Habermas in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 102

Beschreibung

Habermas's great philosophical discovery is a rousing and a modest one. Rousing because almost two centuries after the great philosophers of history Hegel and Marx he attempts once again to discover a meaning and purpose for human history; modest because he describes without bombast humanity's ability to shape its own future and deduces this ability from a phenomenon we encounter in our daily life: language. It is no longer, as in Hegel, the World-Spirit nor, as in Marx, class struggle that forms the motor of development but rather human speech. Agreement achieved through language will, says Habermas, eventually unite humanity.The wish for such an ever greater agreement, based on an unforced exchange of views, is inherent in the structure of our speech. Because as soon as anyone speaks with anyone else anywhere on earth, he must, consciously or unconsciously, raise four universal validity-claims, such as the claim to be understood. What begins so simply is developed by Habermas in an hypothesis of great breadth. In communicative action, and thus in language, there inheres a stubborn claim to rationality, even if it is constantly suppressed. Does language really compel us to rationality? Does it really have such emancipatory power or is it, in the end, just a tool? And if language really causes humanity to draw closer together, why are there still wars? Habermas answers all these questions. The book "Habermas in 60 Minutes" explains the core of his philosophy using over 60 key quotations and many examples. The chapter "Of What Use is Habermas's Discovery to Us Today?" points up the meaning of his Critical Theory for our present world and for our personal lives. The book appears as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine

graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their

excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first

inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most

professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the

English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great

care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear

understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the

needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Habermas’s Great Discovery

Habermas’s Central Idea

The Double Structure of Human Language

The Four Validity-Claims and The Stubborn Wish for Comprehension and Agreement

“Am I Driving Here or You?” – The Four Validity-Claims in Everyday Speech

Rationality as the Goal of Every Act of Linguistic Understanding

Domination-Free Discourse and Discourse Ethics

The Development of Humanity Within the Linguistic Paradigm

Communicative vs. Instrumental Reason

Of What Use Is Habermas’s Discovery for Us Today?

The Struggle Against the Colonization of the Lifeworld

Eugenics, the “Self-Optimization” of Humanity: Act Communicatively, Not Instrumentally!

The Third Millennium: A New Barbarism or the Development of Communicative Rationality?

Dare to Engage in Domination-Free Discourse!

Bibliographical References

Habermas’s Great Discovery

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is generally looked on as one of the most important philosophers of the last half of the 20th and first half of the 21st century. His work is known far beyond the borders of Europe. His magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, has by now been translated into over forty languages and is the subject of debate worldwide. Habermas has read the works of all the most significant British, American, French and German philosophers, linguists, sociologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts and integrated the ideas of these writers into his own theory. It is, in fact, unlikely that there has ever been another philosopher who succeeded, to the degree that Habermas has, in productively drawing so many key ideas, taken from research done in both present-day and classical philosophy and social science, into his own theory. But what has emerged from this is not, as one might have expected, a mere digest or synopsis of contemporary thought as a whole. No. Despite his massive erudition and the multiplicity of his intellectual interests, Habermas does in the end produce his own highly personal answer to the question of life’s sense and meaning.

His great philosophical discovery is both a rousing and a modest one. Rousing because, almost two hundred years after the great philosophers of history Hegel and Marx, Habermas attempts once again to discover a meaning for human history in its entirety, showing that there is reason in this history and that there will continue to be; modest because he describes without any rhetoric or bombast the capacity that humanity has to shape its own future and deduces this capacity, in a highly pragmatic way, from a phenomenon we encounter in our daily life.

Because, whereas for Hegel it was the mystical self-movement of the “World Spirit” that drove history on, and for Marx the drama of “class struggle”, Habermas discovers the driving motor of humanity’s development rather in a seemingly unremarkable phenomenon that surrounds us all day every day: language.

In these few brief words we have the core idea, subtle and revolutionary at the same time, of Habermas’s philosophy. What “raises us out of Nature”, what distinguishes us from plants and animals, is language. All human beings have the capacity for speech. For this reason, Habermas calls language a “species-competence” which belongs, as an innate ability, to human beings already at the moment of our birth and distinguishes us from all other living entities. Communication through language is indeed a faculty which is much more fully formed and developed in human beings than is the case with any other species. In humans it is universal.

Thus, a child that is born in deepest Bavaria but is raised in Beijing will learn to speak Chinese just as perfectly as, conversely, a Chinese child raised in Bavaria will learn to speak German, indeed even the Bavarian dialect of German.

This capacity of human beings to talk with one another is the central starting point for Habermas’s philosophy. His discovery of language to be a key phenomenon explaining mind, identity and society has, in fact, a biographical aspect to it that is not without interest. Habermas himself was born with a speech-related handicap, a so-called “hare lip”, which, even despite two operations, continued to affect his pronunciation and which often made him, as a child, the butt of other children’s mockery. Habermas himself has said that it may well have been this disability that sharpened his attention to the key significance of linguistic communication.

