Metaphilosophy, Modernity, and Criticism in the Writings of Dewey and Habermas by Thomas Patrick Wolf

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy

University of Cambridge Cambridge, England June 1, 2006

Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. 4 Methodological Considerations: Citation, Parallel, and Constellation…………... 6 Critical Contexts: The Pragmatist Controversy and the Literature on Dewey and Habermas as ‘Public Thinkers’ ………………………………………... 8 The Road Ahead: Reconstructing Dewey and Habermas……………................. 12 Chapter One: John Dewey: Modernity, Metaphilosophy and Reconstruction…….…… 15 Defining the Crisis of Modernity………….……………………………………. 17 The Collapse of the Public………………..…………………………….. 17 Criticizing Specialists and the Philosophical Tradition…………….…....19 Dewey’s Response to Modernity……………………………………………….. 23 Centering the Public………….………………………………………….. 23 Rearranging the Spheres………………………………………………… 25 Rearranging the Spheres, Part I: Dewey’s Initial Reconstruction: Science and Morality………………………………………… 26 Rearranging the Spheres, Part II: Maintaining the Distinction Between Science and Art……………………………………. 29 The Deweyan Philosopher……………..……………………….……………..... 31 Philosophy as ‘Criticism’………………………………………...……... 32 Building an Interpretive Community: The Philosopher and Critic……... 33 Looking Ahead……………………………………………………….…………. 35 Chapter Two: Habermas: Modernity, Metaphilosophy, and the Unity of Reason…...… 37 Defining the Crisis of Modernity…………….……………………………….... 38 The Collapse of the Lifeworld………………………………………….. 38 The Systems Perspective……………………………………………….. 41 Habermas’s Response to Modernity……………………………………………. 42 Centering the Communicative Community: Language and Communicative Reason………………………………………………………………...… 44

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Structural Disanalogies’ in Habermas’s Thought of the Early 1980s…………………………………………………………….….……46 Rearranging the Spheres of Modernity, Part I: Science and Morality..… 48 Criticizing the Philosophical Tradition, Part I: The Debates with Kant and Rorty……..………………………………..……………..…... 50 Rearranging the Spheres and Criticizing the Philosophical Tradition, Part II: The Debate with Derrida……………….……………………...…….. 55 The Habermasian Philosopher………………………………………………….. 61 The Encyclopedic Philosopher in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action………………………………………………..… 62 Building an Interpretive Community: The Philosopher and the Critic…. 63 Conclusion………………………………………………………...……………………. 67 The Road Traveled……………………………………………………… 67 Judgment, Totality, and the Absolute………………………..…………. 69

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Introduction The work of American theorist John Dewey (1859 – 1952) and that of German theorist Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) converge on the rift ridden terrain of cultural modernity. In a cultural field marked by the fragmentation of knowledge among multiple non-overlapping specialist discourses, Dewey and Habermas saw both a crisis and an opportunity.1 Modernity presented a crisis insofar as the autonomous development of scientific, moral, and aesthetic knowledge undermined the potential for deliberative decision-making by ‘everyday’ citizens and threatened philosophy’s status as a distinct practice with authoritative, integrating claims over culture. The apparent collapse of cultural unity and philosophical authority, however, provided an opportunity to reconfigure the relationship between philosophy and the spheres of culture, and in the process, to reconstitute philosophy in a humbler form. Dewey and Habermas were not the only thinkers of their respective generations to struggle with the concept, and experience, of modernity. The self-reflexive concern with modernity can be seen as a dominant theme of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought and culture. With their belief in philosophy’s continued viability (albeit in changed form) and their generally positive valuation of science, however, Dewey and Habermas distinguished themselves from most of their respective contemporaries. Dewey’s championing of the scientific method as a model for moral knowledge rankled both American and European critics, while his faith in the democratic potential of science transgressed the narrow expectations of his pro-scientific peers.2 Similarly, Habermas’s less pessimistic stance toward technology and rationalization placed him at odds with many of his German predecessors. Whereas Heidegger mystified science, and Horkheimer and Adorno reviled the instrumental reason that purportedly underlay technological developments, Habermas insisted that modern fragmentation could be

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J. Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981), p. 6. For further commentary on Habermas’s use of the term ‘cultural modernity’, see S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), p. 254; F. Dallmayr, ‘Habermas and Rationality’, Political Theory, 16.4 (Nov. 1988), p. 559. 2 Hollinger, ‘The Problem of Pragmatism in American History’, The Journal of American History 47.1 (Jan. 1980), pp. 100 – 1.

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overcome only by incorporating scientific insights into public knowledge.3 Like Dewey, Habermas strove to recast philosophy’s office in light of science’s apparent demonstration of the fallibility and contingency of all knowledge. Each devised his own term for the project of grappling with modernity and reconstituting philosophy – Dewey termed his, which he elaborated in his major postWorld War I texts, ‘philosophical reconstruction’; Habermas, in his works of the 1980s, referred to the restoration of a ‘unity’ of ‘a reason that [had] objectively split up into its moments’.4 Insofar as these projects were called forth by mutually perceived rifts in modernity, they set forth mutually reinforcing visions for modern culture and philosophy. Both Dewey and Habermas sought to connect the specialist discourses of science, morality, and art with the concerns of ‘everyday people’ without sacrificing the benefits of disciplinary autonomy. In this sense, both thinkers sought to integrate cultural discourses (in the medium of everyday communication) without reducing distinct discourses into (what Habermas would call) a single ‘scientized’, ‘aestheticized’, or ‘moralized’ whole. Paired with this image of a reintegrated modern culture was a vision of the philosopher as an ‘interpreter’ responsible for translating specialist knowledge into publicly accessible terms and introducing non-specialist concerns into specialized practice. Understanding Dewey and Habermas’s visions for modernity and philosophy requires exploring both the subtle rearrangements of the spheres of modernity and the division of ‘interpretative labor’ that they undertook. Dewey and Habermas’s projects proceeded from the triadic, Kantian or Weberian division of culture into disjunct spheres of science, morality, and art. Without collapsing morality into a natural science, they attempted to demonstrate the usefulness of scientific methods for moral decision-making, and subsequently, to illustrate the continuities between scientific theories and moral 3

M. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in D.F. Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (San Francisco, 1993), pp. 307 – 341; M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1993), esp. pp. 3 – 42; M. Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1947); Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, p. 228; D. Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in D. Roberts (ed.), Reconstructing Theory: Gadamer, Habermas, Luhmann (Victoria, 1995), pp. 1 – 2; A. Wellmer, ‘Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment’, in R.J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Oxford, 1985), pp. 44 – 5; S.K. White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice, and Modernity (Cambridge, 1988), p. 90. 4 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System, A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston, 1987), pp. 329, 355 – 6, 397 – 8.

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propositions as (provisional) solutions to problems of contingency; neither thinker, however, thought art could be incorporated under the same rubric. Dewey and Habermas thus superimposed an additional, dyadic division over the aforementioned triadic schema: science and morality were grouped loosely together into a set of problem-solving disciplines, while art, the unincorporated outlier, was accounted for as a separate ‘experience-unifying’ or ‘world-disclosive’ discipline. To match this move from a triadic to a loosely dyadic cultural schema, Dewey and Habermas split the task of interpretation between the philosopher, who translated scientific and moral knowledge to nonspecialists, and the ‘critic’, who treated aesthetic knowledge likewise. The end product of both projects was a cultural field featuring a non-specialist public at its center, bordered on one side by the problem-solving disciplines and on the other by the aesthetic sphere. Articulating the linkages between these spheres was a community of interpreters, sustained by the distinct, but mutually presupposing, work of philosophers and critics. Methodological Considerations: Citation, Parallel, and Constellation Despite the parallels between the writings of these two thinkers, it is crucial to note that Habermas developed his metaphilosophical project of the 1980s without drawing explicitly upon Dewey. Over the course of his career, Habermas has cited Dewey, but only sparingly. A review of his writings reveals a set of Sphinx-like references to Dewey in Theory and Practice (1963), Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ (1968), Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), and Between Facts and Norms (1992), as well as in scattered interviews and magazine articles.5 Habermas’s

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Dates of publication for Habermas’s works given in the body of the text refer to the year of initial German publication. Citations to the English editions of Habermas’s works follow: J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 171, 304, 316; J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971), pp. 36, 139; J. Habermas, ‘On John Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty’, in M. Aboulafia, M. Bookman, and C. Kemp (eds), Habermas and Pragmatism (London, 2002), pp. 229 – 233; J. Habermas, Theory and Practice (London, 1974), p. 263, 272; J. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (London, 1971), pp. 66 – 9; J. Habermas, ‘Questions and Counterquestions’, in R.J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Oxford, 1985), pp. 197 – 8. Commentators on Habermas’s appropriation of pragmatism have repeatedly pointed to the limited presence of Dewey in his works. See J.P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago, 1994), p. 419; H. Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (London, 1993), p. 90; S.B. Rosenthal, ‘Habermas, Dewey, and the

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citations of Dewey formed a primary concern of my third MPhil essay, in which I examined his recent use of Dewey to articulate an ethic of subjective engagement with contingency as part of a greater ‘pragmatist critique’ of Horkheimer.6 Explicit, substantive references to Dewey, however, are nowhere in evidence in Habermas’s metaphilosophical reflections of the 1980s. Thus, in exploring the theoretical relationship between Dewey and Habermas, this study will seek to outline parallels and affinities – or ‘isomorphisms’ – between their respective projects. Dewey and Habermas should be seen as providing separately crafted but similarly configured lenses onto the metaphilosophical problematic of philosophy’s relation to the spheres of culture under conditions of modern fragmentation. The broad similarities in the contours of their projects can be partially attributed to their overlapping patterns of textual influence. The two occupied the same ‘constellation’, a loose configuration of thinkers, ideas, and texts that includes Kant, Hegel, Peirce, and Mead.7 Reinforcing this general alignment was the influence of earlytwentieth century texts on Habermas’s thought. The work of Heidegger, Lukács, and Scheler was integral to Habermas’s early, formative intellectual experiences.8 Add to these experiences his interest in Weber, Durkheim, and Piaget, and one finds Habermas attempting to interpret the post-World War II world with theoretical resources developed in Dewey’s early-twentieth century context.9 While their common sources held them within a general discursive milieu, their non-overlapping sets of interlocutors and unique historical concerns gave their respective bodies of work their distinctive idioms and argumentative thrusts. Dewey’s project took shape through disputes with late-nineteenth century neo-Kantians, logical positivists, Democratic Self’, in M. Aboulafia, M. Bookman, and C. Kemp (eds), Habermas and Pragmatism (London, 2002), pp. 210 – 1. 6 T.P. Wolf, ‘Habermas’s Use of American Pragmatism in his Critique of Horkheimer’, submitted in partial fulfillment of the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, University of Cambridge, 2005 – 2006. 7 I attribute this mode of visualizing textual relationships to Bernstein, who in turn borrowed this metaphor from Adorno and Benjamin. See R.J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, 1991), p. 8. 8 R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, 1994), p. 81. 9 For continuities in paradigms of social analysis in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American and Continental social thought, see T.L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (London, 1977).

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neo-realist political theorists, and American historians and critics such as Arthur Lovejoy and Lewis Mumford. Habermas, conversely, grappled with Western Marxism and German and American neo-pragmatism while taking up positions vis-à-vis French poststructuralists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists, the American Cultural Left, and German neo-conservatives. The effects of these divergent intellectual contexts show themselves most clearly in their respective dealings with Kantian thought. Kant’s shadow looms large in both of their metaphilosophical reflections, but Habermas’s post-Kantian philosophical project lacked the anti-Kantian sentiment that permeated Dewey’s work. As the example of Kant suggests, their theoretical projects were largely similar in their abstract outlines but disaggregated from each other by differences in detail. Consequently, in keeping with this study’s recurring cartographical metaphor, if Dewey and Habermas can be seen as offering similar maps of modernity, outlining the same cultural regions and depicting the same spatial relations between them, they employed different tools to draw those borders and detailed their maps with their own idiosyncratic embellishments. Critical Contexts: The Pragmatist Controversy and the Literature on Dewey and Habermas as ‘Public Thinkers’ Habermas’s passing references to Dewey and his contributions to pragmatism’s revival in Germany have partially fuelled scholarly interest in the parallels between their respective projects.10 Further driving interest in the Dewey-Habermas link has been Habermas’s on-going feud with the American thinker Richard Rorty. Habermas’s appeals to the Deweyian legacy, particularly vis-à-vis Rorty, have made him a key figure for antiRortyan American pragmatists. In the process of elaborating his vision of Dewey over the last two decades, Rorty has been resisted by ‘paleo-pragmatists’ who seek a more ‘historically sensitive’ reading of Dewey. By drawing out the similarities between 10

Habermas’s attempts to inject pragmatic themes into German discourse has been complemented, and at times criticized, by his fellow German theorists Karl-Otto Apel and Hans Joas. See K.-O. Apel, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism (Amherst, 1981); K.-O. Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (London, 1980); K.-O. Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective (Cambridge, 1984); H. Joas, The Creativity of Action (Oxford, 1996); H. Joas, G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of his Thought (Cambridge, 1997); H. Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory.

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Dewey’s participatory notion of democracy and Habermas’s deliberative democratic model, scholars have attempted to undercut Rorty’s presentation of Dewey as a Heideggerian-Wittgensteinian

proto-postmodernist

or

a

proto-deconstructionist

anticipation of Derrida, and, subsequently, to weaken the Rortyan doctrine of ‘ironic liberalism’ it has been devised to support.11 The confluence of interest in Habermas’s invocations of Dewey and his squabbles with Rorty has produced a body of secondary literature on the Habermas-Dewey link that preponderantly emphasizes the political dimensions of their writings.12 Dewey and Habermas are taken as co-contributors to a strand of liberal theory that emphasizes the necessity of deliberative communities of engaged citizens to the vitality of democratic society.13 As tightly delimited comparative studies of Habermas and Dewey, these works provide valuable insight into the parallels that exist between the two thinkers regarding issues of citizenship, deliberation, communication, and political institution-building. Nonetheless, such studies obscure as much as they illuminate. Dewey and Habermas are linked by an attempt not simply to outline a theory of democracy, but, more extensively, to explore and restructure the culture in which democracy operates, and, in turn, to redefine philosophy’s role within that culture. Their common project, in 11

R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Essays: 1972 – 1980 (Sussex, 1983); R. Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge, 1991); R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989); R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford, 1980). See also, R. Rorty, ‘Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein’, Political Theory 15.4 (Nov. 1987), pp. 564 – 580. Westbrook has assumed the lead in marking out a ‘paleo-pragmatist’ opposition to Rorty. Westbrook, ‘A New Pragmatism’, American Quarterly 45.3 (Sep. 1993), p. 438. Among the more cogent ‘paleo-pragmatist’ accounts include Bernstein, The New Constellation, p. 48, 207; J.T. Kloppenberg, ‘Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty’, in J.T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York, 1998), pp. 82 – 103; J.T. Kloppenberg, ‘Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?’, The Journal of American History 83.1 (1996), pp. 109, 133. For more on the general circumstances of the pragmatism’s revival in America, see Kloppenberg, ‘Pragmatism’, pp. 100 – 138. 12 Bernstein, The New Constellation, pp. 207; M. Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory (Oxford, 1997), pp. 146 – 50; T.L. Jacobson, ‘Habermas, Dewey, and Pragmatism’, in D.K. Perry (ed.), American Pragmatism and Communication Research (Mahwah, NJ, 2001), pp. 226; Kloppenberg, ‘Democracy and Disenchantment’; Kloppenberg, ‘Pragmatism’, pp. 109, 133; Rosenthal, ‘Habermas, Dewey, and the Democratic Self’, pp. 210 – 22; D.M. Shalin, ‘Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge’, American Journal of Sociology 98.2 (Sept. 1992).Bartlett has attempted a series of Deweyan critiques of Habermasian deliberative democracy. See S. Bartlett, ‘Discursive Democracy and a Democratic Way of Life’, in L.E. Hahn (ed.), Perspectives on Habermas (Chicago, 2000), pp. 367 – 386. 13 A. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (London, 1995), p. 357; C. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (London, 1989), p. 106. Suggested also by the invocation of the ‘ideal speech situation’ in W.R. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (London, 2000), p. 66.

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other words, is not merely political, but cultural and metaphilosophical. This study will thus shift the terms of the current scholarly discourse, setting aside the long-running concern with political theory to explore their reflections on modernity and philosophy.14 In doing so, it will also challenge presentations of the Dewey-Habermas relationship in articles by Robert J. Antonio and Douglas Kellner, Nikolas Kompridis, and Lawrence A. Hickman, which, despite eschewing the overwhelming focus on political theory in Dewey and Habermas, misconstrue the theoretical relationship between the two.15 While their specific errors vary, these articles are linked by two primary errors: first, they neglect Dewey and Habermas’s efforts to balance cultural integration with cultural autonomy; and second, they ignore the role philosophy was to play in such efforts. Antonio and Kellner not only ignore the metaphilosophical dimensions of Dewey’s thought, but also neglect the value he attached to maintaining specialized disciplinary discourses. Kompridis, meanwhile, falsely claims that Habermas did not present the problem-solving and world-disclosive disciplines as complementary and interdependent. Hickman, finally, erroneously argues that Habermas failed to see the methodological continuities between science and the non-scientific disciplines. Consequently, where these commentators should be noting convergences between Dewey and Habermas, they insist upon divergences. Insofar as both Dewey and Habermas sought to draw our gaze from philosophical abstractions to concrete life conditions, it might seem counterintuitive to displace issues

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Ryan, Kloppenberg, and Festenstein have gestured to further parallels: Ryan suggests similarities between ‘Habermas’s ideas of emancipatory forms of social theory and Dewey’s conception of philosophy as social criticism’; meanwhile, Kloppenberg, framing his comparative study in terms of ‘democracy, disenchantment, and modernity’, provides a fertile, if underexplored, context. Festenstein argues for the three following broad similarities between the two: first, a mutual aversion to ‘spectator theories of knowledge’ or ‘subject-centered’ notions of reason; second, a shared desire to expand definitions of rationality beyond the instrumental; and third, a mutual belief that modern fragmentation calls for collective value reconstitution. In each of these three instances, however, these parallels were proposed more as potential routes for future inquiry, rather than decisive, systematic analyses. Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory, p. 147; Kloppenberg, ‘Democracy, Disenchantment, and Modernity’; Ryan, John Dewey, p. 357. 15 R.J. Antonio and D. Kellner, ‘Communication, Modernity, and Democracy in Habermas and Dewey’, Symbolic Interaction 15.3 (Fall 1992), pp. 277 – 97; N. Kompridis, ‘On World Disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas and Dewey’, Thesis Eleven 37 (1994), pp. 29-45; L.A. Hickman, ‘Habermas’s Unresolved Dualism: Zweckrationalität as Idée Fixe’, in L.E. Hahn (ed.), Perspectives on Habermas (Chicago, 2000), pp. 504 – 7. Hickman’s critique of Habermas suffers partly from its focus on his preTheory of Communicative Action work, but equally from a lack of appreciation for the Peircean model of scientific discourse that Habermas paired with his critique of purposive-rational technology.

