Episode #143 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! Want to give a special thanks to the people out there that support the show on Patreon. Patreon is a crowdfunding platform for episodic content like this show. You can pick how many episodes you want to support per month. Cancel at any time.

Today’s episode is on the work of Jürgen Habermas. I hope you love the show today.

So for a long, long time the Enlightenment has been the whipping child, paying for all the mistakes and all the transgressions of philosophers and leaders alike. And this child has taken a lot of abuse over the years, it should be said. First, we had the Counter-Enlightenment. Then we had the existentialists. Then we had the beginning of the 20th century. Then we had the postmodernists. But for all these thinkers and all the different ways they thought the Enlightenment had produced practically every problem we faced as a species, there were just as many if not more thinkers that came back at them with a very nuanced, philosophical argument that’s been used since the beginning of time.

And the argument was this: “Yeah, but still.” In other words, yeah, turns out in retrospect we aren’t using rationality to arrive at the intrinsic structure of the universe. But, still, who really wants to throw out the entirety of what the Enlightenment has produced in the meantime? Do you really want to throw out all the technical understanding of the universe that science has produced? Do you really want to throw out all the economic progress? Do you want to just sit here, vacationing in France, deconstructing grand narratives for the rest of our lives?

The thinker we’re going to be talking about today, Jürgen Habermas, said no. Habermas thought, sure, the Enlightenment had some problems. And yes, maybe we’re not arriving at the capital-T Truth about anything. But maybe a better plan would be for us to take a closer look at the project of the Enlightenment, figure out what went wrong, and then try to rework and reimagine it so that we can preserve all the things that were so great about it.

Habermas called the problems produced by the Enlightenment the “pathologies of modernity.” And he thought these pathologies were not a sign that the project of modernity was a total failure; he thought they were evidence that the project was incomplete. Reason had been looked at in such a narrow and uncharitable way by the critics of modernity that it was never given a chance to realize its full potential, which by the end of the episode we’ll understand could be the emancipation of the entire human species.

So let’s get started. If you’re somebody that’s trying to defend the Enlightenment, you probably got to begin by addressing some of the most notable works criticizing the Enlightenment. And one of the most scathing investigations into what went wrong we talked about all the way back in our series on the Frankfurt School, one of the most famous books in the history of philosophy The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. It should be said, Habermas is also a member of the Frankfurt School, albeit the newly formed Frankfurt School formed back in Germany after the war. And, while many of his ideas overlap with other thinkers in the Frankfurt School, he nonetheless first has to take this early-20th-century book to task to be able to move forward adequately with his work.

Like we talked about last episode, Adorno and Horkheimer thought that the project of the Enlightenment was destined to consume itself from the beginning. Because, by using reason to question the foundationalism of religion, there’d be an immediate need for reason to, in turn, question itself as a foundation, at which point we’d have no clear foundations for our values, and we’d open up the floodgates of totalitarianism among many other things they thought might go wrong. Check out the series on the Frankfurt School if you want to hear more, but right now we’re going to move on with this episode.

To skip ahead, they believed that one of the major problems that faced modernity was that the project of the Enlightenment put far too much faith in reason. But Habermas is going to say that Adorno and Horkheimer made a huge mistake. They defined reason in a very narrow way that only included two types of reason and ignored other important examples of how reason presents itself in human life. Reason during the Enlightenment was two things to Adorno and Horkheimer. One had to do with making reasonable statements about the world. Reason, on one hand, was the unbiased measuring tool that can supposedly get us to the truth about the universe, which hopefully by this point on the show we’ve talked about enough. But number two had to do with determining which human actions were reasonable. This type of reason was known as “instrumental reason” or, put another way, the type of reason that helps us rationally progress from a starting point to a conclusion. This is the type of reason that is instrumental when it comes to providing the rational means to get us to certain ends we want to achieve: means to an end. Keep that in mind because it’s going to be important.

But, first, let’s give some examples of why this type of reason was a problem for Adorno and Horkheimer and, before them, the sociologist Max Weber. Think of how this type of reason impacts many of these Enlightenment thinkers that spend their lives trying to create elaborate systems that explain the way the universe is. How easy would it be to come up with a conclusion for how you think reality is and then use rational analysis to prove step-by-step that your conclusion is correct? The very fact that so many thinkers seemingly proved things that were mutually exclusive just goes to show why this could be a problem.

