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University Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 USA St. John’s Road, Tyler's Green High Wycombe, Bucks, England HP10 8HR 77-31,856 I

DIXON, George John, 1944- J AN APPLICATION OF CRITICAL THEORY TO THE FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT: \ AN EXAMINATION OF THE IDEAS OF jtiRGEN | HABERMAS.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1977 Education, philosophy

University Microfilms International,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

© Copyright by George John Dixon 1977 fcns«n«m«^njwuui*jn

AN APPLICATION OF CRITICAL THEORY TO THE

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL THOUGHTS AN EXAMINATION

OF THE IDEAS OF JURGEN HABERMAS

i DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By George John Dixon, B. A . , M. A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1977

Reading Committee: Approved By

Donald Bateman Paul Klohr Philip. Smith Adviser Department of Humanities Education For my parents.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my committee, Professors Donald R. Bateman, Paul R. Klohr and Philip L. Smith, for their help and encouragement. VITA . .

April 20, 19*14. . . . Born - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1962-1966 ...... Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania B.A. in English

1966-1967 ...... The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan M.A. in English

1975-1977 ...... The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio Ph.D. in Humanities Education-English

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

1967-1975 ...... Instructor, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Saint Vincent College

1976-1977 ...... Teaching Associate, Department of. English,. The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

"George S. Counts and the Imposition Controversy" in the ■1976 Journal of the Midwest History of Education Society.

FIELDS OF STUDY

.Major Fields: English Education Curriculum Theory

Studies in Curriculum Theory. ProfesSor Paul R. Klohr

Studies in the History of Education. Professor Philip L. Smith

Studies in Educational Communications. Professor John Belland iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page DEDICATION ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

VITA ...... iv LIST OF CHARTS ...... vi

Chapter

I. .INTRODUCTION ...... 1

II. HABERMAS’ THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE ..... 10

III. HABERMAS-' CRITIQUE OF H E G E L ...... 23 IV. THE STATUS OF ETHICAL UNIVERSALS .... 34

V. SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO INTERACTION . 48

VI. HABERMAS' CRITIQUE OF.KOHLBERG ..... 63

VII. SITUATED FREEDOM AND MORAL. EDUCATION . . 84

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 103

v LIST OF CHARTS

Chart I ...... :...... p.

Chart II...... p. CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This study examines the work of Jurgen Habermas as it bears on a number of educational issues, especially on the cognitive-developmental approach to moral education pro­ posed by Lawrence Kohlberg.

Habermas is a German social theorist, born in 1929» and presently associated with .the Max Planck Institute in Starn- berg, West Germany. As a student of Horkheimer, Adorno and

Marcuse, Habermas continues in many ways the work in Critical

Theory begun by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a group whose history in Germany and the United States has been examined recently by Martin Jay in The Dialectical Imag­ ination. ^

. In this country, Habermas is probably best known for

Knowledge and Human Interests. a work that grew out of his

1965 inaugural address at the University of Frankfurt. Three other volumes of his writing have also been translated into

English: Toward a Rational Society (1970), Theory and Prac­

tice (1973) and Legitimation Crisis (1975)*2 The few appli-.

cations.of his work to education have for the most part fo­

cused on the distinctions elaborated in Knowledge and Human

1 Interests, that is, on the technical, practical and emanci­ patory interests that Habermas sees as guiding human percep- : tion.-^

Habermas believes it is important to distinguish these three interests so that we might resist the modern tendency to view knowing as motivated solely by the desire to control the world around us. This motive provides the basis for scientific knowledge in its applied as well as io ''pure” research, insofar as in both cases the investigator relies on manipulation and prediction of his subject's behavior.

But not all knowing is bashed on this instrumental relation­ ship. Habermas—would have us recognize two additional bases for knowing* a practical interest that has its foundation in the interactive processes that exist among mutually-recognized subjects, and an emancipatory interest that seeks to esta­ blish human autonomy by moving beyond the "given" world of technical and interactive knowledge.

As a reconstruction of "the prehistory o.f modern posi- k tivism," Knowledge and Human Interests tries to broaden our

criteria for certainty beyond the narrow standards of tech­ nical or instrumental knowing. For while instrumental pro­

cesses are appropriate for work in the empirical sciences,

other, criteria are needed when our focus shifts to human

interaction and the norms and institutions that grow.out of

such interchange. Thus much of Habermas' work is dedicated to renovating the practical and emancipatory interests and restoring them to philosophical legitimacy.

But Habermas' work involves more than a critique of the dominance of instrumental criteria in technically-advanced societies. In fact, he sees that dominance as just the clearest instance of an imbalance that occurs in one episte- mological position after another, not just in those which openly imitate the "hard" sciences. What is more fundamental to Habermas' position is that balance must be restored to our conception of how men encounter and come to know the world.

And mUch of Habermas' writing focuses on the practical or interactive interest because it is the least understood of the categories of knowing. So while an explication of this interactive category is important, that explication is pre­ liminary to restoring a balance among the technical, practi­ cal and emancipatory interests.-*

The Problem to be Investigated

. It is this latter idea of methodological balance that

.becomes central to this study. For most of our complex edu­ cational problems demand a balanced a comprehensive methodo­

logy that continues to elude us. Time and again our efforts seem hampered by an analytical one-sidedness or by a propen­ sity to reduce complex effects to single causes. In addi­

tion, in our educational theorizing we all too often follow

the tendency of the social sciences to imitate the methods of the natural sciences.^ Thus, in something of a second­ hand fashion, we tend to conceive our analyses solely in instrumental terms, and thereby lose touch with the practi­ cal contexts and emancipatory possibilities of the education­ al process.

A more specific way to describe this problem is in terms of the relationship between the manifest functions and the latent functions of our schools. Our educational system is filled with elaborate and well-conceived curricula, with many available in sophisticated media formats. The manifest content of these curricula are usually beyond question; they promise an enlightening and liberating experience for the student. And yet a good number of studies reveal less de­ sirable and often contradictory results from such efforts, as the latent or "hidden" curriculum works to reinforce tradi­ tional authority patterns and less-than-liberating inter- 7 action among students, teachers and administrators.

In confronting this discrepancy, we need not reject automatically scientifically-designed curricula or the tech­ nology that often brings them into the classroom. A less

extreme position would argue that first we must recognize

the interactive context in which such curricula and techno­

logies operate. We need to develop for educational theory

the balanced approach recommended by Habermas. Only then

can we hope that the schools will live up to the emancipa­

tory function we time and again claim for them. In terms of day-to-day classroom activity, this means that educators need to arrange the available educational re­ sources of people, settings and subject matter so that a shared experience occurs in practice. Without such atten­ tion to how a new curriculum or instructional technique builds on the existing classroom interaction, even the best educational efforts are deprived of a real context. And under such conditions, the manifest intentions of schools have little chance for success against the inertia of the hidden curriculum, with its contradictory and sometimes repressive effects.

This contrast between repression and emancipation in schools is perhaps best drawn by Samuel Bowles and Herbert

Gintis in the concluding chapter of Schooling in Capitalist

America:

The dogma of repressive education is the dogma of neces­ sity which denies freedom. But we must avoid the alter­ native dogma of freedom which denies necessity. Indeed freedom and individuality arise only through a confron­ tation with necessity, and personal powers develop only . when pitted against a recalcitrant reality. According­ ly, most individuals seek environments which they not only draw, on and interact with, but also react against in. furthering the development of their personal powers. Independence, creativity, individuality, and physical prowess are, in this sense, developed in institution­ alized settings, as are docility, subservience, conform­ ity and weakness. Differences must not lie in the pre­ sence or absence of authority but in the type of author­ ity relations governing activity.°

Here we have one of the most telling criticisms that can be directed against the "romantic" educational critics of the past decade.^ That is, in their eagerness to bring freedom and individuality to the schools, such critics of­ ten underestimated the accumulated power of what Habermas calls the"practical sphere." For one cannot install free­ dom and individuality by fiat; those relationships must be achieved through the confrontation described above by

Bowles and Gintis. So, for example, a teacher cannot abo­ lish grades in his course and by that act alone transform the authority and evaluating relationships that exist be­ tween him. and his students. In such a situation, the old structures will inevitably continue, now perhaps even more bothersome because they cannot be openly recognized.

These examples are certainly not meant to deny the claim that schools need to encourage greater freedom and individuality among students. But to promote such values before reckoning with the power of the practical sphere leads in most cases to frustration and bitterness.

For .these reasons, Habermas' renovation of the practi­ cal' and emancipatory interests and his attempt to rebalance our three primary ways of knowing are significant for edu­ cational theorists. As we show in the following chapters,

Habermas'focus on the practical and emancipatory interests at least gives educators a way to analyze the relationships among various educational factors, and perhaps a better way to diagnose perennial educational problems. Unfortunately, 7

Habermas’ work is not easily accessible to educators in this country. For one immediately encounters obstacles when reading his work, obstacles that usually arise from the marked differences between the Continental tradition in philosophy and its Anglo-American counterpart.

Thus one finds Habermas’ translated work full of un­ familiar approaches to problems that resist easy alignment with the central questions of Anglo-American thought. And while we may .recognize the potential value of giving up our accustomed philosophical terms and questions for the sake of fresh insight, there still remains the problem of getting started. We still must find a way to break into the circle of- unusual terms, questions and approaches that characterize 10 the work of a social theorist like Jurgen Habermas.

