Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 in Dusseldorf and
studied philosophy, history, psychology and German Literature in Gotttingen,
Zurich and Bonn. He was under the sway of Martin Heidegger until 1953. In this
year he read the newly published Introduction to Metaphysics.[1]
He was shocked by Heidegger's lack of comment on the Nazi period.[2]
Habermas was then inspired first by Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness which he read in 1954 and
secondly by Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment which he came across in
1955.
He got a job at the Frankfurt Institute as an
assistant in 1956. By 1962 he had risen to become a Professor whilst writing
his influential 'Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere'. He left
Frankfurt University in 1971 after disputes with students in the protest
movement but returned in 1982.
Habermas considers the split between theory and
practice in the Marxist tradition in his book Theory and Practice (1963). In this book he
agrees with the later Adorno in seeing a limitation for human action in the
central Marxist concept of labour. Labour produces a view of human beings as
solely the subject of alienation. He argued that this was only part of the
picture and one that had denied a truly liberating perspective to Marxism.
Beginning
in the early 1970's, Habermas rejected Adorno's aesthetic orientation and began
arguing for a reorientation of critical theory towards a renewed collaboration
between philosophy and the social sciences. (Benhabib et al, 1993 p11)[3]
His attempt to see a human potential beyond the
alienation of labour and to revive the founding cross disciplinary principles
of Critical Social Theory led to his magnum opus which was published in 1981 as
The Theory of Communicative Action. This is the work to which I will now refer.[4]
The subtitle of volume one
is 'Reason and the Rationalisation of Society'. The study of reason has
traditionally belonged to philosophy and philosophical reason can most simply
be defined as an unpacking of reason's experience of itself. However reason is
difficult to define any more than saying that it is thinking codified in
language. Referring to Richard Rorty, Habermas agrees with the postmodernist
position that a philosophical worldview has become untenable and that there can
no longer be a totalising abstract knowledge. However Habermas argues that it
does not then follow that an empirically tested theory of rationality could not
be universal.
As the search for ultimate
foundations by 'first philosophy' or 'The Philosophy of Consciousness' has now
broken down, this must be a pragmatic theory based on science and social
science. This implies that any universalist claims can only be validated by
testing against counter examples in historical (and geographical) contexts -
not by using transcendental ontological assumptions.
This leads him to look for
the basis of a new theory of communicative action in the tradition of sociology.
[1] Introduction to Metaphysics was based on a lecture that Heidegger had given in
1935.
[2] See, Habermas: an introduction, Detlef Horster, (Pennbridge 1992 p82)
[3] It is clear from the essays collected in On Max
Horkheimer, (op cit) that Habermas
owes a huge debt to the influence of Max Horkheimer's original programme at the
Frankfurt Institute.
[4] Page numbers given refer to the Polity Press English
translation by Thomas McCarthy (paperback edition of 1986).