The Force of Reason over
the Reason of Force:
Jurgen Habermas and Critical Social Theory

Federico José T. Lagdameo

Jurgen Habermas has been the principal representative of the “ Frankfurt School ” in the last three decades. His reworking of the “critical theory,” i.e., the notion that modern society's problems can be analyzed and remedied through the critical tools proffered by the social sciences, has gained him widespread prominence in the fields of philosophy, sociology, and political science.

Habermas belongs to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory or the “ Frankfurt School ,” as the movement is commonly called. Steeped in the intellectual tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, the Frankfurt School has for its origins Max Horkheimer's Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), a research center within Frankfurt University. The Institut and subsequently, the movement have taken upon themselves the task of analyzing the ills of modern society with the view of proposing “cures” for them.

Habermas' theory of communicative action, however, is a marked departure from the “critical theory” of his predecessors at the Institut . The latter have sharply criticized “the project of modernity” and the Enlightenment “for engendering new forms of irrationality and repression.” They have claimed that, far from ushering the golden age of humanity where equality and freedom prevail, the Enlightenment has instead brought upon the world such horrors like wars, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, totalitarianism, reification, and the loss of meaning. For Habermas's intellectual forbears, the project of modernity—that task of continuing humanity's progress in knowledge through the rationalization of all aspects of life—is to be held suspect.

Habermas, on the other hand, has sought to reclaim this project of Enlightenment. He has wanted to once more enshrine reason as the impetus, norm, and telos of human endeavors. He has undertaken the critical theory's original role of “giving new life to ideals of reason and freedom by revealing their false embodiment in scientism, capitalism, the ‘culture industry', and bourgeois Western political institutions.” He has once more directed critical theory towards examining society and its ills, and effecting a radical change in society's theory and practice in order to arrive at a cure.

Habermas has pointed to a more optimistic horizon offered by modernity and its vehicle, reason. In effect, his interpretation of “the rationalization of history” has presented possibilities that his predecessors left unconsidered.

This interpretation begins with a more comprehensive conception of reason that goes beyond “instrumental/strategic rationality.” The latter, he claimed, is merely a part of it which, however, has too often been taken as the whole. Rather than confine rationality to the type where its end is the mastery of the world in the service of human interests, Habermas challenges this restrictive understanding of reason.

For Habermas, there is a kind of rationality that is not oriented towards domination. He calls this communicative rationality . Communicative rationality is Habermas' panacea to the social ills brought about by instrumental/strategic reason. For in contrast to using rationality merely as a tool for mastery, communicative rationality uses the consensus-achieving force of reaching mutual understanding inherently present in language, rather than the strategic reason's paradigm of domination of nature and of other subjects.

Thus, Habermas's theory of communicative action aims at supplanting instrumental/strategic reason without the latter's concomitant tyranny and loss of meaning. It would be, Habermas hopes, the reign of reason without Weber's “iron cage.”

Habermas's critical social theory is embodied in what he terms discourse. In general, it is a type of social action in which the speaker or the initiator of the action wishes to reach understanding with another speaker about something in the world. Discourse, Habermas asserts, is oriented to bringing about conflicting interests into the realm of rational and free deliberation of the subjects involved in order to arrive at a consensus. Thus, discourse, rather than leading persons to reification, emancipates them because of the inter-subjectivity present in consensus.

The current essay aims to present a broad outline of Habermas' critical social theory as it appears in his book The Theory of Communicative Action , and in his other related works. The paper demonstrates this theory's reliance on an elaboration of society as both a system and a lifeworld , contrary to Marx's and sociology's claims. Similarly, the essay intends to show the significance of language and its consensus-building character to Habermas' project of rehabilitating reason. Moreover, it discusses Habermas' theory of communicative action as his prescription to a social world afflicted by a rationality solely oriented towards success. Towards the end, a brief critical review of Habermas' theory is offered.

DISCOURSE AND HABERMAS'
CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY

For Habermas, society reproduces itself both materially and socially. In his reconstruction of “historical materialism,” Habermas criticizes Karl Marx for the latter's narrow concept of how human beings in society reproduce their lives. He argues that Marx's concept of socially organized labor cannot account for social integration, a vital dimension of human society. In fact, Habermas points out that social integration occurs because of socialization processes, such as those present in familial relations.

But for Habermas, Marx's concept of social labor does not capture the specifically human reproduction of life. Social labor and economy may be suitable to distinguish the hominid from the primates but not human life itself. . . . What actually distinguished the homo sapiens is not the economy but the family .