The Scone of this Study

In the face of this difficulty, the first aim of this study is to provide Habermas' work with a context that will prove helpful to the Anglo-American reader. In addition, I will show that an application of Habermas' work to certain educational questions can advance our understanding of some perennial educational problems, especially those connected with the school’s transmission of values. So we have in

Chapter Two' an analysis of Habermas' epistemological posi­ tion vis-a-vis our more familiar Anglo-American theories of knowledge. Chapter Three concentrates on Habermas’ criti­ que of Hegel and Marx in relation to the philosophical prob­ lem of universals, while Chapter Four narrows its focus to the status of ethical universals, especially as that prob­

lem relates to Hegel's critique of Kantian formalism.

Chapter Five connects this dispute with 20th Century deve- •

lopments in social science methodology, developments which provide Habermas with a starting point for his recon­

struction of Lawrence Kohlberg's theories. This recon­

struction is examined in Chapter Six and extended in Chap­

ter Seven, where the critical aspects of Habermas' recent

work are analyzed.

Thus we use Habermas' specific criticisms of Kohlberg's

theories as a means to locate his work within traditional

ethical theory as well as within contemporary social sci­

ence methodology. Both topics— ethical theory and social

science methodology— are important for educators, especially

in light of the widespread interest in moral education and ■

value clarification curricula. The work of Jurgen Habermas

not only brings together these two topics, but does so in a

critical way. This study is intended to make some of that

work accessible to educators, although given the broad scope

of Habermas'.work, we can only make a beginning here. 9

FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER ONE

'1 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973)*

2 . ■ All four of Habermas' translated works are available from Beacon Press, Boston.

^See, for example, Barry Franklin, "The Curriculum Field and the Problem of Social Control, 1918-1938: A Study in Critical Theory" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wiscon­ sin, 197^). h Jurgen Habermas, Preface to Knowledge and Human Inter- ■ests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971)*

■^In addition to Knowledge and Human Interests. see_ "Technology and Science as 'Ideology'," in Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).

^For a critique of this tendency in the field of psycho­ logy, see Sigmund Koch, "Psychology as Science," in Philoso­ phy of Psychology, ed. S. C. Brown (London: Macmillan, 197*0» pp. 3-^0.

^See Robert Dreeben, On What is Learned in School (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1968)7 Philip ‘ Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968); John Goodlad etal., Behind the Classroom Door (Worthington, Ohio: Charles A. Jones Publishing Com­ pany, 1970). O Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capi­ talist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 272.

^See, for example, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartr ner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Dela- corte Press, 1969). 10 An especially helpful introduction to Habermas' work is provided by Fred R. Dallmayr, "Reason and Emanci­ pation: Notes on Habermas," in Man and the World 5 (1972): pp. 79-109* CHAPTER TWO'

; HABERMAS' THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

In this chapter I would like to provide an initial context for Habermas’ work by means.of a contrast set up by Charles TaylorProfessor of:Philosophy and Political

Science at McGill University, in his essay, "Marxism and 1 Empiricism." The contrast is not a particularly new one, but it does address directly the problem of locating a

Continental philosopher like Habermas in relation to the

Anglo-American philosophical.tradition. Moreover, by working on an epistemological level, Taylor's distinction provides a useful introduction to the material of this chapter, which has as its focus the origin of Habermas' epistemology.

As Taylor tries to account for the relatively weak

impact of Marxism on British philosophy, he notes that

the empiricist tradition which underlies and periodically

flourishes in British philosophy finds Marxist epistemology

incomprehensible in many ways. Most puzzling is the Marx­

ist notion that there exist a number of ways of perceiving

reality, ways that vary not only through history but also

among individuals in different social classes. For example,

10 11 an empiricist philosopher can make little sense of the claim that capitalist owners perceive the world in a way that is fundamentally different from the worker's percep­ tion.of that same world. Yet that specific claim is basic to a Marxist approach, just as the general claim to episte- mological pluralism underlies- the Continental tradition in which Habermas works.

What seems to contradict the empiricist view at this most basic level is the pluralism of Marxist epistemology.

As Taylor notes, for a philosopher schooled in an empiri­ cist tradition

...it is difficult to see what sense could be made of talk about different ways of seeing the world. In fact, if knowledge consists originally of impressions, then the type or form of impressions is fixed by human . physiology or the nature of the human mind. They were generally thought to take the form of what was called in this century 'sense-data'. In any case, the form was the same for all people at all times. Our know­ ledge of the world, reflected in our talk about it, was entirely built up from our experience of such data, and their temporal and spatial relationships. All ways of looking at the world, or talking about it, must be reducible to one, that which designated the basic evi­ dence, sense-data.

Here we have one important obstacle to a mutual under­ standing between these two philosophical traditions. We find that at an epistemological level, the empiricist is reluctant to give up the search for a single, irreducible substructure that underlies the varying perceptions of reality. In the face of this long-standing empiricist pursuit, the Marxist notion that practice conditions 12 perception seems at best misguided.

Taylor points out a related epistemological difference between the two approaches, this one involving the question of whether perception is an active or a passive process.

For in contrast with idealist and Marxist approaches, em­ piricism sees perception, a one-way process, so that

...this theory essentially looked on knowledge as pas^- sive rather than active. Originally knowledge came through perception which was the reception of impres­ sions on to the mind. This contrasts with an alterna­ tive theory of perception and knowledge, one which has mainly been put forward by idealist theories, to the effect that perception is a form of activity, that it essentially involves some structuring of the phenomena or interpretation. On this latter view, a way of look­ ing at the world is a form of the perceiving or knowing activity which yields interpretations of a certain kind or structures the phenomena in a certain way. Accord­ ing to this conception therefore, since a way of look­ ing at things is already a form of activity, it is more readily understandable how it could be linked with forms of economic and social activity. On the empiri­ cist view, on.the other hand, these forms of activity should have no effect on knowledge, unless it be a com­ plex and indirect causal one, e.g. by making certain data less or more perceptible, the form of the data, however, remaining perenially the same.3

Thus we have differences between the two traditions first

about what we can know, with empiricism committed to locat­

ing a single set of sense data; we also have this second

basic disagreement about how we perceive the world, with

V.i? the empiricist' tradition favoring a relatively passive view

in contrast to the more active Continental epistemologies. 13

' These two differences provide us with a key to what follows in this chapter. That is, Habermas' epistemology is not based on an empirical approach to perception, but rather has its roots in the Continental tradition, speci­ fically in an approach that owes much to Hegel and Marx.

Thus Habermas' exposition of Hegel's Jena lectures, which we will examine at . some length in this chapter., assumes both the activity and the plurality of perception that

Taylor finds so troublesome for Anglo-American thinkers.

And while these distinctions might provide us with a key to Habermas' work, we should note that this emphasis on activity and plurality is not confined to idealistic phi­ losophies, nor to the Marxist materialism that "stood

Hegel on his head." An emphasis on the active nature of perception also characterizes pragmatic and phenomenologi­ cal epistemologies, among others. Indeed, one of Habermas' strong points is that he has not been immune to these philosophical traditions. Instead, he has. incorporated insights from a variety of philosophers and social theorists into his work, perhaps most notably in Knowledge and Human

Interests. ... lty

In that work, Habermas carries out a detailed epis- temological critique of positivism, that version of empiri­ cism that has dominated 20th Century thought. Beginning, with an analysis of Kant's philosophical method, Habermas characteristically traces the "prehistory" of positivism through most of the significant philosophical movements of the past two centuries, from Hegel and Marx through Dilthey and Peirce to Freud and Husserl. In Habermas' view, these disparate approaches intersect as they struggle with the impasses found within positivism.. And, as we might expect, his set of three interests that guide the perceptive pro­ cess— the technical, practical and emancipatory interests— counteract the supposedly passive and neutral epistemology of positivism. The plurality and activity that mark Conti- . nental epistemologies generally are presupposed by Habermas' distinctions.

But it is in a 1967 essay entitled "Labor and Inter­ action" that we find the roots of Habermas' epistemological position, this time cast in the form of a critique of Hegel if and Marx. In this essay, Habermas analyzes the lectures given by Hegel at Jena in 1803-0^ and 1805-06 on the — ..-. ..

15 Philosophy of Nature and of Mind. The lectures focus on

the question of how men as rational beings come to know

their world, a question that still gives Hegel's work

philosophical significance, in Habermas' estimate. Other

philosophers had, of course, considered this question, but

it was Hegel who first grasped the complexity of human

awareness and attempted to analyze all of the factors in­

volved in it.

For one thing, Hegel saw that the foundation of know­

ledge could be located neither in the isolated individual

nor in a transcendental realm.- Thus he could accept neither

an empirical nor a Kantian explanation of knowledge. In­

stead, Hegel argued in his Jena lectures that the process

of knowing is based on the individual's interaction with

his environment and with his fellow men in a set of process- '

es that are both individual and social. Hegel saw these

interactions as falling into three basic categories or

patterns, whose origins and characteristics he went on to

. analyze in his lectures. He designated these mediating

patterns "tools, family and language" or as Habermas calls

them, "labor, interaction and language." 16 .