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of political participation and activist engagement in favor of metaphilosophical questions. As I contend, however, their metaphilosophical and cultural concerns were integral to their attempts to concretize theory and affect political change. Much as Dewey considered democracy a total way of life embracing both institutions and thought, so Habermas argued for the mutual implication of philosophy and politics in efforts to manage modernity, writing, ‘[The] pluralization of diverging universes of discourse belongs to specifically modern experience… In the framework of our culture… the thrust of this experience [has] to be worked through not only politically but philosophically’.16 Through their metaphilosophical reflections, both Dewey and Habermas developed the programmatic rationale and directives for the philosopher’s public involvement that have come to define their public personae. In discussing the two in these terms it will be possible not only to comment on existing comparative treatments of these thinkers, but also to deal with the nonoverlapping bodies of literature concerning Dewey and Habermas. The interpretation of Dewey as a ‘reconstructive’ philosopher that guides this study functions at least in part as a comment both upon the conventional presentation of Dewey as a ‘critic in the public sphere’ and upon current disagreements regarding the relative significance of scientific and artistic experience for Dewey’s thought.17 In a similar vein, an attempt will be made to qualify, deepen, and diversify the image of Habermas set forth in R.C. Holub’s Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (1991) and in Jan-Werner Müller’s Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity (2000). Given their interest in the specifically German context of much of Habermas’s work, Holub and Müller offer an overly limited picture of his vision of the philosopher. Holub both 16

Habermas, ‘Questions and Counterquestions’, p. 192; c.f. Bartlett, ‘Discursive Democracy and a Democratic Way of Life’, p. 381. For Dewey’s most concise formulation of democracy as a ‘way of life’, see J. Dewey, ‘Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us’, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925 – 1953. Volume 14: 1939 – 1941, ed. J.A. Boydston (Carbondale, 1988), pp. 224 – 230. 17 T.M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature (Albany, 1987); W.R. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (London, 2000); M.E. Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (London, 1998); L.A. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Indianapolis, 1992); R.B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991). While not attempting to provide the level of intellectual biographical detail that distinguishes the work of Westbrook and Ryan, the following study is generally sympathetic to their common argument for the centrality of democracy to Dewey’s thought; indeed, as I contend, it was around a centrally located public and in the service of a democratic way of life (however broadly defined) that Dewey rearranged the spheres of culture and delineated philosophy’s role.

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understates the importance of Habermas’s debates with Derrida (and, in turn, with Rorty) in the formation of his notion of philosophy and obscures the interpretative responsibilities of the Habermasian philosopher. Müller, meanwhile, wholly omits Habermas’s interactions with non-German interlocutors, thus missing Habermas’s most well developed discussions regarding the philosopher’s responsibilities and the state of modernity.18 At all times, Habermas must be seen as a syncretic thinker willing to appropriate ideas from, and engage in debates with, thinkers from a variety of backgrounds. For Habermas, seemingly all of Western thought was open ground for his theoretic practice. The Road Ahead: Reconstructing Dewey and Habermas Explaining Dewey’s reconstructive vision entails a ‘reconstructive’ effort of a second sort. Dewey’s collected writings comprise thirty-seven volumes, representing several decades of thought and writing. I have attempted to limit distortions to his thought by concentrating on his major works from the close of World War I through 1938. In this, Dewey’s ‘philosophical’ period, his metaphilosophical concerns moved to the fore and he began to elaborate his reconstructive program. The works that figure most prominently in this period include not only Reconstruction in Philosophy, The Quest for Certainty, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, which Habermas encountered in the 1960s, but also The Public and its Problems, Experience and Nature, and Art as Experience.19 Reconstructing Habermas’s response to modernity requires a similar approach. Habermas’s oeuvre extends over a half-century, engaging a variety of topics from an array of methodological perspectives. Crafting a systematic account of Habermas’s thought, in all its guises, represents a challenge far beyond the scope of the following

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R.C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (London, 1991); J.-W. Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity (London, 2000). Pensky has committed similar errors and oversights. See M. Pensky, ‘Jürgen Habermas and the Antinomies of the Intellectual’, in P. Dews (ed.), Habermas: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1999), pp. 211 – 237. 19 J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 2005); J. Dewey, Experience and Nature (London, 1929); J. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938); J. Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Chicago, 1954); J. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925 – 1953, vol. 4: 1929, J.A. Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, 1984); J. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston, 1957).

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study, which restricts its attention to a single phase of his work, namely, the ‘philosophical phase’ of the 1980s. Bounded roughly by his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his Postmetaphysical Thinking (1988), this philosophical phase stood between his sociologically and linguistically dominated work of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reflections on legal and political theory that he initiated at the close of the 1980s.20 Multiple themes run through even this fairly clearly delineated set of texts; I have principally drawn upon those passages and articles that foreground Habermas’s concerns with generic boundaries and the role of the philosopher, and which are, in turn, linked by a chain of references and citations. Their projects did not take shape in vacuums, but with reference to past precedents and contemporary debates. In order to understand Dewey and Habermas’s respective projects, it will thus be necessary also to consider their criticisms of rival thinkers. This study engages these interlocutors (including Kant, Lippmann, Rorty, and Derrida) from a standpoint internal to Dewey and Habermas’s thought.21 While their interpretations of these thinkers were not always the most hermeneutically sensitive, such interpretations regarding the difficulties and threats inherent in the work of their predecessors and contemporaries nonetheless crucially informed both thinkers’ work. As Dewey and Habermas’s writings show, philosophical battles are waged as frequently against subtle diffractions, vague shadows, and straw men as between full-bodied combatants. The following study will be divided into two major chapters, the first focusing on Dewey, the second on Habermas. Each chapter encompasses three subsections, moving from the thinker’s diagnosis of modernity, to his response to modernity, and concluding with his vision for the philosopher and the critic. As noted previously, uniting these

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J. Habermas, Nachtmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt Am Main, 1988). Other works placed within this grouping include J. Habermas, Moralbewusstein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt Am Main, 1983); J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). Rasmussen has suggested The Theory of Communicative Action as a point of transition. See D.M. Rasmussen, ‘The Dilemmas of Modernity’, in D.M. Rasmussen & J. Swindal (eds), Jürgen Habermas: Volume II (4 vol., London, 2002), p. 81. See also Holub, Jürgen Habermas, p. 3; Bernstein, Introduction to Habermas and Modernity, p. 15. For commentary on Habermas’s early works, see R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, 1993); T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, 1984). 21 T. McCarthy, Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, p. xi.

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reconstructions of Dewey and Habermas’s thought is the claim that both thinkers were engaged in parallel attempts to manage modern fragmentation. These attempts produced isomorphic maps of modernity featuring a loosely dyadic arrangement of problemsolving and aesthetic disciplines around a central non-specialist public sphere. More importantly, Dewey and Habermas articulated mutually reinforcing images of the philosopher as a single interpreter amidst a community of interpreters dedicated to maintaining communication between the specialist spheres and the non-specialist public.

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John Dewey: Modernity, Metaphilosophy, and Reconstruction World War I inflicted tremendous physical damage upon the European countryside and its populace. Dewey, however, read that epochal clash in more abstract terms. Rather than a storm of steel, Dewey’s World War I was a morality play, the faltering of Everyman, who, with his impoverished knowledge and outmoded systems of meaning, fell victim to the circumstances created by the machina of industrialization. While the immediate implications of World War I were readily apparent to Dewey, his understanding of the depth and breadth of modern crisis, and, in turn, his program for managing modernity, evolved only slowly, plotted out over the course of nearly two decades. Six works contributed significantly to his overall assessment of modernity in the post-War period, specifically, Reconstruction in Philosophy (RP, 1920), The Public and Its Problems (PP, 1927), Experience and Nature (EN, 1929), The Quest for Certainty (QC, 1929), Art as Experience (AE, 1934), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (LTI, 1938). Although linked by concerns with modernity and metaphilosophy, these works can be resolved into three intertwined strands of thought. The first, longest running strand represents Dewey’s ‘proper’ or ‘initial’ reconstructive thought and encompasses RP, PP, EN, QC, and LTI. Reconstruction involved the ‘operationalization’ of moral decisionmaking, the reattachment of the spheres of science and morality to the public sphere, and the revision of philosophy’s relationship to science and morals. This reconstructive project developed around the second, political strand found in PP. In this work, Dewey firmly affixed the democratic public at the center of his vision for the proper organization of modern knowledge. In the midst of elaborating his ‘proper’ or ‘initial’ reconstructive project, and, in the wake of his political reflections, a third, complementary strand of thought emerged, which was concerned more centrally with art. The texts that figure most prominently in this strand are EN and AE. In order to see the ‘bigger picture’ of modernity and philosophy that Dewey presented, these strands must be synthesized. This synthesis will proceed through three stages. First, Dewey’s full-fledged image of modernity will be reconstructed, beginning with PP and opening outward to draw in the ‘reconstructive’ texts that contributed to this

15

view. The image that will emerge is that of a field of modernity fragmented first along its horizontal dimension between the involuted, ‘expert’ spheres of art, science, and morality, and subsequently along the vertical dimension with a division between philosophy and the remainder of culture. We will then turn to his rearrangement of the fragmented topos of modernity, exploring first his remaking of the sphere of morality on the model of scientific problem-solving, and second, his reconceptualization of the work of art. Finally, Dewey’s understanding of the new role awaiting philosophy, that of interpreter, mediator, or liaison, will be presented. Throughout, Dewey’s thought will be framed in terms of those problematics (meaning ‘desiccation’, cultural fragmentation, disciplinary overspecialization, philosophical obfuscation) which also structured Habermas’s

thought,

and

those

solutions

(controlled

integration,

renewed

democratization, philosophical mediation, and the collaborative nature of knowledge interpretation) on which both thinkers converged. Linked with this presentation of Dewey’s thought will be three interlocking propositions. First, as PP makes clear, Dewey’s diagnosis and response to modernity attributed the plight of the public not to an inherent flaw in participatory democracy, but rather, to a flaw in the organization of knowledge in cultural modernity. Dewey’s reconstructive project assumed the democratic public as the ‘center’ around which modern culture was to be rearranged. Second, while Dewey’s reconstructive project was initially concerned with the spheres of science and morality, it gradually expanded to include the aesthetic sphere. Reconstruction accommodated art, however, only with some difficulty. Dewey perceived the need to distinguish the aesthetic from the scientific, creating a map of modernity that featured a loosely bipartite division between science and morality, on one side, and art, on the other, which he subsequently imposed upon Kant’s tripartite map of modernity. Third, along with this dyadic distinction, Dewey introduced the ‘critic’, a collaborator in the philosopher’s interpretative enterprise. The end product of this work was a map of modernity that featured the public as the central repository of the knowledge derived from the peripheral disciplines of science, morality, and art; maintaining the links between the public and the expert cultures was the activity of a community of interpreters, comprised of philosophers and critics. For Dewey, ultimately,

16

democracy would thrive only insofar as culture was reintegrated, collaboratively and publicly, through the combined resources of publics, experts, and interpreters. Defining the Crisis of Modernity The Collapse of the Public Dewey’s major works of the post-World War I period were rooted in a narrative of modern crisis featuring the modern ‘public’ as its protagonist. In Dewey’s terms, a ‘public’ referred to a set of individuals mutually implicated in the consequences of individual or group behavior and decision-making. With the rise of industry, Dewey argued, the transparent, localized webs of interrelationship and decision-making characteristic of the face-to-face community were increasingly displaced by opaque, ubiquitous fields of influence. By virtue of the sheer scale of industry’s operations, the small, isolated publics of pre-industrial America were amalgamated into a single public implicated in industry’s all consuming field of influence.22 While the individual could experience the effects of industry in his daily life, the origins of those effects were beyond his comprehension. Subsequently, in the absence of a coherent understanding of the forces shaping its world, the general population could not recognize itself as a public, as a single interest group with a stake in regulating industrial growth. Thus, with the ‘invasion’ of the ‘local face-to-face community’ by industrial forces, the public transformed from a body of citizens self-reflexively aware of their common circumstances and interests into a fragmented group of individuals who ‘felt’ their plight without ‘perceiving’ it.23 Although Dewey introduced the ‘public’ as a political concept, the crisis faced by the public was not, in his view, a crisis of democracy per se. Consider briefly the insurgent realist democratic sentiment against which Dewey wrote. Dewey’s immediate target in PP was the journalist Walter Lippmann, a harsh critic of pragmatism whose 22

Dewey, PP, p. 126. For a thoroughgoing criticism of Dewey’s public as an insufficiently determinate and potentially retrograde concept of political organization, see Westbrook, John Dewey, pp. 305, 317 – 8. 23 Dewey, PP, p. 131. See also pp. 130, 133 – 4. For continuities between Dewey’s analysis and the general thesis of ‘interdependence’ that appeared to shape much of social inquiry in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, see Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science, pp. 241, 252.

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works Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925) questioned the public’s capacity for critical thought, and, subsequently, proposed a transition to a new era of American politics in which governance by a cadre of experts would replace the nineteenth-century ideal of mass political participation. In criticizing Lippmann, and, by extension, the realist cadre of Charles Merriam, Harold Gosnell, and Harold Lasswell, Dewey railed against a general trend in post-World War I political thought that threatened to marginalize the non-expert’s role in democratic governance.24 Counter to his realist opponents, Dewey offered an image of a democratic society based upon the public exchange, and the communal scrutiny, of subjective experience. As he argued, ‘the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy’, or, alternatively, ‘the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion’.

25

Dewey envisioned democratic communication as a means of reconstituting the selfreflexive unity of identity that the modern public lacked. By communicating their experiences to others, members of the public could come to see their mutual implication in similar sets of circumstances. With this recognition, a ‘scattered, mobile and manifold public’ could become a coherent public, united by knowledge of a common situation and galvanized by communally derived plans of action.26 As the vigor with which Dewey proclaimed his allegiance to his unique brand of democracy suggests, the crisis of modernity did not arise from an inherent flaw in the democratic process. Indeed, the general model of democratic communication was still viable and, moreover, necessary. From Dewey’s standpoint, if the public was to extricate itself from its state of industrial serfdom, it would only do so democratically. Accepting the merits of democracy in the abstract, Dewey was more concerned with realizing democracy in modernity; thus, he turned his attention to the culture in which industrial democracy operated. Premised as it was upon a model of the communicative exchange of individualized perspectives, Deweyan democracy presumed a fund of meaning upon which individuals could draw to articulate their experience in 24

‘Democratic realism’ received a boost in the late 1920s and 1930s by Freudian psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism, both of which suggested the deep-rooted irrationality of the typical individual’s behavior and decision-making. Ryan, John Dewey, pp. 25, 201, 209, 216 – 7; Westbrook, John Dewey, pp. 280 – 293, 300. 25 Dewey, PP, pp. 152 – 3. See also pp. 15 – 6, 35, 126, 146, 148 – 9, 208. 26 Ibid, pp. 148, 152 – 3.

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generally accessible terms. Surveying the field of modern discourse, however, Dewey found a ‘Babel’ of ‘signs and symbols’, a welter of unreconciled ways of grasping and articulating experience that rendered shared meaning ‘impossible’.27 Scattered complexes of meaning were not the only cause for Dewey’s concern. Note again his description of the archetypal industrial subject: an agent overwhelmed by complexity, lacking an understanding of the industrial processes rapidly penetrating and remaking the texture of everyday life along all its dimensions, whether economic, political, or social. Beyond lacking the resources to articulate his experience to others, the industrial subject lacked the knowledge to make sense of his experiences for himself. The Deweyan crisis of modernity was thus a crisis of knowledge and meaning. Criticizing Specialists and the Philosophical Tradition In PP, Dewey attributed fragmentation largely to the post-War scientific community, which owing to ‘conceit of possession and authority’ and ‘contempt or disregard of human concern in its use’, generated knowledge that was, from the standpoint of the public, esoteric and impenetrable.28 Rather than articulate their findings in ways that suggested continuities between specialized projects and everyday concerns, scientists offered up knowledge that was ‘merely’ technical. In his critique of American scientists, Dewey signaled his dissatisfaction with the processes of specialization that had come to define early twentieth century academia. The late-nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a full-scale, professionalized academic culture in America. With the growth of professional research institutions came increasingly fine divisions in intellectual labor, producing a field of knowledge divided among an ever widening array of disciplines. For many thinkers at the turn of the century, the ultimate fruit of specialization was to be an increase in the store of popular knowledge, brought about by cooperative communities of interested scholars; however, as Dewey’s writings suggest, professionalization had, by 1927, collapsed in upon itself. Just as the minutiae of university politics appeared to distract academics from their social ‘responsibilities’, so

27 28

Ibid, p. 141 – 2, 145 – 6. Ibid, pp. 175 – 6. See also ibid, p. 172.

