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One of the most interesting and important developments in contemporary philosophy has been the work of Jurgen Habermas. He synthesizes many trends and themes in the history of Western thought, and he, I believe, wishes to offer us an expanded conception of rationality, allowing us to criticize in a reasonable way the society that we live in, the direction that history is taking, and the way in which the social world around us is organized.
Jurgen Habermas, and the work of the Frankfurt School in general, from which he, of which he is a part, has been attempting to create a rational, critical analysis of advanced or contemporary capitalism. Now, Habermas's intellectual genealogy goes back to his early days as a student of famous members of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno. And what the Frankfurt School's program is, or what their project is, is to offer a left-wing criticism, essentially oriented around Marxism and other critical developments in German, in German culture in particular, and Western culture in general. Offer a criticism of society which allows us to redeem our normative claims.
So, Habermas is attempting to reconnect science and ethics. Habermas, and the tendency in German or continental thought that he represents, is a reaction against positivism, against the attempt to subsume the science of society under natural science. So, in that respect, Habermas is the legitimate heir, or the critical theory that he's produced is the legitimate heir of Western rationalism. But what it tries to do, because it has to make its allowances for this century, is to create a rational critique of society that involves no physics, no hocus-pocus, no appeal to mythological or imaginary entities. And of course, this is a very, very tall order. To get rational normative discourse without creating a second world, without creating a Platonic realm of the forms, is what Habermas is going to try and do.
He's going to appropriate the insights of psychoanalysis, of Hegelian Marxism, the Marxism that's most oriented towards human freedom and the problems of alienation. And in addition, he's going to appropriate parts of modern linguistic philosophy. He is very well-versed in Habermas, Quine, Rorty, all of the modern American neo-pragmatists. And those philosophers that are primarily concerned with language have all been read and absorbed and digested by Habermas. And what he attempts to do is to bring all these themes together in one general overview of the status of knowledge and the status of society.
It is, in some respects, a typically German project, in the sense of looking for an architectonic overview for an entire range of problems, connecting politics and ethics. If you think of the German or continental intellectual tradition as being closely allied with the tradition of Greek rationalism, you will see that for the same reason that Plato connected politics and ethics, those that attempt to create a rational theory of ethics will, by implication, also be creating a rational theory of politics. This is Habermas's target.
Now, perhaps the most important and accessible of his works for those who are interested in this kind of research, in this kind of discourse, is called "Legitimation Crisis." And "Legitimation Crisis" is a short book, roughly 140 pages, and it's an outline, it's provisional, it's a general attempt to at least organize and focus thinking about the status of advanced capitalism, the problems that it has encountered in the past, and that it's likely to encounter in the future. And in addition to that, he offers us ways in which these crises, which may or may not be coming, can be avoided or redirected or reinterpreted, so that it is possible to offer a legitimate and rational justification for the norms that are characteristic of our society.
If you think back to Professor Stauff's lecture on Max Weber, Max Weber thought that legitimate domination was oppressive, no matter what form it took. Whether it was charismatic or traditional, or whatever kind of legitimate domination was being used in a given society, it inevitably was a stalking horse for oppression. There was always some sort of covert agenda behind it. It served the interests of one particular stratum of society. And in contrast to this, Habermas wants to say that our coercive norms, those elements in our society which involve domination, can be legitimized, and can be legitimized on a rational basis, on a universal basis, without the construction of metaphysical norm, or without the construction of metaphysical constructs, and without the projection of a metaphysics onto a century that can't absorb and take seriously such a project.
In breaking advanced capitalist society apart, Habermas looks at it in a systematic way. He borrows from systems theory, the theory of cybernetic systems, and looks also at medical terminology, particularly he's interested in the concept of crisis. A crisis occurs when an organic system reaches some impasse, where the various systems that make up an organism no longer integrate properly, and there is some sort of malfunction that will result either in the death of the organism or a reestablishment of a kind of homeostatic equilibrium.