Now, to show how this “instrumental reason” could be downright dangerous, let’s consider a more extreme everyday example. Let’s say I have some crazy goal I want to achieve. Let’s say today I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork. Then I’m going to run out into my front yard and take out a pack of predatory buffalo. And then I’m going to take an entire pallet of Aqua Net and spray it into the sky, so it rips a hole in the ozone layer. Now, ridiculous goal without a doubt. But, nonetheless, consider the fact there are completely rational steps we could plan out and take that would provide us the means to get closer and closer to this end we’re trying to achieve. First, I go into the kitchen, open the drawer, grab a fork. Then I go out to the front yard, start tackling buffalos one by one. The danger of “instrumental reason” is that it’s completely possible to mistake a process that is entirely rational for it being something humanity should ever want to actually implement.

See, “instrumental reason” can only get us from point A to point B. But who out there gets to decide what point B should consist of? Left in the hands of the Enlightenment, many critics believed it led to the chaos of the 20th century. So this raises the question “How do we ever ensure that the ends we’re trying to achieve never become coopted, as Habermas feared, by a single thinker or group that happens to captivate a particular culture with a compelling argument during their time?” History has shown us this is very possible. And it should be said, in this sense, the postmodernists feared a very real threat that was looming out there. The defensive strategy of some was to deconstruct and fragment these grand narratives that spoke about having conclusions we should be aiming for, the goal being to show that human knowledge is always from a particular, individual perspective, not from some privileged position.

So right now we should pause and understand that this is the climate that Habermas finds himself doing his work in. He wants to, on one hand, acknowledge the fact that knowledge always needs to go through the filter of an individual human perspective. But he thinks it’s possible, through intersubjectivity, through all of these individual human perspectives coming together, maybe it’s possible for us to arrive at useful information about reality that doesn’t rely on any one single person’s perspective. This is why, near the end of the 20th century, there’s a resurgence in the philosophical approach of pragmatism, Habermas being one of the greats. See, it’s from this pragmatic perspective that Habermas sees where Adorno and Horkheimer went wrong.

Reason is not just “instrumental” and “strategic” reason. One of the biggest ways reason presented itself in the world, that changed the game all the way back in the Enlightenment, was through the process of what he calls “communicative rationality.” Let me explain what he means by that. See, like many philosophers throughout the 20th century, Habermas was interested in linguistic analysis. But, unlike many philosophers, Habermas developed a healthy obsession with the specific topic of communication. Language may shape our reality to a certain degree, but how we communicate that language has a considerable effect as well. Signs and symbols may be the raw building materials, but the way they’re communicated is a construction team that puts the building together.

So, while on this journey where he’s fascinated by how people communicate with each other, Habermas realizes a few things. Whenever someone successfully communicates anything to another person and that person understands what was said, that communication will need to have possessed four, very important qualities. One, it needs to be intelligible. It needs to use actual words; it needs to follow the rules of grammar, etc. Two, both people must accept beforehand that whatever they’re talking about is a legitimate conversation to have at all. Three, there has to be an understanding that both people believe whatever it is that they’re saying, not just trying to manipulate the other one. And four, whatever reasoning is used in the conversation needs to correspond with certain values or norms that both people agree upon and understand.

Now, the exciting, philosophical point that these four criteria are implying here is that language is not this disinterested set of building blocks where we just describe raw states of affairs out there. “I’m going to deliver you the news in an unbiased way.” “I’m going to tell you what I think about your Uncle Lou in an unbiased way.” To communicate anything at all to another person and for them to be able to understand it, we have to embed our speech in normative constraints. The way we view the world, morally or otherwise, has to be present in any successful communication we have with someone else. Now, some of you out there might be saying, “Okay, Habermas. That’s all well and good. I love learning about language. But what does any of this have to do with political philosophy or rescuing reason from all those evil postmodernists out there?”