It is the- distinctness of these three patterns that catches Habermas' attention. As he notes in "Labor and

Interaction"

The categories language, tools, and family designated three equally significant patterns of dialectical re- lation: symbolic representation, the labor-process, and interaction on the basis of reciprocity; each mediates subject and object in its own way. The dia­ lectics of language, of labor, and of moral relations are each.developed as a specific configuration of mediation; what is involved are not stages constructed according to the same logical form, but diverse forms o f .construction, itself.5

In contrast to the single set of irreducible sense data pursued by the empiricist according to a set of positivist, criteria, the three patterns of Hegel's triad are not re-,

■ducible to one another. Each has its particular charac­ teristics and its own legitimacy; each involves the per- ceiver in a distinct way of coming to know the world. In order to clarify those distinct activities of perception,

let us take a closer look at Hegel's method of deriving

his Jena system.

Hegel's analysis of each pattern involves the use of

what we have come to recognize as typical Hegelian dialec­

tic. Thus he argues that while the activity of language

enables man to confront nature by naming its various 17 aspectsf it simultaneously brings about an awareness of separation between the k'nower and the known. As a result, more than representation is involved in human speech; it also initiates a self-reflective act the reveals the speak­ er in the very act of revealing the object spoken about.

Habermas summarizes Hegel’s treatment of this initial split between nature and consciousness in this way!

As the name of things, the symbol' has a double function....The representional symbol indicates an object or a state of affairs as something else and designates it in the meaning it has for us. On the other hand, we ourselves have produced the symbols. By means of them speaking consciousness becomes ob­ jective for itself and in them experiences itself as a subject.°

Here we have the dialectic movement that will charac­ terize each pattern: language provides a way of knowing both the world and the knower, both the object and the sub­ ject of the perception process. Through the medium of lan­ guage, both sides of the process are formed and recognized.

As Habermas notes, the medium ("middle" in Hegel's terms) of labor involves a similar but not identical inter­ action between subject and object, this time mediated by tools and the technical rules that govern their uses

Labor Hegel calls that specific mode of satisfying drives which distinguishes existing spirit from nature. Just as language breaks t>>e dictates of immediate per­ ception and orders the chaos of the manifold impression into identifiable things, so labor breaks the dictates of immediate desires and,, as it were, arrests the process of drive satisfaction. Like symbols in language, here the instruments, in which the laborer's experience of his objects is deposited, form the existing m i d d l e . 7 18'

Seen from this temporal perspective, each pattern provides a mediation between what is ephemeral and what proves to be permanent. Just as language makes permanent the passing moment of perception through the process of naming, so too the labor process gives a certain permanence to individual needs and desires through tools and techniques. As Haber­ mas put it, "In the tools the subjectivity of labor has been elevated to something universal; everyone can imitate it and work in precisely the same manner; thus it is the O constant rule of labor."

.What we also see from this last perspective is the way in which the three patterns mediate the individual and the universal. Such an ontological perspective probably brings us closer to Hegel's view of these mediations; it also brings us closer to Hegel's third pattern, the one by which men .come to self-consciousness through interaction with other men. For whereas language and labor involve primarily a subject's interaction with the objects of nature, this third pattern begins with the relationships that develop between mutually-recognized subjects. This self-conscious­ ness ......

...results from the experience of interaction, in which I learn to see myself through the eyes of other subjects. The consciousness of myself is the derivation of the intersection of perspectives. Self-consciousness is formed only on the basis of mutual recognition; it must be tied to my being mirrored in the consciousness of another subject....Consciousness exists as the middle ground on which the subjects encounter each other, so. that without encountering each other they cannot exist . as subjects.° 19 Here the dialectical relationship becomes even more complex, for the universals which grow out of such inter­ action seem to have no stable or "objective" basis. For whereas the patterns of labor and language have the objects of nature to guarantee an initial stability, the interactive pattern seems to brings together two or more individual and perhaps arbitrary subjects. Is it any wonder that philoso­ phers and social scientists have such difficulty locating

and analyzing such "subjective" universals with a satis­

factory degree of objectivity?

But that is exactly the task that Hegel set for philo­

sophy. He wanted to account for the universals that develop

through each pattern of perception, that is, for mediated

relations that are neither arbitrary nor merely aggregates

of individual experiences. And he wanted to clarify the

objective basis of universals not just within Kant's realm

of pure reason, but also for practical reason, the locus of

man's ethical, religious and aesthetic experience.

In one sense, this was not a new problem for philosophy,

although the success of Enlightenment science had much to do

with its revival. For both Kant and Hegel saw the need to protect the realm of ethics, religion and aesthetics from

the objectifying tendencies of their times. 10 As we shall

see. in Chapter Three, they both sought ways to prevent man

from being treated as just another object of scientific anal­

ysis. But whereas Kant sought to guarantee man’s freedom .20 and subjectivity within a realm of a priori forms, Hegel sought to ground consciousness in man's activity. Thus, while Hegel was certainly an idealist in the strict philo­ sophical sense, he saw himself as reacting against an idealistic reduction in Kant's work. Despite the popular image of Hegel's idealism, he never denied, for example, the reality or utility of human action in the material world. In fact, he wanted to establish philosophical cer­ tainty in just that realm.

Perhaps a better way to describe Hegel's idealism would be to call his philosophy one of "internal relations."

This view, which Bertell Oilman develops in his book,

Alienation, establishes the identity of an individual entity in its relations with the whole of reality. Oilman claims that such a view can be traced back at least to Parmenides, although Spinoza and Leibniz revived it in the modern peri­ od. But it was Hegel who worked through the details of this view, in part through the Jena triad of mediations, as he confronted the dualism of Kantian thought. As Oilman notes: ...Hegel was perhaps the first to work through the main implications of the philosophy of internal relations and to construct in some detail the total system which it impled. In this he was aided— as is often the case in philosophy— by the character of the impasse bequeathed to him by his immediate predecessor, Kant. The latter . had convincingly demonstrated that things are no more than the qualities by which we know them, but found such a conclusion unacceptable. Determined to believe that what appears is something more than (really, for him, .something behind) what actually strikes our senses, Kant invented the nebulous 'thing in itself' which remains the same through all changes in the entity. 21

Hegel exhibited less timidity before Kant's first conclusion, that things dissolve upon inspection into their qualities, but considered that the decisive task is to show how this conclusion must be understood..,. Thus, for Hegel, the thing under examination is not just . the sum of its qualities but, through the links these qualities (individually or together in the thing) have with the rest of nature, it is also a particular expres­ sion of the whole. To a great extent, the distinctive­ ness of Hegel's system lies in the various means used to maintain our awareness of the whole while he sets about distinguishing between its parts. 11

Here we have the basis of Hegel's insistence that we take into account all three mediations when we analyze a phenomenon. To do anything less, to reduce one or another pattern to a sub-ordinate position, for instance, can only result in a distorted and incomplete knowledge, no matter what the level of our analysis. If we are to avoid such abstractness, we must account for-a plurality of factors) in the case of Hegel’s Jena system, the major categories for these factors were language, labor and interaction.

But having noted the basic characteristics that

Habermas adopts from Hegel's epistemology, we must turn

our attnetion to Habermas' critique of Hegel's direction

after the Jena period. For it is this critique that reveals

the motive for Habermas' continuing attempt to reestablish

the importance of practical reason for social science me­

thodology as well as for the related areas of ethical and

political theory. 22

FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER TWO

A Charles Taylor, "Marxism and Empiricism," in British Analytical Philosophy, eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (New'York* Humanities Press, 1966), pp. 227-246.

2 Ibid., p. 2 3 3 /

3 Ibid., p. 2 3 4 .

^Jurgen Habermas, "Labor and Interaction: Remarks oh Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Mind," in Theory and Practice. trans. Jonn Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974)» pp. 142- I6 9.

Ibid., P* 142.

Ibid., P* 153.

Ibid., PP 153 -1 54.

Ibid., P* 154.

Ibid., P* 145. l0Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1975)« PP* 2 9-36* ^Bertell Oilman, Alienation: Marx' s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1976), p. 31* CHAPTER THREE

HABERMAS• CRITIQUE OF HEGEL

For the most part, the system that Hegel developed at

Jena has been neglected by philosophers and social theorists

since then. In fact, Hegel’s edited lecture notes from that

period remained unpublished until the 1930 's and have never

been fully translated into English. But that is not to say

that Habermas is the only Continental theorist to recognize

their importance. In 19^1 Herbert Marcuse devoted a sec­

tion of Reason and Revolution to Hegel's Jena system. There

he acknowledged the importance of Hegel's early work, con­

tending that "Hegel's first system already reveals the out­

standing traits of his philosophy, especially its emphasis i on the universal as the true being."

More recently, Shlomo Avineri has examined the Jena

system and its epistemological triad in Hegel's Theory of 2 the Modern State. He emphasizes, as did Marcuse, the con­

tinuity that exists between the Jena system and Hegel's

later work. Avineri's general thesis also echoes Marcuse's •

claim that Hegel's philosophical work was firmly grounded

in the social and political developments of his' time'; both

portray Hegel as anything but an otherworldly philosopher

who would deny either the reality or the value of the 23 material world.

In- any case, Habermas' exposition of the Jena triad generally agrees with the analyses of Marcuse and Avineri.