Habermas breaks advanced capitalist society down into three parts. In the center is the political system, that can be thought of in shorthand as the state, the government. And on both sides of that, there are two other systems that perform different functions and that are absolutely necessary. On one side of the political system, we have what we might call the economic system. This is the set of activities, seize us, by which human societies, particularly in this case, advanced capitalist societies, appropriate the products of nature through what is called labor or work. In other words, borrowing a page from Marx, Habermas assumes that human societies, in this case, advanced capitalist societies, must confront nature, must master nature, and appropriate nature for their own purposes through work. The economic system, in other words, provides the things that society needs to live on, and it also, in the process of doing that, gives what's called a fiscal skim off, or in fact, taxes to the political system, which makes it able to run. In other words, a political system, a government, can't run unless it has money to do so. And the money, or the value that it uses in order to engage in social programs, in order to do the bureaucratic things that it needs to do, comes from the economic system.
But this is sort of a homeostatic relationship between the two. Because while the economic system gives to the political system what it needs, in the case of, in this case, taxes, the political system gives to the economic system things that it needs. And the political performances that are performed for the economic system are called steering performances. What the government does is it tinkers with the economy in order to optimize the productivity of the economy. So the government will be concerned with doing things like determining the supply of money, restricting the rate of inflation, determining rules for the regulation of industry, for example, Clean Air Acts, Clean Water Acts, anti-pollution legislation across the board. So, there's a sort of homeostatic relationship between these two systems. The political system gets its money, gets essentially its financial lifeblood from the economic system. What it gives back to the economic system is steering performances, and these exist in a sort of homeostatic equilibrium.
Now, on the other side, our third system, we have what's called the socio-cultural system. And the socio-cultural system might be thought of as that part of advanced capitalist society which appropriates internal nature rather than external nature. In other words, the socio-cultural system is the system by which we, we the politics and the economics characteristic of our society. And it's also, and the socio-cultural system is also the part of our society that is involved in the very important function of socializing our children, and of educating our children, and of performing those actions on our children which allow us to cultivate their inner nature, which is to say, which allow us to educate them and cultivate our minds. This connects back to the Hegelian Marxist tradition with its particular concern with human consciousness. So, rather than a kind of linear, deterministic Marxism, the kind of Marxism characteristic of the early phases of say, Bolshevism, Habermas offers us a very sophisticated critique of capitalist society based upon Marx's conception that the political system must interact with the economic system in order to make the economic system viable, in order to optimize its performances. And in addition, the political system must also take charge of appropriating inner nature as well as external nature. It must provide for the education and socialization of children.
Now, take the idea one step further. We have here three systems that form a sort of organic whole. There may be more systems than this. In other words, this is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather the idea of these three systems is meant to be necessary, if not sufficient. In other words, there is no advanced capitalist society that doesn't have a government. There is no advanced capitalist society that doesn't have an economy. And there's no advanced capitalist society that doesn't have a socio-economic system. The point here is that in performing these necessary functions, certain tensions emerge which are not immediately traceable to their point of origin.
Let us make the analogy that Habermas does in comparing the body politic to the body individual. And think back to Plato's Republic and the resonances of connecting the city and the man here. Just as in the analogical sense, if in a physical body there's something wrong with your circulatory system, when you go to the doctor, you may go with a complaint that refers to your circulation, but in fact, you may also go with a complaint that refers to something else. It may refer to your respiratory system. You may be having problems breathing. In other words, the systems that make up the individual human body are interdependent and homeostatic, and a problem in one system may not manifest itself in that system. It may manifest itself somewhere else. And this disguised manifestation may be traceable back to its original systemic difficulty.
What Habermas wants to do is look at the problems that we have in our socio-cultural system, offer us a critique of culture. But his argument is that many of the cultural crises we face, many of the difficulties that we have in legitimizing the society that we live in, may not come from our cultural system. They may actually be the product of a breakdown or a disequilibrium in some other part of the system, particularly in the political or economic systems. And we may be looking for the cause of these cultural difficulties in the wrong place.
So, what Habermas wants to do is to examine the problems in legitimizing advanced capitalist societies, to see if it is possible to rationally legitimize and rationally redeem our normative judgments, and then to see what sort of crisis is likely to come in an advanced capitalist society, and what might be done to prevent these crises from overwhelming the society. He's a very non-dogmatic Marxist, and I think this is very much to his credit. He's willing to borrow from many intellectual traditions, and he's not interested in laying down final assertions about the ultimate trends in history. He talks about potential and possibility, the possibility that a crisis may reach an impasse which would bring a society down, but he makes no guarantees, and he does very little desk-pounding.