Habermas is going say that “instrumental reason,” that means to an end that we talked about, is not the only way that reason manifests itself in the world that’s capable of governing human actions. There is another type of reason grounded in our communication with other human beings that can not only inform our political strategy but can also provide a justification for liberal democracy that doesn’t rely on a god or appeal to anything supposedly written into the universe. In fact, from the unique vantage point of being both a sociologist and a pragmatic philosopher, Habermas makes one of the most profound points in his entire work. Habermas talks about how different types of reason actually mirror the different methods of coordinating human action, hence the connection to political philosophy.

Let’s talk about some examples. So one way of governing human action is to give people a set of rules or norms to live by. This is just one way human beings could figure out what to do next. This could be actual rules posted on a wall. This could be moral standards. This could even just be societal norms that are unspoken. For example, you don’t just walk into the bank and cut in front of everybody in line, unless you’re this guy at my bank that actually wears a straw hat to the bank. But I don’t talk about that guy on this show. The point is you can govern human action pretty effectively by holding people to a code of conduct. Now, compare this to one type of rationality that follows a set of preordained rules. Think of syllogisms in formal logic. All cats are mean. Snowball is a cat. Therefore, Snowball is mean. You can have a string of propositions just as you can have a string of human actions. And, if any one of those propositions doesn’t follow the necessary rules, the entire string becomes invalid. This way that reason presents itself in the world mirrors a particular method of governing human action.

Let’s talk about the one Adorno and Horkheimer were so concerned with, “instrumental reason.” The same way we can decide on a conclusion we’d like to rationally justify and then come up with a series of actions that rationally move us closer and closer to that end, group human action can also be mediated by turning people into a means to an end. We see this kind of thing in the military or a company or a sports team. The army, for example, has a mission that it needs to carry out, a final goal or an end, and each and every soldier down to the lowest rank plays a small but necessary role in accomplishing that greater, overall mission. The soldiers, in this case, become a means to an end. We can govern human action more broadly, in other words, by turning individuals into a means that’s working towards some end that we’ve decided is worth pursuing.

Well, Habermas is going to say that a third way human action can be coordinated and a third way that reason presents itself in human life, the type of reason that Adorno and Horkheimer mistakenly left out of their book, and the type of reason grounded in our communication, is what he calls “communicative rationality.” Simply put, there’s another way that human beings can coordinate, and that’s by coming together and having genuine, intelligible conversations starting from a premise of similar values. In other words, following those four criteria for proper communication that we talked about before, people get together, communicate effectively, and rationally come to a collective agreement about how they should be moving forward.

So again, this is not holding people to a set of rules or norms. This is not making people a means to an end. “Communicative rationality” is a particular way of communicating that carries with it the express intent of delivering your perspective, hearing the perspectives of other people, and ultimately coming to an agreement about things.

Now, Habermas would instantly want to mark a contrast between this “communicative rationality” and “strategic rationality” because a very important part of these conversations -- where everyone’s speaking their peace, debating, trying to come to an agreement -- is that everyone speaking actually, genuinely believes in whatever case they’re trying to make. That is the essence of “communicative rationality.”

But what happens when someone doesn’t really believe in what they’re saying? Maybe they’re just arguing a particular position because they benefit from people holding that position. Maybe they’re just trolling. These are examples of what Habermas calls “strategic rationality.” And the best example of this is probably a classic salesman.

Picture someone at one of those kiosks at the mall trying to sell you a smartphone case. There’s a sense in which, when you’re talking to that person, the entire interaction is clouded by the fact that it’s not really a genuine conversation that you’re having. Does this person really care this much about phones being protected? Do they really care about your own personal level of phone safety? No. There’s a sense in which everything they say to you could be taken with a grain of salt. There’s a sense in which everything they say to you about how great their phone cases are is driven by the fact that they’re going to get paid a commission if they sell you one. Having a conversation with this person is uncomfortable. And, if you’re the kind of person genuinely trying to develop your understanding of the world of phone cases, this would definitely not be the person you’d want to talk to. Well, imagine this same kind of interaction speaking to someone about politics, where they have a similar incentive to sell you a particular idea. More on that in a second.