Habermas' critical social theory proposes a dual understanding of society: as system, or that to which the material reproduction of life pertains; and as lifeworld, the unquestionable background of meanings that is the locus for social integration. In general, system refers to the material reproduction which has to do with the preservation of bodies, and which occurs mainly through the market and the state; while lifeworld refers to the horizon of meanings individuals share in society and is coordinated and reproduced symbolically.

Approaches to the study of society or the history of sociology, according to Habermas, have been marked by the over-emphasis of one over the other. A combination of these two approaches may be required. The said over-emphases has only resulted in an inadequate and unbalanced assessment of society's condition. As such, it has led to a case of a wrong diagnosis providing an equally wrong remedy.

Habermas considers either of these conceptual strategies, taken by itself, to be one-sided. The theory of society requires the combination of the two—of the internalist perspective of the participant with the externalist perspective of the observer, of hermeneutic and structuralist analysis with systems-theoretic and functional analysis, of the study of social integration with the study of system integration. Because social action is symbolically mediated, structural patterns of action systems that are integral to their continued existence have to be grasped hermeneutically; we have to understand and reconstruct the meaning of symbolic structures. Moreover, the self-maintenance of social systems is subject to internal limitations resulting from the “inner logic” of symbolic reproduction. . . . On the other hand, the lifeworld approach, taken by itself, runs the risk of a “hermeneutical idealism” that conceptualizes society from the perspective of participants and remains blind to causes, connections, and consequences that lie beyond the horizon of everyday practice.

For Habermas, both the material and symbolic reproductions of society take place because of a double process of rationalization. Rationalization (following the tradition of German historical idealism) is that process wherein reason unfolds in history, and unfolds history. “To Habermas reason operates in history. . . . because [human beings] themselves have, as a species, a capacity for rationality.” Thus, rationalization implies the human subject's use of knowledge which, in turn, is governed by any of the three human interests.

Unlike Hegel and those influenced by him, Habermas does not hold that the rationalization of history is inevitable. He explains that rationalization's logic of development is different from its dynamics of development . The former is concerned with the possibilities attendant to reason's unfolding in and of history; while the latter points to its actual and ongoing process. This distinction is important for it paves the way for his argument that due to rationalization's present dynamics, selective rationalization has taken place. It is an argument that Habermas would issue in view of the said double process of rationalization.

One of these processes is the rationalization of the system that entails the use of instrumental/strategic rationality. In his critique of Weber's action theory, Habermas points out that there are two action orientations, “that which corresponds to the coordination of action through interest positions and through normative agreement.” In other words, actions are either oriented to success, or oriented to reaching understanding. The rationalization of the system requires actions rationally oriented to success.

Success is defined as the appearance in the world of a desired state, which can, in a given situation, be causally produced through goal-oriented action or omission. The effects of action comprise the results of action (which the actor foresaw and intended, or made allowance for) and the side effects (which the actor did not foresee). We call an action oriented to success instrumental when we consider it under the aspect of following technical rules of action and assess the efficiency of an intervention into a complex of circumstances and events. We call an action oriented to success strategic when we consider it under the aspect of following rules of rational choice and assess the efficacy of influencing the decisions of a rational opponent. Instrumental actions can be connected with and subordinated to social interactions of a different type --for example, as the “task elements” of social roles; strategic actions are social actions by themselves.

Actions oriented to success, whether instrumental or strategic, are motivated by a rationality that is itself oriented to success. Habermas identifies this as “instrumental/strategic reason.”

With regards to the system, therefore, human beings reproduce their lives materially by dominating or mastering their world. Instrumental/strategic rationality makes this possible.

In contrast, the rationalization of the lifeworld is made possible by communicative rationality. The reproduction of symbols or meaning requires a different type of rationality that is not within the domain of instrumental/strategic reason. “The symbolic structures of the lifeworld are reproduced through three processes: cultural tradition, social integration, and socialization; and they operate only in communicative reason.”

Hence, social reality rests not on the subject's mastery of the external world but rather on the subject's “communicative competence.” Habermas explains the latter as “the ability of a speaker oriented to mutual understanding to embed a well-formed sentence in relation to reality.”

Social reproduction of society demands that human agents, as speakers and participants in a shared lifeworld, should strive to expand that common horizon of meanings. As speakers and participants, therefore, their action orientation should be geared towards reaching mutual understanding with other subjects. Consequently, the rationalization of the lifeworld entails actions oriented to reaching understanding among subjects comprising society. And these actions are within the object domain of communicative rationality.