To locate Habermas' specific contribution to this topic we must examine the critique of Hegel and Marx contained in the second half of "Labor and Interaction." There we see that what attracts Habermas to the Jena system in the first place is the. balance that obtains among the three moments of the triad. Labor, language and interaction are equal and reciprocal media of human activity; a method based on all three might lead to a comprehensive analysis of the sort that Habermas is trying to find for the social sci- 3 . ences generally. But in the latter part of his essay, Habermas criti­ cizes Hegel for abandoning this carefully balanced set of mediating patterns. Instead, in his subsequent and more famous work, Hegel adopted a set of categories that col­ lapsed the three discrete patterns into a different and unequal relationship. Habermas contends that as early as the Enzvklonadie of 1806, labor has lost its significant connection with the interactive pattern. The result is what we have come to recognize as Hegel's movement toward idealism. As Habermas analyzes this transition:

...Hegel soon abandoned the systematics of these lec­ tures and replaced it by the subdivisions of the Enzvklooadie. into subjective, objective and absolute spirit. While in the Jena lectures, language, labor, and action in reciprocity were not only stages in the 25 formative process of spirit, but also principles of its formation itself, in the Enzvklooadie. language and labor, once models of construction for dialecti­ cal- movement, are now themselves constructed as sub­ ordinate real conditions.4'’

So in Hegel's major works, the equal role attributed to . labor and language in the Jena lectures is gone, although

Habermas claims that traces of labor's original function can still be found in Hegel’s concept of Abstract Right^

What seems to lead Hegel, to interpret the pattern of labor in this idealistic fashion was his move toward the single mediation provided by Absolute Spirit realizing

itself in history. Later, Habermas finds a similar col­

lapse into monism at another level, this time.in Hegel's merging of the dialectic of morality with the historical nation state. In any case, the balance that Habermas so admires in the Jena lectures was not maintained for long

even by Hegel himself. And, if Habermas' analysis is cor­

rect, the balance was rediscovered and subsequently aban­

doned forty years later by Karl Marx.^ For in the Paris

Manuscripts, Marx reestablished the connection between

labor and interaction that Hegel had abandoned, but then

went on to reverse Hegel's priorities by raising labor to

its position of primacy within his own materialistic system.

We might note here one significant difference between

Habermas' interpretation of Hegel and Marcuse's in Reason

and Revolution. Habermas sees the need to maintain a ba­

lance among the three moments of the triad and to avoid . 26 raising one to a position of primacy. Marcuse, on the other

hand, interprets Hegel (and later, Marx) as subordinating

interaction to labor, at least in the sense that interac­

tion separates men according to their individual interests

without reintegrating those interests in any way. This task

of reintegration is assigned to labor, at least in Marcuse's 7 interpretation of Hegel and Marx/ Here we see an instance,

as Martin Jay notes in The Dialectical Imagination, of Mar- O cuse's attempt to read labor back into Hegel's philosophy.

Just as there has been a concerted effort in the past thirty

years to locate Marx's roots in Hegel's work, so too we oc­

casionally find such attempts to re-read Hegel in the light

of Marx.

Marx's reversal of Hegel’s priorities may have served

to de-mystify Hegel's philosophy of internal relations, but

. it brought with it another set of problems, as Habermas is

quick to note:

Marx does not actually explicate the interrelationship of interaction and labor, but instead, under the un­ specific title of social praxis, reduces the one to the other, namely: communicative action to instrumental ac­ tion For Marx instrumental action, the productive activity that regulates the material interchange of the human species with its natural environment, becomes the paradigm for the generation of all the categories; every­ thing is resolved into the self-movement of production. . Because of this, Marx's brilliant insight into the dialectical relationship between the forces of produc­ tion and the relations of production could very quickly be misinterpreted in a mechanistic manner.9 27 : i . This last claim by Habermas reopens a question of long­ standing controversy, one that concerns the working out 10 of Marxian analysis in history. But whetherror not we agree that Marxism contained the seeds of its own positiv- istic interpretation, we can now see more clearly the reason for Habermas' attempt to rescue Hegel's original triad.

Habermas' contribution to this question has been, to place the Jena triad between the extremes of idealism and materi­ alism, so that the significance of the original balance as well as its delicate nature become more apparent.

Habermas claims that both Hegel and Marx moved away, each in his own philosophical direction, from the careful balance of the Jena triad. And while each in turn continued to raise the fundamental question of how the human species forms itself in the world, the issue remained insolvable within their philosophical systems. In the case of Hegel, we find the mediations of language and labor interpreted idealistically! Marxism, on the other hand, would soon be plagued by positivistic interpretations. In neither case ■ would their philosophical framework allow for a complete analysis of human activity.

Habermas' efforts since "Labor and Interaction" might be seen as an extended confrontation with that basic ques­ tion of how men know their world.' In various essays and in

Knowledge'and Human Interests he contends that the interac­ tive pattern is a legitimate source of knowledge. But in 28 addition to restoring the philosophical legitimacy of interaction, Habermas sees such a restoration as preli­ minary to striking a balance among all three epistemologi- cal patterns. In, the process, he has ranged over a broad spectrum of issues, but seems to have kept that central epistemological concern in mind. Perhaps this is the strongest testimony to the importance and complexity of the

Hegelian questions he revived in "Labor and Interaction."

At this point, it may seem puzzling to note that

Habermas' recent work has focused less on interaction and more on' various aspects of language, specifically on what 11 he calls the "pragmatics" of language. In part, this focus on language can be attributed to the influence of contemporary language analysis on Habermas, particularly that of Austin, Searle and Chomsky. But it also involves •

Habermas' emphasis on the unique position held by the media­ tion of language, a development in his work that parallels

Hegel's later "change in the role of language from a defi­ nite stage in his thought to a basis for explaining his 12 thinking in general." But there is an important differ- . ence.here, as we shall see. For Habermas wants to acknow­ ledge the unique role of language without losing sight of the function of labor and interaction, despite the manifest difficulties encountered when one tries to maintain the comprehensive approach of Hegel's first system. 29

There is, after all, more at stake here than impasses within Hegelian or Marxist epistemology. Habermas wants to extend his analysis beyond the scope of "Labor and Inter­ action" to include philosophical positions that have deve­ loped since Hegel’s time, as well as social and political theories that have attempted to explain human interactions and institutions. In his'view,’ all of these disciplines have been flawed by their failure to assign a significant role to the interactive pattern. For one thing, they usually regard interaction only as a source of arbitrary or subjective opinion, father than as a source of universals. In this, they seem to extend the negative interpretation of inter­ action which we found in Marcuse's Reason and Revolution.

As Habermas develops his larger critique, our failure to recognize interaction as a legitimate source of knowledge condemns our explanations of human action to "the limits of methodological individualism." That is, our analyses of knowing and acting are presently based on a model in which the individual confronts the world without a social context.

In this view, society and its institutions can be seen only as aggregates of private perceptions, desires and decisions.

The social context in which all these activities develop is seen as the sum' of these activities, rather than as a condi­ tion of everything we recognize as human action. Thus we have a vision of the individual passively perceiving some part of the world, thinking and acting in isolation from 5C57/'netn&Sra

30 other men and from the institutions that make up his society.

From this individualistic approach, a sense of subjec­ tivity and arbitrariness is bound to result. So too, meth­ odological problems and impasses continue, since neither the basic activity nor plurality of perception is given adequate recognition.

We can find confirmation for this critique, this time from the Anglo-American point of view, in Steven Lukes’

short study, Individualism. In a concluding chapter on the

"doctrine" of individualism, he notes;

The individual of epistemological individualism is, by definition, abstract, since this doctrine precludes con­ sideration of the impact of social, cultural and lin­ guistic factors on the individual's mind and experience; thus Descartes, Kant and the British'empiricists all begin from the 'individual', abstracted (unsuccessfully, of course) from his social context. The 'social con­ struction of reality' and the socio-historical deter­ mination of experience are ideas which their theories necessarily exclude. (It is really only with Hegel that . they first appear.) Lastly, if my arguments concerning methodological individualism are correct, then, if the allegedly explanatory 'individuals' are abstract, the doctrine is interesting but highly implausible; while if they are not, it is uninteresting, since social factors have already been built into them.13

To return to Habermas, in "Labor and Interaction" we

find him contending that the issues raised by Hegel in the

■Jena lectures remain central problems for modern ethics,

politics, and the social sciences generally. He sees these

disciplines plagued by a one-sidedness and a methodological

individualism that abstract their subject from his social

genesis. As a result, they continue to.founder on what 31 proves to be the classical philosophical problem of urii-

•versals.

Habermas has touched on these related questions at a number of points in his career, especially in the political essays of Toward a Rational Society and in his analysis of systems theory in Legitimation Crisis. There he translates his epistemological concerns.into questions of this sort:

Can political decisions express a generalized interest of a population rather than remain mere aggregates of private interests? Can individual autonomy survive within techni­ cally advanced societies, with their growing reliance bn technical expertise? Can we study society empirically with­ in out losing sight of individual awareness and aspiration?

Habermas poses these questions against an era in which political theories— whether they be idealist, Marxist or contemporary systems analysis— tend to work "behind the back" of- individual members of society. There seems to be no way to bridge the gap between individual awareness and the larger patterns of social development detected by empirical methods. Here we have one of the major consequences for 15 political theory of the unresolved problem of universals.

