Briefly, whether we’re concerned with Habermas or Wittgenstein, the idea that philosophy is an exclusively negative discourse, a practice aiming at emancipation (or, in Wittgenstein, a return to ordinary language) through the dissolution of ideology (in Wittgenstein, the dissolution of linguistic nonsense), engenders paradoxes entailing that it must be abandoned. Which is what Habermas does, having recognized these impasses, in the mid-1970s. From that point, all his efforts will seek to overcome this schism between the ideal and the real (a schism implied by the definition of philosophy as pure therapy). This is the second period of his philosophy, by far the best known and the longest lasting,13 namely:
Philosophy as Inquiry into Conditions of Possibility: “Universal Pragmatics”
To overcome the schism between ideal and real, Habermas will try to see if he can’t find ideal communication within empirical communication. The philosophy of language will give him a guiding thread, by whose measure he will attempt to rethink his system. It becomes a matter, around the middle of the 1970s, of reconstructing, from an analysis of empirical communication, the presuppositions of an ideal communication.14
The starting point for the reconstruction is the theory of speech acts. Habermas takes up Austin’s thesis, already discussed, according to which our utterances are acts and not simply representations or descriptions of events. But the theory of discursive acts is only a starting point, for Habermas will quickly criticize philosophers of language for not going beyond the level of accidental contexts and not wondering about the more fundamental level of the universal and necessary presuppositions of any discursive act. Habermas’s movement thus consists in radicalizing pragmatic theory by going from the initial pragmatists (Austin, Searle, etc.) to what Habermas will call “universal pragmatics.” Starting with an analysis of the communicative situation, in which I effect discursive acts, Habermas will show that every discursive form presupposes a series of claims implicitly uttered and mutually admitted by the interlocutors. There are four such claims: in making an utterance, the speaker implicitly claims that what he says is understandable (verständlich), that the propositional content is true (wahr), that the utterance is appropriate (richtig), and that the expression of his intentions is sincere (wahrhaftig). Taken together, these four make up a statement’s validity claims and constitute its veritable conditions of possibility. As soon as an activity oriented to understanding is initiated (“communicative action”), the interlocutors have always already raised these four validity claims. Every discourse, even those of a practical order, like morality and law, is an enactment of these demands, the basis for communication. The model of communication thus described is, of course, an ideal distinct from the empirical conditions of communication. Nevertheless, Habermas explains, in carrying out discursive acts we proceed counterfactually as if the ideal speech situation were not merely fictional but real. Habermas has thereby overcome the sterilely and self-contradictorily regulative dimension of philosophy as therapy. What we have here are constitutive presuppositions, because these claims are conditions of possibility. On this point, Habermas writes in “What is Universal Pragmatics?” that “I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.”15 Without intelligibility claims, truth claims, etc., there is no communication, that is, no speech teleologically oriented toward mutual understanding between interlocutors. Thus, where his first philosophy failed by asserting the radical schism between empirical and ideal communication, his second seems to succeed by demonstrating that communication is the immanent telos of language. Philosophy is no longer a therapeutic and negative reflection; it becomes an enterprise aimed at clarifying the conditions implicit in every speech act. This paradigm shift appears to be a necessary step to “save” the philosophical discourse. The philosopher is no longer a mediocre school teacher for humanity who, unable to explain or even transform the real, glorifies radical finitude, unhappy consciousness, inescapable tragedy, and all those sorts of things but becomes a scholar who unveils the universal conditions of possibility necessarily inscribed in the very use of language.16 This dimension of necessity, which is not present in Habermas’s first philosophy and is introduced by universal pragmatics, is emphasized in his subsequent works. Thus, Habermas doesn’t hesitate to say, “I would agree, with certain qualifications, with the statement that a speaker, in transposing a well-formed sentence into an act oriented to reaching understanding, merely actualizes what is inherent in the sentence structures.”17 The idea of an actualization by each subject of a structure “always already” inscribed in language underscores the necessity thesis that Habermas maintains. Likewise, in “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” he explains that even the most radical skeptic, in the final analysis, cannot help but aim at mutual understanding: “Unless he is willing to take refuge in suicide or serious mental illness … he cannot extricate himself from the communicative practice.”18 He