Communicative reason recognizes that linguistic utterances presuppose a common background for understanding. Habermas asserts that there is an inherent quality in language itself for consensus building. Making use of John Searle's, John L. Austin's speech-act theories, and Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental pragmatics of language, Habermas developed a theory of communicative rationality which sought to harness the binding and bonding force of speech, and would correspond to the demands brought about by humanity's highest interest: emancipation.

Habermas' critical theory addresses the crises confronting capitalist societies today by identifying their roots in strategic rationality/action. The current social pathologies afflicting society are the direct result of strategic rationality as it becomes the type of rationalization taking place in the lifeworld. Loss of meaning and freedom, alienation and reification are the pathologies Weber and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School inveighed against; they are the self-same illnesses which Habermas attributes to the “strategic rationalization” of the lifeworld, or what he has called “the colonization of the lifeworld.”

In capitalist societies, the system, as represented by the economy and the state, has encroached upon the lifeworld; the system's media of interaction—money and power—have taken over and replaced that which holds the lifeworld together: shared meanings brought about by language. By imposing new steering media to a lifeworld being bound by intersubjective understanding, the “colonization of the lifeworld” has led to crisis tendencies being felt by the same capitalist societies.

Logically enough, Habermas states that the cure to the pathologies brought about by this colonization is the expansion of the lifeworld, i.e., social integration and socialization processes should be effected through communicative rationality and communicative action. “Argumentative speech-acts” or discourse is that form of communicative action that leads to social integration and the expansion of the realm of shared meanings in the face of the crises of colonization. For discourse brings conflicting views and interests of the subjects involved into the realm of free and rational discussion where a consensus could be arrived.

Discourse can be understood as that form of communication that is removed from contexts of experience and action and whose structure assures us: that the bracketed validity claims of assertions, recommendations, or warnings are the exclusive object of discussion; that participants, themes and contributions are not restricted except with reference to the goal of testing the validity claims in questions; that no force except that of the better argument is exercised; and that, as a result, all motives except that of the cooperative search for truth are excluded.

Language plays a pivotal role in discourse. It is the avenue through which communicative reason expresses itself in socialization processes. Nonetheless, it can also be employed as a means of strategic rationality.

Habermas keenly distinguishes between communicative rationality's use of language in order to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus and strategic reason's employment of the same in order to influence or manipulate the hearer. In an article he contributed to Philosophical Problems Today, Habermas gives a rough overall sketch of his approach to formal pragmatics. There he writes on how communicative action is different from strategic action from the viewpoint of action-coordination provided by language:

The types of interaction can be distinguished from one another by the mechanism of action coordination, specifically in terms of whether natural language is employed only as a medium for transmitting information or as a source of social integration. . . . [In communicative action], the consensus-achieving force of reaching mutual understanding, i.e. the bonding energies of language itself have an impact on action coordination; [in strategic action] the coordinating effect remains dependent on the influence exerted by the actors on the situation and on one another.

The value of discourse in social integration can be seen in its adherence to the equality supposedly afforded by reason and freedom. Assertions of the imperativist sort are made obligatory to the hearer because it is grounded not on power or money (the steering media of the system), but rather on reason and freedom. Discourse is therefore motivated and made legitimate by reason and freedom, both components of the lifeworld.

Discourse does not only affirm the lifeworld; it also presupposes its existence. Argumentative speech is possible because its participants share the same normative contexts or meanings. The speaker in discourse, precisely appeals to these norms as the basis for mutual understanding.

Habermas characterizes the process and rules of discourse as follows:

1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in discourse.    
2. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatsoever.
3. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatsoever into the discourse.
4. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs.
5. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in
   (1) and (2).

Discourse involves the speaker's redemption of validity claims through the “unforced force of reason.” It makes use of “the force of logic” rather than “the logic of force.” The hearer or the other participants to discourse can accept the speaker's claims to validity because of the rational motivation contained therein. By relying on “the force of the better argument,” participants justify their claims with regards to the logical-semantic realm, and more importantly, to the moral and practical realm of existence.

The process of justification, nonetheless, is problematic. Universal validity rests on what participants to discourse could consider to be “rational.” And yet, what counts as “rational” is debatable; modern-day pluralism and issues like “ethnocentrism” and “rational imperialism” are points for consideration. To address the problem, Habermas makes use of Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental mode of justification or “performative contradiction.” This refers to the contradiction one incurs when his/her explicit assertion in discourse refutes his/her implicit assumption. The execution of such contradiction necessarily invalidates the claim from rational discourse; it hereby safeguards the latter from being prompted by anything other than communicative reason. Hence, claims are said to be valid and rational if they do not incur this contradiction, and are recognized consensually by the participants or is “universalizable.”