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the rapidly elaborating network of professional associations seemed to exaggerate the isolation of the lettered from the masses.29 PP, in this sense, was anguished plea to consummate the promise of professionalization in the face of its apparent collapse. Dewey’s criticisms of the post-War scientific community were, undoubtedly, damning. Taken in the context of his collected output of this period, however, this strand of critique represented merely one element of a far more sweeping assault upon an inveterate Western tendency to divide and hierarchalize the field of culture. Here, Dewey’s political writings merged with a second strand of thought that both predated PP and continued through it, namely, his metaphilosophical reflection on the status of philosophy and the role of the philosopher in modernity. If, from Dewey’s perspective, empowering the public required a renovation of prevailing disciplinary practices, such a renovation could be achieved only if the philosophical imperatives that had created, and continued to maintain, modern fragmentation were neutralized. Although Dewey’s critique of the philosophical tradition left scarcely any philosopher unscathed, he reserved his harshest criticisms for Kant. Dewey did not consider Kant to be the first philosopher to endorse cultural fragmentation; nevertheless, he held Kant and his legions of neo-Kantian exegetes accountable for shaping the general contours of modern Western thought. Educated within the New England stronghold of late-nineteenth century neo-Kantianism, Dewey perceived Kantian thought as a very real philosophical obstacle; much of his early experimentation with Hegelian themes arose in opposition to the neo-Kantian doctrines entertained by his teachers. In moving into the era of post-Kantian philosophy, Dewey never abandoned his anti-Kantian polemic. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, Dewey struggled both to explain, and subsequently, to manage, the complicated patrimony Kant willed to modern man.30 In the immediate wake of World War I, Dewey’s primary concern was with the ‘horizontal’ division between the spheres of scientific and moral knowledge. As the 29

S. Biel, Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910 – 1945 (London, 1992), p. 4 – 29; S. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), p. 225, 464, 470; Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science, pp. 18 – 9, 211 – 228; J. Higham, ‘The Matrix of Specialization’, in A. Oleson and J. Voss (eds), The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860 – 1920 (London, 1979), pp. 3 – 7; B. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge Massachusetts, 1860 – 1930 (London, 1977), pp. 451 – 2, 565 – 71. 30 Dewey, QC, pp. 8 – 9, 11 – 4, 22, 216, 234; Dewey, RP, pp. 17 – 8, 21 – 3, 43 – 9, 121; Hickman, Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, p. 37; Westbrook, John Dewey, pp. 348 – 50.

20

Greeks detected, and Kant appeared to recognize, empirical desires or natural states provided unstable grounds for those striving to model moral decision-making in absolute terms. Like his Greek predecessors, Dewey argued, Kant solved this problem by positing ‘the notion of an isolation of the two fields [of science and morality] so complete that there [would be] no possible overlapping and hence no possibility of interference’.31 In an attempt to isolate morals from the influence of contingent empirical fact, Kant established a wholesale distinction between the noumenal realm of rational moral universality and the phenomenal realm of empirical event.32 In this manner, Kant permitted moral knowledge, maintained by purely formal rational thought, to develop independent of technical knowledge. From Dewey’s standpoint, Kant’s invidious distinctions had legitimated the modern impulse toward fragmentation, giving license to further attempts to balkanize culture. Spiraling outward from Kant’s initial distinctions were a series of further divisions since pursued to the minutest detail, producing a cultural field riven by disciplinary boundaries ‘into independent and insulated branches of learning’. Scanning the cultural field, Dewey observed, ‘Anthropology, history, sociology, morals, economics, political science, go their own ways without constant and systematized fruitful interaction’.33 Insofar as Kant and his neo-Kantian exegetes drove wedges between the spheres of experience, the cultural field, at the level of the empirical, was thus fragmented horizontally into a set of non-overlapping disciplines. Within these horizontal cultural divisions lay the cause of the crises that troubled Dewey – not only the apparent extension of industrial control over the public, but also the heightened severity of modern warfare seen in World War I. As Dewey was fond of suggesting, the moral and social sciences had not changed appreciably since the Scientific Revolution. Without being held accountable for changing modern realities, scientific knowledge became unrelated to the concrete situations of actors, resulting in a dangerous disjunction between technological capability and popular self-concepts and values. As Dewey argued, ‘[m]aterial dealt with by specialized abstractive processes comes to have a psychological independence and completion which is converted – 31

Dewey, QC, p. 47. Ibid, p. 49. 33 Dewey, LTI, p. 508; Dewey, PP, p. 171 32

21

hypostatized – into objective independence and self-sufficiency’.34 Despite being increasingly enmeshed in a world constructed by science, modern actors were confronting a modern world with ideas suited to a pre-scientific world. Dewey’s modern subject was ignorant of science’s potentialities and effects, a state of ignorance fostered in large part by the sequestering of scientific knowledge in a sphere that was categorically disjunct from the world of everyday affairs. The subject lacked not only knowledge of the scientific processes shaping modern life, but also a moral system sufficiently complex and responsive to cope with the new, international patterns of causality initiated by industrialization.35 Intertwined with Dewey’s critique of the ‘horizontal’ fragmentation sanctioned by Kantian philosophy was a critique of the ‘vertical’ fragmentation it fostered, primarily through its emphasis upon the ‘private’ epistemology of the philosopher. According to Dewey, ‘There is not anything overt, observable and temporal or historical in the Kantian machinery’, for the ‘forms and categories’ according to which phenomena were arranged ‘are as inaccessible to observation as were the occult forms and essences whose rejection was a prerequisite of development of modern science’.36 The Kantian philosopher’s mind, from Dewey’s standpoint, represented a sort of black box; there were no grounds within the transcendental system to challenge its categories. In the absence of such grounding, the Kantian philosopher enjoyed an unalloyed authority over the sciences, maintaining and extending the tradition of the supra-scientific first philosophy initiated in pre-modern times. The Kantian philosopher, from his ‘spectatorial’ remove, thus became the focus of modernity, the stable, central point above experience against which all knowledge was checked. In light of this critique of Kantian epistemology and juristic privilege, the field of modernity, as perceived by Dewey, assumes its fullest shape. As a result of the machinations of Kant and his exegetes, the industrial subject inherited a field of culture where knowledge was evacuated to the edges, sealed off from intercourse with the public world through rigid disciplinary boundaries. Cultural authority, meanwhile, resided above individual and communal experience in the office of the philosopher. By virtue of its 34

Dewey, QC, p. 174. Dewey, LTI, pp. 507, 535; Dewey, RP, pp. 125. 36 Dewey, QC, p. 231. 35

22

horizontal and vertical cleavages, modernity presented a two-fold challenge to the Deweyan philosopher, namely, that of unifying the fragmented cultural field across its horizontal fault lines while simultaneously eradicating the juristic privilege claimed by philosophy. Only in this way could man be made at home in modernity. Dewey’s Response to Modernity Centering the Public Guiding Dewey’s rearrangement of the spheres of modernity and revision of the responsibilities of philosophy was an attempt to filter expert knowledge back into public discourse, and in turn, to position the democratic public squarely in the center of the new map of modernity. Dewey’s critique of the post-War specialist culture assumed that publicity was a necessary condition of knowledge qua knowledge. ‘The schools may suppose that a thing is known when it is found out’; but, as Dewey countered, ‘[A] thing is fully known only when it is published, shared, socially accessible’.37 Knowledge, for Dewey, was better understood in terms of ‘dialogue’, rather than ‘soliloquy’. Where expert-dominated cultures placed primary value on specialization, the ideal Deweyan democratic culture would emphasize communication and dissemination. Under such conditions, the involuted ‘private knowledge’ characteristic of the extant disciplines would be converted into ‘public knowledge’, a body of ideas that could be drawn upon by the public to make sense of modernity38 With the shift of specialized knowledge from ‘private’ to ‘public’ came a similar alteration in the proper center of the field of modernity. Properly construed, knowledge was not to reside on the outer fringes of the modern topos, sealed away in the specialized disciplines, but rather, was to be directed always toward the public, the space of commonality that stood at the center of the manifold spheres of modernity. Concluding his revision of the expert’s relationship with knowledge, Dewey wrote:

37 38

Dewey, PP, p. 176. Ibid, p. 173. See also pp. 207, 218.

23

Inquiry, indeed, is a work which devolves upon experts. But their expertness is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon which the former depend… It is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns.39 Through his critique of expert cultures, Dewey premised a new end for knowledge. Rather than seek a continual advancement of knowledge for its own sake, a hyperspecialized disciplinary orientation that only produced further fragmentation and public powerlessness, knowledge was always to be sought as an addition to the knowledge of a communicating public, a contribution to the ability of non-specialists to understand and manage their circumstances. The public, in this sense, became the hub of modernity, the focus of all attempts to expand human knowledge and the repository into which all newly generated knowledge was to be deposited. Integral to this project was Dewey’s rejection of ‘reason’ as a philosophical term of art. Wrapped up within that term, he suggested, was the counterproductive heritage of Kantian thought. In reason’s place, Dewey inserted a concept of ‘intelligence’: Reason, as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality and regularity into experience, strikes us more and more as superfluous – the unnecessary creation of men addicted to traditional formalism and to elaborate terminology. Concrete suggestions arising from past experiences, developed and matured in the light of the needs and deficiencies of the present, employed as aims and methods of specific reconstruction, and tested by success or failure in accomplishing this task of readjustment, suffice. To such empirical suggestions used in constructive fashion for new ends the name intelligence is given.40 Whereas reason, in Dewey’s lexicon, ministered to the absolute, ‘intelligence’ responded to experience. To act intelligently was to interact with the world through a set of experimentally developed ideas, to test constantly one’s store of knowledge against reality. Intelligence, in this sense, represented both a process by which experimental ideas were gathered, developed, and tested and a disposition, a willingness to tackle ambiguity 39 40

Ibid, p. 208 – 9. Dewey, RP, pp. 95 – 6. See also pp. 97 – 9.

24

and contingency. The Deweyan subject, as experimenter and tool-maker, was to live not rationally, but intelligently.41 Rearranging the Spheres To balance an ‘intelligent’ public’s need for information with the evident gains associated with specialization, Dewey sought a measured or modulated integration.42 Insofar as he derided Kant’s schema of non-overlapping cultural spheres maintained by a ‘hard and fast division of interests, concerns and purposes of human activity,’ Dewey nonetheless perceived the cultural field as populated by non-redundant disciplines.43 As Dewey noted, ‘[E]ach type of subject-matter is entitled to its own characteristic categories, according to the questions it raises and the operations necessary to answer them’.44 In other words, philosophy was not to advocate a wholesale collapse of disciplinary distinctions. In seeking to maintain a degree of disciplinary differentiation, Dewey conceded not only the beneficial effects of specialization, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the ever-outward spiraling nature of knowledge. In this respect, Dewey argued, ‘Philosophy has often entertained an ideal of a complete integration of knowledge… [But] diversification of discoveries and the opening up of new points of view and new methods… defeats the idea of any complete synthesis of knowledge upon an intellectual basis’.45 The humility of the Deweyan philosopher was both principled and practical. Knowledge of the whole, once it had expanded to such sprawling proportions and muddled diversity, simply lay beyond the comprehension of the individual. Consequently, with the shift to the Deweyan paradigm of philosophy came a rejection of the quest for totality.

41

Dewey, QC, pp. 169 – 70, 211. Cf. Antonio and Kellner, ‘Communication, Modernity, and Democracy’, pp. 290, 292 43 Dewey, RP, p. xxxi. 44 Dewey, QC, p. 172. 45 Ibid, p. 249. 42

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Rearranging the Spheres, Part I: Dewey’s Initial ‘Reconstruction’ of Science and Morality The quest to unify without reduction or totalization played itself out most prominently in Dewey’s attempt to reconcile the autonomous spheres of science and morality, as announced in RP and continued in QC and LTI. This project relied upon a definition of ‘science’ that was, in many ways, uncharacteristic of American philosophical discourse of Dewey’s time. While the various strains of positivism that coursed through American thought in the opening decades of the twentieth century inherited the legacy ‘of Cartesian dualism, of the British empiricist tradition with its psychological atomism, and of the Kantian solution to Humean skepticism’, Dewey’s conception of science was rooted in lines of thought that had emerged in explicit opposition to positivism, such as ‘Hegel’s critique of “sense certainty”, Charles Peirce’s Pragmatism, and William James’s functional psychology’.46 Unlike his positivist contemporaries, who applied the label ‘scientific’ to knowledge that assumed a certain empirical form, Dewey conceived science ‘methodologically’, or in terms of the ‘experimental’ logic that guided the production of knowledge.47 At its most basic procedural level, science represented a process of ‘inquiry’, ‘discovery’, or, as Dewey alternatively characterized it, ‘a mode of directed practical doing’.48 As the experiments of Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein’s work in the field of relativity had demonstrated to Dewey, timeless, spectatorial knowledge of the 46

Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, pp. 45 – 6; M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923 – 1950 (London, 1973), pp. 61 – 2; Kloppenberg, ‘Pragmatism’, pp. 106 – 7; Westbrook, John Dewey, pp. 139, 141. While perhaps descended from Peirce and James, Dewey’s relationship with his fellow (older) pragmatists was more complicated than Caspary’s rough genealogy suggests. As Sleeper notes, Dewey was suspicious of the Kantian elements of Peirce’s thought, and thus engaged in a highly selective and fairly liberal reinterpretation of key Peircean concepts. R.W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (London, 1986), pp. 4, 47 – 50. See also Ryan, John Dewey, p. 72. 47 Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, pp. 48 – 9; Westbrook, John Dewey, p. 141. As his biographers have suggested, Dewey appears to have been acclimated to the beneficence of technology at an early age. His boyhood home of Burlington, Vermont was a hub of the New England manufacturing and timber industries, and save for a short stint as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, spent most of his life in metropolises that were being radically remade by the advent of the machine age. By the time Dewey had begun his formal graduate study of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, he had spent several years studying not only the biological sciences, but also, and perhaps more formatively, the debates over evolutionary biology. See Hickman, Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, pp. 2 – 4; Ryan, John Dewey, pp. 44, 57; Westbrook, John Dewey, p. 5. 48 Dewey, QC, p. 20.

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physical world was unachievable. The individual was necessarily implicated within the world, producing knowledge that bore the imprint of his spatially and temporally particular position. In light of this circumstance, the logic of discovery regarded received theories ‘critically’; in other words, Dewey noted near the outset of RP, ‘[Knowledge is] something to be tested by new experiences rather than as something to be dogmatically taught and obediently received. Its chief interest in even the most carefully tested readymade knowledge is the use which may be made of it in further inquiries and discoveries’.49 While knowledge was conditionally useful, it was never settled.50 By evaluating new experiences in light of old, and vice versa, it was possible to reshape knowledge to account more productively for contingencies. The interplay between theoretical standard and empirical novelty generated a mode of experience that Dewey termed ‘constructively self-regulative’.51 The ideas that scientists held were nothing more than tools, fashioned provisionally for concrete purposes arising from a constantly shifting physical situation. From the example of scientific inquiry, Dewey fashioned the ‘operationalist’ notion of truth that underlay his reconstructive project. Drawing upon the notions of instrumentality that informed scientific inquiry, Dewey wrote: ‘If ideas… are instrumental to an active reorganization of the given environment… then the test of their validity and value lies in accomplishing this work. If they succeed in their office, they are reliable, sound, valid, good, true’.52 Contrary to pre-scientific notions of truth, which designated as ‘true’ those ideas that aligned with a preordained, unchanging body of beliefs, Dewey’s instrumentalist truth referred to the productivity of ideas as guidelines for action. In this sense, ‘truth’, Dewey explained, was best understood as an adverb. Should a given theory aid the scientist’s manipulation of his environment for specified ends, the theory could be said to lead him ‘truly’ through the world.53 Surveying the field of morality from the territory of science, Dewey envisioned a revolution in moral norms through an importation of scientific insights. While Dewey 49

Dewey, RP, pp. 33 – 4. Dewey, LTI, pp. 8 – 9, 112 – 3; Dewey, QC, pp. 163, 236; Dewey, RP, pp. 96 – 7. 51 Dewey, LTI, pp. 13, 105 – 113, 247; Dewey, QC, pp. 68, 70, 138, 149, 163, 217; Dewey, RP, pp. 94 – 6, 159. 52 Dewey, RP, p. 156. 53 Ibid, p. 159; Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, pp. 57 – 8, 126. 50

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bemoaned the popular ‘distrust’ of science, he sought to avoid ‘scientizing’ morality, understood alternatively as collapsing the absolutes of religion and transcendental philosophy into a simple empiricism or reducing morality to a laboratory procedure. In other words, Dewey understood his challenge to consist of the revision of moral norms to suit mankind’s emerging interests without sacrificing the regulative authority that was traditionally associated with absolutist moral systems.54 To achieve this renovation of morals, Dewey

generalized his statements regarding the contingency and

instrumentalism of scientific theory to moral law. ‘A moral law, like a law in physics’, Dewey wrote, ‘is not something to swear by and stick to at all hazards; it is a formula of the way to respond when specified conditions present themselves’.55 Just as scientific laws emerged from an interplay between empirical fact and the observer’s positionality, so moral law represented a temporally and spatially specific response to emerging problems.56 The process of constructing moral norms, consequently, was to be understood as ‘operative’, not ‘contemplative’, envisioned not as a striving for ends as ‘limit[s] to be reached’, but rather, as an ‘active process of transforming the existent situation’, the ‘ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, [and] refining’.57 Reconceived in this way, the body of moral laws thus shifted from a set of descriptions of noumenal reality distinct from the sphere of human action, to a collection of principles designed to attain specific human ends through action.58 Dewey’s reconstructed ethics was not only operational, but communally regulated.59 Deweyan moral decision-making was to be a transparent process, conducted in light of ‘public, objective and shared consequences’.60 As a single, limited observer confronted by a plural reality, the individual necessarily relied upon a community of interpreters to make sense of his surroundings; simultaneously, as a single respondent to

54

Dewey, QC, pp. 86, 200, 204, 207, 218; Dewey, RP, p. 160. Dewey, QC, p. 222. 56 Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, pp. 121 – 2. 57 Dewey, RP, p. 177. 58 Dewey, QC, p. 111; Dewey, RP, pp. 122 – 4. 59 Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, pp. 60, 64. As Caspary notes, ‘This is, of course, an idealized view of science. Real scientific communities – even the smaller-scale, more autonomous, and less frenetic ones of Dewey’s time – have their share of hierarchy and privilege, uncivil conflict, ideology, rigidity, and even occasional outright fraud. Dewey, however, argues in terms of the norms that constitute the practice of science rather than the motivation and behavior of individual scientists’. Ibid, p. 65. 60 Dewey, QC, p. 38. 55

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problems affecting the group as a whole, his proposed norms were subject to arbitration for their perceived communal applicability. The individual, in this sense, was responsible not only for the effects of his decisions upon his own well-being, but also for the social consequences of his choices. Dewey thus bound discrete individuals into a community of collaborative problem-solving, which drew upon its collective resources to mediate individual judgment and orient collective action.61 Rearranging the Spheres, Part II: Maintaining the Distinction between Science and Art While Dewey drew science and morality together by refashioning morality on the model of a scientific problem-solving discipline, the aesthetic sphere seemed to resist a similar integration.62 Dividing the scientific from aesthetic practices, according to Dewey, were differences in purpose, and, subsequently, differences in the type of meaning scientific and aesthetic practice offered the non-specialist public.63 The scientist, according to Dewey, was ‘interested in problems’: ‘Of course he cares for their resolution. But he does not rest in it; he passes on to another problem using an attained solution only as a stepping stone from which to set on foot further inquiries’.64 As Dewey would alternatively conceptualize the scientist’s relationship to experience, the scientist was interested in the seams between experiences (old and new), seeking always to arbitrate between new ‘discoveries’ with standing theories as part of an on-going, 61

Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, pp. 135 – 8, 153, 187. A certain subset of recent commentators appears to have struggled with the notion of disciplinary balance that defined Dewey’s project. Dewey saw scientific, moral, and aesthetic modes of structuring experience as each providing a useful contribution to shared meaning; subsequently, in order for meaning to be restored to public life in all its ‘fullness’ and ‘richness’, the resources of each discipline had to be called upon. While mutually reinforcing, these different disciplinary approaches were not fungible; art could not do the work of science, nor science that of art. In this sense, science was not to be seen as an extension of art; nor was art to be seen as a simple extension of scientific inquiry. Lack of understanding on this point compromises the usefulness of several recent sources for our understanding of Dewey’s overall project. For instance, while Hickman overemphasizes the value Dewey placed on the technological or scientific, effectively reducing Dewey’s aesthetic theory to an extension of his technological reflections, Shusterman and Alexander err in suggesting that Dewey ‘privileged’ art over science (Shusterman) or, alternatively, that the aesthetic was the ‘central, guiding thought in his philosophy’ (Alexander). See Alexander, Dewey’s Theory of Art, pp. xiii – xiv, xvi, 1, 185; Hickman, Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, pp. 68 – 9; R. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford, 1992), pp. 11 – 2. For more hermeneutically sensitive interpretations of Dewey’s project, see Ryan, John Dewey, p. 129 – 30; Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, p. 97. 63 Hickman, Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, p.197; Westbrook, John Dewey, p. 393. 64 Dewey, AE, p. 14. 62

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perpetually open-ended renovation and augmentation of knowledge. The artist, meanwhile, focused not on problem-solving, but upon identifying ‘experiences as experiences’.65 In temporal terms, just as the scientist focused on the seams or problem points that emerged between knowledge and new experiences, the artist differentiated the stream of experience into discrete intervals in order to bring ‘to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total’.66 The artist’s concern was to create ‘refined and intensified forms of experience’, or, in other words, to impose a sense of order or harmony upon an existence that, in the absence of such reflection, appeared chaotic and indeterminate.67 While Dewey distinguished between scientific and artistic activity, AE took part in the same attempt to transform ‘private knowledge’ into ‘public knowledge’ that motivated his works on science and morality. AE should be read as a warrant for the democratic engagement of ‘specialized’ art products by the non-specialist public. For Dewey, the ‘work of art’ was not an object, but rather, ‘the work’ that ‘takes place when a human being cooperates with the [art] product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties’.68 In grappling with signifiers drawn from the surrounding world, the artist necessarily expressed his selfhood through materials that possessed supra-individual meanings.69 In this respect, Dewey perceived the art product as both expressive and ‘communicative’, or rather, as a vector of experience, a means whereby other individuals could recapitulate the experiences of the artist. The proper art audience was, in turn, not a set of ‘cold spectators’; as Dewey explained, ‘[T]o perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent’.70 As an actively involved ‘participant’, the non-artist drew upon the emotions evoked by, and collective experiences called forth in, the work of art to imaginatively reconstruct the artist’s experience. Such a process was not unidirectional, with a perfectly unambiguous 65

Ibid, pp. 44, 306. Ibid, pp. 14, 208. 67 Ibid, pp. 2, 16, 44 – 5, 48, 87, 258, 285, 306. 68 Dewey’s resistance to the contemplative aesthetics of the ‘detached spectator’ earned the praise of Adorno, who similarly critiqued Kantian aesthetics. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1997), pp. 3, 333 – 5, 353 – 7. 69 Dewey, AE, pp. 67 – 8, 77. See also ibid, pp. 78, 108. 70 Ibid, pp. 56, 222. See also pp. 3 – 4, 54, 347. 66

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meaning impressing itself upon the mind of the non-artist; rather, just as the artist ‘selected, simplified, clarified, abridged, and condensed according to his interest’, the beholder draws from the work ‘according to his point of view and interest’, thus developing a particularized sense of its meaning.71 When dealing with aesthetic matters, Dewey was primarily concerned with the horizon-merging potential of artworks. Quoting the poet-critics Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold at length, Dewey pointed to the role art played in challenging popular pieties by offering new perspectives through which to view experience. ‘By disclosure, through imaginative vision addressed to imaginative experience… of possibilities that contrast with actual conditions’, artists were capable of exposing ossified and oppressive social forms, while simultaneously positing ideals for which to strive.72 Insofar as art was expressive of individual subjectivity, it was also disclosive, setting out potentials for the world. Conceived in this way, works of art enriched the general cultural climate, providing a variety of ways to understand moral values, selfhood, and the physical world. Just as works of art drew upon collective experience, they created and sustained collectivities, offering perspectives on experience that could be communicated between community members and used to order experience more effectively while simultaneously shaping collective desires and purposes. By contributing to commonly held experiences and granting others the resources through which to understand their experiences, art facilitated the communication that was integral to the properly functioning Deweyan democratic society.73 The Deweyan Philosopher Although willing to install the democratic public as the hub of modernity, and, in turn, to urge a democratic participation in science, morality, and the arts, Dewey was not prepared to banish philosophy from the field of modernity. In its humbled, Deweyan form, philosophy assumed the responsibility for articulating and protecting the links 71

Ibid, pp. 27, 56, 349. Dewey, AE, p. 360. 73 Dewey, AE, pp. 84, 254, 281 – 2, 298, 336, 350, 359; Alexander, Dewey’s Theory of Art, pp. 185 – 9, 192, 200, 202, 230; Westbrook, John Dewey, p. 398. 72

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between the public and the expert spheres, ensuring the publicity of knowledge and the coherence of communally held meaning. In his twin texts of 1929, EN and QC, Dewey set forth his new model of philosophy as a ‘liaison officer’ or ‘translator’. In an age of fragmentation, Dewey explained in EN, there existed a ‘need for a generalized medium of intercommunication, of mutual criticism through all-around translation from one separated region of experience into another’; philosophy, in turn, ‘becomes in effect a messenger, a liaison officer, making reciprocally intelligible voices speaking provincial tongues, and thereby enlarging as well as rectifying the meanings with which they are charged’.74 Employing the same metaphor of ‘liaison officer,’ Dewey wrote in QC, philosophy’s ‘critical mind would be directed against the domination exercised by prejudice, narrow interest, routine custom and the authority which issues from institutions apart from the human ends they serve’.75 To the ‘Babel’ of modern tongues, Dewey’s redeemed philosophy offered the Ur text. Philosophy as ‘Criticism’ Bound up within Dewey’s writings of the post-War period are two interwoven conceptualizations of the role of philosophy. The first is that of ‘criticism,’ the function most widely acknowledged by Deweyan exegetes and taken as the key to his understanding of philosophy.76 While undoubtedly a realist, holding that there existed a world prior to the actor’s knowledge, Dewey did not believe that the individual could come in unmediated contact with the world. As Dewey noted throughout EN, individuals construed the world always in terms of culturally acquired schema, or ‘prejudices’; experience, in turn, was always ‘already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages’. Philosophy, correspondingly, was to function as ‘a critique of prejudices’. By pointing out the artificiality of standing distinctions and commonplace cultural knowledge, philosophy disturbed the status quo, prying off the assumptions ‘welded’ onto ‘first-hand experience’ and asserting the

74

Dewey, EN, pp. 409 – 10. Dewey, QC, p. 248. 76 Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism, p. 1; West, American Evasion of Philosophy, p. 71; Westbrook, John Dewey, pp. 137 – 8, 301, 370. 75

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provisionality of all knowledge. Thus pursued, criticism represented ‘discriminating judgment’, a ‘careful appraisal’ of acceptability of extant norms, practices, and beliefs.77 In their attempts to concretize Dewey’s notion of philosophy as criticism, commentators have routinely pointed to his own ‘engaged’ political and intellectual activity. In this sense, philosophy as criticism assumes the form of a polemical battering ram, a tool wielded against apparent enemies of democratic politics and thought. That Dewey construed his own office as philosopher in this manner is undoubted. Much of his later career was marked by active involvement in high-profile activist causes, whether in the form of his resistance to American entry into the League of Nations, his organization of the American Association of University Professors, his support of women’s suffrage and the Outlawry of War movement, his participation in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, or his contributions to the New School for Social Research and the American Civil Liberties Union.78 Building an Interpretive Community: The Philosopher and the Critic Dewey’s vision of philosophy, however, was wider ranging than the polemical activities of the politically engaged philosopher. Indeed, such impassioned polemics were always secondary, and instrumental, to the deeper responsibility of the philosopher to the public. In characterizing the office of philosophy in terms of ‘translation’, ‘provision’, and ‘facilitation’, Dewey set forth an image of philosophy that insisted upon its subordination to processes of inquiry taken up by all members of a society. As Dewey wrote in the introduction to EN, ‘[Philosophy’s] ultimate value for life-experience is that it continuously provides instruments for the criticism of those values – whether of beliefs, institutions, actions, or products – that are found in all aspects of experience’.79 The qualification of extant values and assumptions was to be achieved by the transfer of insights from one sphere of culture to another; philosophy was to facilitate that transfer. The Deweyan critic, in ‘criticizing’, was thus not to claim ‘Mosaic or Pauline authority’, but rather, to ‘provide’ knowledge that would be otherwise inaccessible in an age riven 77

Dewey, EN, pp. 37, 398, 400, 403. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism, pp. 100 – 1; Westbrook, John Dewey, pp. 277 – 8. 79 Dewey, EN, p. ix. 78

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by disciplinary fault lines.80 That knowledge, in turn, lacking ‘revelatory authority’, was itself open to question. The Deweyan philosopher was most fundamentally an initiator of discourse, a supplier of the knowledge around which deliberative communities could be organized. In the facilitated interplay between bodies of specialized knowledge, meaning could be ‘rectified’, articulated once again as a coherent set of tools for managing the exigencies of modern existence. This presentation of the philosopher as the facilitator of public discourse received perhaps its clearest articulation in AE. Notably, AE concerned itself not with the activity of the philosopher, but with another figure he termed the ‘critic’. While, as noted earlier, works such as RP and QC frequently described philosophy as ‘criticism’, Dewey’s use of the term ‘critic’ in AE appeared to trade primarily on the notion of the ‘art critic’ that he sought to undermine. In this respect, the critic appears as the aesthetic analogue to the Deweyan philosopher, whom Dewey, throughout his reconstructive texts, heavily associated with the physical, moral, and social sciences. With the introduction of the critic, Dewey effectively situated the philosopher in a community of interpreters, whose cumulative work maintained the vibrancy of the democratic public.81 The Deweyan critic’s most basic task was the identification of unities within artists’ works. Just as artists themselves sought to unify experiences into coherent wholes, the critic was to outline the general shape of the work, pointing out its basic structures and ideas. In performing this function, the Deweyan critic functioned not as a judicial arbiter of conversation, but rather as a sort of facilitator who bridged the gaps between the aesthetic sphere and the public. Indeed, Dewey asserted, the critic could not usurp for

80

Dewey, EN, p. 408. Elements of EN suggest that the philosopher and critic could perhaps be seen as one and the same. There, Dewey expanded the philosopher’s responsibilities to embrace the entirety of culture. Having ‘no stock of information or body of knowledge peculiarly its own’, Dewey wrote, philosophy ‘partakes both of scientific and literary discourse’. Considered from this standpoint, the philosopher, in his fully reconstructed form, became an interpreter not only of scientific findings for the greater community, but also a purveyor of aesthetic knowledge. While this alternative view of the relationship between the philosopher and the critic cannot be ruled out, what I set forth above appears to more accurately reflect both his choice of terms and his attempts to distinguish between moral-scientific and aesthetic complexes of knowledge. In either case, this apparent distinction between the philosopher and the critic would become an explicit element of Habermas’s work. Dewey, EN, p. 407. 81

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himself the work of art.82 In this respect, critical activity, Dewey wrote, was necessarily subservient to the individual’s direct interaction with the object of art: The individual who has an enlarged and quickened experience is the one who should make for himself his own appraisal. The way to help him is through the expansion of his own experience by the work of art to which criticism is subsidiary. The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice… It is the critic’s privilege to share in the promotion of this active process.83 From Dewey’s standpoint, the layman’s aesthetic experiences were to be ‘mediated’ only to the extent that critics identified convenient points of access to the expressive content contained within objects of art. Insofar as the critic sought to illuminate unities and meanings within works that would be readily assimilable by others, he was simultaneously to recognize the status of his criticism as ‘a social document’ that could and would be ‘checked by others to whom the same objective material is available’.84 As they engaged the objects of the critic’s judgment, the members of the public produced a body of experience against which the pronouncements of the critic could be judged and revised. Just as the aesthetic experience, under the Deweyan critic’s influence, became participatory, the critical enterprise, as the search for the meaning of art, became a collaborative, experimental endeavor. Looking Ahead The end product of Dewey’s post-War work was a redrawn map of modernity. Surveying the landscape of Western culture in the wake of the war, Dewey found the topos of modernity fragmented both horizontally (among non-overlapping disciplines such as science, morality, and art) and vertically (between a higher philosophical plane and a lower cultural plane over which philosophy claimed juridical privilege). Lost somewhere in the rifts of modernity was the democratic public, which was stripped of the knowledge and meaning necessary to its operation by esoteric experts and boundary82

Dewey, AE, pp. 322, 327. Dewey, AE, p. 338. 84 Dewey, AE, p. 321. 83

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enforcing philosophers. In concert, Dewey’s post-War works reconstituted that map by centering the public as the proper recipient of specialized knowledge, linking science and morality, democratizing the aesthetic sphere, and reconstituting philosophy as a mediating or interpreting discipline alongside aesthetic criticism. Coursing throughout this Deweyan remapping of modernity were several themes that reemerged in Habermas’s thought, including concerns with modern cultural fragmentation, the centrality of the ‘everyday’ actor as both a barometer and principal agent in the modern project, and the necessity of reshaping philosophy to suit a project of collaborative cultural integration. In tackling these problematics, however, Habermas would adopt his own approaches, articulating a more complex image of the dynamics controlling society, softening the Deweyan critique of Kant, and engaging his own set of interlocutors. As shall be seen, however, although Habermas pursued his reconstruction of modernity with his own unique theoretical tools and in light of his own contemporary concerns, his work ultimately converged on the distinctly Deweyan images of a reintegrated, publicly centered modern topos and the philosopher as interpreter.

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Habermas: Modernity, Metaphilosophy, and the Unity of Reason In 1988, Habermas set forth his vision of a new, ‘postmetaphysical’ philosophy. Convinced that ‘[i]n the wake of metaphysics, philosophy [had] surrender[ed] its extraordinary status’, Habermas proclaimed: ‘What remains for philosophy, and what is within its capabilities, is to mediate interpretatively between expert knowledge and an everyday practice in need of orientation’. In shedding its ‘extraordinary status’ to take its place between the disciplines and the lifeworld, the Habermasian philosopher was not only to set foot on a cultural landscape that he had previously only observed from a distant remove, but also to abandon all hopes for a ‘conclusive’ or ‘integrating’ idea that would resolve all of modern knowledge into a totality. Instead, he was to minister to the needs of communal deliberation.85 A less grandiose task, perhaps, but nonetheless daunting. The modern map and philosophical mission Habermas handed his newly initiated postmetaphysical philosopher were the results of a decade-long struggle with the metaphilosophical implications of modernity. Postmetaphysical Thinking did not initiate a new era in Habermas’s thinking; rather, it summed up work begun in the early 1980s in such articles, monographs, and speeches as ‘Modernity Versus Postmodernity’ (1981), The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA, 1981), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (MCCA, 1983), and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (PDM, 1985). Together, these works set forth both a comprehensive diagnosis of the modern condition and a regimen of philosophically led cultural integration designed to overcome modernity’s ills. In what follows, the path to Habermas’s bold proclamations in Postmetaphysical Thinking will be traced. First, we will explore Habermas’s diagnosis of the modern condition, which was set forth in ‘Modernity Versus Postmodernity’ and TCA. Therein, modernity assumed the form of a state of cultural fragmentation and impoverishment that arose from disciplinary fragmentation and ‘systems’ imperatives. With its foregrounding of language and communicative rationality as the keys to reintegrating modern culture, TCA placed the community of everyday non-specialists at the center of Habermas’s new 85

Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, pp. 18, 51.

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map of modernity. The problem of modernity thus set forth, we will turn to Habermas’s attempts to reshape modernity and philosophy, which, while originating in TCA, continued through its successor works, MCCA, PDM, and PT. Guiding this portion of the study will be the proposition that, despite the contributions of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse to Habermas’s initial diagnosis of modernity in TCA, one must look outside Habermas’s Frankfurt School context to a different set of interlocutors to see and understand his refinements to his original diagnosis.86 It was only through a series of critiques of Kant, Rorty, and Derrida that Habermas’s notions of a reformed modernity and postmetaphysical philosophy assumed their fullest form. In developing these critiques over the course of the 1980s, Habermas performed two interrelated operations: first, he superimposed upon the tri-partite, Kantian and Weberian spheres of science, morality, and art a dyadic distinction problem-solving and world-disclosive disciplines; second, and largely simultaneously, he positioned the philosopher and the critic in the gaps between the lifeworld and the expert cultures as participants in a collaborative process of interpretation, translation, or mediation. Emerging from Habermas’s works of the mid- to late-1980s were both a map of modernity that was isomorphic to Dewey’s and an account of philosophy’s collaborative, interpretive responsibilities that converged with Dewey’s vision for a reconstituted philosophy. Defining the Crisis of Modernity The Collapse of the Lifeworld Forming the backdrop to Habermas’s works of the 1980s was a narrative of ‘the irresistible irony of the world-historical process of enlightenment’.87 The lineaments of this narrative, which Habermas set out primarily in ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’

86

As I argued in my third MPhil essay, Habermas was never able to break fully with his early mentors, returning, for instance, to Horkheimer’s thought on several occasions throughout the 1990s. Wolf, ‘Habermas’s Use of American Pragmatism in his Critique of Horkheimer’. References will be made to the Habermas’s Frankfurt School context throughout this portion of the study; however, for fuller descriptions of the significance of the first generation Frankfurt School for his thought, see Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, 1993); Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia. 87 Habermas, TCAII, p. 155. See also Habermas, PDM, p. 335; Habermas, TCAI, p. 342 – 3.