' But perhaps the Habermasian question most important for this study has to do with ethical theory, that is, Can we find a transpersonal basis for ethical judgments, one that does not reduce them to aggregates of private insight or arbitrary decision? This question arises in a context of what we might see as an incomplete pluralism, where ra­ tional discussion is limited to technical questions, to questions of implementation, while the formulation of goals and values must ultimately.stand outside the bounds of rational formation. It is to this question of ethical universals that we now turn, in an effort to locate

Habermas' specific contribution to ethical theory and to' the educational problems related to such theory. 33

FOOTNOTES -'CHAPTER THREE

^Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. 2nd ed. (New York: Humanities Press, 195*0 p. 8 8. 2 Shlomo Avineri, Hegel*s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972 ), pp. Sl-lll*-.

^Habermas, "Labor and Interaction," p. 1^2.

^Ibid., pp. 161-1 6 2 .

■^Ibid., pp. 167-1 6 8.

^Ibid., pp. 168-1 6 9. "^Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 77. 0 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of The Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1.921-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973) P- 75*

^Habermas, "Labor and Interaction," pp. I68-I6 9. 1 0 * For a detailed discussion of this position, see Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (New York: Seabury Press, 197*0 > pp. 67-119* 11 Jurgen Habermas, "Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics," trans. Pieter Pekelharing and Cornelis Disco Theory and Society 3 (1976): pp. 155-167*

12 Daniel J. Cook, Language in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague: Mouton, 1973)» PP* ^0-^1. ^-^Steven Lukes, Individualism (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) , p.s l*+0 . 1 li> Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis. trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975)> especially Chapter Three. ■^Cf. Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971)* PP* 3“51* CHAPTER.FOUR

THE STATUS OF ETHICAL UNIVERSALS

This chapter places Habermas' work, especially as it connects with his renovation of Hegel's triad, in a philos­ ophical context, specifically in a context of ethical the­ ory. I intend to show in this chapter and the next that there exists a continuity between the questions considered by Hegel at Jena and two ethical questions that have re­ mained unsettled since then: namely, how ethical universals are formed and what it means to be a moral agent.

These questions are significant not only for the Kant-

Hegel debate that we shall examine in this chapter. On a more general level, the status of universals, ethical or otherwise, still proves problematic for social philosophers and social scientists. Finally, anyone concerned with the direction of moral education must eventually face these problems., since theories of moral development inevitably include assumptions about ethical universals and moral ac­ tion. In later chapters we will face these two questions on more general levels, but first we need to examine the ethical theory that grew out of Hegel's ■ early work-.

3^ 35

A convenient starting point for reconstructing the context in which Hegel developed his initial ethical sys­ tem is again provided by Charles Taylor, in his recent \ work, Hegel. There Taylor analyzes much of Hegel's work, hut especially his ethical theory, as an extended response to Kant's philosophical system. As one might expect, the young Hegel reacted to the Kantian .system that dominated

European philosophy in the late 18th and early 19th Cen­ turies. Indeed, Hegel's Glauben und Wissen of 1802-03 was an explicit critique of Kant, Fichte and Jacobi. But perhaps more significantly, Taylor demonstrates that even in his mature work Hegel was struggling with the problems and impasses he found within the Kantian ethical system.

But Hegel also responded to other philosophical and social problems that were in the air during his lifetime.

To begin to- do justice to the complexity of these influ­ ences and thus to the complexity of Hegel's responses, we must trace his dispute with Kant back to its broader ori­ gin in the Enlightenment. For it was the scientific and philosophical advances of that-era which demanded of ethi­ cal theorists, Kant and Hegel foremost among them, new answers to traditional ethical and social problems.

At the heart of these new demands was the demystify­ ing of nature by Enlightenment science. Nature was no longer seen as a great chain of final causes, but became instead an object to be manipulated by the hand and mind 36 of man. This empirical approach to the world promised great advances in human understanding and an attendant material prosperity. But the process of Objectification also seemed to threaten man's spiritual nature, in that science could conceive of men and their actions only as more or less complex combinations of atoms and physical forces operating among them. Prom this objective view­ point, human actions seemed, in the final analysis, devoid of meaning and value. The promised control of nature was already exacting a high price.

According to Taylor's analysis, Kant responded to this threat by grounding man's mental and spiritual attri­ butes on the a priori forms that characterize human con­ sciousness. In doing so, Kant believed he could protect the form, if not the content, of human actions and values against the objectification of Enlightenment science.

Let us take, for example, Kant's response to Enlight­ enment demands on the question of ethical universals. We can easily see why this problem moved to stage center with the rise of modern science and philosophy. For with the triumph of empiricism over its philosophical predecessors, it was no longer possible to reconcile scientific and phi­ losophical knowledge with religious belief or with its secular counterpart— myth. The conflict that had been a- voided since the 13 th Century could no longer be hidden by compromise or double-truth strategies. For in working from 37 an empirical foundation, both modern science and modern philosophy undercut the worldviews and value systems tradi-

tionally provided by myth or religion. Up until the En­ lightenment, an individual could rely on tradition or reve­

lation to provide either specific moral standards or at

least a general direction for ethical action. But with the

Enlightenment came the demand that all knowledge, even eth­

ical-understanding, find its basis in human reason and its ? empirical investigations.

We would do well to see this demand in its positive as

well as it negative aspect. For most thinkers saw these

Enlightenment demands not primarily as an attempt to de­

stroy ethical standards or the moral behavior that might

follow from them. To the contrary, this new foundation for

moral was seen as a positive evolution in man's ethical

nature, as Taylor points out in his discussion of Kants

When Kant said that he wanted to demolish claims to speculative knowledge about God to make room for faith, he was not just.offering a consolation prize. His principal interest here was in the moral freedom of the subject, and this in a radical sense, that man should draw his moral precepts out of his own will and not • from any external source, be this God himself. TJiUs in . the Critique of Practical Reason Kant makes the point that it is fortunate for us that our speculative reason ■cannot take us farther. If we could convincingly see God and the prospect of immortality, we would have al­ ways acted out of fear, and hope, and would never have . developed the inner motivation of duty, which is the crown of moral life.3

At the- same time that he place such grave responsibili­ ty within the human subject, Kant recognized the need to 38 move beyond individual desires and limitations, for these would necessarily differ from person to person. Thus he

separated duty from its objects, since they are all contin­

gent and individual, and established man's sense of duty in

the operation of human will itself, that is, in the formal

laws that govern the human will in an a priori fashion. As

Kant notes in The Metaphysical Foundations of Morals:

An action performed from duty does not have its moral worth in the purpose which is to be achieved through it. but in the maxim by which it is determined. Its moral value, therefore, does not depend on the realization of the object of the action but merely on the principle of volition by which the action is done without any regard to the objects of the faculty of desire. From the pre-. ceding discussion it is clear that the purposes we may have for our actions and their effects as ends and in­ centives of the will cannot give the actions any uncon­ ditional and moral worth....Since it must be determined by something, if it is done from duty it must be deter­ mined by the formal principle of volition as such since every material principle has been withdrawn from it.4.

To establish moral certainty for the individual without,

falling back on revelation or tradition, Kant found it nec­

essary, indeed desirable, to ignore the content of moral

decisions and to concentrate instead on formal principles

•of morality like universalization. Thus, if an ethical de­

cision was capable of being followed by all men, if it could

be recommended as a universal course of action, then its con­

tent was at best secondary. For Kant, the universal form of

the moral judgment provided the autonomous subject with 39 ethical certainty, just as the a priori forms of perception provided certainty in the realm of pure reason.

Philsophers since Kant's time have disputed his claim to formal moral certainty, but as Taylor points out, the direction of Kantian ethics answered Enlightenment demands for a new foundation of morality as well as for an autono­ mous moral subject. Perhaps more significantly for our ana­ lysis, Kant's scheme captured the philosophical field with its emphasis on radical freedom;

... the Kantian appeal to formal laws which would never­ theless give a determinate answer to the question of what we ought to do has always seemed a little like squaring ^he circle. But the exciting kernel of this moral phij jsophy, which has been immensely influential, is the radical notion of freedom. In being determined by a purely formal law, binding on me simply qua ration­ al will> I declare my independence, as it were, from all. natural considerations and motives and from the natural causality which rules.them. ...1 am free in a radical sense, self-determining not as a natural being, but as a pure, moral will.5

We need not look far to find the continuing influence, even dominance, of this idea since Kant's time. The rela­ tionship between autonomous moral subjects and ethical standards, in the form of Kantian maxims has been thoroughly ingrained in our view of morality. So ingrained, in fact, that we have difficulty recognizing any other set of rela­ tionships as constituting an ethical system. Our conception of conscience, guilt, and moral action all rely on what proves to be a Kantian view of the good will. Despite all objections to this scheme, and despite some obvious IK)

advantages of alternative ethical theories, we still find

persuasive Kant’s formalist explanation of morality, for we

still want to preserve that moral autonomy first demanded

in the Enlightenment era.

• But along with this exhilarating autonomy from natural

and cultural causality comes the price demanded by a formal­

ist system. For while Kant's scheme answered the intellec­

tual standards of his time, that morality coincide with

human reason, Kant could bring this about only by placing

the ethical agent in opposition to nature, to tradition, and

to individual inclinations. Taylor sums up these separa­

tions, or "diremptions," that generally characterized En­

lightenment thought and which Kant extended to a radical

conclusion in ethics:

Radical freedom seemed only possible at the cost of a diremption with nature, a division within myself between reason and sensibility more radical than anything the materialist, utilitarian Enlightenment had dreamed, and hence a division with external nature, from whose causal laws the free self must be radically independent, even while phenomenally his behaviour appeared to conform. The radically free subject was thrown back on himself, and it seemed on his individual self, in opposition to nature and external authority, and on to a decision in which others could have no share.