Consequently, “the better argument” takes the form of a claim that passes these criteria. And in resolving the conflicts of society brought about by the system's colonization of the life­world, Habermas' critical social theory submits discourse as the arena where “the better argument” ultimately triumphs.

LIMITATIONS OF HABERMAS'
CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY

Habermas' theory of communicative action has its share of criticisms. Some of these critical remarks can be found in the reviews of Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action . For instance, Steven B. Smith points out that Habermas makes the following crucial claim in the book, but nonetheless, leaves it unsubstantiated:

The problem with the theory of communicative action is not that it stresses the hermeneutic at the expense of the purposive dimension of language but, rather, what Habermas takes this to imply. He remarks at one point that “the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use” upon which strategic thinking is in general “parasitic.” Yet nowhere is the priority of reaching an understanding demonstrated.

Although Smith mentions three difficulties attendant to Habermas' work, the one just mentioned is the most insurmountable.

Frederick A. Olafson offers a lengthier and more detailed review of The Theory of Communicative Action . Like Smith, Olafson lauds Habermas for intellectual breadth and depth, and in particular, for his synthetic approach to the varied fields of study he delves in. Likewise, he also takes issue with Habermas on certain significant points raised by the latter in the said work.

In particular, Olafson is puzzled as to why Habermas turns towards an ontological direction after undertaking a theory of argumentation that has centered on the three validity claims that Habermas enunciates. These validity claims are made to refer to three “worlds”: an objective world, a social world, and a subjective world. These ontological references, however, appear to be problematic vis-à-vis Habermas' description of the lifeworld:

Unfortunately, these two metaphors—the life-world as the “extra-mundane” place in which one stands for purposes of reference to things or facts in the three worlds and the life-world as that which operates from behind one's back—do not consort well with one another. They also leave unanswered the question whether Habermas's concept of the life-world comprises that of a primordial world-relation ( Weltbezug ), in the phenomenological sense, from which the three worlds would be derived by subsequent discriminations but which would itself define the permanent horizon within which we live. If this were the case, then the ontology of the three worlds would have to be expanded to accommodate the life-world as the matrix from which these “worlds” emerge.

Such an expansion, Olafson argues, would imply a reductionism that Habermas distinctly inveighed against.

This difficulty can be traced to Habermas' neglect, unintentional perhaps, of an account of the lifeworld that is not ambiguous and metaphorical. Olafson faults him in this because in lieu of a lucid presentation of the concept, Habermas chooses to dwell on the nuances of the speech-act theory of Austin which too often has no direct bearing on his major thesis.

Ultimately, Olafson's critique of The Theory of Communicative Action rests on its “weak concept of intersubjectivity that is not anchored deeply enough in a philosophical concept of the human subject.” In a word, Habermas's fault lies in his rather impersonal and even “mechanistic” description of the human subject that any discussion of intersubjective relations becomes problematic. Ironically enough, it seems that Habermas himself incurs the mistake that he has sought out to correct. For by conceiving the human subject in a reductionist manner, Habermas may well have further brought about “the colonization of the lifeworld.”

An objection to Habermas' theory in general is the position that discourse can be made inutile when one actually refuses to enter it. A subject, for instance, can refrain from entering into discourse because of a desire to evade the process of justifying one's claims.

Habermas anticipates this and has an available rejoinder. He demonstrates that such a refusal is equivalent to a denial of the communicative context of everyday life. By deliberately refraining from participating in discourse, a subject isolates himself/herself from the lifeworld. Habermas stresses that such a course of action is inconceivable even as a thought experiment for it assumes a position outside the lifeworld, a stance both untenable and, more importantly, self-contradicting.

It can be pointed out, however, that freedom is distinct from rationality. No matter how rational an option may be, freedom or human agency can choose another option “less reasonable” if not “unreasonable.”

Discourse does motivate the human subject to take a position or an action which is rational; however, it cannot and does not necessitate the actual accomplishment of that action . In the critical comments Brand has made of Habermas's theory, he notes—together with the other critics of the theory—that “being rational requires a form of commitment, that the mere fact of entering into communication does not imply, in itself, the willingness ‘to yield to the better argument'.” Similarly, the refusal to enter discourse underscores the will's capacity for “irrationality.” It can be motivated by something other than reason. The will, because it is free, can choose "the reason of power" over "the power of reason.”