But I want to plant a flag in the ground here and mark this as a big reason why it’s extremely important for everyone to genuinely believe in what it is they’re debating when engaging in “communicative rationality” within a group. Because remember, embedded into our communication is a common set of premises and a common set of values for the people who are having the conversation. Now, couple this with the fact that Habermas is a huge fan of liberal democracy and the Enlightenment’s attempt to ground its legitimacy in something greater than just pure relativism, and you could start to see the direction Habermas is going here.

“Communicative rationality” is essentially democracy. People come together; they have conversations with each other about the best course of action, and then they decide which way to go moving forward. But let’s consider something important about democracy for a second: “democracy” is just a word. It’s a word that denotes a particular political strategy that we’re all very familiar with. And, while we should use the word “democracy” so we have something specific to reference, and while the political strategy is no doubt the most neatly-packaged version of what it is we’re talking about here, we should never forget that the process that underlies the system of democracy has applications far beyond the realm of politics. To Habermas, “communicative rationality” is that process. And people use it all the time. They use it to have conversations when trying to figure out which political candidate to choose. They use it when deciding where their group of friends should meet for dinner. They use it at their church to decide where the funds should be allocated.

The process of two or more people coming together, telling each other about their own experiences, trading insights, and then using all the information at their disposal to try to come to an agreement about how to move forward -- Look, trading recipes is included in that process. How much butter to put in your chocolate chip cookies is included. The point is this is a process that human beings generally engage in, even if its purest expression is in the realm of politics and something we call democracy.

And, to Habermas, as modernity has progressed over the years, gradual changes in people’s lives have made participating in this process progressively rare. There is less and less participation by citizens in one of the greatest things Habermas thinks the Enlightenment ever produced to improve the lives of individuals, something he calls the “public sphere.” To understand why he thinks this is happening, we have to understand what the “public sphere” is and how it even came into existence in the first place.

Let’s start with a bit of historical context. Say you were an average citizen living in pre-Enlightenment France, which would of course be prior to the French Revolution. That would place you right in the middle of the feudal system organized by the three estates of government: First Estate was the church; Second Estate was the nobility; and the Third Estate was the peasantry, the peasantry meaning everybody else. Now, when there’s political turmoil or there’s a serious situation that needs to be handled by government, the deliberation about that decision, the burden of choosing which direction to go falls on the shoulders of the king or queen. Maybe there’s a consultation between the first two estates. Maybe the church is considered in the decision-making process. But one thing is for sure: the peasantry was not part of the political process at all. France would, for example, go to war with Spain and, throughout the entire process of deciding whether or not to go to war, the peasantry would never even be asked for an opinion.

So, when it comes to being a politically informed member of your society, up on current events, when you’re a peasant in the middle ages, not only can you probably not read but even if you could read you probably speak a language different than the information’s being written in at the time. When you’re having conversations with friends, you’re not having a political debate; you’re talking about harvests and famine and events happening in your community, much of the time, probably, your relationship with the church. But then the Enlightenment comes along. Governments are restructured. Economies are restructured. But maybe the biggest change, when it comes to political involvement, is that mass print is becoming more common. There is a rapid rise of what we now know as the bourgeoisie or the middle class, not only in terms of spending power but also in terms of forming their own set of values and political attitude.

So these changes at the beginning of the Enlightenment allow for an entirely new kind of space to emerge, the classic coffee houses or salons of early-Enlightenment France. For the first time in the history of the world, a person could go down to one of these communal gathering places, pick up a mass-printed journal that they were capable of reading, read about what the king or queen was doing, the political goings-on of the day, and then discuss and debate what was going on with their fellow citizens. These gathering places became the forum where the political voice of the middle class could finally be developed. And the existence of these forums led to massive changes when it comes to how governments of the future had to interact with the public. These public forums of discussion and the greater political voice that surrounded them became known to Habermas as the “public sphere.”

Now, the “public sphere” is based in the process of “communicative rationality.” This is a democracy of ideas. The process of coming together, giving your own individual experiences you’ve had in life, and trying to discuss towards arriving at an agreement, that was just part of it. But, as modernity has gone on, Habermas says, people have been engaging in the “public sphere” less and less. More generally, with the progression of technology, people have been engaging in “communicative rationality” less frequently. They’re having fewer of these conversations with each other where they learn about the world around them through other human beings.