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and TCA, have been well rehearsed.88 At the core of Habermas’s image of modernity was the concept of the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebensvelt), a concept which he synthesized from the writings of such thinkers as Husserl, Mead, Durkheim, and Gadamer. In its most commonly invoked form, the lifeworld denoted the ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized’ interpretative patterns that characterized a particular linguistic community. Included among these patterns were moral norms, religious concepts, and tropes for articulating communal solidarity and individual identity. Consequent to being raised within a specific linguistic community, the individual internalized the norms and modes of self-conceptualization characteristic of his community. These interpretative patterns remained relatively ‘unproblematic’, or, in other words, were assumed as useful for describing and managing the world unless proven otherwise by experience.89 The dawn of modernity, Habermas argued, witnessed a collapse in the metaphysically unified body of meaning characteristic of the premodern lifeworld. Driving this collapse was the emergence of a new mode of rationality, which Habermas deemed ‘communicative’. Unlike pre-modern actors, who

simply assimilated

contingencies within a static, absolute body of interpretative patterns, ‘communicatively rational’ early modern actors evaluated interpretations on the basis of their validity for describing their immediate existential circumstances. Just as lifeworld knowledge was ‘intersubjective,’ available to all but reducible to the individual meaning systems of none, so a communicatively rational actor, in appealing to the validity of a given interpretation, always necessarily submitted his claim for evaluation by the members of his speech community. In the process of mediating these discrepancies between the experiences of early modern actors and the pre-modern lifeworld, traditions were gradually amended or replaced altogether.90 While perhaps manageable in its earliest stages, the revision of lifeworld values rapidly outpaced the rationalizing capacity of interpretative communities; with ever outward spiraling changes in the fabric of lived life came

88

For a more thorough exegesis, see White, Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, 1988). As Habermas wrote, ‘Participants find the relations between the objective, social, and subjective worlds already preinterpreted. When they go beyond the horizon of a given situation, they cannot step into a void; they find themselves right away in another, now actualized, yet preinterpreted domain of what is culturally taken for granted’. J. Habermas, TCAII, p. 125. See also Habermas, TCAI, pp. 13, 68 – 70, 82, 95, 100, 335; Habermas, TCAII, pp. 124 – 6, 132 – 3, 137, 140. 90 Habermas, TCAII, pp. 96, 107. 89

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increasing pressure to rationalize the lifeworld.91 In scrambling to achieve stability in the face of an increasingly contingent reality, modern communities resorted to two mutually damaging tactics, namely, the further elaboration of specialized cultural discourses and the replacement of communicative action with norm-free ‘steering media’. Between these two processes, the unity of the lifeworld dissolved into a constellation of shattered, autonomous cultural fragments, encased by an increasingly complex system of parasitic media. Like Dewey, Habermas acknowledged the contributions of disciplinary specialization to the fragmentation of knowledge and meaning. As a result of specialization, modernity was marked by ‘a plurality of value spheres’, each possessing its own logic.92 With the division of modern culture into its characteristic disciplines – ‘scientific enterprise, moral-practical discourse in the political public sphere and in the legal system, and aesthetic criticism in the artistic and literary enterprise’ – came two unfortunate side effects. First, the community resolved into a set of non-overlapping concentrations of labor.93 More damaging than the specialization of functions, however, was the tendency of specialists to pursue purely ‘formal’ problems whose solutions failed to reconnect with the experience of non-specialists. Since, from Habermas’s perspective, knowledge did not easily transcend disciplinary boundaries, the knowledge generated by modern practices increasingly accumulated in distant hinterlands of formal knowledge.94 In a further similarity to Dewey, Habermas acknowledged the role philosophers played in hierarchializing the field of culture; as shall be discussed in second section of this study, Habermas too railed against the overriding cultural authority Kant assigned to the philosopher as ‘usher’ and ‘judge’.95 Nevertheless, while Habermas argued that philosophy, in its Kantian derivation, did little to alleviate cultural fragmentation, he resisted Dewey’s presentation of philosophy as the root cause of fragmentation. For Habermas, cultural differentiation was not artificially imposed upon culture from above, but rather, generated from within; the fragmentation characteristic of modernity was the 91

Habermas, TCAI, pp. 70, 100; Habermas, TCAII, p. 134. Habermas, TCAI, p. 247. 93 Habermas, TCAII, pp. 326, 352 – 3, 355. See also pp. 163 – 4, 196, 339 – 40. 94 Habermas, TCAII, p. 326. See also ibid, p. 327; Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, 92

p. 8.

95

See pp. 47 below.

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product of non-philosophers ‘progressively learn[ing]’ to ‘deal with issues of truth, justice, and taste discreetly rather than simultaneously’. Autonomization, in other words, continued because it was productive, granting actors expanded ability to reconstitute elements of their lifeworld.96 The Systems Perspective While Dewey saw modernity principally, and almost solely, as a crisis driven by patterns of thought, Habermas pointed to additional structural factors that corrupted shared meaning.97 For Habermas, modern fragmentation was the product both of specialization, a process that pulled shared meaning apart from the inside, and of ‘mediatization’, a process that eroded shared meaning and knowledge from the outside. Within the processes of communication, Habermas held, there was no guide for action other than the speakers’ mutual faith in the consensus-forming power of argumentation.98 Modern actors, in choosing to step beyond accepted norms of action, traded epistemic certainty for epistemic provisionality; ‘Steering media’ gained a foothold on the edges of the lifeworld by latching onto the modern fear of the dissensus that could arise once premodern norms were abandoned. ‘Mediatization’, Habermas explained, provided a convenient shortcut to consensus by ‘setting social action loose from integration through value consensus and switching it over to purposive rationality steered by media’.99 Unlike communicative rational practices, which were oriented toward mutual understanding and under which all directives were considered provisional, the purposive-rational action of the steering media was oriented solely toward the achievement of pre-determined ends. For instance, within the market, courses of action were evaluated solely in terms of their capacity for increasing monetary wealth.100 Once permitted to encamp at the edge of the lifeworld, the systems of purposive-rationality expanded into spheres of human activity 96

Habermas, MCMA, p. 17. J. Dewey, ‘Philosophy’, in J.A. Boydston (ed), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925 – 1953 (17 vols., Carbondale, 1988), III, p.120. Antonio and Kellner applaud Habermas’s more nuanced approach to power. ‘Communication, Modernity, and Democracy’, pp. 292 – 3. 98 Habermas, TCAI, p. 100 – 1, 341; Habermas, TCAII, pp. 96, 107, 183, 196. See also Habermas, PDM, pp. 345 – 51. 99 Habermas, TCAI, p. 342. 100 Habermas, TCAII, p. 150. 97

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previously relegated to communicative action. Habermas characterized this corruption of lifeworld practice by media as a ‘sociopathological’ process of ‘colonization’.101 Colonization undermined not only communicative action, but also and subsequently, all means through which to envision communal purpose and self-identity outside of the relentless drive for power and wealth. Thus colonized, the lifeworld collapsed into a condition of unreflexive systems-obsession, a state of ‘systemically induced reification’.102 Under conditions of mediatization and specialization, everyday communities had an increasingly finite store of meaning and knowledge upon which to draw. The unified lifeworld characteristic of premodernity had been dispersed, locked up either in the expert cultures that were drifting ever further from the center of concrete practice or in the increasingly complex network of media. Their lifeworld chipped away by media (from the outside) and pulled apart by experts (from the inside), non-specialists entered into a state of ‘cultural impoverishment’. 103 At the perhaps the height of its cumulative knowledge, Western society reached the nadir of its communally shared knowledge and meaning, its communicative resources now scattered throughout its periphery. Habermas’s Response to Modernity The phenomena of systemic reification and cultural impoverishment, from Habermas’s standpoint, posed a particularly complex challenge to the philosopher: recoupling the specialized cultural discourses with the activities of a non-specialist public and controlling the spread of systems logic, or in effect, reassembling the unity of ‘a reason that has objectively split up into its moments’.104 In seeking to ‘utilize [the] accumulation of specialized culture’ to overcome modernity’s ills, Habermas presented himself as a defender of the Enlightenment tradition. Reason was not to be declaimed as (contra Lyotard) ‘terroristic’ or (contra Horkheimer and Adorno of Dialectic of Enlightenment) dialectically ‘self-destructive’. Habermas here was responding not just to 101

Ibid, p.305. See also p. 196. Habermas, TCAII, p. 327. See also, Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, p. 7. 103 Habermas, TCAII, p. 327. 104 Habermas, TCAII, pp. 329, 355 – 6, 397 – 8. 102

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his French rivals or his Frankfurt School forebears, but to the ‘posthistorical apologia for modernity’ advanced by German thinkers such as Gehlen, Schelsky, and Ritter in the wake of World War II and reasserted (according to Habermas) in the 1980s by Hermann Lübbe and Odo Marquand (among others). Under the terms of this ‘apologia’, Müller explains, it was held that ‘the emancipatory processes of the Enlightenment were dead, but its consequences in the form of instrumental reason still unfolding’; there were, in other words, no alternatives for subsequent social development beyond increased bureaucratization and industrialization.105 In opposition to this ‘technocratic’ affirmation of technical imperatives and rejection of cultural modernity as degenerate or irretrievably ‘crystallized’, the resources of modern culture were to be galvanized to resist mediatization and bureaucratization.106 Under the terms of Habermas’s project, modernity was thus to be reorganized, its fundamental dynamics shifted without the loss of its most valuable advances. As Habermas asserted in TCA and reiterated throughout the 1980s, this reorganization would entail the communicative rational interaction of informed actors; indeed, it was only in the medium of communication, structured by the validity claims inherent in language, that reason could be reassembled.107 If Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality, with its tripartite validity claims, was central to his work of the 1980s, it did not prove unproblematic for either his critics or for Habermas himself. At issue was the adequacy of the complexes of rationality

(‘cognitive-instrumental’,

‘moral-practical’,

and

‘aesthetic-practical’

rationality), for describing the nature of specialized cultural activities. Even as Habermas defended the centrality of communicative reason to his project, he developed a second, bipartite mode of conceptualizing the relationships between the spheres, one which arose 105

Müller, Another Country, pp. 35, 105 – 6. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester, 2004), pp. xxv, 66, 81 – 2; Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 4. For Habermas’s critique of Horkheimer and Adorno, see Habermas, TCAI, pp. 372 – 377, 382 – 3, 387. For Habermas’s critique of Gehlen, see J. Habermas, ‘Neoconservative Cultural Criticism in the United States and West Germany’, in J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate (Oxford, 1989), pp. 35 – 44. Rasmussen has emphasized Habermas’s treatment of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work as a ‘false diagnosis’ or incorrectly framed way of seeing the Enlightenment. D.M. Rasmussen, ‘Communicative Action and Philosophy: Reflections on Habermas’s Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns’, in D.M. Rasmussen & J. Swindal (eds), Jürgen Habermas: Volume I (4 vols, London, 2002), p. 232; D.M. Rasmussen, ‘The Dilemmas of Modernity’, in D.M. Rasmussen & J. Swindal (eds), Jürgen Habermas: Volume II (4 vol., London, 2002), p. 83. 107 Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, pp. 9, 11. 106

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only gradually over the course of the 1980s, beginning with his work on discourse ethics and culminating in his confrontation with Derrida. This second, bipartite scheme would prove crucial to his ultimate conception of the philosopher’s role as an interpreter among interpreters. Intertwined with this reshuffling of the spheres of modernity was an attack upon the Kantian, Rortyan, and Derridean models of philosophy. Through this combination of cultural remodeling and metaphilosophical critique, Habermas, in MCCA, PDM, and PMT laid the groundwork for his notion of philosopher as interpreter. Centering the Communicative Community: Language and Communicative Reason At the core of Habermas’s understanding of ‘unified reason’ was his evolving theory of language, a strand of thought that united his various theoretical works of the 1980s.108 Reacting to Weber’s decisionist declaration of the irremediable fragmentation of the cultural value spheres, Habermas argued, ‘The unity of rationality in the multiplicity of value spheres rationalized according to their inner logics is secured

108

Habermas’s arguments regarding language have attracted critical attention whenever and wherever they have appeared, from his studies of universal pragmatics in the 1960s, to his reflections on communicative rationality and discourse ethics in the 1970s and 1980s, to his writings on deliberative democracy of the 1990s. Critics have routinely pointed to the ‘outrageously strong’ a priority and ‘circularity’ of his ‘quasi-transcendental’ model of language, as well as to the ‘unrealistic’ qualities of the ideal speech situation, which imagines collective decision-making in terms of undistorted, egalitarian, universalistic, and rational argumentative practices. For various iterations of this critique, see Apel, ‘Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ through Recourse to the Lifeworld?’, in A. Honneth, T. McCarthy, C. Offe, & A. Wellmer (eds), Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1992), esp. pp. 126 – 9, 142 – 3; S. Benhabib, ‘Communicative Ethics and Current Controversies in Practical Philosophy’, in D.M. Rasmussen & J. Swindal (eds), Jürgen Habermas: Volume III (4 vol., London, 2002), pp. 183; M. Hesse, ‘Science and Objectivity,’ in J.B. Thompson and D. Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates (Macmillan Press, 1982), p. 114 – 5; R. Pippin, ‘Hegel, Modernity, and Habermas’s, in D.M. Rasmussen & J. Swindal (eds), Jürgen Habermas: Volume II (4 vol., London, 2002), pp. 45, 47. Rasmussen, ‘Communicative Action and Philosophy’, p. 239; N. Rescher, Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford, 1993), p. 46. Against these critics, commentators such as Alford, Wellmer, and Bernstein have argued for a more sympathetic reading of Habermas’s linguistic theses. This defense entails, first, the presentation of the ideal speech situation as an intentionally ‘unrealistic’ model of communication through which corruptions and obstructions of discourse could be identified and mitigated, and second, the presentation of the inherent ‘rationality’ of language as a strong encouragement to cultivate (in Bernstein’s words) ‘the types of dialogical communities in which phronēsis, judgment, and practical discourse become concretely embodied in our everyday practices’. C.F. Alford, ‘The Possibility of Rational Outcomes from Democratic Discourse and Procedures’, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 58.3 (Aug. 1996), pp. 754 – 5; Wellmer, ‘Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment’, pp. 61 – 2; R.J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 194 – 5, 223, 231.

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precisely at the formal level of the argumentative redemption of validity claims’.109 Under Habermas’s ‘transcendental’ model of language, speech acts were to be understood as structured in accordance with a three-fold validity claim to truth, rightness, and authenticity. Insofar as a proposition could be seen as properly describing the objective world, it was to be regarded as ‘true’. Meanwhile, to the extent that a normative proposition could be communally supported, it was to be regarded as ‘right’. Finally, insofar as a statement was taken to express the character of an individual’s experience and his self-understanding of that experience, it was considered ‘authentic’.110 The illocutionary force of a statement, in turn, lay in the assumption (implicitly made by all communicating actors) that a speaker could, if pressed by his interlocutors, offer valid reasons in support of his utterance, or, in other words, that he could show his utterance to be true, right, and authentic.111 On the basis of this inherent structure of language, knowledge could be evaluated and reassembled into a provisional, communicatively constituted whole. Thus, insofar as reason was to be unified, such unification was to occur through the communicative interaction of everyday citizens. With this assertion, Habermas positioned the speech community at the center of modernity. John McCumber offers a sense of what this ‘centrality’ consisted of, writing ‘The theory of communicative action is to be ‘central,’ not in the sense that it generates other discourses, but to the contrary: in that they all come together in it’.112 McCumber’s error, however, lies in the faulty equation of Habermas’s ‘theory of communicative action’ with his notion of ‘philosophy’.113 While it is correct to see the communicative community as the coordinating center of modern discourse, philosophy, in Habermas’s terms, was to be found elsewhere. If, using McCumber’s metaphor, communicative rationality represented the ‘hub’ of modernity, philosophy represented the ‘spokes’ connecting the hub to the expert discourses on the outer rim of the wheel; or, to translate to my cartographical metaphor, philosophy was a bridge between the territories of the lifeworld and specialized discourses. 109

Habermas, TCAI, p. 249. Ibid, pp. 15 – 7, 84, 98 – 9, 100, 308; TCAII, p. 120. 111 Habermas, TCAII, pp. 120 – 121. 112 J. McCumber, ‘Philosophy as the Heteronomous Center of Modern Discourse’, in H.J. Silverman (ed.), Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty (London, 1988), p. 214. 113 Ibid, p. 214. 110

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In order to understand the role philosophy would ultimately play as a bridging discipline, both in terms of its functions and its territories of concern, it is necessary first to explore two interlocking strands in Habermas’s thought of the 1980s. The first strand comprises his meditations on rationality, specifically, the tri-partite notion of rationality that attended his three-world theory of language. Over the course of the 1980s, Habermas (and his critics) struggled with the usefulness of the tripartite moments of reason as a comprehensive description of the functions of, and relationships among, the spheres of culture. The second, interrelated strand involves his critique of competing notions of philosophy’s office. In the process of remapping modernity, Habermas downgraded the claims of philosophy, negotiating constantly between the competing claims of Kantian, Rortyan, and Derridean thought. Structural Disanalogies in Habermas’s Thought of the Early 1980s Habermas’s theory of language, with its tripartite division of validity claims into truth, rightness, and authenticity, was simply one of a set of interlocking, tripartite distinctions that structured much of his writing in ‘Modernity Versus Postmodernity’, TCA, and MCCA. Among the other tripartite tropes in Habermas’s writing of this period included: first (and pointed to above), a ‘three-world’ distinction between the objective (states of affairs that could be described as facts), intersubjective (states of affairs that could be described as collectively constituted), and subjective (states of affairs to which only the individual qua individual had access) worlds; and second, a three-fold distinction between the possible attitudes an actor could assume in relation to these worlds (objectivating, norm-conformative, and expressive). The interaction between the three worlds and the three possible attitudes toward those worlds produced nine (formally) possible types of rationalization. Habermas demarcated three of these formally possible types as impossible, and arranged the other six into three complexes of ‘cumulative, institutionalizable’ rationality, which are as follows: first, ‘cognitive-instrumental rationality’, a type of rationality that emphasizes the manipulation of variables (in the objective and social worlds) to achieve specified ends; second, ‘moral-practical’ rationality, which was dedicated to deliberation over standards of right; and third, ‘aesthetic-practical’ rationality, which corresponded to the creation and evaluation of art 46

works.114 In his early writing, Habermas simply mapped these various interlocking schemes of validity and rationality onto the field of cultural practice, aligning the three spheres of expert practice (scientific inquiry, moral deliberation, and aesthetic creation) with the three validity claims (truth, rightness, and authenticity, respectively). Habermas’s contemporary commentators found this characterization of the disciplines in terms of validity claims or rationality complexes problematic. As many commentators noted, certain ‘structural disanalogies’ existed in this tri-partite schema of reason. In Habermas’s early writings, it is unclear not only in what sense moral discourse is institutionalizable, but also, in what sense aesthetic creation can be described in terms of cumulative rationality.115 The contours of Habermas’s writing on modernity in the wake of TCA and MCCA suggest that Habermas was himself dissatisfied with this mode of mapping the spheres. While he would not wholly abandon his tripartite schema, he did, over the course of the 1980s, introduce an additional bi-partite way of mapping modernity, one which organized scientific and moral inquiry into a loosely unified complex of ‘problem-solving’ disciplines vis-à-vis the ‘world-disclosive’ discipline of artistic creation, a schema which emphasized the purpose of the products of expert cultures, rather than their validity as true, right, or authentic.116 While arising most clearly in his debate with Derrida and his 1985 interview with R.J. Bernstein, this bi-partite schema built upon Habermas’s earlier work in discourse ethics, which forged a working relationship between science and morality.