Habermas commits his whole philosophical enterprise to the bridging of the chasm between theory and practice. He avers that communicative rationality bridges that gap; through discourse, actions of subjects are directed towards consensus, bringing about human emancipation which is reason's ultimate goal. Brand concludes as much when he quotes Leszek Kolakowski, a critic of Habermas:

Habermas was, in accordance with ‘the whole tradition of German Idealism', in search of a focal point ‘at which practical and theoretical reason, cognition and will, knowledge of the world and the movement to change it, all become identical'.

That “focal point” remains elusive, nonetheless, given the distinction between reason and freedom. Still, Habermas remains hopeful that reason will persuade our freedom to choose what is rational. This, he believes, is reason's true power.

In sum, Habermas' critical social theory which is expressed in his theory of communicative action has analyzed society as being both a system and a lifeworld. Further, it has diagnosed that modern society suffers from ills that are symptomatic of a general malady called the system's colonization of the lifeworld . The lifeworld is that part of society wherein the symbolic reproduction of human life occurs. With its colonization, communication becomes nebulous, meaning and interpersonal understanding are distorted, humanity is dehumanized. For meaning, so crucial to the reproduction of human life, can neither be forced or coerced.

Habermas has proposed that this ongoing colonization must be halted through discourse or communicative action. At the level of the lifeworld, the steering medium must neither be money nor power (the steering media of the system) but language oriented towards consensus. The systemic colonization of the lifeworld must be remedied through the widespread application of communicative action, an action that fosters intersubjective understanding.

For Habermas, therefore, “the reason of force” must and can only be confronted by the “force of reason.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources:

Habermas, Jurgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston : Beacon Press, 1971.

________. Legitimation Crisis. Boston : Beacon Press, 1973.

________. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston : Beacon Press, 1979.

________. The Theory of Communicative Action . Boston : Beacon Press, 1984.

________. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge , Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 1990.

________. “Actions, speech acts, linguistically mediated interactions and the lifeworld” in Philosophical Problems Today . Ed. Guttorm Fløistad. Dordrecht : Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

Secondary Sources:

Brand, Arie. The Force of Reason: An Introduction to Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action. Sydney : Allen & Unwin, 1990.

Dy, Manuel B. Jr. “The Economic Structure of Society: Habermas's Reconstruction of Historical Materialism” in Contemporary Social Philosophy. Ed. Manuel B. Dy, Jr. Quezon City: JMC Press, Inc., 1994.

Kettner, Matthias. “Karl-Otto Apel's Contribution to Critical Theory” in Handbook of Critical Theory. Ed. David M. Rasmussen. Oxford : Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge , Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 1991.

Olafson, Frederick A. “Habermas as a Philosopher” Ethics 96 (April 1986).

Smith, Steven B. “Review of Theory of Communicative Action” Ethics 100 (April 1990).

White, Stephen K. “Reason, modernity, and democracy” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge , Massachusetts : Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Stephen K. White, “Reason, modernity, and democracy” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3.

bid., 4.

Manuel B. Dy, Jr., “The Economic Structure of Society: Habermas's Reconstruction of Historical Materialism” in Contemporary Social Philosophy, ed. Manuel B. Dy, Jr., (Quezon City: JMC Press, 1994), 20.

Arie Brand, The Force of Reason: An Introduction to Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), xii.

Thomas McCarthy, Introduction to Theory of Communicative Action, by Jurgen Habermas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), xxvi.

Brand, The Force of Reason, ix.

Habermas contends that humanity has three major types of interest which is inherent in our quest for knowledge: instrumental or strategic interest, interpretative interest, and emancipatory interest. See Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.)

Brand, The Force of Reason, xi-xii.

Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, Beacon Press , 1984), 285. Henceforth, TCA .

Ibid.

Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 102. Hereafter, it will be referred to as MCCA.

Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 29.

Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 107-108.

Jurgen Habermas, “Actions, speech acts, linguistically mediated interactions and the lifeworld” in Philosophical Problems Today, vol. 1, ed. Guttorm Fløistad (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).

Ibid, 51.

MCCA, 89.

In his adoption of speech-act theory, Habermas identifies three kinds of validity claims. The first is the claim to truth, or the speaker's assertion about something in the objective world. The second is the claim to rightness, or the speaker's claim for his action in relation to a normative context. And the third, the claim to truthfulness or the speaker's sincerity in stating something from one's subjective world to which one has privileged access. See TCA, 305-319.

MCCA, 80.

Steven B. Smith, “Review of Theory of Communicative Action ” in Ethics 100 (April 1990), 646.

Frederick A. Olafson, “Habermas as a Philosopher” in Ethics 96 (April 1986), 639

Olafson, “Habermas as a Philosopher,” 641.

MCCA, 99-101.

Brand, The Force of Reason, 120.

Ibid.