So, what Habermas says is that especially since the end of the Second World War, a number of crises, particularly socio-cultural crises, crises of legitimation, crises of normative justification, have emerged in advanced capitalist society. And he thinks that we have been looking in the wrong place to find the source of these problems. Let's think of an example of legitimation crisis. Let's try the 1960s. The hippies who dropped out of society had not absorbed the normative structures that society had hoped that they would. By deciding that they would not enter the job market, or that they were going to engage in a kind of narcissistic movement towards drugs and self-indulgence, what that means is that the normative structures of society, the usual collection of hopes, anticipations, aspirations, had not been transferred to these people. And that means there's some sort of problem in the process by which they are socialized. Any mass defection from the norms characteristic of a society means that there's something wrong in the socio-cultural system.
Now, according to Habermas, or at least this is a possible extrapolation from him, the source of this enemy, the source of this rejection of the normative structures of society, may well have been found in the political system, something like the Vietnam War. It may have been found in the economic system, in the sense that economic life, or a job life, for people's occupations, no longer give them any sense of fulfillment or any sense of satisfaction. They feel like cogs in a wheel. They no longer have the desire to desire to work for corporate America. So they drop out. And as a consequence, eventually, the economic system begins to erode as well. So these systems are interdependent in the same way that the systems of the body are interdependent, and their interdependence can mask the true source of these problems.
Let us look at some of the legitimation problems that we have today. We have an extremely effective economy. And even if it hasn't been in some short-term local trouble, for the most part, we're a very wealthy country. Yet at the same time, anywhere you walk up and down the street in any major American city, there are people begging for quarters. Now, here we have a number of problems. First of all, it seems that these people have not been appropriately socialized, in many cases, to take their place within the economic system. They don't have the educational capacity to perform at the level of skill required of an advanced capitalist society. The problem lies not intrinsically in the economy. It may well, in this case, be a socio-cultural problem, which may come, in fact, from a political unwillingness to pay for education. So this will avoid facile reductionism.
Instead, Habermas offers us a very intriguing insight into the problems that are likely to emerge in society, because eventually we are going to be forced to ask ourselves, why is it, in a society that has the amount of wealth that we do, that there are so many people out of work, begging for quarters? That we have such a high rate, for example, of illiteracy? All of these problems are problems which may or may not lead to a crisis, but they certainly tend towards disequilibrium. And if the society is not able to homeostatically reestablish that equilibrium, that would, in fact, cause a crisis, a complete collapse of the various systemic elements in society. And that would cause the sort of crisis that Marx had anticipated would happen in 19th century England, or in the industrial societies as a whole.
Now, Marx was wrong, according to the Frankfurt School, in his estimation that capitalism was about to collapse due to its own crises of production. In fact, the political system stepped in, regulated economic production, created the possibility of things like labor unions, so that it mollified the socio-economic system, made people view the society as more legitimate, and consequently managed to reestablish equilibrium and continue on. This may or may not continue to happen. Habermas doesn't insist one way or another, but he does point out that many of the problems that we encounter in advanced capitalist societies are problems of legitimation. In other words, many of our problems, perhaps most of our problems, are to be found in the socio-cultural system, but their source may not be there.
Consider the fact that an advanced capitalist economic system distributes wealth very unequally. Now, the political system can decide to engage in transfer payments. It can tax progressively, take a larger percentage of the income from very wealthy people, transfer that money to those that are not capable, or somehow outside the economic system, outside the capacity to provide for themselves, and thus increase their perceived legitimacy, or the perceived legitimacy of the political system and the economic system. All these things are interdependent. Now, one of the problems is that if the political system does not engage in things like transfer payments, fails to address the inequity in the way that advanced capitalist society distributes wealth, you may find that there are a great number of people who call into question the legitimacy of such a political and economic system.
So, the problem that Habermas wants us to address is the fact that legitimation crises are among the most important things we are going to have to try and deal with as in an advanced capitalist society. And there are signs of progressively worsening legitimation crises. Have you ever wondered why, after the hippie movement kind of stopped, that young people in many cases decided that they wanted purple or orange hair, or that they engaged in behavior which showed that they wanted to distance themselves from the norms of their society? What we have here is a failure of these people to internalize the norms which society had hoped to impress upon them, so that they could be integrated into the economic and political system once they came of age.
