic circles, in cafés, wherever political discussion takes place?

 

Clotilde Nouët: Perhaps we should start by trying to clarify what we mean by freedom of expression. The classical liberal interpretation tends to see it as a sphere of individual expression protected from state interference. But Habermas conceives of freedom of expression rather as one of the constituent rights of the public sphere, alongside freedom of assembly and association and freedom of the press. The idea is that freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of a democratic public space, and therefore contributes in an essential way to democracy itself: far from being a negative freedom, or to use the terminology developed by Hohfeld, a privilege13, a simple freedom to do something without being prevented from doing it, it is therefore both a positive and political freedom, which may require a “guarantee of participation14”, and which is part of a collective exercise of expression.

Luc Foisneau: What exactly is meant by this astonishing formulation, in view of classical liberalism, according to which freedom of expression would be a social right?

 

Clotilde Nouët: Habermas himself does not use this expression. But I rely on a 1963 text in which he rereads the Declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, trying to distance himself from the Marxist reading of human rights15. He shows that the object of Marx’s criticism, namely rights according to political liberalism, can be thought of differently: these rights are in fact ways of articulating social demands. It is thus a very specific architecture of the relations between civil society and the State that is put in place on the occasion of the Declarations of Rights. These should not be understood as the manifestation of an opposition between individuals and the State. The determination of individual liberties reveals a certain relationship between civil society and the State. This interpretation clearly shows that what is at stake in the right to freedom of expression is the question of the social conditions for the exercise of this right. Thus, freedom of expression is not only a right to communicate and receive opinions, but a right to have access to spaces of expression where individual opinion is audible, as well as a right to dispose of a plurality of information and opinions allowing for a considered judgment to be formed. This necessarily leads us to reflect on the positive obligations of states or governments to ensure such a “claim-right”.

Luc Foisneau: What does this mean concretely in relation to the current situation? On the one hand, we have an official public space and media, which strongly frame freedom of expression, and, on the other hand, an anarchic public space in the strong sense of the term, where social demands are expressed that do not find an echo in the sphere of representation and official deliberation, as well as hate speech. This is one of the difficulties of the current situation16: do people seek to express a social situation that the rulers refuse to see, or to express opinions that the constitution forbids them to express because they are contrary to the spirit of the Republic? Can a Habermasian theory of the public space allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff —this formulation expresses, I am aware, a normative position —or, at least, guide us in the work of regulating this multiple expression?

 

Clotilde Nouët: Habermas would probably not help us to establish a normative dividing line between good and bad discourse, because the procedural model of democracy that he defends does not claim to impose normative content on discussions. The latter are supposed to regulate themselves and produce their own normativity.  This being said, there are two scenarios. Deliberations that are subject to procedural constraints, as reflected in a constitutional framework, are subject to norms that could be called “of equal freedom” and that imply mutual respect in deliberation. Moreover, such deliberations are not necessarily the monopoly of institutions. On the other hand, what Habermas calls “mass communication” refers to all the flows of opinions and ideas that circulate in the media space (and today we would include social networks), which, for their part, do not always seek representativeness or quality. But this is due to the very structure of such communication, which escapes face-to-face encounters —therefore to the reversibility of the positions of the speaker and the recipient —and thus can emancipate itself from the constraints of justification that normally weigh on deliberations. And yet Habermas does not call for the regulation of such communications. He is convinced that thoughtful public opinions are quite capable of being formed by exploiting the rational potential of so-called “wild” communication flows —as long as both press freedom and the diversity and independence of the media are guaranteed17.

Difficulties in Habermas’ thinking

Luc Foisneau: That’s the difficulty. Today, the French government has proposed a major national debate to respond to the multiple demands expressed in the Yellow jackets movement. The question is not simply who will lead or organize this debate, but whether the very framework of a national debate does not already constitute a radical limitation on the freedom to express oneself. The normative framework itself can raise suspicion, in the sense that the place where the debate is organized can in part determine the possibilities of expression. Could you tell us what the transformation of an anarchic debate into an official debate changes, or does not change, to the content of what is expressed? Can Habermas help us answer this question? Or maybe not? I am referring here to the critical dimension in your current reflection on his work.

 

Clotilde Nouët: Yes, from my point of view, the weaknesses of the Habermasian thought lie in the gap between its inaugural project and its realization. His project is indeed, through a theory of communication, to think the dissolution of all forms of domination, both social and political. The limit seems to me to lie less at the level of the idea of deliberative politics —which is a central concept to articulate different forms of political claims or political subjectivities —than at the level of the theory of discursive rationality, that is to say, at the level of the theory of argumentation that grounds the Habermasian conception of deliberative democracy.