It was just this triple separation of reason from nature, sensibility and tradition that Hegel saw as the basic flaw in

Kant's ethical system. And since we seem to have inherited that triple separation by way of modern science and Kant's

continuing influence, Hegel's response to Kantian ethics should still be relevant for our understanding of this con­ tinuing dilemma. Indeed this is Habermas' reason for con­ tending that Hegel should still be considered a contemporary thinker, since he foresaw the role that philosophy must play for the modern consciousness:

...philosophy, in Hegel's design, had to reconstitute the unity which so far only the myth has been able to provide. This explains why Hegel, again and again, re­ turned to the example of the morality embodied in the Polis; for it is here within Greek polytheism that in Hegel's •opinion the individual could find an identity of self that was in harmony with the identity of the city- state. Stated in these terms, philosophy must create anew the same community with the horizon of a universal cosmic order, as was effected by the myth....This time, however, it must accomplish this task under the extreme conditions meanwhile posited by the modern ideas of. the freedom and of the complete individuality of the human subject. ' ’

Let us examine then, in greater detail, Hegel's critique of. Kantian ethics, beginning with what Hegel saw as problems of internal logic in Kant's method of grounding ethical know­ ledge in the supposedly a priori forms taken by ethical con­ sciousness.

First, Hegel saw certain difficulties in Kant's explana­ tion of how moral subjects and moral standards are established in the first place. When Kant ignored the question of how autonomous subjects develop that autonomy, Hegel saw him as presupposing as solved what has in fact been a continuing problem. For just as men confront nature and form themselves through language and labor in Hegel's scheme, so too they can only form themselves as moral subjects through interaction h z

with other subjects. For Hegel, this process of growing

autonomy must have its genesis in the mutual recognition of

the Other as both separate from and at the same time reflec­

tive of the Self. To conceive of interaction as involving

already-formed individuals, as seems to be the case in Kant's

ethical system, is to short circuit one of the fundamental

ways by which men come to self-consciousness. Thus, Kant

seemed to beg the question of how moral autonomy comes about

in the first place. As Habermas notes:

Because Hegel conceives self-consciousness in terms of the interactional structure of complementary action, namely, as the. result of a struggle for recognition, he saw through the concept of autonomous will that appears to constitute the essential value of Kant's moral phi­ losophy. He realizes that this concept is a peculiar • abstraction from the moral relationships of communicating individuals. By presupposing autonomy— and that means the will's property of being a law unto itself— in prac­ tical philosophy in the same way as he does the unassail­ able and simple identity of self-consciousness in theo-. retical philosophy, Kant expells moral action from the very domain of morality itself.°

It is important to see the reason for the direction

Hegel took here, for he was responding to demands that re-

■ main in conflict today. Hegel wanted to preserve the moral

autonomy of the subject just as Kant had done, but he wanted

to locate its foundation in man's activity rather than in a

transcendent realm of a priori forms. But preserving auto­

nomy while fulfilling the criteria of Enlightenment objec­

tivity proved to be no easy task. For if the investigator

attempts to reduce human activity to its "objective" ^ 3 physical equivalents, he then loses what is most significant about those actions. In addition, he loses sight of the de­ velopment through interaction that forms each autonomous actor. In ethical theory, for instance, we must allow for ascertain minimum of interaction needed by an individual before he can even comprehend what constitutes a moral ques­ tion or a moral action. Such interaction is necessarily prior to moral reasoning at the level described by Kant.

In addition, Hegel saw another impasse within the Kantian

system. That is, Kant's moral system seemed to presuppose

not only moral autonomy, but also presumed without explana­

tion a harmony'of interests among moral subjects. Hegel con­

tended that the harmony of interests implicit in the maxim of

universalization needed some sort of explanation. But once

again Kant seemed to sidestep this crucial problem of ethical

theory. He never faced the question of how we can assume

that men will eventually align their separate and often con­

flicting wills under a categorical imperative. To explain

this harmony without recourse to supernatural intervention is

a problem that Hegel was among the first to face.^

So we have in Kant's system two unresolved genetic

questions: first, how we can conceive of autonomous individu- •

als arising without an interactive context; second, how the

harmony implicit in the maxim of universalization can be es­

tablished without extranatural explanations. And to these,

Hegel added a third criticism of Kant, namely the unresolved Zj4 question of how moral action would be possible once duty and individual desire have been reconciled within a moral per­ son. As W. H..Walsh summarizes this criticism in Hegelian

Ethics: . Hegel argues that, on Kant's premises, perfecting of the moral will, would entail the disappearance of morality, since there would be nothing for the moral agent to . struggle against, and draws the conclusion that the Kantian morali.st cannot really want what he says he wants.

There are, of course, a number of arguments that can be put forth in defense of Kant's position. For example, in response to this last Hegelian criticism, we could say that

Kant continued to see certain decisions and actions as moral even as the actor's desires came into closer alignment with his duty. Kant contended that such alignment could never be complete in this world, even though that distance between duty and desire might grow less and less in a consistently moral person. For Kant, this was a realistic view of moral life in a less than perfect world; for Hegel, on the other hand, this was an instance of infinite regression in the 11 logic of Kant's ethics. Such logical problems provided the basis for each of his criticisms of Kant.

We might speculate for a moment on the correspondence between these three criticisms and the three moments of

Hegel's Jena triad. The question of autonomy seems to in­ volve the triad's interactive moment in particular, since autonomy depends primarily on interaction among moral > 5

Subjects. The harmony implicit in the maxim of universaliza­ tion seems best connected with the special role of language. at least insofar as language can move beyond the present limits of specific social/historical contexts. Finally, the tension between duty and desire brings us back to the func­ tion of labor in the Jena triad, that is, to the way in which labor gives permanence to individual desires. . This last point should remind us that the Jena triad not only explicates the primary ways by which men know the world.

Its three moments also mediate between individual actions and the universals that grow out of such actions. Any adequate account of the status of universals must preserve the tension that exists between the two poles— subject and object— of this interchange. Similarly, any explanation that ignores one or more moments, or that reduces them to a single pattern, will ultimately fail to conceptualize human action adequately.

At present, the diversity as well as the interactive nature

of these processes too often escape our recognition as we at­ tempt to explain human action. As a result, the Kantian di- remptions from nature, tradition and individual aspiration

continue.

It was just these separations that Hegel reacted against

in his critique o£ Kant. In the face of Kant's focus on

individual motives and intentions, Hegel sought to give

ethics a more comprehensive framework, one that could take

account of the social factors that influence moral decisions. k6

In the next chapter, we contend that the same objections could be generalized and directed against positivistic ap­ proaches in the social sciences, and, by extension, to posi­ tivistic approaches to educational questions. In addition,

the next chapter indicates that the direction taken by Hegel

to resolve these Kantian impasses often parallels attempts by contemporary social scientists to resolve their own methodological problems. This continuity of problem and response is important

here, especially when we turn to Habermas' treatment of the

question of ethical universals and moral action in Chapter

Six. For we find Habermas analyzing moral development theo­

ries not with the traditional philosophical terms of the

Kant-Hegel dispute, but rather with the terminology of con­

temporary theory of action. We now turn to the problem of

universalsas it- has manifested itself in that area of socio­

logical theory. *f-7

, FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER FOUR

■^Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1975)i especially Chapter One.

^Ibid., p. 55*

•^Ibid., p. 31- ^Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969)>P« 19*

•^Taylor, Hegel, p. 31.

6Ibid., p. 33- ^Jurgen Habermas,. "On Social Identity," Telos 19 (Spring, 197*0: P- 95* . Q Habermas, "Labor and Interaction," p. 150.

9Ibid., pp. 150-152. "^W. H. Walsh, Hegelian Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1969). P. 33- 11Ibid., pp. 33 -3^. CHAPTER FIVE

SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO INTERACTION

It now seems almost, inevitable that in the 19th Century

the social sciences would take the natural sciences as their methodological model and would pursue relationships that

could be investigated positivistically. For at the time,

scientific method seemed to guarantee straightforward prog- gress in accumulating knowledge about any natural phenomenon.

Scientific inverstigators, supposedly free from metaphysical

systems and traditional prejudices, would eventually bring

nature under rational control. By adopting the same method,

social scientists would no doubt acquire a similar under­

standing and control over social and cultural forces. But scientific method did not remain unproblematic for

long, for there proved to be more phenomena to be explained

than could fit within strictly positivistic analysis. By the

end of the 19th Century there began various attempts to dif­

ferentiate social science methodology from the methodologies

of the natural sciences. And while these differentiations

still have not amounted to a clean break between the two,

enough differences have developed so that we might detect a t a few long-range patterns.

^8 Generally, these' patterns reflect the need to sensitize

social science methodology to its special subject matter, namely human rather than physical phenomena. Stated nega­ tively, this differentiation process may be seen as a series of attempts to avoid the .reduction of human experiences to their physical correlates. This chapter will trace some of these attempts, focusing on the question of how one locates and investigates non-reductive universals within the social

sciences.