Well, this sort of, this sort of behavior is symptomatic of a problem in the way in which we socialize our children. And the question then arises, what sort of society would it take to create a world, to create a political and an economic and a socio-cultural system which could be rationally legitimized? And here, Habermas looks for something that will allow us to make normative judgments and rationally approve of or disapprove of the coercive inequalities of our society. In other words, every society must correspond to a society that doesn't have laws, and there's no society that doesn't have policemen. Only anarchists would approve of something like that. And an advanced capitalist society would immediately collapse under such circumstances. I mean, think of what New York City is like during a blackout.
Capitalist societies demand a certain degree of coercion. Perhaps every society demands a certain degree of coercion. The faculty is, how will we know which coercion is rationally legitimate and which coercion is not? And here, Habermas wants to go for an idea that says that we can rationally legitimize a kind of coercion if it serves general interests. In other words, what Habermas wishes to do is, in some respects, like the Kantian project of finding universal moral rules that apply to every rational person, and that these moral rules can be defended and justified and redeemed on the basis of some canons of rationality which Habermas plans to establish. So, it's a very, very ambitious project he's engaged in.
Now, we have some problems. How will we know which coercion can be rationally justified? Habermas says that the only coercion which can be rationally justified is that coercion that serves the general interests, as opposed to the interests of some particular segment of society. In other words, Habermas wants something approximating Kantian autonomy without the metaphysics. So, we will allow the fact that if there's no metaphysics, we can't have autonomy in the Kantian sense, but perhaps we can make intelligent distinctions between different kinds of heteronomy. In other words, there will be heteronomous behaviors that serve only an individual or a small segment of society, and there are other heteronomous behaviors that serve our interests, that are in the interests of society as a whole.
Let me give you an example of an interest which serves not just the interest of society as a whole, but the interests of our species. Something like the ozone layer. All human beings, or all human beings that we might call rational or sane, would prefer not to have skin cancer. It does no one any good, and we share as a species a common human interest in preventing things like deadly diseases that cause misery and pain. What Habermas wants to do is take universally generalizable interests, which is alas heteronomous, but a particularly important and universal kind of heteronomy, and raise that to the status of a moral principle. He says rationality demands that we engage in behaviors that serve all of our interests. There is no rational argument against that.
Consider another possible example. Something like the GATT agreements, the agreements, the international agreements on tariffs and trade. It has been found, as a matter of empirical fact, that the closer we come to approximating free trade between nations, the greater the degree of the division of labor, and the greater the degree of output, the greater the degree of productivity. What that means is that as a species, on a global level, the whole entire species ends up wealthier. And since there's enough poverty and misery in the world as it is, rationality demands that we do our best to satisfy these universal heteronomous demands.
Now, let's take an alternative view. Let's talk about coercive measures, heteronomous measures, which do not meet this universal generalizable standard. Let's look at something like the government of South Africa. If we were to rationally inquire into the government of South Africa, we would find that it doesn't serve the interests of the people as a whole. What it does is serve the interests of a very small, narrow elite. And that when called upon to justify this, there is no common interest that can be pointed to which this satisfies. So, insofar as this apparatus of government imposes coercion, and bloody and miserable coercion, it is on people, it has no rational warrant. And simply to expose this to the light of rational scrutiny undermines it.
And what Habermas is doing here is liberating us from moral skepticism, based upon an attempt to universalize our rational needs, our rational desires. And our rational desires are the universally generalizable desires. The desires of the white South African regime are not rational because they cannot be defended by reference to any universal human good. So now we have, in a way, or perhaps at least the beginnings of a skeleton key, which allows us to look into every kind of coercion, in every kind of government, which allows us to look at every political policy and ask ourselves, benefits, in whose interest is this kind of coercion? And Habermas says, the burden, since freedom is an intrinsically good thing, consider the resonances back to Kant and philosophy, since freedom is an intrinsically good thing, the burden of proof rests with those who would impose coercion. If they cannot legitimize it by referring to some universal human good or some generalizable interest, then in fact, it is illegitimate, and we should get rid of it.