Habermas is not sensitive enough, in my opinion, to the disqualifying effects of discourse that manifest themselves in the social space, whether these disqualifications are due to the difference in status between speakers or whether they are related to the fact that certain arguments used by political subjects are not always audible. Habermas’ idea is that, in principle if not in fact, the best argument will always win. We can maintain this regulatory ideal, but it is not enough to say that the discussion is likely to produce false statements. We still need to elucidate the reasons why it does so. This fallibility stems from the fact that one can argue in a supposedly rational space, which nevertheless remains impervious to the correctness of certain arguments because the structure of the social space masks the power relations that underlie the discussion. Let’s take the example of domestic violence: in order for this theme to be treated as a political theme, it is necessary to have previously accepted that the domestic sphere is not strictly a private space, so it is necessary to accept the idea of a relative politicization of the domestic sphere. This process implies, upstream of the rational space, that social relations or the whole social structure allow such arguments to be heard for what they are.

Politika

SEoP

By linking meaning with the acceptability of speech acts, Habermas moves the analysis beyond a narrow focus on the truth-conditional semantics of representation to the social intelligibility of interaction. The complexity of social interaction then allows him to find three basic validity claims potentially at stake in any speech act used for cooperative purposes (i.e., in strong communicative action). His argument relies on three “world relations” that are potentially involved in strongly communicative acts in which a speaker intends to say something to someone about something (TCA 1: 275ff). For example, a constative (fact-stating) speech act (a) expresses an inner world (an intention to communicate a belief); (b) establishes a communicative relation with a hearer (and thus relates to a social world, specifically one in which both persons share a piece of information, and know they do); and (c) attempts to represent the external world. This triadic structure suggests that many speech acts, including non-constatives, involve a set of tacit validity claims: the claim that the speech act is sincere (non-deceptive), is socially appropriate or right, and is factually true (or more broadly: representationally adequate). Conversely, speech acts can be criticized for failing on one or more of these scores. Thus fully successful speech acts, insofar as they involve these three world relations, must satisfy the demands connected with these three basic validity claims (sincerity, rightness, and truth) in order to be acceptable.

We can think of strong communicative action in the above sense as defining the end of a spectrum of communicative possibilities. At that end, social cooperation is both deeply consensual and reasonable: actors sincerely agree that their modes of cooperation can be justified as good, right, and free of empirical error. Given the difficulties of maintaining such deep consensus, however, it makes sense, particularly in complex, pluralistic societies, to relax these communicative demands for specified types of situations, allowing for weaker forms of communicative action (in which not all three types of validity claims are at stake) or strategic action (in which actors understand that everyone is oriented toward individual success).

Habermas distinguishes the “system” as those predefined situations, or modes of coordination, in which the demands of communicative action are relaxed in this way, within legally specified limits. The prime examples of systemic coordination are markets and bureaucracies. In these systemically structured contexts, nonlinguistic media take up the slack in coordinating actions, which proceeds on the basis of money and institutional power—these media do the talking, as it were, thus relieving actors of the demands of strongly communicative action. The term “lifeworld,” by contrast, refers to domains of action in which consensual modes of action coordination predominate. In fact, the distinction between lifeworld and system is better understood as an analytic one that identifies different aspects of social interaction and cooperation (1991b). “Lifeworld” then refers to the background resources, contexts, and dimensions of social action that enable actors to cooperate on the basis of mutual understanding: shared cultural systems of meaning, institutional orders that stabilize patterns of action, and personality structures acquired in family, church, neighborhood, and school (TCA 1: chap. 6; 1998b, chap. 4).

Habermas's system-lifeworld distinction has been criticized from a number of perspectives. Some have argued that the distinction oversimplifies the interpenetrating dynamics of social institutions (e.g., McCarthy 1991, 152–80). Others attacked the distinction as covertly ideological, concealing forms of patriarchal and economic domination (e.g., Fraser 1985). Habermas's attempt to clarify the analytic character of the distinction only goes partway toward answering these criticisms (1991b).

TCA has also encountered rather heavy weather as a theory of meaning. In the analytic philosophy of language, one of the standard requirements is to account for the compositionality of language, the fact that a finite set of words can be used to form an indefinite number of sentences. From that perspective, Habermas's theory falls short (Heath 2001, chap. 3). But perhaps we would do better to assess Habermas's theory of meaning from a different perspective. The compositionality requirement is important if one wants to explain grammatical competence. But early on Habermas (1976b) expressed a greater interest in explaining communicative, rather than grammatical, competence: the ability of speakers to use grammatically well-formed sentences in social contexts. Although Habermas often presents his pragmatics as a further development in analytic theories of meaning, his analysis focuses primarily on the context-sensitive acceptability of speech acts: acceptability conditions as a function of formal features that distinguish different speech situations. This suggests his theory of meaning involves a quite different sort of project: to articulate the “validity basis” of social order.