cannot, as Habermas repeatedly explains,19 because strategic action itself (namely, the sophist’s discourse that does not mean to “communicate with” but to produce an effect in his interlocutor, which thus privileges the perlocutionary over the illocutionary) presupposes communicative action. If the sophist were to succeed, he would have to feign to be engaging in communicative action in the sense that “the use of language for mutual understanding is its original mode.”20 Habermas here presupposes a telos (mutual understanding) immanent in language, posits that language has a “good” essence, and makes the implicit claims “always already” expressed by the speaker into strong claims inherent in the very structure of language. As Habermas writes, these conditions are “speech-act-immanent obligation[s].”21 Thus, he will no longer hesitate to say that “morality is inscribed in the grammar learned by every subject.”22
What should we conclude from this analysis of Habermas’s second period? First of all, it is clear that he has totally changed his definition of philosophy. It is no longer a merely negative, deconstructive, therapeutic activity but becomes the elucidation of the necessary conditions for any language. Its function is thus first to reveal a true structure (for example, the four conditions), not the elimination of a behavior. The status of philosophical discourse has undeniably changed. With this first observation, we can now say that the phenomenon of philosophy’s oscillation between two functions can be found in Habermas’s philosophy—the first, which we could call the function ad minima, the therapeutic function, and the second, more positive, namely the discovery of a truth inscribed in nucleo in the structure of the real (here, in this case, in the structure of language, for since the “linguistic turn”23 language has served as ultimate reality). A single doctrine thus offers an illustration of the swinging pendulum that we saw earlier in multiple philosophies. Thus, in his first period, Habermas articulated a renewed criticism, not very far from a moderated skepticism, and then turned to a more positive theory of truth, in which the necessity “inscribed in language” becomes the key idea.
Can we add another conclusion to this first insight, namely, that there is an internal contradiction in this second position, a contradiction that would compel its abandonment and a turn toward a third epistemic paradigm, closer to classical fallibilism? Without a doubt, for as Luc Langlois recalls in his article “Habermas et la question de la vérité,”24 Habermas himself recognizes that “revisions to his theory of truth were in large part motivated by Albrecht Wellmer’s objections.”25 But what does this objection consist of, if not, once again, the exhibition of a performative contradiction? Indeed, Langlois explains, “The idea of a definitive consensus [which is the telos toward which language, internally and necessarily, tends] turns out to be fundamentally contradictory, because this idea [presupposes] something beyond argument and discourse, that is, the very thing for which it is supposed to provide the index of rationality.”26 Thus, the logical pathology that we have seen in every conte
mporary doctrine so far appears again. However, while I share Langlois’ view that because of the contradictions that Wellmer had brought out, “Habermas undertook, in Truth and Justification (published in 1999), to review from top to bottom the premises of his theory of truth, whose main tenets had been articulated in 1972,”27 in my view, a question nevertheless remains unanswered. Why is this redevelopment done in favor of a fallibilist theory? Why hasn’t Habermas tried, following the example of Karl-Otto Apel, to overcome this contradiction while remaining in the same framework, namely, of philosophy understood as an investigation of the conditions of possibility inherent in our communicative acts? Indeed, it is perhaps not strictly necessary, given the idea that “we cannot escape from communicative theory,” that we go back to the Hegelian idea of a final realization of the good—that is, in this context, a final realization of the ideal communicative action, freed of any strategic or parasitic action. If we follow Apel,28 Habermas could have avoided any performative contradiction with out completely disrupting his theories of truth and of philosophy. The latter, however, is exactly what he did. Why this very unexpected return—given the universal character of his second philosophy—to a fallibilist pragmatism when he could have effected, if not a totally transcendental, at least an Apelian reorientation of his project? I have to address this question for, beyond the intrinsic interest in tracing Habermas’s philosophical evolution, it gives us one of the most telling illustrations of the trends in philosophy today.29
From Universal Pragmatics to Fallibilist Pragmatism30