So now we can go through all the coercive measures in our society, and we have some rough-and-ready pragmatic standard of justification. And once we have inquired into it and asked, who benefits? What good does it do? Why do we really need it? If it can't be justified, it should be gotten rid of. So it's an extremely powerful, far-reaching critique of the coercive structures of society. And what it does is rescue us from the fact-value distinction, which is characteristic of most of the tradition of English and Anglo-American philosophy. In other words, instead of saying, in the human sense, and like many of the grandsons of Hume, that rationality only applies to descriptions of the world, Habermas is reasserting the Kantian tradition, saying that reason is not merely instrumental, it is also essentially teleological. It cannot, it can tell us not only means, it can also tell us the ends we ought to achieve. And the ends which we ought to achieve are universal human liberation. Again, in some respects, back to Kant and Hegel. The gradual extension of freedom is what progress is. And to deny that there's any rational standard for distinguishing between just societies and unjust societies, between legitimate and illegitimate coercion, is in fact to capitulate to this simple fact of coercion.
So, Habermas is going to lead us out of the labyrinth of modernity, if his project is successful. Now, we have some problems. First problem is, how will we know when we've efficiently legitimized a kind of coercion? In other words, who is it that's going to engage in the discussion of coercive activities, the part of the government? And how will we know when we've reached some resolution? And here's where we get a borrowing from both Heidegger, and I would say also Wittgenstein, in the sense that there is no ultimate solution to this. It's an ongoing, rolling process. As new approaches to society and law emerge, we can incorporate these things. In other words, I would say that this is formal, in the sense that Kant's moral theory is formal, but I would call this an open forum, as opposed to a closed form, which is what the categorical imperative is. It's totally closed and airtight. Here, there's always the possibility of progress. In addition, it is not any final solution, because it allows for the progressive change in the way in which we understand the necessities of society.
Now, what Habermas wants to do is use as a kind of paradigm for the normative justification of our coercion, the, what he calls, the ideal speech situation. And the ideal speech situation is never actually realized here in the world, but it can be approximated. And again, being a good practical thinker in this respect, which is so unusual in the metaphysical tradition of the West, Habermas says that while we can't realize the ideal speech situation, some speech situations are more or less approximating this. And a speech situation is deformed and inferior if it is coerced. In other words, if in some way we are altering, we are mis-shaping or deforming the speech of a group of people or a person by some heteronomous means, which prevents them from saying what they really think and expressing their real views on a problem of coercion.
Think about it this way. Suppose you go into work, and your boss asks you, "Do you like my new tie?" And suppose it's a horror. Suppose you hate the tie. What do you say? Everyone laughs. Why? Because they understand. Well, now I have to say something other than what I thought. Now, Habermas's point here is that this is not, or this is the opposite of the ideal speech situation, because a kind of coercion is being imposed on you, which is deforming and preventing you from saying what you really have on your mind. And saying, "Well, look, if you want my opinion, it's really ugly." You can't say that under certain circumstances. That is one kind of coercion. Why? Because you are being forced to alter your speech patterns in order to satisfy some other need, in this case, the need to get along with your boss.
Now, we can extrapolate this to quite a great extent. Imagine, for example, you had something like the government of South Africa, which systematically refused to a large percentage of the population access to higher education. Well, it should come as no surprise later on that they are unable to engage in the speech patterns and the judgments of legitimacy that would be characteristic of people who had had access to such a thing. In other words, they are being coerced, and speech is being deformed. In other words, what appears to be free speech is not. What Habermas wishes us to do is to liberate us from those external constraints on our speech, thus liberating us from external constraints on our thought, thus allowing us to create a real rational critique of society here in this world, on an ongoing basis.
So, he seems to be a kind of modern Daedalus, who perhaps can lead us out of the labyrinth of modernity into at least a provisional kind of rationality, which allows for rational criticism and discussion in the public realm. This is very much in keeping with the tradition of German idealism, the tradition of German philosophy in general. It is critical, but it is also more than an instrumental conception of reason. It is a teleological conception of reason. And what makes it beautiful and moving and profound is the fact that it doesn't involve any entities that glow in the dark. It doesn't involve anything that's metaphysical. Very few words that are translated into English where they keep the capital letter at the beginning of the noun. It actually refers to everyday things like coercion that we experience every day. When I asked you about the boss's tie, imagine that this would allow us to take our criticism of society onward forever, incorporating whatever we need. It is an ongoing Hegelian approach to both philosophy and politics and ethics.
