Jürgen Habermas Interview

A few days ago, in my doctoral seminar, we started talking about the noose hanging incident at Teachers College. The discussion rapidly turned to issues of morality – and specifically, toward concepts of justice and solidarity. One of my classmates argued for a morality based in an empathy and solidarity with those who suffer discrimination; by his own admission, he (as a white Southern male) didn’t truly understand what it means to be treated equally until he lived abroad for a year and suffered discrimination at the hands of others. Another replied that she felt such talk about empathy to be needlessly politically correct and fashionable; she didn’t think it necessary to empathize with others – to take the role of the other, so to speak – in order to know how to accord others basic respect and basic rights…to treat them justly, in other words.

Habermas redux, I thought to myself, and have been tossing him around in my mind for a few days. So, here’s a YouTube video of an English-language interview of the great man which I discovered trolling around Strenge Jacke!. ‘Great man’ is not intended facetiously; even though I don’t consider myself a Habermasian I think not only his intellectual contribution but also his towering moral and personal integrity has to be recognized. To the extent that I read any of the grand theorists nowaday, I spend most of my time puzzling over Luhmann rather than Habermas, but my love for the theory of modernity and the history of social theory came through picking up, by accident, the first volume of The Theory of Communicative Action and spending a summer soldiering through that book.

While I don’t think anyone could quite figure out what to do was quite satisfied with the system/lifeworld distinction he developed in TCA, and while I didn’t quite find myself buying into his discourse-theoretic reconstruction of Kantian moral theory, I nevertheless found the approach productive. But where I started to turn away from Habermas was when he extended the theory into the domain of law and democratic theory and developed a concept of ‘deliberative democracy’ out of his approach. Normatively appealing – but hardly necessitated by a concept of formal pragmatics. That is to say, it is one thing to say that linguistic communication has an unavoidable pragmatic structure that warrants a kind of universalistic moral proceduralism, but even if indubitably true, I can see this as having at best only an elective affinity with a range of different kinds of political and democratic theories whose plausibility may vary according to different material and cultural contingencies (of course, Habermas’s political and legal theory doesn’t disallow this, but in politics and law what’s interesting are precisely those contingencies rather than the universals, which even on Habermas’s own account exert a weak force at best). Also, I wasn’t entirely convinced by Habermas’s attempt to differentiate – in order to answer, primarily, his neo-Aristotelian critics – moral discourses into moral, ethical, and pragmatic discourses on the one hand, or to suggest that functionally we have to distinguish between discourses of ‘justification’ against discourses of ‘application.’ (Moral/ethical/pragmatic discourses take up different aspects of the ’should’: what ’should’ I do? has to be answered depending on how one understands the ’sollen’. The distinction between justificatory and application discourses has to do with deliberation over principles versus deliberation over the contingent application of those principles.) This proliferation of discursive systems to me reflected a kind of uninhibited taxonomic fervor that only ended up vitiating the strength and clarity of his original, though more limited, discourse-theoretic formulation of Kantian moral proceduralism.

These are debates I’ve left behind since turning toward a more sociological focus in my studies, but it’s still interesting to see in everyday conversations preicsely the intuitions that Habermas helped to elucidate and give sociological and philosophical significance to at work.