It is my contention that this process of differentia­

tion, especially as it seeks non-reductive universals, pro­ vides a modern parallel to Hegel's critique of Kantian ethics

and Enlightenment "objectification." For, as we saw in Chap­

ter Two, Kant and Hegel, each in his own way, tried to pre­

serve human autonomy against the objectifying tendencies of

enlightenment science. Similarly, during the past 100 years,

we find a number of social scientists concerned about pre­

serving a specifically human dimension in the face of strong

positivistic pressures. The object of their search is an

analytical' framework that does not reduce interactive ana

self-reflective subjects to passive objects existing only in

a field of physical action and reaction. As we shall see,

some of the foremost theorists of the social sciences have

contributed to this differentiating process. But at the same

time, we must note that the positivist influence still domi­

nates social science methodology, although in more subtle 50 ways that before. Despite the recent work of a number of ■

Social philosophers and theorists, a thorough restructuring

of these disciplines on a non-positivist basis is still in 2 its germinal.stage.

In any case, in this chapter we will follow some of the

philosophical impasses of Chapter Four into contemporary

social science, especially sociology. This should provide

us with a methodological context for Habermas' work in gene­

ral, and especially for his contributions to ethical theory,

a topic we take up in Chapter Six.

.It would be a monumental task to consider every facet

of the search for a more adequate social science methodology.

But within the limits, of this chapter, we can mark some of

the most significant developments in that search, with the

aid of Talcott Parsons' article on. "Social Interaction"-^ in

the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. For

there Parsons fucuses. on the methodological impasses that

the social sciences inherited from modern philosophy, with

Descartes' Discourse on Method providing Parsons with a his­

torical starting point for his analysis. Parsons traces the

responses that social philosophers and scientists have made

to the Cartesian position, beginning with the early reactions

of empiricists like Hobbes and Locke. After summarizing fur­

ther philosophical contributions from Kant, Hegel and Marx,

he then concentrates on the methodological expansions of 51

Freud, Durkheim, Weber and various pragmatists and existen­ tialists in this Century.

Parsons .sees these developments as reactions to two ma­ jor limitations within the Cartesian system that has domi­ nated modern Western thought, one limitation involving the ob.iect of the social sciences and the other involving our conception of the knowing sub.iect. In tracing Parsons' ana­ lysis of this' double limitation we should find not only a parallel for Hegel's critique of Kant but also a context for

Habermas' social theorizing, since Habermas takes as a point of departure for much of his work the sociological theory of action that culminated in the work of Talcott Parsons.

As Parsons describe them, the two expansions required by social science methodology involve a recognition that man is more than an introspecting thinker who maintains a simple subject-object relationship with both external objects and his own internal states. For as 17th Century philosophers like Hobbes and Locke were quick to point out, human passions and desires must be added to introspection if we are to hope for.a complete explanation of human motives. A neutral con­ templation does not adequately represent man's relationship to the world around him.

Additionally, on the side of the subject, social scien­ tists needed a view of perception that recognizes its active nature. Here Kant made a contribution that paralleled those

of Hobbesand Locke when he explored the elements that constitute and internally limit human knowledge. As Parsons sums up these Cartesian impasses and subsequent responses:

Of course we can now say, almost at the level of com­ mon sense, that Descartes dealt with a limiting case of social action. First, he excluded the 'inter-' in our formula of interaction by assuming that there was no 'action' on one side of the relation, i.e., that the ob­ ject only came to be known and that 'being known' was in- no way a stimulus for the object, to intervene in and pos­ sibly change the relation to the knower.• Second, he ex­ cluded analysis of the complex nature of the 'entity' which' knows, which is part of the basic relational system of the subject-object relation. We would hold that em­ pirical' cognition is an activity or 'function' of persons....Furthermore, the recognition of complexity in the units on both sides of the relationship obviously . entails complicating the conceptualization of the rela­ tional pattern between them. Here Descartes considered the relation merely one. of the flow of 'information' from. ■ object to subject, resulting in consequent 'understanding' ' or knowledge, with little specificity about how far and in what ways such understanding involved processes other than the•simple input of information.^

On the basis of these impasses, Parsons goes on to deve­ lop an outline of the contributions of various social theo­ rists who expanded the analytical reach of the social scien­ ces. In the 19th Century, we find Hegel, Marx and the Utili­ tarian philosophers exploring systematic relationships among the multiple factors that constitute society. In the 20th

Century, we have Freud's focus on the social nature of indi­ vidual development, Durkheim's emphasis on social facts and

their various symbolic representations, and Weber's analysis

of how the ideal and material spheres interpenetrate in human experience. Each of these three men saw the need to include

in his analysis the larger forces— be they unconscious,

ideological or economic— that impinge on individual development. 53 .

Add to this the crucial work of pragmatist George H. Mead, and the influence of phenomenologists.iike Husserl and

Heidigger and we arrive at the mid-century system of inter- 5 active analysis that is best summed up in Parsons' own work.

This Parsonian "functionalism" is the dominant social science framework available to contemporary social theorists, Habermas among them.

We might note that while Habermas departs from this interactive analysis in significant ways, he is generally sympathetic with the aims of an expanded framework for social analysis, especially as it restores the pattern of interaction to its legitimate place. So while much of Habermas' recent work can be read as a critique of Parsonian functionalism,

Habermas acknowledges his indebtedness to Parsons and the interactive tradition his work sums up. In fact, we might best return to Parsons' analytical presentation of functional­ ism to set the stage for Habermas' critique of Kohlberg.

•After his historical summary of theory of action, Par­ sons outlines the analytical framework of interactive analysis and describes a double contingency within interactions

The crucial reference points for analyzing interaction are two: (l) that each actor is both acting agent and ob­ ject of orientation both to himself and to the others; and (2 ) that, as acting agent, he orients to himself and to others, in all of the primary modes or aspects. The actor is knower and object of cognition, utilizer of instru­ mental means and himself a means,emotionally attached to others and an object of attachment, evaluator and object of evaluation, intepreter of symbols and himself a sym­ bol.6 5^

Thus.contemporary analysis of action must take into ac­ count multiple roles and expectations, shared normative or-. ders and incentives, as well as the interpenetration of va­ rious sub-systems in which each individual acts. There are two important emphases here, emphases that parallel the di­ rection taken by Hegel in his reaction to Kant and to En­ lightenment objectification. First, on the side of the object, social scientists investigate relationships that are neither arbitrary nor subjective even though they have their genesis in interaction among subjects. Such relationships, as they evolve and endure within a social system, provide just as firm a base, for empirical investigation as do the spatial and temporal events investigated by the physical sci­ ences. Instead of a physical basis, such relationships and. the symbolic systems by which human actors interpret them have a normative foundation which cannot be ignored.

Second, on the side of the subject, we are well beyond the subject^object relationships of traditional physical

science investigation. The multiple role expectations and

the. self-reflective nature of interaction demand an alternate view of the connection between.investigator and subject.

Significantly, Parsons finds a model for this complex rela­

tionship in the experience of shared language, an experience

that involves both norms and social context, when he notes: 55

The concept of a shared basis of normative order is basically the same as that of a common culture of a "symbolic system." The prototype of such an order is . language. A language involves a code. consisting of the generalized norms which define 'correct' speech or writ- ' ing, as the basis for using symbols to formulate and transmit messages. Although there is considerable minor deviation, the massive fact is that all speakers of a language 'observe' the norms of the code.--'conform' to them, if you will— on penalty of not being understood. Language, to be sure, is not a primary normative constituent of social systems in the sense true of the law in complex systems, but it is a primary normative .constituent of distinct cultural systems. However, the point I wish to make here is that all culture is a matter .of normative control, or the 'guidance' of action. This .is one sense in which the dyad Is clearly a limiting case of interaction. However isolated a dyad may be in other respects, it can never generate the ramified common cul­ ture which makes meaningful and stable interaction possi­ ble. A dyad always presupposes a culture shared in a wider system. Furthermore, such a culture is always the product of a 'historical' process long transcending the duration of a particular dyadic relationship.'

So here we have the basis for human action and for the interactive analyses that attempt to study the regularities or universals of such action. We find a normative base, sym­ bolic representation, and a characteristic relationship dif­ ferent from the subject-object relationship of the physical sciences. Whereas previous philosophical and social analyses took the dyadic relationship as the basis for all interaction, contemporary theory of action stresses the multiple roles and culturally-shared symbolic systems that organize its subject matter--self-reflective human actors in their social settings.

In retrospect, contemporary sociological analysis seems to have come a long way from its positivistic origin. In its attempts to analyze the patterns of human interaction it has 56 made major differentiations on the side of both its subject and its object. These developments have reduced the ten­ dency toward reductionism, have sought the genesis of social universals, and have stressed interaction and symbolic repre­ sentation. And will all of this Habermas is in basic agree­ ment, especially as it reinforces a recognition of the prac­ tical sphere.

But some would say, Habermas among them, that these dif­ ferentiations have not gone far enough, that the normative basis of social interaction still proves problematic for the social sciences. For while social scientists have sensitized their methods to a greater variety of social universals, and while they have recognized the legitimacy of normative uni­ versals- within their subject matter, for the most part, they have not yet admitted the normative basis of social science 8 investigation itself. As a result, questions of objectivity and value-free inquiry still prove troublesome within social sciences. A major reason for this failure to extend their search to a radical conclusion has to do with social scientists' fascination with method. That is, despite all their careful differentiations, most social scientists still seek the methodological certainty that seems to prevail in the natural sciences. Whether such certainty does in fact exist within the natural sciences remains for the most part unquestioned; what prevails in the social sciences is a faith in methodology 57 as the guarantee of certainty.