Habermas said in his inaugural lecture in 1965, I believe, that "I am concerned to question the separation of science and ethics. In other words, I am concerned to undo the fact-value distinction. I am concerned to reassert the German tradition of teleological rationality." An amazing and extraordinary intellectual tour de force. Now, he, like Wittgenstein, moves from the earlier positivistic concentration on the logical canons of grammatical speech to the social context of speech acts. Think about the difference between saying, "Yes, boss, I like your tie," as just a sentence independent of context, and now put in the context we're talking about your boss and his ugly tie. It adds a new dimension within which no logician can offer us. It's that historical dimension, that concentration on the embeddedness of language in society, which brings him back to the Marxist tradition and allows him to kind of give us an overview and a synopsis and a kind of synthesis of the disparate tendencies in both Anglo-American and Continental philosophy with a practical orientation, which can liberate societies across the board, apparently forever, or apparently without any obvious boundaries.
Now, this has had actual practical influence on the world around us. And here in the United States, one of the most important of these movements, which is Habermasian, or at least critical theoretic in its orientation, is called Critical Legal Studies. It's one of the most important movements in the analysis of American law. As I understand it, it's centered at Harvard Law School. And what Critical Legal Studies wishes to do is to analyze the structures of American law. And since law is inevitably backed up with some sort of coercion, Hobbes says, "Covenants without the sword are mere words." Since all of our laws are backed up by coercive force, Habermas and his disciples at Harvard Law School Quentin analyze the laws that were characteristic of our society and ask, "Who benefits here? Is the interest that these coercions serve generalizable to the society as a whole, or does it benefit a small fraction of society?" If it benefits only a small fraction of society, if we simply say so, we delegitimize this. And by delegitimizing this, we can put ourselves on the road towards changing these modes of coercion to something that can be rationally justified.
What we are offered here, then, is a possibility of law that is not intrinsically conservative. We do not want to get rid of the idea of law, but we do not want our laws to unjustifiably serve the interests of only a small fraction of society. Think of what, for example, Critical Legal Studies, this sort of Habermasian analysis, would have done with the law in 19th century America regarding slavery. Well, it would have asked, "Who benefits from this?" If we were to give equal access to all human beings in our society to deploy speech acts without being afraid of the boss, would everybody say, "Yeah, this is a good idea. This is really rational. This serves all our interests"? No, of course not. It is therefore irrational. It is therefore to be gotten rid of. It offers us the possibility of reasoning out our problems rather than fighting them out. And again, that's the holy grail. That's it. That's one of the main intellectual difficulties of our age. If we can't reason our problems out, we have to fight them out. Habermas is starting to forge the tools by which we might start to reason out our problems.
Again, think about the criticism of the law which treats women differently from men. Well, Critical Legal Studies goes through the books of our law and asks, "Who benefits from the legal oppression of women? Who benefits from preventing women from taking certain jobs or getting access to certain kinds of education?" Well, not the women, apparently. Even though there is a veneer of concern for the health or status of women painted on these laws, in fact, they attempt to coerce women into a subordinate and inferior position in society. And this position of subordination and coercion cannot be reasonably justified. It cannot be rationally redeemed. And what Critical Legal Studies does is point the finger at that and say, "What sense does that make?" And if somebody can't come up with a reasonable argument which justifies and legitimizes this coercion on the basis of generalizable interests, then it is what we mean by a bad law. It is a law which arbitrarily coerces people for no good reason. And since human freedom is an intrinsically good thing, what that means is that we have to get rid of these laws, or rather, that reason demands that we get rid of these laws.
Because what Habermas is kind of sneaking back in here is the idea that generalizable interests will serve the function that the categorical imperative used to serve. Instead of the possibility of autonomy in the Kantian sense being created in our legal system, what we are going to do is the next best thing, which is make sure that all interests of everyone in society are represented. And not all interests of everyone in society as an empirical fact, because many people's speech patterns may have been deformed by their insufficiency or irregularity of their education, by various kinds of cultural trends which come from our political or economic system. And the consequence of this is that we will gradually refine our government, we will gradually refine our coercive systems to the point where we can create a truly just society. And we will have a truly just society, or we will be moving towards a purely just society, when we have a society whose coercive measures are entirely legitimate in the eyes of all those that they cover, or as many of those that they cover as can rationally engage in discourse about the coercive measures.
