Jürgen Habermas

The Jürgen Habermas
Web Resource

by Steve Robinson

Professor Dean Rehberger
English 980: Studies in Rhetoric
Michigan State University

This hypertext project began as a class project on the rhetorical theory of Jürgen Habermas for my English 980: Studies in Rhetoric class at Michigan State University. My intent is to sustain and expand this project, so it might become a valuable resource on Habermas and his work. Please direct comments or questions to robinson@edtech.mcc.edu
I am often asked how to contact Professor Habermas. Unfortunately, I do not have his e-mail address or contact information.

Sources for Habermas and His Work

 Habermas was a student of Theodor Adorno, and a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He is perhaps the last major thinker to embrace the basic project of the enlightenment, a project for which he is often attacked. When compositionists and rhetoricians pay attention to Habermas, it is usually to pair him in a theoretical debate over issues surrounding postmodernism. Foucault, Gadamer, Lyotard, etc. are often set up as his opponents. Yet the debate always seems to be a racasting of the debate between Kant and Hegel. Habermas is decidedly Kantian in his dedication to reason, ethics, and moral philosophy.

At the center of Habermas's controversial project, as it is outlined in his written work, are the contested and problematic areas of universality and rationality. Of his theoreitcal intent and his debt to important German sociologists like Marx and Weber, Jefferey Alexander notes:

To restore universality to critical rationality and to cleanse the critical tradition from its elitism, Habermas seeks to return to key concepts of Marx's original strategy ("Habermas and Critical Theory" 50).
In many ways, Habermas is engaged in the restoration of philosophical and sociological work which has been descredited or harshly criticised. Among these are theorists such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Lukacs, Sigmund Freud, G. H. Mead, and Talcott Parsons (Foss, et. al. 241) as well as contemporary critics such as Stephen Toulmin and Jean Piaget.

Habermas has no shortage of critics. His work is routinely criticized by postmodernists, poststructuralists, and feminists. A particularly damning dismissal of the political nature of contemporary critical theory is given by Edward Said, who uses Habermas as a spokesman for theory's anti-political stance.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

 Habermas's most complete exploration of the notion of the public sphere is found in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (1989). Central to many theorists in the area of print culture, the public sphere is further elaborated by Habermas in Volume Two of The Theory of Communicative Action as he discusses the distinction between lifeworld and system. As Johanna Mehan notes:

This distinction between public and private parallels, but is not identical to, the distinction he draws between system and lifeworld. On the one hand, action in the modern world is coordinated by sytems which function according to means-end rationality; the market is a paradigmatic example of such a system... On the other hand, actions are coordinated primarily by communicatively mediated norms and values, and by the socially defined ends and meanings which constitute the fabric of the lifeworld (6-7).
Mehan further states that Habermas sees the differentiation and structure of the public and private spheres as "essential to the character of modernity" (Femnists Read Habermas 6).

Habermas and Communication Theory

 Habermas's main contribution to communication theory is the elaborate theoretical apparatus he described in the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action, published in 1981. Power is a key concept in Habermas's conception of communicative rationality. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas note that the publication of this work, "brought to a provisional conclusion the intellectual efforts of twenty years of reflection and research." They see the large work by Habermas as adressing the following four general themes:

Honneth and Joas argue that the basic idea behind the two volume treatise is "that an indestructable momnet of communicative rationality is anchored in the social form of human life." This thesis "is defended in this book by means of a contemporary philosophy of language and science, and is used as as the foundation for a comprehensive social theory" (Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action).

In Moral Consciousness and Communicatative Action Habermas defines the concept of communicative action:

Communicative action can be understood as a circular process in which the actor is two things in one: an initiator, who masters situations through actions for which he is accountable, and a product of the transitions surrounding him, of groups whose cohesion is based on solidarity to which he belongs, and of processes of socialization in which he is reared (135).
Central to this social notion of language and human reason is the concept that Habermas terms validity claims, the idea by which he connects speech acts to the idea of rationality.