114

Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, p. 8; T. McCarthy, ‘Reflections on Rationalization in The Theory of Communicative Action’, in R.J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Oxford, 1985), pp. 177 – 8. 115 J.M. Bernstein, ‘The Causality of Fate: Modernity and Modernism in Habermas’, in M.P. d’Entrèves and S. Benhabib, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 246 – 7; D. Ingram, ‘Philosophy and the Aesthetic Mediation of Life: Weber and Habermas and the Paradox of Rationality’, The Philosophical Forum, 18.4 (Summer 1987), pp. 338; M. Jay, ‘Habermas and Modernism’, in R.J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Oxford, 1985), p. 137; McCarthy, ‘Reflections on Rationalization’, pp. 178-80; D.M. Rasmussen, ‘Communicative Action and Philosophy’, p. 239. 116 In this sense, while it was true that Habermas thought ‘that Kant was correct to argue for the differentiation of these spheres [of science, morality, and art] from one another’, he simultaneously looked for ways of understanding the relationship among the various spheres that did not rely strictly on a tripartite division of reason. Cf. Hoy, ‘Splitting the Difference’, in M.P. d’Entrèves & S. Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 124 – 47. Ingram points to a shift in the terms of Habermas’s thought, but he fails to trace the circumstances that precipitated it. See Ingram, ‘Philosophy and the Aesthetic Mediation of Life’, p. 351 – 2.

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Rearranging the Spheres, Part I: Science and Morality Simultaneously acknowledging the necessity of communally binding norms and the impossibility of a return to pre-modern metaphysical or religious moralities, Habermas strove to reconstitute morality in a new, more resilient and dynamic form. He termed the ultimate product of his efforts ‘discourse ethics’, a proceduralist approach to norm-testing that tied moral ‘rightness’ to the deliberations of an intersubjective speech community.117 In elaborating and refining the project of discourse ethics over the course of the 1980s, Habermas reshaped moral norm-derivation on the model of a discursive, Peircean science.118 Habermas found in Peirce’s thought a model of science that elevated the provisional and the communal over the absolute and the subjective.119 Under this model, ‘scientific’ knowledge referred not to knowledge that was known to be ‘correct and cogent’ (in the sense of corresponding to an ‘actual’ state of natural affairs), but rather, to a set of theories verified through a process of communicative deliberation. Scientific knowledge was developed gradually through the constant communal revision of standing scientific interpretations in light of ‘independent original stimuli’ that ‘render[ed] prevailing opinions problematic’. To be counted as scientific, a theory had to elicit ‘an uncompelled and permanent consensus’ from the assembled community regarding its validity’. Within the course of daily scientific activity, new challenges to knowledge were repeatedly generated, producing a body of knowledge that was constantly shifting. ‘True’ knowledge, in turn, corresponded to those ‘interpretations that have stood up to indefinitely repeated tests and are intersubjectively recognized in the long run’; in other words, ‘truth’ was a statement not of absolute knowledge, but of tested, historically

117

As Habermas noted, discourse ethics was norm-testing, rather than ‘norm-generating’. On Habermas’s account, discourse ethics represented a procedure, rather than a substantive body of norms, and thus ‘depend[ed] on content brought to [it] from outside’. Habermas, MCCA, p. 103. 118 Cf. Hickman, ‘Habermas’s Unresolved Dualism’, pp. 504 – 7. 119 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, pp. 95, 97. For a discussion of the complicated, multiple valences of ‘science’ in Habermas’s early writings, see Hesse, ‘Science and Objectivity’, pp. 98 – 115.

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reliable propositions.120 Under Peirce’s approach, absolute and subjectivistic scientific truths became provisional and communally constituted conceptual frameworks for further inquiry.121 Habermas generalized this Peircean image of procedurally verified scientific knowledge into a model for norm derivation.122 Near the close of his reflections on discourse ethics in MCCA, Habermas offered a succinct account of his position, asserting, ‘The principle of discourse ethics (D) makes reference to a procedure, namely the discursive redemption of normative claims to validity… [Practical discourse is] a procedure for testing the validity of norms that are being proposed and hypothetically considered for adoption’.123 Unlike scientific claims, which appealed to the objective order of things (truth), normative claims appealed to rightness, or, in other words, to legitimacy as a good for all members of the speech community. Nevertheless, as Habermas argued, ‘normative claims to validity’ could ‘be treated like claims to truth’. Just as the community of inquirers intersubjectively probed the truth of new theories, so the speech community could intersubjectively test the rightness of new normative claims. In testing a claim raised by an individual, the deliberative community stripped the claim of its subjective valences, scrutinizing it for its ‘universality’, whether ‘the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative

possibilities

for

regulation)’.124

Under

ideal

circumstances,

such

argumentation would produce a consensus regarding a claim’s rightness, established solely through the force of the best argument – that argument, which, when reviewed by the speech community, appeared to be buttressed (or at least potentially buttressed) by the most convincing reasons. Taken from Habermas’s standpoint, scientific inquiry and moral deliberation both represented mechanisms for coping with novelty and provisionally stabilizing knowledge. Just as ‘innovative stimuli’ destabilized scientific consensus, new validity claims 120

Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, pp. 91 – 2, 98, 100 – 1, 107. Habermas did not profess an unqualified appreciation for Peirce, pointing at a later juncture in Knowledge and Human Interests to the purposive-rational traces in his thought. Ibid, p. 137. 122 Bernstein, introduction to Habermas and Modernity, p. 17; cf. Antonio and Kellner, ‘Communication, Modernity, and Democracy’, pp. 285 –6. 123 Habermas, MCCA, p. 103. 124 Ibid, pp. 65, 67 – 8. 121

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‘disrupted’ the normative consensus, plunging the community into ‘moral dilemmas'...125 The responsibility of the discursive community was not to develop norms formally, by abstracting from their lifeworld context, but rather, to solve problems that arose through conflicts between their unique values and novel validity claims. By tying deliberation to the reigning speech context, Habermas pointed to the implication of morality in ethical life (Sittlichkeit), the existing store of cultural values.126 Elaborating on this point, Habermas wrote, ‘It would be utterly pointless to engage in a practical discourse without a horizon provided by the lifeworld of a specific social group and without real conflicts in a concrete situation…’127 While, on certain occasions, communities responded by ‘restoring’ the initial arrangement of norms, on others, they pulled apart and rewove the moral fabric to incorporate for the novel claim. In any and all cases, the goal of such deliberation was to maintain the responsiveness of moral norms to the context of lived life, repairing or building out norms that appeared weak or limited. Criticizing the Philosophical Tradition, Part I: The Debates with Kant and Rorty In the process of elaborating his discourse ethics, Habermas undertook several critiques of rival conceptions of philosophy. Habermas’s campaign to reconstitute philosophy in a form fit for modernity proceeded always in the shadow of Kant, his rearrangement of the relationships of the spheres of culture an attempt to cope with the complicated patrimony bequeathed to modern thought by his predecessor. Kant functioned in Habermas’s works of the 1980s as the institutor of the philosophical problems within whose ambit all modern philosophy moved (despite claims to the contrary lodged by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their exegetes).128 Indeed, if, for Habermas, Hegel was the first philosopher to find modernity to be problematic, Kant, however unwittingly, set forth the terms of that modern ‘problem’.129 In battling Kant, Habermas took aim at two interlocking concepts of the philosopher’s office as an ‘usher’

125

Ibid, pp. 57 – 8, 67. Ibid, pp. 92, 99. 127 Ibid, p. 103. 128 Habermas, PDM, p. 19; Bernstein, ‘The Causality of Fate’, p. 257. 129 Habermas, PDM, p. 16. 126

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to and ‘judge’ of culture. In doing so, he sought to unseat philosophy from its position atop the Kantian ‘architectonic’ of reason. Despite the post-Kantian orientation of his project, Habermas lacked the harshly anti-Kantian edge that marked Dewey’s work. Theorizing in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey, Habermas took a syncretic approach to Kant, tempering some of his insights into moral decision-making with subsequent traditions of thought and subtly revising the Kantian map of modernity.130 Consequently, even as Habermas criticized Kant, he attempted to modulate radically anti-Kantian polemics lodged by his contemporaries, chief among whom included American thinker Richard Rorty. As the terms of Habermas’s opening essay in MCCA, ‘Philosophy as “Stand-In” and “Interpreter”’ suggest, Kant and Rorty were mutually implicated in Habermas’s attempt to reconstitute philosophy, representing, in a sense, antipodally opposed interpretations of the authority of philosophy as a vehicle of reason. Thus, despite seeking, in MCCA and later in PDM and PMT, to level philosophy’s privileged cultural position, Habermas refused to dissolve philosophy as an identifiable discipline.131 In referring to the Kantian philosopher as an ‘usher’, Habermas was principally concerned with the relationship between philosophy and the empirical sciences. As Habermas argued, Kant, in positioning philosophy as epistemology, attempted to identify the terms under which scientific knowing was possible; as such, Kantian philosophy became the champion of ‘the idea of cognition before cognition’, a higher form of knowledge than scientific knowing, which could set ‘limits of what can and cannot be experienced’. With this understanding, the Kantian philosopher functioned as an ‘usher’, 130

Critics have routinely pointed to Habermas’s complicated Kantian heritage. See K.-O. Apel, ‘Normatively Grounding “Critical Theory” through Recourse to the Lifeworld?’, pp. 126 – 7, 129, 142 – 3, 152; S. Benhabib, ‘Communicative Ethics’, pp. 338 – 9; Bernstein, introduction to Habermas and Modernity, pp. 13 – 4; W.S.K. Cameron, ‘Fallibilism, Rational Reconstruction, and the Distinction between Moral Theory and Ethical Life’, in L.E. Hahn (ed.), Perspectives on Habermas (Chicago, 2000), pp. 179, 181. 131 The following account of the Habermas-Rorty dispute examines only a thin sliver of an exchange that has slowly developed over the last two decades with several shifts in the terms of the debate. For key texts in this evolving dispute, see Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Rorty, ‘Thugs and Theorists’; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Rorty, Essays on Heidegger; Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; Habermas, ‘Questions and Counterquestions’, pp. 193 – 199; Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking; J. Habermas, ‘Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, in J. Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, trans. M. Cooke (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 343 – 382. It should be remembered that Habermas’s Rorty is caricatured, and that, in responding to this constructed Rorty, he is also responding, as Dallmayr notes, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Dallmayr, ‘Habermas and Rationality’, p. 565.

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showing science its proper place by identifying those aspects of experience that could be subjected to scientific inquiry and, subsequently, keeping it in its seat by tightly constraining the scope of its claims.132 As Habermas’s presentation suggests, any aid philosophy provided to knowledge-accumulation by identifying fruitful areas of scientific inquiry was offset by its matching tendency to demean science as an imperfect endeavor effectively lost in the dark of the theater of experience. The Kantian philosopher’s status as usher, according to Habermas, was to be seen as merely the foremost indicator of Kant’s inveterate tendency to divide and hierarchalize culture. The end product of Kant’s efforts was an ‘architectonic of reason,’ a division of reason into separate moments, with the faculties of practical reason, judgment, and theoretical cognition each receiving their own non-overlapping foundations. With the three-fold division in reason came an attendant shattering of culture into the disjunct ‘value spheres’ of science and technology, law and morality, art and art criticism’, which were then parceled out among the faculties.133 Like the empirical sciences, moral and aesthetic discourses represented merely one type of tightly delimited knowing, the grounds of which could be determined only by reference to epistemology. Kantian philosophy, in Habermas’s view, played a game of divide and conquer with culture. The cultural disciplines, in being so narrowly and formally defined, could generate no claims to legitimacy without recourse to epistemology. Philosophy thus became not only a super-scientific arbiter of science, but a super-cultural judge of culture in its many fragmented moments.134 To counter Kant, Habermas drew upon the irony of cultural modernization. Insofar as the Kantian philosopher’s privilege as usher and judge rested upon the fragmentation of culture, Habermas argued, the spheres of culture, once autonomized, rapidly expanded beyond the grasp of the all-encompassing judge. Pointing to the uncontrolled growth of specialized knowledge over the course of modernity, Habermas wrote, ‘Philosophy must operate under conditions of rationality that it has not chosen… It can no longer place the totalities of the different lifeworlds, which appear only in the 132

Habermas, MCCA, p. 2. Habermas, PDM, p. 358; Habermas, PMT, p. 14. 134 Or, as Habermas put it, ‘the highest court of appeal vis-à-vis the sciences and culture as a whole’. Habermas, MCCA, p. 3; Habermas, PDM, pp. 18 – 9. 133

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plural, into a hierarchy of those which are of greater or lesser value’.135 Paired with the proliferation of knowledge, under this same analysis, was an increased sense of the fallibility of knowledge. Whereas, in a pre-scientific era, philosophy could claim advantage over the sciences through an appeal to rationally derived metaphysical truths, in the wake of modernity’s progress, it had ‘no advantage over the sciences, and it certainly [did] not possess the infallibility of a privileged access to truth’.136 In the face of the shifting topography of modernity, philosophy thus descended to the same cultural strata as the specialized disciplines. Habermas’s contentious stance toward Kantian epistemology and foundationalism produced a complicated relationship with Rorty. Reviewing Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Habermas could not help but see his American counterpart as a sort of comrade in arms. Pointing to Rorty’s ‘impressive’ work in assembling ‘compelling metaphilosophical arguments in support of the view that the roles Kant the master thinker had envisaged for philosophy, namely those of usher and judge, are too big for it’, Habermas asserted, ‘I agree that philosophy has no business playing the part of the highest arbiter in matters of science and culture…’.137 Habermas, however, was quick to qualify this praise, writing: I have trouble accepting his conclusion, which is that if philosophy forswears these two roles [of usher and judge], it must also surrender the function of being the ‘guardian of rationality’. If I understand Rorty, he is saying that the new modesty of philosophy involves the abandonment of any claim to reason…138 From Habermas’s perspective, Rorty’s anti-Kantianism was excessively radical, seeking not only to eradicate the Kantian conceptualization of philosophy, but also, insofar as ‘philosophy’ was to be understood as a discipline concerned with the preservation of rationality (however variously defined), to ‘abolish’ philosophy as a whole.139 While

135

Habermas, PMT, p. 18. See also Habermas, PDM, p. 358. Habermas, PMT, p. 14. 137 Habermas, MCCA, pp. 3. 138 Ibid, p. 3. 139 Ibid, p. 9. 136

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Habermas railed against at the elevated epistemological privilege of Kantian philosophy, he stopped short of revoking philosophy’s claim to function as a ‘guardian of rationality’. Spearheading Habermas’s critique of Rorty was an immanent critique of the pragmatic presuppositions through which Rorty underwrote his anti-philosophical project. He particularly bridled at Rorty’s extrapolation of pragmatism into an engine ‘for the abnegation by philosophical thought of any claim to rationality and indeed for the abnegation of philosophy per se’.140 From Habermas’s perspective, Rorty seized upon pragmatic anti-foundationalism, which denied philosophy any authority over the affairs of science, as evidence for a need to establish a ‘division of labor that puts science on one side and philosophical faith, life, existential freedom, myth, cultivation, or what have you, on the other’.141 As Habermas argued, ‘Contemporary post-structuralist, latepragmatist, and neohistoricist tendencies share a narrow objectivistic conception of science. Over against scientific cognition they carve out a sphere where thought can be illuminating or awakening instead of being objective’.142 Rorty’s mistake, according to Habermas, stemmed from the former’s faulty equation of the concepts of objectivity and rationality, whereby philosophy’s (traditional) claims to true knowledge regarding the objective world were treated as identical with its dependence upon argumentation to validate its claims. Such an equation allowed Rorty to assert (fallaciously) that, in successfully undermining the links of philosophy to the objective world, pragmatism had simultaneously placed philosophy in a separate, non-overlapping sphere of discourse (‘edifying’ conversation) that operated free of argumentative constraints. 140

Ibid, p. 10. Ibid, pp. 13, 14. In offering this characterization of Rorty’s project, Habermas appears to have been engaging in his own ‘strong misreading’ of Rorty. Far from suggesting a firm division between philosophy and science, Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature argued that both philosophy and science were nothing more than historically contingent, highly unstable patterns of describing ourselves and our experiences. Casting the natural- and human-science dichotomy as an artefact of a particular historical state of discourse, Rorty chided Charles Taylor, ‘[The] line [is not] between the human and the nonhuman but between that portion of the field of inquiry where we feel rather uncertain that we have the right vocabulary at hand and that portion where we feel rather certain that we do. This does, at the moment, roughly coincide with the distinction between the fields of the Geistes- and the Naturwissenschaften. But this coincidence may be mere coincidence’. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 352; see also ibid, p. 362. Habermas subsequently altered his critique of Rorty, presenting him later in PDM as undertaking the same sort of total leveling of all disciplinary/discursive distinctions that he attributed to Derrida. Yet again, Rorty would object to being classed so closely or indiscriminately alongside Derrida, whose attempts to overcome the ‘ontotheological tradition’ he found counterproductive. See PDM, pp. 206 – 7. Rorty, Essays on Heidegger, esp. ch. 5. 142 Habermas, MCCA, p. 13. 141