So, Habermas wants to offer us a universal pragmatics. That's what he calls it. He says that universal pragmatics will investigate the social context of language, and consequently the social context of thought. And if our government, if our politics is consistent with this sort of universal pragmatics, if in fact we can rationally justify it, then and only then will we have a just society. It goes back to the Platonic idea that the just society is one that will emerge out of the dialectic between rational speakers. In other words, in my estimation, the ideal speech situation is the ghost of the Platonic dialectic returned. And that shows the consistency across 25 centuries of the rationalist program for creating universal canons of human rationality, which apply to morals, which apply to politics, which apply to society, as well as the things which everyone grants it applies to physics and logic.
What Habermas wants to do is to create a system by which we can redeem our judgments of "should" and "ought," by which we can have reasonable, rational, normative discourse, which does not succumb to the tendency or the possibility of simply acquiescing to the world as it is. What he does is offers a far-reaching critique of our society, and not just our society. This will work for any society, but it's particularly applicable and obviously apt for advanced capitalist societies. It's very clear, for example, if you were to look at something like the suicide rate among teenagers in Japan, that in fact there was some problem in the process by which these young people are socialized, which would account for the very high rate of suicide. There is some set of disappointed expectations, perhaps a set of pressures imposed upon them, which cannot be rationally legitimized. Perhaps the source is back in the socio-cultural system, perhaps it's in the economic system. But not only does it apply to America, it applies to Japan, it applies to South Africa. It is universal and global, in the same way that Kant and the entire tradition of German idealism wants universal, global rationality, wants canons which apply to everyone under all circumstances.
In other words, instead of the program characteristic of positivists, characteristic of the scientifically oriented philosophers who essentially adopt a position of "physics uber alles," what this is going to be is "logos uber alles," rationality uber alles. What this is, is the high point of reviving the Greek tradition in Western culture. I think that's why Habermas is the type of thinker which could only emerge from the Continental tradition. It is not the kind of thing, it's not the kind of project that would emerge from the tradition of human skepticism, of moral relativism. This is the sort of position, and this is the sort of set of aspirations, that could only be characteristic of someone who thought that the marrow of human being, what it means to be human, is the same thing as what it means to be rational, and that there's one set of moral rules connected to everyone, which can be justified independent of religious myth and independent of moral skepticism. And by trying to negotiate between these two unfortunate tendencies, they drift into mythology and religious orientation, or they drift to straightforward moral skepticism, and then the onward rush into moral nihilism. Habermas wants to take us right through that, towards a new stage in our analysis of society and our analysis of the world, which allows us to treat each other as if we were all part of the same project, as if human beings had universal moral value. And again, the echoes to Kant are unmistakable.
To finish up, think about Habermas this way. In the writings of Immanuel Kant, he says that it was Hume and Hume's moral skepticism that aroused him from his dogmatic slumbers. And in writing something like "The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" and his other moral works, Kant wants, says that he wants to be the Newton of the moral world. He wants to split the world in half and talk about questions of "ought" rather than questions of "is," and create a new and radically rational, universal system of moral judgment. What Habermas wants to do is, in some respects, like that. Perhaps we could say that he's going to be the Einstein of the moral world. But he's going to do this by not completely copying the Kantian model. He is not going to ontologically split the world into physics and metaphysics. He'll split it into the world of objects and the world of the human world. And this human world, this world of conscious, human, rational subjects, is the topic that he primarily wishes to address. His concern is to find a way to get out of the deformations in our speech, and consequently the deformations in our language, and consequently the deformations in our society. He wants to revive, at least the possibility of the tradition of progress actually taking place and being a serious intellectual topic. And what he wants to do is to make moral discourse legitimate again as a topic of serious intellectual activity, rather than to succumb to the lure of the priests and the poets. In that respect, he is the great-grandson of Kant, and he has offered us a Kantian or quasi-Kantian solution to the problems of the modern world. If it is not complete, it is at least suggestive. And if it is not final, it makes it that much more appropriate to our age of open rather than closed forms.