The seemingly incomprehensible shift from philosophy as an investigation into the ultimate conditions of possibility to a philosophy that, like the other empirical sciences, is subject to verification by reality and is liable to be falsified, can be explained in my view by the following: the tensions in Habermas’s philosophy do not cease with a simple self-contradiction in his fundamental doctrine of truth. On this point, we can see the extent to which the theory of argumentation, which Habermas developed throughout his second period,31 contains such difficulties and serious contradictions that it forced an abandonment of the system of “universal pragmatics” (an abandonment of its universally transcendental character), and thus explains, in my view, the withdrawal to a classic form of fallibilist pragmatism or utilitarianism. Before we carefully dissect this nodal theory of argumentation, recall that Habermas’s second philosophy is composed of three closely interwoven levels that must nevertheless be kept distinct. Universal pragmatics constitutes the first level, where it is a matter of seeking criteria to identify valid propositions. The inherent presuppositions of any discursive act that claims to be valid will be what determines a theory of truth. The second level is of argumentation, where it is a matter of exhibiting the rules of justification for propositions in the current argumentative practice. This is effected by a theory of argumentation. Third and finally is the sociological level, where a twofold question is asked: how do legitimation problems arise at the heart of a society, and how does a theory of communicative action allow us to grasp social life in all its dimensions? These questions are addressed by a theory of society?.32 I have already shown that the contradiction at the level of a theory of truth is of a pragmatic order. Let’s now consider what sort of contradictions appear in the theory of argumentation, the hinge between the theories of truth and society and, in my view, the key point for Habermas’s second philosophy. First of all we should recall that for Habermas, an argumentative inference is what orients a series of acts toward a conclusion. Argumentation thus does not merely establish that a given thing is true in a given world (a classic positivist view) but must also establish it relative to the intention to convince a listener and to obtain his assent. The intention to convince by means of proof is one of the specific characteristics of argumentation distinguishing it from a simple logical inference, like implication. Arguments, because they must be adaptable to some purpose, are thus liable to be ranked (one argument may be deemed better than another in regard to a given end). Given that, how are we to determine the “force of the better argument”? Habermas answers that the force of the better argument is simultaneously “constraining and non-coercive”—a model that pushes for agreement, “the justification that should motivate us to recognize a validity claim,”33 but that cannot be reduced to the constraint imposed by logical propositions that are as necessary as they are empty of content, or by empirical propositions that “come into argumentation, so to speak, from the outside.”34 In a word, the force of the better argument neither obliges nor imposes, it motivates. Let’s consider now the different steps of argumentation as well as how one passes from one stage to the next. The first stage is clearly occasioned by the disruption of an initial consensus, that is, by the challenging of a validity claim. The speaker will then try to justify his claim by a “deduction from a justifying language,” that is, by exhibiting a principle or general norm that is liable to explain his statement. How does a validity claim come to be contested? In other words, why do certain propositions that had been accepted up to that point (God exists, Aristotelian physics is correct, one must always pay one’s debts) become transformed into problems? Far from the results of a sovereign individual’s sudden decision, these challenges arise from the evolution of society, or even, more generally, the species. Through this process of evolution, a consensus is transformed into a dissensus. This is explained by the “theory of the life-world” that Habermas develops at the end of volume 2 of The Theory of Communicative Action. The lifeworld is defined as the ensemble of beliefs shared by the individuals of a given society. “Taken as a whole, they [these beliefs] form the context of background knowledge accepted without question.”35 But if at a given moment a participant challenges not the totality but a fragment, a segment of this reservoir, it puts things under pressure: “It takes an earthquake to make us aware that we had regarded the ground on which we stand every day as unshakable … Whether a lifeworld, in its opaque take-for-grantedness, eludes the phenomenologist’s inquiring gaze or is opened up to it does not depend on just choosing to adopt a theoretical attitude.”36 Here Habermas develops two fundamentally anti-Cartesian theses: the first, which he borrows from Wittgenstein, asserts that radical doubt is impossible, that there will always be propositions that are held to be paradigmatic (which Habermas terms “background knowledge”) on whose basis an only-partial challenge can arise; the second shows that the origin of reflection cannot be imputed to a philosopher’s act of will but results from an external event. The real in itself is his concern here (the metaphor of the earthquake, at least, seemingly must be interpreted in this way). It is thus clear that a movement from a zero level (shared belief) to a first level (its challenge) is a necessary movement, induced by the real itself.
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