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In the face of this two-world image of discourse, Habermas countered, ‘[E]ven a philosophy that has been taught its limits by pragmatism and hermeneuticism will not be able to find a resting place in edifying conversation outside the sciences without immediately being drawn back into argumentation, that is, justificatory discourse’.143 From Habermas’s standpoint, all discourses were regulated by the transcendental structure of language; in speaking, the philosopher necessarily set forth propositions argumentatively. Discourses, in turn, did not derive from a human desire to redescribe things for the sake of redescription, but rather, took shape as part of an argumentative project of convincing others to accept a particular interpretation of a situation. Insofar as these conditions held, a suspension of philosophy’s claims to rational validity, such as that posited by Rorty, was ‘untenable’.144 Rearranging the Spheres and Criticizing the Philosophical Tradition, Part II: The Debate with Derrida During the 1980s, Habermas engaged not just Kant and Rorty, but an additional challenger, Jacques Derrida. Habermas’s difficulties with Derrida were partly philosophically motivated, partly politically so. In one sense, as Habermas suggests in PDM, Derrida was to be loathed simply for his role in the long-running Continental attempt to overcome the transcendental subject through strategies that were themselves subjectivistic; Derrida thus was blamed both for his ‘sins’, and for those of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.145 Derrida’s ‘blameworthiness’ was doubled by his proximity. Unlike his predecessors, whom Habermas could only engage in a backward-looking shadow play, Derrida stood at the nexus (however unintentionally or reluctantly) of a 143

Ibid, p. 14. Ibid, p. 14. 145 In this sense, Habermas’s critique of Derrida is firmly rooted in a greater critique that included his fellow French theorists Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. Habermas’s overarching argument in PDM is concisely summarized in D. Ingram, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (New Haven, 1987), pp. 75 – 103. A particularly strong objection to Habermas’s sweeping style of critique can be found in C. Norris, ‘Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Philosophy: Habermas on Derrida’, in M.P. d’Entrèves and S. Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 97 – 123. For a discussion of the challenges posed to Habermas’s thought by Lyotard, see Holub, Jürgen Habermas, pp. 134 – 52; on the subject of Habermas’s stance vis-à-vis both Lyotard and Foucault, see D. Villa, ‘Postmodernism and the Public Sphere’, The American Political Science Review, 86.3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 712-721. 144

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deconstructionist theoretical community that was expanding in Habermas’s own time. From its origins in the French academy, Derridean deconstruction had rapidly spread to the United States, proliferating throughout the late-1960s and 1970s to form the theoretical structure for a new professional subclass of literary theorists cum antimetaphysicians.146 Bound up with this philosophical critique was a political agenda. Writing against the background of a neo-conservative resurgence led by the nationalliberal wing of the German FDP and battling his long-standing fears of a ‘post-fascist democratic deficit’ in Germany, Habermas perceived any challenges to rationalism and cultural modernism as recidivistic threats that would plunge the fragile German state into the throes of irrational conservatism.147 Upon further examination, however, Derrida’s purported transgressions against the project of modernity significantly differed from those committed by Habermas’s other favorite targets. Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Foucault, for instance, attempted to overcome modernity by unearthing a ground beneath it, whether in the form of the Being of beings suggested by phenomenological questioning, or the power excavated by genealogy and its successor critiques. The Derridean challenge, meanwhile, arose from an identifiable territory on Habermas’s disciplinary field, namely, the realm of writing, a sub-sphere of the aesthetic. In Derridean deconstruction, Habermas saw the potential for disciplinary imperialism, the subsumption of the entire cultural field beneath the validity claims of the aesthetic sphere. In addressing Derrida’s notion of 'archewriting' [archinecriture or Urschrift] in both the earlier essays of The Philosophical Discourse and the slightly later Postmetaphysical Thinking, Habermas was thus not simply

146

For more on the impact of deconstruction on American literary criticism, see F. Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980). 147 Müller, Another Country, pp. 9, 35 – 6. For further insight into Habermas’s political concerns at this juncture of his career, see J. Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981), esp. pp. 7 – 13; J. Habermas, ‘Neoconservative Culture Criticism’, pp. 22 – 47; G. Trey, Solidarity and Difference: The Politics of Enlightenment in the Aftermath of Modernity (Albany, 1998), p. 110 – 118, 123; Holub, Jürgen Habermas, ch. 7, ‘National Socialism and the Holocaust: The Debate with the Historians’. Giddens has pointed to the ‘directly political motif’ running through The Theory of Communicative Action. A. Giddens, ‘Reason Without Revolution? Habermas’s Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’ in R.J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Oxford, 1985), p. 98.

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grappling with a threat to intersubjective rationality, but an internal challenge to the topos of modernity.148 At its most basic level, Habermas’s critique of Derrida centered on the subjectivistic, metaphysical implications of Derrida’s attempts to overcome the ‘philosophy of presence’. In order to advance this argument, Habermas attempted to reconstruct Derrida’s critique of Husserl, published shortly after Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Against Husserl’s attempts to perceive an ‘object that is identical with itself’, a state wherein an object could be known without any sort of mediating idea or concept, Derrida, as Habermas noted, posited the inescapably representative nature of all perception; the sense of the ‘unity of what is intuitively given’ to which phenomenological analysis appealed was, in actuality, ‘something compounded and produced’ according to a consciousness structured in terms of writing. The Derridean subject could not express himself immediately, but only through a language he came upon prestructured; indeed, the signs the subject presumably ‘fixed’ into a one-to-one, transparent relationship with an object in the world gained their meaning only by being part of a pre-subjective system.149 In this way, Habermas wrote, transcendental subjectivity ‘disappear[s] without a trace’ subsumed by ‘an anonymous occurring of language… which reaches through everything, through the now porous borders of the ego, of the author, and of his work’.150 The subject’s role as a definitive meaning-giver thus undercut, ‘archewriting takes on the role of a subjectless generator of structures that, according to structuralism, are without any author’.151

148

Habermas’s struggles with his French contemporaries sparked a fractious ‘Habermas-Foucault’ debate in the social sciences. It also, however, generated a small cottage industry of thinkers undertaking critiques of Derrida in a Habermasian vein, or, alternatively, critiques of Habermas in a Derridean vein. For an example of the former, see T. McCarthy, ‘The Politics of the Ineffable: Derrida’s Deconstructionism’, in T. McCarthy, Ideas and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (London, 1991), pp.97 – 119; for the latter, see J. Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford, 1988), p. 185 – 200. Increasingly, commentators argue, the notion of a Manichean ‘HabermasDerrida debate’ relies on an uncritical acceptance of Habermas’s characterization of Derrida. Thus, efforts have been made recently to ‘split the difference’ between the two, either by exposing their similarities and strengthening their respective positions through mutual critique or by rejecting the terms of the debate altogether in search of alternative positions. For a representative sampling of these efforts, see Bernstein, New Constellation, pp. 199 – 229; Hoy, ‘Splitting the Difference’, pp. 124 – 47; Norris, ‘Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Philosophy’, p. 100; Trey, Solidarity and Difference, p. 131. 149 Habermas, PDM, pp. 171 – 80. 150 Habermas, PMT, pp. 209 – 10. 151 Habermas, PDM, p. 180.

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As Derrida’s play with subjectivity suggested, deconstruction was as destabilizing for notions of literary authorship as it was for disciplinary divisions.152 Indeed, its peculiar attractiveness, and, from Habermas’s standpoint, its particular threat, lay precisely in its all-encompassing claims to a ‘sovereignty’ that extended without limits, washing over the topos of modernity and dissolving all discourse and writing into a universal textuality.153 Habermas wrote, ‘Even before it makes its appearance, every text and every particular genre has already lost its autonomy to an all-devouring context’; as a consequence, ‘all genre distinctions are ultimately dissolved; philosophy and science no more constitute their own proper universes than art and literature constitute a realm of fiction that could assert its autonomy vis-à-vis the universal text’.154 By exploring the multiple valences associated with the words chosen to advance claims, readers could produce meanings other than the ‘manifest content’ (the argument for which the text presumably exists) meanings that frequently contradicted or subtly undermined the primary argumentative thrust of the work. Deconstruction thus downgraded the importance of ‘logic’, the process of expositing a claim on the basis of the internal coherence of a set of ideas manifested in words that are themselves largely transparent vehicles for those ideas. In logic’s place, Derrida placed ‘rhetoric’, the process of elaborating the meaning (or meanings) arising from words themselves, considered apart from any sort of organizing ideas that preceded language.155 At stake in this subversive spread of writing was not only the integrity of philosophical and scientific discourse geared toward argumentation, but also the integrity of literature, which derived its effectiveness as a specialized mode of discourse, according to Habermas, from its differences with argumentation.156

152

Ibid, p. 187, 188. Habermas relied heavily upon images of flooding to describe the implications of the radical linguistic turn carried out by Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. For instance, Habermas wrote, ‘… the borders between literal and metaphorical meaning, between logic and rhetoric, and between serious and fictional speech are washed away in the flow of a universal textual occurrence (which is presided over indiscriminately by thinkers and poets)’. Alternatively, he describes Heidegger’s language play, ‘The house of ‘being’ is itself sucked into the maelstrom of an undirected linguistic current’. Habermas, PMT, p. 207, 210. 154 Ibid, p. 190 – 1. 155 Habermas, PDM, p. 189. 156 Ibid, p. 205. 153

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In the ‘leveling’ proposed by Derrida, Habermas thus confronted a counterpoint to his own critique of Kantian modernity. Considered vis-à-vis Kant, Habermas’s project represented a drawing down of philosophy’s judicial claims and a relaxing of the horizontal divisions in modern culture (drawing science and morals more closely together).157 The downward (vertical) movement of Habermas’s project, however, had a limit that Habermas articulated most clearly in his collision with Rorty. In Derrida, Habermas found the absolute limit to the inward (horizontal) momentum of his project. Insofar as modernity was to be protected from impoverishment, it was, for Habermas, also to be protected from totalizing subsumption under any one sphere of value. Against Derrida, Habermas was compelled to reinforce the boundaries between the spheres, primarily through an articulation of the role of fiction as a distinct mode of discourse. The end product of Habermas’s machinations, tying in as they did with his concurrent work on discourse ethics, was a cultural realm polarized between the spheres of problemsolving and world-disclosure. In order to reverse deconstruction’s genre-dissolving tide, Habermas attempted to forge a strong distinction between argumentative, ‘normal’, or ‘everyday’ discourse and fictional or aesthetic discourse. Marking ‘normal’ discourse, as noted in the previous discussion of the three-fold validity claims inherent in Habermas’s linguistic paradigm, was the use of language to establish an agreement among actors regarding ‘something in the objective world, in their common social world, or in the subjective worlds to which each has privileged access’. The power of normal discourse to generate agreement, its illocutionary force, derived from the (implicit) ability of the disputants to offer reasons in support of their claims. Fictional discourse, in turn, was distinguished from normal discourse by its ‘bracketing’ of illocutionary force; insofar as a fictional work, as a ‘disempowered illocutionary act’, communicated something to a reader, it did so without drawing upon the tri-partite complex of validity claims. Fiction, as such, was an autonomous realm of discourse with its own purposes and working methods.158 Drawing upon the work of literary theorist Richard Ohmann, Habermas pointed to ‘the generation of aesthetic illusion’ that characterized fiction, writing, ‘Neutralizing [the] binding force

157 158

Ibid, p. 206. Ibid, pp. 204 – 5; PMT, p. 223.

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[of fictional works] releases the disempowered illocutionary acts from the pressure to decide proper to everyday communicative practice… and thereby empowers them for the playful creation of new worlds – or, rather, for the pure demonstration of the worlddisclosing force of innovative linguistic expressions’.159 Insofar as artists and writers were permitted to play with words (and, analogously, visual artists and musicians could play with other media) without regard for their pragmatic uses., the language of fiction could be seen as a medium ‘specialized for world-disclosure’, a means of generating ways to represent a world, rather than the world. The ‘knowledge’ or ‘experience’ (as Habermas termed the content of art) encoded in aesthetic products, in turn, constituted a new, ‘innovative’ way of perceiving the materials of the world apart from common uses. An encounter between art object and observer resulted ‘in the changed configuration of the evaluative vocabulary, [and] in a renovation of value orientations and need interpretations, which alters the color of modes of life by way of altering modes of perception’.160 This notion of art was not entirely new in Habermas’s writings. He had previously argued for the world-disclosive power of art in ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’.161 This view of art, however, was largely suppressed in TCA as he attempted to map his tripartite schema of validity claims onto the cultural topos. In order to account for this worlddisclosive function of art within his cultural map, Habermas thus had to break from his initial tripartite validity structure and introduce a new bipartite categorization of the spheres. In the course of his 1985 interview with Bernstein, Habermas acknowledged the inappropriateness of his use of his foundational tri-partite validity complex as an adequate tool for demarcating the cultural field: ‘[The] ‘truth potential’ [inherent in aesthetic world disclosure] may not be connected to (or even identified with) just one of

159

Habermas, PDM, pp. 200 – 1. See also p. 203. Habermas, PDM, pp. 203, 205, 208 – 9. 161 The resurgence of this presentation of art points once again to Habermas’s incomplete break with the Frankfurt School. As Martin Jay has suggested, Habermas’s aesthetic theory, however minimally developed, not only borrows from Wellmer, but seems to occupy an ambiguous middle ground between the thought of Adorno and Benjamin. Ingram, for one, considers Benjamin’s influence to be predominant. For a fuller discussion of these aspects of Habermas’s thought, see Jay, ‘Habermas and Modernism’; Ingram, ‘Philosophy and the Aesthetic Mediation of Life’, p. 350 – 1. Traces of Marcuse’s belief in the worldchanging power of art can also be seen, although Habermas would not follow Marcuse so far as to expound art’s (dramatic) implication with Eros, rebellion, death, and destruction. H. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (London, 1978), pp. 62 – 3. 160

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the three validity claims constitutive for communicative action, as I have been previously inclined to maintain’.162 Viewed in light of his critique of Derrida, Habermas’s statement suggests that the true fault line between the disciplines lay in the distinction between problem-solving and world-disclosure.163 Unlike aesthetic practice, which concerned itself with nonillocutionary, formal manipulations of words and other materials, Habermas wrote: ‘In modern societies, the spheres of science, morality, and law have crystallized around… forms of argumentation. The corresponding systems of action administer problem-solving capacities in a way similar to that in which the enterprises of art and literature administer capacities for world-disclosure’. Considered from the level of the spheres themselves, the cultural field was, from Habermas’s perspective, ‘differentiated, as it were, in opposite directions’ by a ‘polar tension between world-disclosure and problem-solving’.164 The lifeworld, as a domain of everyday practice distinct from the expert cultures, thus became suspended between two cultural complexes – that of the problem-solving disciplines of science, morality, and law on one side, and art and literature on the other. The Habermasian Philosopher Through his debates with Kant, Rorty, and Derrida, Habermas sought to reconstitute philosophy in a ‘modest, self-critical form’.165 In reducing philosophy’s claims to juristic authority over culture and elevating the everyday communication to a position of centrality in the reassembly of reason, Habermas did not thereby license philosophy to retreat into its own esoteric sphere. Indeed, Habermas’s postmetaphysical philosopher was not to perpetuate the example of the German ‘mandarins’(such as Hermann Hesse, the young Thomas Mann, Ernst Robert Curtius, or Karl Jaspers), the ‘Geistesaristokratie [intellectual aristocracy] founded on a mixture of nineteenth-century German Bildung-humanism and Nietzscheanism’, who, in Habermas’s view, had

162

Habermas, ‘Questions and Counterquestions’, p. 203. Habermas, PDM, p. 208 – 9. See also Habermas, PMT, p. 205. Cf. Hoy, ‘Splitting the Difference’, p. 135; Norris, ‘Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Philosophy’, p. 113 – 4. 164 Habermas, PDM, p. 207. 165 Habermas, MCCA, pp. 10 – 1. 163

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retreated from the public responsibilities of the intellectual.166 Featuring particularly prominently in Habermas’s attempts to present a new model for philosophy was his metaphor of ‘philosophy as interpreter’. Although this metaphor recurred throughout Habermas’s writings of the 1980s, its meaning shifted slightly with each iteration; indeed, Habermas appeared uncertain as to the appropriate scope of the philosopher’s responsibilities. Following his initial confrontation with Kant and Rorty, Habermas granted the philosopher as interpreter an encyclopedic project, charging him with interpreting each of the three expert spheres to the lifeworld. In the wake of his confrontation with Derrida, however, he scaled back the philosopher’s responsibilities, splitting the interpretative burden between the philosopher and the ‘critic’. The end result of Habermas’s metaphilosophical reflections of the 1980s was an image of the philosopher as a single contributor to a larger, communal project of interpretation, a participant in the collaborative restoration of shared meaning and knowledge. The Encyclopedic Philosopher in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action Following his critiques of Kant and Rorty, Habermas set out a particularly farreaching role for the philosopher as an interpreter of the entirety of culture. For Habermas, the most vital gap to be spanned was not that between one specialized discipline and its neighbor, but between the expert cultures, taken as a whole, and the lifeworld. The impoverishment of the lifeworld, from Habermas’s perspective, could not be solved simply by cross-fertilization among specialized disciplines. Thus, while the self-evident productivity of the specialized disciplines meant that the various spheres of culture did not ‘need to be grounded or justified or given a place by philosophy’, the process of autonomization still posed ‘problems of mediation’.167 Accordingly, the philosopher’s project as a mediating interpreter was to establish ‘a new balance between the separated moments of reason’ within ‘communicative everyday life’.168 Throughout this process, the interpreter acted a servant to communicative action, deferring always to 166

Müller, p.11. J. Habermas, ‘Heinrich Heine and the Role of the Intellectual in Germany’, in Habermas, The New Conservatism (Oxford, 1989), pp. 77 – 8. 167 Ibid, p. 17, 18. 168 Ibid, p. 19.