Discourse Ethics

Habermas defines discourse ethics as a "scaled down" version of Kant's categorical imparative--a kind of moral argumentation. Discourse ethics is built from Habermas's understanding of constructivist models of learning. He remarks that discourse ethics is:

The primary sticking point for all of us in this class will be the last category, the univeral or what Habermas refers to as U. Central to his concept of discourse ethics is the domain Habermas terms practical discourse, which owes much to the work of Stephen Toulmin and the "informal logic" movement in philosophy.

The Debate over Modernity

 When he was awarded the Adorno Prize in 1980, Habermas wrote his important essay "Modernity--An Incomplete Project." In his introduction to the essay, Thomas Docherty notes:
The occasion of the essay aligns Habermas with Adorno; yet the content of the lecture aligns him with precicely that rationalist tradition in Enlghtenment of which Adorno was enormously sceptical. Here, as in his later work of the 1980s, Habermas sees the possibility of salvaging Enlightenment rationality. The project of modernity done by eighteenth-century philosophers 'consisted of their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic', their aim being, according to Habermas here, 'the rational organization of everyday social life.' (Postmodernism 95).
Habermas appears to be the only contemporary theorist willing to defend the tradition of modernity, and he is frequently called to do so in debates with theorists like Lyotard, Gadamer, and Foucault. As Victor Vitanza's English 5352 syllabus demonstrates, rhetoricians often cast Habermas as the modernist in a debate over modernity. His course, entitled "Major Figures in Rhetoric: Habermas, Lyotard, and the problem of the Ethical Subject," explores the problems of ethics and postmodernism.

The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas

Jurgen Habermas is widely considered as the most influential thinker in Germany over the past decade [1970-80]. As a philosopher and sociologist he has mastered and creatively articulated an extraordinary range of specialized literature in the social sciences, social theory and the history of ideas in the provocative critical theory of knowledge and human interests. His roots are in the tradition of German thought from Kant to Marx, and he has been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theorists which pioneered in the study of the relationship of the ideas of Marx and Freud.' (Mezirow, 1981)

Habermas' Three Generic Domains of Human Interest

Habermas differentiates three primary generic cognitive areas in which human interest generates knowledge. These areas determine categories relevant to what we interpret as knowledge. That is, they are termed 'knowledge constitutive' -- they determine the mode of discovering knowledge and whether knowledge claims can be warranted. These areas define cognitive interests or learning domains, and are grounded in different aspects of social existence -- work, interaction and power.

Work Knowledge

Work broadly refers to the way one controls and manipulates one's environment. This is commonly known as instrumental action -- knowledge is based upon empirical investigation and governed by technical rules. The criterion of effective control of reality direct what is or is not appropriate action. The empirical-analytic sciences using hypothetical-deductive theories characterize this domain. Much of what we consider 'scientific' research domains -- e.g. Physics, Chemistry and Biology are classified by Habermas as belonging to the domain of Work.

Practical Knowledge

The Practical domain identifies human social interaction or 'communicative action'. Social knowledge is governed by binding consensual norms, which define reciprocal expectations about behaviour between individuals. Social norms can be related to empirical or analytical propositions, but their validity is grounded 'only in the intersubjectivity of the mutual understanding of intentions'. The criterion of clarification of conditions for communication and intersubjectivity (the understanding of meaning rather than causality) is used to determine what is appropriate action. Much of the historical-hermeneutic disciplines -- descriptive social science, history, aesthetics, legal, ethnographic literary and so forth are classified by Habermas as belonging to the domain of the Practical.

Emancipatory Knowledge

The Emancipatory domain identifies 'self-knowledge' or self-reflection. This involves 'interest in the way one's history and biography has expressed itself in the way one sees oneself, one's roles and social expectations. Emancipation is from libidinal, institutional or environmental forces which limit our options and rational control over our lives but have been taken for granted as beyond human control (a.k.a. 'reification'). Insights gained through critical self-awareness are emancipatory in the sense that at least one can recognize the correct reasons for his or her problems.' Knowledge is gained by self-emancipation through reflection leading to a transformed consciousness or 'perspective transformation'. Examples of critical sciences include feminist theory, psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology, according to Habermas.

