Abstract
Over four decades, Habermas has put to paper many critical remarks on Husserl’s work as occasion has demanded. These scattered critical engagements nonetheless do add up to a coherent (if contestable) position regarding the project of transcendental phenomenology. This essay provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the arguments Habermas makes and offers a critical assessment of them. With an eye in particular to the theme of intersubjectivity (a theme of fundamental interest to both thinkers), it is argued that Habermas’s arguments do indeed show up deficiencies in Husserlian phenomenology and yet that they do not succeed in proving that we must abandon the methods and tasks of phenomenological research. On the contrary, it is argued that phenomenological methods may well be needed in order to investigate certain philosophical questions that Habermas’s theory of communication has thus far only partially addressed.
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Notes
For a more detailed comparison of these two thinkers on the topics of lifeworld and crisis, see Baynes (1990).
“The common speech situation constitutes the center—and not, for instance, my body, as an anthropologizing phenomenology has claimed—in which social spaces (staggered concentrically according to depth and width) and historical times (arranged three-dimensionally) converge prior to any objectivation through measuring operations… I, in my body, and I, as my body, find myself always already occupying an intersubjectively shared world, whereby these collectively inhabited lifeworlds telescope into each other, overlap, and entwine like text and context” (Habermas 1998, p. 244).
How this can be squared with his disavowal of the “philosophy of the subject” is, of course, a difficult question, and one that has been pressed against Habermas (and not only by phenomenologists). For an overview of some of the recent German debates on the validity of Habermas’s so-called “paradigm shift”, see Dews (1995).
This field of background knowledge is further categorized into (i) the kind of unthematic knowledge which is constitutive for a particular lifeworld; and (ii) universal, prereflexive unthematic knowledge, which includes the linguistic competencies required to participate in any lifeworld whatsoever as an individual capable of speech and action (Habermas 1998, pp. 237–239).
“The one-sidedness of the culturalistic concept of the lifeworld becomes clear when we consider that communicative action is not only a process of reaching understanding; in coming to an understanding about something in the world, actors are at the same time taking part in interactions through which they develop, confirm, and renew their membership in social groups and their own identities. Communicative actions are not only processes of interpretation in which cultural knowledge is ‘tested against the world’; they are at the same time processes of social integration and of socialization… While participants in interaction, turned ‘toward the world,’ reproduce through their accomplishment of mutual understanding the cultural knowledge upon which they draw, they simultaneously reproduce their memberships in collectivities and their identities” (Habermas 1987a, p. 139).
Habermas famously declares this to be a “paradigm shift” from “the philosophy of the subject” to a theory of communication. See Habermas (1987b, pp. 294ff.).
In addition to the discussions below, see also Zahavi (2001, pp. 178ff.), for further detailed analysis of and response to Habermas’s critique. Zahavi’s analysis is largely compatible with my own, notwithstanding some differences of emphasis.
Husserl had himself spoken of the “validities” that make up the lifeworld (Hua VI, pp. 145f./142f., 317f./272f., et passim). It is conceivable that Husserl would have endorsed in principle Habermas’s attempts to clarify the sense in which the things we come across in the lifeworld are “valid” for us; however, he would no doubt have wanted to know how this related to his own attempts to do the same.
It is possible that we see here the direct or indirect influence on Habermas of Heidegger’s account of understanding, interpretation and assertion in Heidegger (1962, Sect. 31–34). On Heidegger’s model, assertion is just the linguistic articulation of what is already understood and interpreted pre-linguistically; assertion reflects the “as” structure of the latter through the “is” of a proposition.
The critique of science, on the other hand, does still require a philosophical standpoint, according to Habermas (cf. 1991a, pp. 43–48). Nevertheless, even then such a standpoint is not to be understood as transcendental; rather, it consists in the ability to contribute to a fallibilistic reconstruction of the conditions of rationality alongside other relevant theoretical and empirical disciplines. That is, the philosophical standpoint is to be among the differentiated discourses of the rationalized modern world rather than occupying the position of ultimate arbiter. See Habermas (1990).
This line of argumentation is most clearly seen in Husserl’s Vienna Lecture of 1935, published as Abhandlung III in Hua VI, pp. 314–48/269–99.