But why is this happening? Habermas thinks this trajectory began at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, major elements of society were largely determined by inherited tradition. We structured things like the economy or the government to resemble the way things had worked for us before. But post-Enlightenment, once we’d thrown out these classical traditions and are instead trying to build these systems from scratch, what happens is each one of these systems has to rebuild itself and come up with its own self-reinforcing rationality that keeps it alive and keeps it moving forward.

When it comes to the economy and the government in particular, Habermas thinks what emerged at their base was a very obvious form of “instrumental rationality,” means to an end thinking. It makes total sense too. I mean, the government has certain ends it needs to accomplish for the maintenance of society. The economy has certain benchmarks it needs to meet. Profit is almost always an end worth going for. Habermas thinks what has happened as the years have gone on is that the lines between the economy and the government have blurred beyond recognition. The two have fused together into a sort of supersystem. He just calls it “the system.” But the point is the two have combined into a massive, powerful means-to-an-end machine.

We live our lives as modern people immersed in two competing worlds to Habermas. See, certain aspects of our lives are determined for us. On one hand, we are given a socioeconomic role to play within society by this economic, governmental system that exists. This is one world we live in. Whatever person we want to be has to take into consideration those parameters handed down to us by “the system.” But, on the other hand, there are many aspects of who we are that are determined by what he calls the “life world.” This is the other world we live in or the piece of our lives that resembles the “public sphere” and “communicative rationality.” This is the portion of our lives where we exchange experiences, we have discussions. This is where citizens get together; they talk to each other. They decide on a path moving forward rather than act like little soldiers for the economic, governmental system that tells them how to behave as a means to make sure we can bring about certain ends that are predetermined.

Now, what has also happened in modernity that’s led to the relationship between the “life world” and “the system” being even more complicated is that the nature of media has drastically changed. By and large anymore, people are not reading journals and newspapers to get their understanding of what’s going on in the world. And, if they are, the ownership and agenda of those newspapers and journals has completely transformed.

Remember our salesman at the kiosk in the mall trying to sell you a smartphone case? How it feels like you’re not even having an authentic conversation because they’re constantly trying to sell you something, and you can leave the whole conversation feeling a little bit dirty. Well, Habermas thinks the nature of media has changed into more something that’s looking to sell you a candidate than to report to you the news, to sell you a way to be, a system of values to believe in, rather than you participating in “communicative rationality” with your fellow human beings and arriving at one yourself.

Now, you might respond to that and say, “Well, when you get around the dinner table and you guys are talking about values, those people are just trying to sell you their ideas as well.” But this is why it’s so important that to even participate in “communicative rationality” you need to genuinely believe in whatever it is you’re arguing for. Because of course, Habermas thinks most of the time people within these conversations are going to disagree and misunderstand each other, and both sides are going to try to convince the other one of why they’re right. But the relationship between these two parties is going to be between two real human beings having a conversation about something they both believe in and not between a salesman and a customer.

When transnational corporations with very specific ends they’re trying to achieve own major media outlets, when there’s so much power in controlling people’s values, Habermas thinks the economic, governmental system progressively colonizes the “life world.” Where we used to sit around the dinner table or go out to the coffee house and have discussions to determine our thoughts about the world, we now turn on a screen and are sold ways to think about things. The further we got away from the origins of the “public sphere” in those coffee houses all the way back in France, the further we got away from “communicative rationality.” We got so far away from it we could barely see it anymore, to the point where brilliant thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer wrote an entire book about rationality and didn’t even consider its existence.

But, for any chains we’re supposedly wrapped in by the Enlightenment, Habermas thought the key to get us out of them was built into the Enlightenment all along. We just lost sight of it: the emancipatory potential of reason, reason’s ability to direct us away from treating people as a means to an end; the type of reason grounded in communication, grounded in the pursuit of genuinely trying to understand the other person’s perspective and then working towards an agreement; the type of reason that can allow us to make our decisions about things not by buying into an endless sales pitch but by talking to our fellow citizens in the “life world,” comparing our individual perspectives, intersubjectivity.

True democracy to Habermas is when the “life world” controls “the system,” not “the system” controlling the “life world.”

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.