Figure 1. Habermas' Three Domains of Knowledge (after Tinning, 1992)

Habermas' Critical Theory compared to that of Marx and Freire

Critical Theory agrees with that of Karl Marx in that '...one must become conscious of how an ideology reflects and distorts ... reality ... and what factors ... influence and sustain the false consciousness which it represents -- especially reified powers of domination.' Habermas' 'perspective transformation' or transformed consciousness is similar to that of Marx and is akin to that experienced by research into the way that 'sexual, racial, religious, educational, occupational, political economic and technological' ideologies create or contribute to our dependency on 'reified powers'. Habermas differs from Marx in that Marx revised Hegelian thought to claim that a transformed consciousness should lead to a predictable form of action -- for example (Marx & Engels, 1969), the abolition of private property (p 96). Habermas posits no predictable outcomes (Mezirow, 1981).

Paulo Freire's 'pedagogy of the oppressed' (1970) is also centred upon such a transformed consciousness, but is devoted to empowering the oppressed (impoverished Central American peons) by a variety of methods including self-directed, appropriate education. He also refers to the false consciousness of the oppressor, and emphasizes the need to lead the oppressor to see how 'reification' dehumanizes the oppressor as well as the oppressed. Freire's principal concern lies with the social transformation of Central American political oligarchies by educating both the oppressors and the oppressed through critical self-reflection ('conscientisation').

Habermas and Action Research

It is important to note that the educational action research movement predates Habermas considerably. Action research can readily be traced back to the end of World War II in the US when social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1946) developed the methodology. Some even surmise action research dates back to the ideas of John Dewey (1929):
'The answer is that (1) educational practises provide the data, the subject-matter, which form the problems of inquiry... These educational practises are also (2) the final test of value of the conclusions of all researches... Actual activities in education test the worth of scientific results... They may be scientific in some other field, but not in education until they serve educational purposes, and whether they really serve or not can be found out only in practise.' (p. 33)
Habermas has provided a theoretical background to the methodologies advocated by action research advocates (Kemmis & McTaggert, 1990), not vice-versa. Kemmis (1990) states that there is considerable '...debate about the extent to which action research is a research methodology or technique on one hand or a broad approach to social research and reform on the other'. Kemmis also raises the issue of where action research should be located, either as '...part of the wider field of social theory or in the narrower focus of education and the development of educational theory.' This can be readily seen by the different schools of action research, where some are concerned with '...the development of teacher's (or others') theories of education and society versus questions of social and educational change -- improvement, reform and innovation'.

Dan MacIsaac, 1996 (http://www.physics.nau.edu/~danmac)

Bibliography and Resources

Bruner, Jerome (1957). The relevance of education. N.Y.: W.W. Norton.

Dewey, John (1929). The sources of a science of education. N.Y.:Liveright.

Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. N.Y.:Herter and Herter.

Gortzen, Rene & van Gelder, Frederik (1970). Jurgen Habermas: The complete oeuvre. A bibliography of primarly literature, translations and reviews. Human Studies 2, 285-300.

Kemmis, S. & McTaggart, R. (Eds.). (1990). The action research planner. Victoria: Deakin University.

Lewin, Kurt (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34-46.

Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich (1969). The communist manifesto (Trans. unknown) (Introd. by A. J. P. Taylor). Baltimore: Penguin. (Original work published in 1848).

McCarthy, Thomas A. (1979). The critical theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.

Mezirow, Jack (1981). An critical theory of adult learning and education. Adult Education (32) 3-24.

Roderick, Rick (1986). Habermas and the foundations of critical theory. N.Y.: St. Martin's.

Sabia, Daniel R. & Wallulis, Jerald (Eds.). (1983). Changing social science : Critical theory and other critical perspectives. Albany N.Y.: State University of New York.

Schon, Donald A. (1983). The reflective practitioner : How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books

Schroyer, Trent (1973). The critique of domination: The origins and development of critical theory. Boston: Beacon Press.

Young, Robert E. (1990). A critical theory of education : Habermas and our children's future. N.Y.: Teachers' College Press.

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