As this makes clear, practices of language use play the role of a transcendental ground according to Habermas. And yet, he does not claim, as Karl-Otto Apel does, that the intersubjective field now occupies precisely the position previously held by the transcendental subject. Habermas denies, in particular, that the intersubjectively instituted practices of argumentation could themselves exhibit the fully self-grounding relation that would be necessary to fulfill the traditional criteria of an “ultimate foundation”.
Regarding this apparent revival of disinterested, transcendentally-oriented theory in Habermas (a return to Kant from Marx, as it were), see McCarthy (1978, p. 102).
Cf. “If we now relinquish the basic concepts of the philosophy of consciousness in which Husserl dealt with the problem of the lifeworld, we can think of the lifeworld as represented by a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns. Then the idea of a ‘context of relevance’ that connects the elements of the situation with one another, and the situation with the lifeworld, need no longer be explained in the framework of a phenomenology and psychology of perception. Relevance structures can be conceived instead in interconnections of meaning holding between a given utterance, the immediate context, and its connotative horizon of meanings. Contexts of relevance are based on grammatically regulated relations among the elements of a linguistically organized stock of knowledge” (Habermas 1987a, p. 124. Emphasis in original).
“The entire life process must be reducible to the performance of acts by a productive subjectivity, which articulates itself in meaning structures of possible objects of intuitive experience” (Habermas 2001, p. 31).
It is important to note, however, that Habermas has since modified his view and recognized a certain irreducibility of phenomenal evidence in the justification of epistemic validity claims; see Habermas (2003, pp. 237–275).
Habermas and Luhmann (1971, p. 177); Habermas (1987a, pp. 129f.; 1987b, p. 150; 1991b, p. 250; 1992, p. 42 and 161; 2003, p. 193). As well as occasionally referring to his own analysis in Habermas (2001, Chap. 2), in these places Habermas also appeals to the following works to support his claim: Theunissen (1984, Chaps. 4 and 6); Schutz (1970); Carr (1973); Hutcheson (1980); and, more recently, Honneth (1995).
Even then, the discussion of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity is limited to a discussion of Hua I.
Habermas evidently lifts this particular argument without much critical reflection from Schutz (1970, pp. 62–64).
Also: “What I actually see is not a sign and not a mere analogue, a depiction in any natural sense of the word; on the contrary, it is someone else” (Hua I, p. 153/124).
This is a point Habermas stresses heavily in his confrontation with Luhmann’s systems theory (e.g. 1987b, pp. 368ff.), and also in his critique of Charles Taylor (1991b, pp. 215–220). Strangely enough, he nonetheless does not seem to think of this as committing himself to a philosophy of the subject.
A similar argument is made at greater length by Zahavi (2001, pp. 188ff.); however, Zahavi is more confident than I am that the resources needed to address the deficiencies in the linguistic-pragmatic approach of Habermas and Apel can be found in Husserl’s own work.
For a detailed examination of the way in which Husserl’s theory of transcendental intersubjectivity is supposed to found these categories, see Zahavi (2001, pp. 1–122).
“[T]he sphere of my transcendental ego’s primordial ownness, must contain the motivational foundation for the constitution of those transcendencies that are genuine, that go beyond it, and originate first of all as ‘others’ (other psychophysical beings and other transcendental egos), the transcendencies that, thus mediated, make possible the constitution of an Objective world in the everyday sense: a world of the ‘non-Ego’, of what is other than my Ego’s own. All Objectivity, in this sense, is related back constitutionally to the first affair that is other than my Ego’s own, the other-than-my-Ego’s-own in the form, someone ‘else’—that is to say: the non-Ego in the form, ‘another Ego’” (Hua XVII, p. 248/241).
“Reaching understanding cannot function unless the participants refer to a single objective world, thereby stabilizing the intersubjectively shared public space with which everything that is merely subjective can be contrasted. This supposition of an objective world that is independent of our descriptions fulfills a functional requirement of our processes of cooperation and communication. Without this supposition, everyday practices, which rest on the (in a certain sense) Platonic distinction between believing and knowing unreservedly, would come apart at the seams” (Habermas 1998, p. 359).
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Russell, M. On Habermas’s Critique of Husserl. Husserl Stud 27, 41–62 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-010-9080-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-010-9080-8