The significance of this conception of reaching understanding and of rationally motivated agreement can also be seen by contrasting this account with other conceptions of understanding and interpretation, such as Gadamer's hermeneutics. Given Habermas's conception of speech acts and their relation to validity claims, it is not surprising that he argues that “communicative actions always require interpretations that are rational in approach” (TCA 1: 106), that is, ones that are made in the performative attitude by an interpreter. In general, Habermas agrees with hermeneutics that the whole domain of the social sciences is accessible only through interpretation, precisely because processes of reaching understanding already at work in the social sciences have antecedently constituted them (ibid., 107). But he draws a distinctive conclusion. Although social scientists are not actors, they must employ their own pretheoretical knowledge to gain interpretive access through communicative experience. As a “virtual participant,” the social scientist must take a position on the claims made by those he observes: he has access through communicative experience only “under the presupposition that he judges the agreement and disagreement, the validity claims and potential reasons with which he is confronted” (ibid., 116). There is then no disjunction between the attitude of the critic and the interpreter as reflective participants. Social scientists may withhold judgments, but only at the cost of impoverishing their interpretation and putting out of play their pretheoretical, practical knowledge that they have in common with others who are able to reach understanding. Thus, various forms of rationality become essential to the social sciences, because of the nature of the social domain.

Objecting to Habermas's line of argument, McCarthy and others have argued that it is not a necessary condition that interpreters take a position in order to understand reasons, even if we have to rely on our own competence to judge the validity and soundness of reasons and to identify them as reasons at all. Nonetheless, Habermas uses this conception in his social theory of modernity to show the ways in which modern culture has unleashed communicative rationality from its previous cultural and ideological constraints. In modern societies, social norms are no longer presumed to be valid but rather are subjected to critical reflection, as for example when the ethical life of a specific culture is criticized from the standpoint of justice. In a sense consistent with the Enlightenment imperative to use one's own reason, the everyday “lifeworld” of social experience has been rationalized, especially in the form of discourses that institutionalize reflective communicative action, as in scientific and democratic institutions.

The rationalization of the lifeworld in Western modernity went hand-in-hand with the growth of systemic mechanisms of coordination already mentioned above, in which the demands on fully communicative consensus are relaxed. If large and complex modern societies can no longer be integrated solely on the basis of shared cultural values and norms, new non-intentional mechanisms of coordination must emerge, which take the form of the non-linguistic media of money and power. For example, markets coordinate the collective production and distribution of goods non-intentionally, even if they are grounded in cultural and political institutions such as firms and states. Modernization can become pathological, as when money and power “colonize the lifeworld” and displace communicative forms of solidarity and inhibit the reproduction of the lifeworld (e.g., when universities become governed by market strategies). “Juridification” is another such pathological form, when law comes to invade more and more areas of social life, turning citizens into clients of bureaucracies with what Foucault might call “normalizing” effects. This aspect of TCA has less of an impact on Habermas's current work, which returns to the theme of improving democratic practice as a means of counteracting juridification and colonization. Democratic institutions, if properly designed and robustly executed, are supposed to ensure that the law does not take this pathological form but is subject to the deliberation of citizens, who thus author the laws to which they are subject (see sec. 3.4).

After TCA, then, Habermas begins to see law not as part of the problem, but as part of the solution, once he offers a more complete discourse-theoretical account of law and democracy. Nonetheless the theory of modernity still remains in his continued use of systems theory and its understanding of nonintentional integration. By insisting upon popular sovereignty as the outcome of the generation of “communicative power” in the public sphere, Habermas tries to save the substance of radical democracy. The unresolved difficulty is that in a complex society, as Habermas asserts, “public opinion does not rule” but rather points administrative power in particular directions; or, as he puts it, it does not “steer” but “countersteers” institutional complexity (1996b, chapter 8). That is, citizens do not control social processes; they exercise influence through particular institutionalized mechanisms and channels of communication. However successful democracy is in creating legitimacy, it cannot gain full control over large-scale complex societies, nor even of the necessary conditions for its own realization. In this sense, Habermas's emphasis on the limiting effect of complexity on democracy and his rejection of a fully democratic form of sociation continue the basic argument of the necessity of systems integration, even with its costs. Radical democracy may no longer be the only means to social transformation, though it is clear that it remains “the unfinished project of modernity”: realizing and transforming democracy is still a genuine goal even for complex and globalizing societies.

Stanford