For Habermas, language stands both at the beginning and at the end of humanity’s history. It points the way forward for us. And not just a way leading anywhere but a way to a better future. In his famous magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, he expounds his great hypothesis regarding development both singular and collective: the learning and the exercise of language leaves profound marks on the development both of the individual and the species and culminates in an insistent claim to the necessity of ever better and ever broader understanding between human beings:

“Telos” is the Greek word for “aim” or “goal”. The sentence, therefore, means: “reaching understanding is the inherent goal of human speech”. But why? Why would language aim in every case at reaching understanding? I can, of course, use language in everyday situations to come to an understanding or agreement with other people. I can use it to arrive at a compromise with others, for example, or even to express solidarity with them and join them in realizing a shared project. But is this enough to prove that mutual understanding is the “telos”, or inherent goal, of language? Is Habermas, perhaps, being a little too optimistic here?

Language, one might object here, surely also contains tendencies directly opposite to those evoked by Habermas. I can, after all, equally well use language to curse, insult and otherwise verbally injure other people. It is well-known that words do not always lead to consensus and mutual understanding but rather, on the contrary, very often to conflict and quarrel. Habermas, of course, is aware of these objections to his central thesis. He holds, however, to this radical thesis nonetheless:

What does Habermas mean by writing that “our first sentence unequivocally expresses” the wish for consensus, that is to say, mutual agreement? This claim has, in the last analysis, a historical dimension. Indeed, it has a prehistoric one. This means nothing other than that our oldest caveman ancestor set, with the very first sentence he spoke to another caveman, a process in motion whose effects reach down to the present day and is still now leading to better and better mutual understanding between human beings. Because whatever this one caveman may actually have said to the other, one thing, says Habermas, lies beyond all question here: the caveman wished that the other should understand what he was saying because, if he had not so wished, he would never have begun to speak at all. And even if the first act of speech in human history had only been a threat or an angry warning, that is to say, an aggressive act, the person performing it surely wished at least to succeed in making the person thus spoken to understand this threat or this warning and tailor his behaviour accordingly.

If, for example, the caveman in question had stood in front of his cave and shouted: “Go away! This hole is mine!” or, as is more probable, had just emitted a loud cry, shaken his fist and shook his club, then even with this language of noises and gestures he had wanted to achieve the result of prompting the other caveman to respect his domicile and move on. In other words, he had wished to come to some sort of understanding with the other and had thereby set a process of mutual understanding in motion, even if it was at the most primitive possible level.

Or perhaps the first words spoken in human history were the warning shouts of a hunter who wanted to alert his fellow tribesman to the presence of a dangerous animal. Or maybe they were gentle hummed words with which a mother put her child to sleep. In all these cases, however, we can say that there began, with the first sentence spoken, an ever-growing exchange of sounds, gestures, words and phrases. Because once the wish for mutual understanding came to be present in the world it inevitably began to exert its peculiarly binding effect, at the end of the development of which Habermas believes there to stand, potentially, a global society in which humanity brings to realization a “universal, uncoerced consensus” of all its members, regardless of their origin, their wealth or their degree of culture. There will then come to rule no longer power or violence but rather, in a phrase of Habermas’s that has become very famous, “the unforced force of the better argument”5.

This highly positive prognosis is, Habermas makes a point of emphasizing, no idealistic assumption but rather a development which can be proven to be firmly anchored in the nature of language itself.

And Habermas does in fact succeed, in his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action and in other works preparatory to this latter, in proving, through a whole series of painstakingly precise micro-analyses, that there is contained in every one of the sentences we speak every day, i.e. in every speech-act of any kind, the seed of a later general mutual understanding, and this quite regardless of when and where these sentences are spoken. For this reason Habermas can confidently write:

Habermas, then, propounds the exciting thesis that every person that speaks automatically raises, whether he wishes to or not, certain “claims”. That is to say, he makes certain assumptions and these assumptions must, in the last analysis, tend to result in a rational mutual understanding. Because, Habermas argues, every one of us that ever moves our lips and speaks must in doing so, without stating this explicitly and perhaps without even realizing it immediately, make certain silent assumptions and must also suppose that these assumptions are correct and can be vindicated. These silent assumptions which are implicitly at play in every conversation Habermas calls “universal validity-claims”.

One of these “universal validity-claims” consists, for example, simply in the fact that, at the moment at which we start to speak, we make the assumption that the other person can both hear and understand what we are saying. That is to say, that we are speaking loudly enough and that the person spoken to can decipher what we are saying, i.e. that they speak the same national language as us and that they are not, for example, a child who will not yet have mastered the grammatical structures we are using. In short: when we say something, we assume that what is said has a good chance of being heard and understood. Conversely, we assume of our own conversation partner, indeed demand of him, that he too, if he has something to say to me, says it in a manner such that I can understand it.

And this is just a first example of a whole series of such validity-claims implicitly present in language. Habermas’s merit is that he has discovered these submerged but nonetheless effective language-internal mechanisms and drawn them up onto the surface.

The sum of these validity-claims, along with their interaction with one another, provide the impulse for an ever-expanding rational mutual understanding. Habermas’s great philosophical achievement, then, consists in the deciphering of the implicit effects of language. But that is not all. He also shows us how we can give support to these effects and allow them to develop themselves in ways directed to aims of our own. Right at the beginning of his researches in this direction he wrote:

And in his groundbreaking magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action