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the judgment of deliberative communities. Despite abnegating the juridical function of the Kantian philosopher, the Habermasian philosopher assumed an equally daunting responsibility, namely, sifting through the entirety of specialized knowledge in search of cultural materials around which deliberative discourses could be constructed. The magnitude of the philosopher’s task became clear when Habermas wrote, ‘Reaching understanding in the lifeworld requires a cultural tradition that ranges across the whole spectrum, not just the fruits of science and technology…’169 In his earliest iterations, then, the philosopher as interpreter had an encyclopedic task, representing the lifeworld to all three major spheres of science, morals, and art. Building an Interpretive Community: The Philosopher and the Critic The philosopher’s responsibility took on a more limited cast once Habermas, through his initial assault on Derrida, had introduced his overlying distinction between the problem-solving and world-disclosive disciplines. In the process of separating philosophy and literature, Habermas, in PDM, divided the territories of culture between the philosopher and a figure Habermas termed the ‘critic’. In erecting this distinction between philosophy and criticism, Habermas assigned criticism and philosophy each its own specialist, ‘esoteric’ discourse. To the purview of criticism, Habermas assigned literary or aesthetic discourse. As an argumentative discourse, aesthetic discussion revolved around ‘questions of taste’, a relatively broad concern with the ‘claims to “artistic truth”, aesthetic harmony, exemplary validity, innovative force, and authenticity’ present in a piece of art.170 Philosophy, meanwhile, was assigned to the theoretical discourse surrounding the activities of the problem-solving disciplines, ‘attach[ing] theoretical claims to [their] statements’.171 In this capacity, philosophy assumed the role of ‘stand-in’ [Platzhalter], selectively synthesizing ideas drawn from the philosophical tradition with paradigms of empirical and social scientific inquiry. With this productive marriage of science and theory, philosophy would become a stand-in for, in Habermas’s 169

Ibid, pp. 18 – 9. Emphasis Habermas’s. Cf. Antonio and Kellner, ‘Communication, Modernity, and Democracy’, p. 290. 170 Habermas, PDM, p. 207. 171 Ibid, p. 208.

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terms ‘empirical theories with strong universalistic claims’.172 While Habermas, in invoking his vision of a new philosophy, explicitly aligned himself with such theorists as Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Mead, Weber, and Chomsky, his image of philosophy as standin can simultaneously be seen as an attempt to improve upon the interdisciplinary project of the Frankfurt School of the 1930s, restoring its emphasis on interdisciplinary research while discarding its emphasis on totality.173 While literary criticism and philosophy shared in the specialized activities of their respective spheres, these discourses had responsibilities and functions extending beyond the concerns of the expert cultures. For Habermas, neither literary criticism nor philosophy was simply ‘an esoteric component of an expert culture’; rather, he posited, ‘both philosophy and literary criticism, each in its own way, assume [the status of] mediators between expert cultures and the everyday world’.174 In this sense, both philosophy and art criticism assumed a ‘two-front’ configuration, stretched between the lifeworld and the various specialized cultural spheres and linking ‘everyday concerns’ with ‘expert concerns’. Insofar as the Habermasian art critic engaged in specialized disputes within the community of art critics, he also performed, in Habermas’s language, a ‘translating’ function. As he elaborated: From this second, exoteric standpoint, criticism performs a translating activity of a unique kind. It brings the experiential content of the work of art into normal language; the innovative potential of art and literature for the lifeworlds and life histories that reproduce themselves through everyday communicative practice can only be unleashed in this maieutic way. This is then deposited in the changed configuration of the evaluative vocabulary, in a renovation of value orientations and need interpretations...175 In this ‘exoteric’ function, the Habermasian critic mined art works for those features that would prove particularly fruitful for everyday communication.176 As Habermas’s appeal 172

Habermas, MCCA, p. 16. Ibid, p. 15. 174 Habermas, PDM, p. 207. Statement replicated for philosophy, ibid, p. 208. 175 Habermas, PDM, p. 208. 176 Habermas later invoked Heinrich Heine as an example of a critic that balanced the claims of esoteric and exoteric discourse. Habermas, ‘Heinrich Heine’, pp. 87 – 8. 173

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to the ‘innovative potential of art and literature’ suggests, this act of translation involved a revelation of something inherent in the work itself, rather than something added atop or attached to the artefact. The critic, in other words, provided the means through which the artefact’s meaning could become manifest to everyday actors. In performing this task, the art critic was responsible for enriching the lifeworld, providing a potentially barren field of everyday discourse with structuring ideas and tropes. Drawn back into the everyday communicative context, art could prove, if not revolutionary, at least eye-opening. The new worlds disclosed by artists’ experimentations could merge into, and subsequently build out, the worlds of communicating actors. 177 As the problem-solving analogue of the Habermasian critic, the Habermasian philosopher functioned as a bridge between the lifeworld and the specialized cultures of science and morality. Philosophy, from Habermas’s standpoint, ‘is also well suited… for the role of an interpreter mediating between the expert cultures of science, technology, law, and morality on the one hand, and everyday communicative practices on the other hand, and indeed in a manner similar to that in which literary and art criticism mediate between art and life’.178 As seen in earlier discussions of the role of philosophy as ‘standin’, philosophy added a degree of universality or concrete applicability to scientific inquiry, providing general theoretical frameworks through which specialized scientific discoveries could be linked to the concerns of non-specialist actors. At the same time, however, Habermas suggests, the philosopher was to seize upon specialized moral and scientific knowledge to upset consensuses, stimulating new waves of conversation by pointing to areas of knowledge presently unaccounted for in everyday discourse. Consequently, just as the Habermasian critic fostered innovation by exposing conversants to the different worlds disclosed in art, so the Habermasian philosopher became an agent for social change. In a final nod to Derrida, Habermas pointed to the necessity of rhetoric to such bridging functions, highlighting the role of literary topes and metaphor in communicating ideas across the fissures of culture. Faced with real language gaps between the specialized cultures and the lifeworld, the philosopher and the critic had to ‘rhetorically

177 178

Cf. Kompridis, ‘On World Disclosure’, p. 39. Habermas, PMT, p. 38.

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[expand] and [enrich] their special languages to the extent that is required to link up indirect communications with the manifest contents of statements and to do so in a deliberate way’.179 Bridging, in this sense, occurred through many of the staples of Derridean deconstruction, namely, analogy, metaphor, and wordplay. The harmonization or mingling of multiple worldviews was to occur at their edges, where words could be manipulated to include new valences. Through these alterations on the horizons of lifeworlds, new meanings could be taken up into language. The reliance of philosophy and criticism on linguistic manipulations, for Habermas, did not signal a collapse of logic into rhetoric, but rather, the appropriation of rhetoric for logical ends – the transformation of language itself into a vector through which claims and ideas could travel from the specialized spheres to the lifeworld.180

179

Habermas, PDM, p. 209. Habermas’s reflections on this point seem to discount Bryan Garsten’s claim that Habermas excluded rhetoric from argumentation. Garsten’s claim, in turn, rests upon a specious distinction between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘logic’. See B. Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, 2006), p. 190. 180

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Conclusion The Road Traveled With these final comments on the role of the post-Kantian, postmetaphysical philosopher, Habermas’s metaphilosophical reflections converged with Dewey’s, replicating even his division of the burden of interpretation between the philosopher and the critic. While occurring seemingly independent of Dewey’s direct influence, this convergence was not entirely serendipitous. Not only did Dewey and Habermas draw upon common intellectual resources in their respective approaches to the problematic of modernity (directly or indirectly, including Kant, Hegel, and Peirce), but Habermas relied heavily on the insights of many of Dewey’s close contemporaries (Weber, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno) in shaping his diagnosis of modernity. Grounding their respective visions of the philosopher were highly similar (although not wholly congruent) interpretations of, and reactions to, modernity. Habermas, like Dewey, envisioned himself as an inheritor of a modern landscape fragmented both vertically and horizontally by disciplinary specialization and buttressed by a philosophical contempt for concrete praxis. Moreover, in a testament to their common Peircean roots, both men saw themselves as responsible for rebuilding thought in the wake of science’s challenge to epistemic certainty. Their respective projects resulted in isomorphic blueprints for a new modernity, one which placed the non-specialist public at the center of culture, flanked on one side by the closely linked spheres of science and morality (on one side) and the aesthetic (on the other). Uniting these territories of modernity were the ‘bridging’ or mediating activities of the community of philosophers and critics. If Dewey and Habermas’s respective approaches to modernity proceeded from similar

premises

(meaning

‘desiccation’,

cultural

fragmentation,

disciplinary

overspecialization, philosophical obfuscation) and converged upon a set of similar solutions (modulated integration, renewed democratization, philosophical mediation, and knowledge interpretation as collaboration), their non-overlapping historical concerns and theoretical contexts disaggregated their theoretical perspectives. A running theme of this study has been the subtle rift separating Dewey and Habermas on the subject of Kant. Coming in the wake not only of Dewey, but also of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and

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Wittgenstein, Habermas lacked the anti-Kantian agenda that informed Dewey’s theorizing. Not only did Habermas retain ‘reason’ as a (primary) term of art, but he also retained elements of Kantian transcendentalism in his theories of language and ethics. While noticeable, this divergence should not be overexaggerated. Habermas not only sought to expunge philosophy of its Kantian ‘juristic’ privileges, but he also strove to recast Kantian reason in an intersubjective mode and struggled with alternative ways of schematizing the relationships between the spheres of culture that could complement, if not wholly override, the Kantian trisection of reason. In the end, if Habermas did not align himself with Dewey on the frontlines of anti-Kantianism, both thinkers, in their theorizing, actively strove to develop post-Kantian stances. This partial asymmetry in attitudes toward Kant pointed to broader divergences in their respective diagnoses of modernity. Placing heavy emphasis upon the world-shaping power of philosophy, Dewey pinned much of the blame for the desolation of public knowledge upon the Western philosophical tradition. As the terms of PDM suggest, Habermas too noted the role philosophy played in sustaining cultural fragmentation; nevertheless, for Habermas, the plight of the lifeworld was attributable both to patterns of thought and to the structures of media that surrounded the ever-shrinking and ever-more fragmented lifeworld in a norm-free exoskeleton of power and money. Habermas’s comfort with (quasi-)transcendental structures of language, yet another apparent inheritance from Kant (via Peirce), accounts for perhaps his most noted disanalogy with Dewey, namely, his underdeveloped commentary on educational issues. 181 Although Habermas’s early journalistic forays displayed a concern with the secondary schools and universities in Germany of the 1950s and 1960s, his oeuvre lacks an identifiable analogue to any of Dewey’s many writings on education.182 Habermas’s account of communicative rationality largely takes for granted not only the ability of the agent to assemble disparate pieces of knowledge into a whole, but also the inherent ability and/or willingness of individuals to participate in discursive decision-making and 181

Bartlett, ‘Discursive Democracy and a Democratic Way of Life,’ pp. 381 – 3. For a reflection on the usefulness of Deweyan and Habermasian thought for American university reform, see S.T. Ostovich, ‘Dewey, Habermas, and the University in Society’, Educational Theory 45. 4 (1995), pp. 465-77. 182 Pensky, ‘Jürgen Habermas and the Antinomies of the Intellectual’, pp. 225. See also J. Habermas, ‘The Idea of the University: Learning Processes’, in J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 100 – 127.

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collaborative knowledge-building. Lacking this faith in the transcendental structure of language, Dewey placed significant emphasis upon pedagogy designed to train individuals for democratic citizenship. Judgment, Totality, and the Absolute The general outline of ‘philosopher as mediator and interpreter’ having been set forth, there remains to explore, through the limitations and ambiguities that arise in light of a few relevant precedents, the ultimate implications of this philosophical model for Dewey and Habermas’s views of a reconstituted field of modern knowledge. Looming large in Dewey and Habermas’s discussions of the philosopher is the issue of judgment. Despite the overt attack launched by Dewey and Habermas on the authority of the philosopher, a judging function remains implicit in their refashioned concept of the philosopher as mediator and interpreter. Bearing in mind the state of fragmented and endlessly proliferating knowledge to which Dewey and Habermas responded, the postKantian philosopher, as a lone individual, could not aspire to unify and translate the entirety of knowledge. In seeking knowledge around which public discourses could be organized, the philosopher would have to appropriate selectively. Under these conditions, the network of subsidiary discourses that arose in the everyday world would undeniably be shaped by the philosopher’s own preferences. As Dewey noted, the individual was not a ‘transparency’ or a passive node through which unmediated knowledge manifested itself, but rather, a ‘force’, which gave shape and meaning to phenomena.183 In selecting smaller bits of knowledge from society’s greater pool, the philosopher as interpreter would, by his very nature as a ‘force’, add a subjective spin to the knowledge he offered to the public. Implicitly framing the knowledge so offered would be the presumption of its importance to public discourse, a standard derived both from the philosopher’s own understanding of the problems facing his society and from his vision for potential solutions to those problems. Undoubtedly, as noted earlier, the philosopher’s subjective standards for selection would be fluid; ideally, as an active participant in the discourses transpiring in the public realm, the philosopher would check his recommendations against 183

Dewey, AE, p. 256.

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the judgments of the public. In this respect, the philosopher’s standards of judgment would evolve and change in response to the needs, challenges, and abilities of his audience. Nevertheless, if such a situation effectively reorients the philosopher’s judgment from transcendental categories to pragmatically derived social concerns, it does not thereby eliminate the process of philosophical judgment. To organize conversation was necessarily to select a particular element of knowledge from the fragmented morass of modernity for a specific purpose. If to organize conversation was to select, to select was first to know; to fulfill his duty as a representative of the lifeworld to the realms of science, morality, and art, the philosopher as interpreter would seem to require, if not total, then extensive, knowledge of modern knowledge. The issue of judgment thus raises another issue for the DeweyanHabermasian philosopher that has been touched on throughout this study, namely, the issue of totality or the Absolute. Dewey perceived totality as a hopelessly elusive goal, yoked to philosophy by neo-Kantianism; as he remarked in QC, ‘[The] diversification of discoveries and the opening up of new points of view and new methods… defeats the idea of any complete synthesis of knowledge upon an intellectual basis’.184 If Habermas assented to Dewey’s critique of Kant, he approached the question of totality with an extra set of historical concerns. In addition to struggling with Kant, Rorty, and Derrida, Habermas was, in the 1980s, also attempting to move beyond the constraints of the Western Marxist tradition in which his earliest writings were rooted. Against Lukács’ claims that the ultimate goal of theorization was the identification of the ‘totality (to the whole of society seen as a process), through which every aspect of the struggle acquires its revolutionary significance’ or Horkheimer’s attempts to identify a unity amid the ravages of instrumental rationalization, Habermas pointed to the impossibility of uncovering a single principle that transformed historical chaos into a decipherable whole.185 Yet, even as Dewey and Habermas appeared to deny totality and the Absolute, they placed a heavy burden upon the philosopher. If, in the era of endlessly proliferating knowledge, things were not to be known in their totality, they were, at the very least, to be extensively explored and catalogued in their plurality. 184

Dewey, QC, p. 249. G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 22. 185

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It is within the context of the interpretive burden of plurality that Dewey and Habermas’s pairing of the philosopher with the critic appears crucial. In their theoretical writings, both Dewey and Habermas acknowledged the necessity of furnishing deliberative communities with knowledge from all specialist spheres. In their own practice, however, both men identified more closely with the more limited view of the philosopher as a scientific and moral thinker. As ‘philosophers’, Dewey and Habermas presented themselves primarily as ‘social scientists’, occupying a vague middle ground between science, morals, and the ‘human’, ‘social’, or ‘reconstructive sciences’; while both commented on art, neither presented himself as a full fledged aesthetic critic. By pointing to a potential division of interpretive labor, both appeared to attest to the limits of their own knowledge and capacities. The nature of their own practice called for contributions from thinkers of different persuasions, motivated by diverse sets of concerns. Full coverage of culture was not to come from totalizing, encyclopedic philosophizing, but through carefully delimited interpretative practices. This notion emerges most strongly in Habermas’s critique of Derrida, where he presented the philosopher and the critic as mutually implicated in a cooperative enterprise. Together, the Habermasian philosopher and critic ‘are supposed to feed the contents of expert cultures in which knowledge is accumulated under one aspect of validity at a time into an everyday practice in which all linguistic functions and aspects of validity are intermeshed to form one syndrome’.186 Insofar as everyday language drew on all spheres of validity to perform its illocutionary task, the philosopher and critic were to be seen as ministering in their own unique ways to the communicative life of the community. Functionally differentiated, the philosopher and the critic could thus nonetheless be seen as part of a common project of re-enriching collective knowledge and meaning. Considered within the broad framework of Habermas’s critique of modernity, however, the philosopher and critic were not simply complementary; more vitally, each presupposed the other.187 Habermas, as noted previously, feared the domination of the lifeworld by one sphere of validity as much as he feared complete cultural fragmentation. 186

Habermas, PDM, p. 209. Cf. Antonio and Kellner, ‘Communication, Modernity, and Democracy’, p. 284; Kompridis, ‘On World Disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas and Dewey’, p. 32, 40 – 1. 187

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Driving his critique of Derrida was the attempt to prevent his own attempts to overcome the horizontal fragmentation of cultural modernity from collapsing into the totalitarianism of a single sphere of culture. From this standpoint, in the absence of his counterpart, the philosopher or the critic’s work threatened to yield a culturally crippling domination of the lifeworld wherein one set of validity claims came to dominate all others. Thus, the relationship between the philosopher and the critic should be seen as dialectically intertwined. The contributions of each were valued not in isolation, but only in concert. In this description of philosophy and criticism’s mutual reliance, the relevance of Dewey and Habermas’s metaphilosophical reflections to democratic practice emerges in its fullest form. Not only was philosophy to be rendered interpretative to serve the interests of democratic publics, but the act of interpretation was itself to be a collaborative endeavor. Knowledge was not to be delivered to non-specialists en bloc by a single interpreter, but rather, supplied in pieces by a community of interpreters; once supplied, knowledge would be subject to review by the assembled community of nonspecialists. Foregrounded at all times in this conception of the interpreter’s activity was not the interpreter, but the product to which he contributed: knowledge, collaboratively generated, provisionally held, and meaningfully deployed. In this sense, Dewey and Habermas sought to prefigure in theory the practical consummation of the promise of modern cultural specialization. For them, specialized knowledge was to be collaboratively generated knowledge, and, in turn, public knowledge. Modernity had not collapsed irretrievably in upon itself, but rather, required only (albeit not simply) a programmatic reorientation from within, drawing upon the resources of specialists and non-specialists alike. It was upon this reintegrated terrain of modern culture, assembled through collaborative practice, that Dewey and Habermas’s political aspirations rested. Any attempts to salvage the promise of democracy would succeed only if paired with a reconfiguration of modern culture, which sheltered and supported the deliberative communities at the center of Dewey and Habermas’s redrawn maps of modernity.

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