There are alternatives to this dominant faith in methodo­ logy as a sufficient reason for certainty. The clearest is provided by the interpretive discipline of hermeneutics, which over the past century has expanded far beyond its original application to literary texts, especially Biblical texts in need of exegesis. Yet even when extended beyond literature to larger cultural phenomena, hermeneutics has remained faith­ ful to its basic interpretive tenet: that a cultural artifact or phenomenon must be "read" first on its own terms and with­ in its own social/historical context. As a result, a her­ meneutic investigation begins with the self-understanding of a text or cultural phenomenon and seeks to clarify its mean­ ing through interpretation. Unlike a positivist approach, it does not seek to clear the ground completely and then.trans­ late the original meaning into a neutral language or struc­ ture. For to do so would be to lose what is significant about the phenomenon to be investigated. On this principle, her­ meneutics, action theory and Habermas are in complete agree­ ment . .

The most influential hermeneutical theorist of this Cen­ tury is Hans-Georg Gadamer. His classic Truth and Method sets forth the foundations of this extended interpretive approach and in so doing provides a fundamental criticism of positi­ vism. That critique is succinctly summarized in this passage from Alasdair MacIntyre's review of the English translation 58

(in 19.76) of Truth and Method:

Ever since Bacon and Descartes the dominant intel­ lectual tradition has connected truth and method. Let us only discover the appropriate method of enquiry and truth will lie plain before us.... But suppose that method does not yield truth; suppose that it is not^sophistication that we need but the right kind of naivete; suppose that what we need to reflect upon to move towards the truth is what we already (in some sense) know; suppose that if truth is hidden, it is not because it requires searching out by some device of method, but because it is so plainly before our eyes in our everyday activities and conversations that we cannot perceive it.... °

' But what is the alternative to a detached and value-free method, to a method that clearly separates subject and object?

Gadamer's answer echoes Parsons' description of the normative basis for interactive analysis:

At the very end of his Gadamer invites us reflect on cer­ tain types of conversation. When I am engrossed in a stimulating conversational exchange I do not pick my words with care, as I might under cross-examination, or recite already constructed sentences, like an actor. I speak spontaneously and in speaking formulate thoughts, often enough for the very first time. So that I learn what I think at the same moment that my hearer learns it too. And often enough my hearer discovers that his ques­ tions or comment or objection which evoked my new thoughts had a meaning which he had not recognized in the act of speaking. The conversation takes ort a life which transcends the previous intentions and experiences of the' speakers.... At the same time, no conversation is an isolated ex­ perience. Each of the participants brings with him an inherited mode of interpretation which leads him.to con­ strue both what others say and what he himself says in one way rather than another....Conversation is rather the medium within which purposes are developed, criticized, modified and abandoned. It is a form of activity which individuals sustain, but do not create; and it is a form of activity such that in it the whole weight of an his­ torical tradition is present, although usually unper­ ceived. 59

Here we have one conclusion to that long process of dif­ ferentiation described by Parsons. Here too we might find the goal of developments in various philosophical disci­ plines, notably phenomenology, some varieties of pragmatism, even ordinary language analysis. For each of these has con­ fronted the positivistic methodology and criteria of the natural sciences and has struggled with the impasses that positivism creates. In response, each has moved in the di­ rection described by MacIntyre, approaching but never com­ pletely attaining the following conclusions: l) neither the subject nor the object exists in isolation from a specific social/historical context; 2 ) no single method of analysis is universally applicable; 3 ) certainty comes about through interpretation rather than through radical skepticism or em­ pirical demonstration; and h) conversation rather than experi­ mentation may provide a more adequate prototype for the pro­ cess of knowing.

These hermeneutic principles provide one radical alter­ native to past methods in the social sciences, an alternative whose implications we have just begun to grasp. Charles Tay­ lor, for one, has drawn out some of these implications in his 11 1971 essay, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man." More recently, Richard Bernstein has traced these ideas into a number of fields in The Restructuring of Social and Political

Theory, devoting a long section to Habermas' contributions to this continuing renovation of the practical sphere. 60

We must note, however, that while much of Knowledge and

Human Interests traces the developments noted here, Habermas is not satisfied with just adding the practical sphere to the technical sphere. He wants to move beyond the self-under­ standing of social subjects to explicate a third interest within knowing, an interest that would emancipate individuals from their social/historical context. But in doing so, Haber­ mas runs once again into the problem of universals. For if he does not look to extranatural sources for such emancipating values, and if such values are beyond the present self-under­ standing- of individuals, then where are they to be found?

The explication of Habermas' answer to this last ques­ tion must wait until Chapter Seven. For the moment let us note that he locates the source of such universals— ethical or otherwise— in communicative action, that is, in the prac­ tical sphere. It is here that Habermas' work coincides with the developments we have just traced through action theory and hermeneutics.

But an important difference between Habermas' position and a hermeneutic position can be seen in the fact that

Habermas does not limit universals to the self-understanding

of individuals in specific social/historical contexts. As a result, he pays more attention to the obstacles that prevent dialogue or impede interaction. Additionally, his position

contrasts with formalistic ethics, which makes secondary any

such considerations of outside influences on moral judgment. .. 61

Here too he differs with action theory, which tends to focus on the factors that promote rather than obstruct the smooth functioning of a social system.^ All of these differences finally come down to Habermas' commitment to critique, to a social theory that can be both interpretive and critical. FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER FIVE

■'■Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971)« pp. ^5~51.

2For an extended discussion of these developments, see Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Poli- ■ tical Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).

•^■International .Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1968 ed., s.v. "Social Interaction," by Talcott Parsons.

^Ibid., p. 430.

-*Cf. Habermas' comment on the teleological^model shared by Weber and Parsons in "Hannah Arendt's Communications Con­ cept of Power," Social Research, vol. kk, no. 1 (Spring, 1977)* p. 5. Parsons, "Social Interaction," p. ^3 6 .

7Ibid., p. ^ 37 . O Richard J.Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, especially pp. 225 -236 .

^Alasdair MacIntyre, "Contexts of Interpretation," Boston University Journal, vol. 2k, no. 1 (1976)1 p. kZ,

10Ibid. 11 Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of. Man," Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971)* pp. 3-51* 12 Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, especially pp. 185-225.

■'■■^For a critical analysis of this tendency of function­ alism, see Raymond Boudon, "The Three Basic Paradigms of Macrosociology: Functionalism, Neo-Marxism and Interaction Analysis," Theory and Decision 6 (1975)* pp. 381-^06. CHAPTER SIX

HABERMAS' CRITIQUE OF KOHLBERG

A major theme of this study is that Hegel's critique of

Kantian ethics remains relevant for contemporary discussions of ethical theory, despite great changes of approach and terminology in that area. The previous chapters have set the stage for an analysis of Habermas' response to contemporary ethical formalism, at least as that formalism is represented in Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of cognitive-developmental ethics.. We might note at the outset that Habermas is a sym­ pathetic critic of Kohlberg, one who wishes to ground Kohl- • berg's scheme of moral development on a more adequate base than it has at.present. And as we shall see in this chapter,

Habermas attempts this reconstruction not with the classical terminology of Germas Idealism but rather with the terms and concepts of 20 th Century theory of action.

As a point of departure for our presentation of Habermas' reconstruction, we would do well to recall the specifics of

Hegel's second criticism of Kantian ethics. Hegel raised the question of how the interests of various individuals achieve the harmony implied in the maxim of universalization. Kant had struck upon this maxim as a formal criterion for moral

63...... 6k action, a criterion that made unnecessary a judgment about the content of ethical decisions. But Hegel saw this for­ malist criterion as too quick a solution; in proposing.the maxim of universalization, Kant seemed to sidestep a crucial aspect of the problem by implying a pre-existing harmony with which individuals could align their action.

Hegel saw an obvious dilemma here: if Kant was to remain true to his immanent critique of reason, he could not fall back on an external source— God, for instance— .to provide a pre-established harmony. But if the required harmony is not prior to individual moral decisions, then Kant is under some obligation to explain how such a harmony develops in history.

This means facing the question of what transpersonal process guides such development. In other words, How are ethical universals formed?

As it turns out, the positing of such a transpersonal process is not only philosophically difficult; it is a pro­ ject that evokes reluctance and sometimes scorn from modern philosophers, at .least if we try to assign rationality a significant role in the process. More often than not the

20 th Century solution to this difficulty has been to place such processes outside the realm of reason, relegating them to the affective realm, for example. Or such processes have sometimes been explained by an analogy with classical eco­ nomic theory, where an unseen hand regulates the conflicting self-interests of individuals. In either case, this amounts 65

j j j | to denying the existence of universals in this area, at'1 least of universals that are open to rational formation, criticism and reconstruction.

But it is this second critique of Kant and the rational reconstruction of universals that Habermas finds most press­ ing for modern ethical theory. For once we are no longer satisfied with the explanation that moral principles arise

"naturally," then somehow we must try to explain how men come to create such principles. In the past, that "natural" process had worked by extra-natural imposition or by un- • noticed social processes, that is, by appeals to divine com­ mands or longstanding traditions. But since the Enlighten-’ ment— for better or. worse— we have assumed the task of re- contructing such principles or universals rationally. So that prior to the question of how men come to align their actions with moral principles we must face the more funda- ■ mental question of what it means to be a moral agent in the first place. As it turns out, our modern conception of moral autonomy demands that we take Hegel's second critique of Kant seriously.

Habermas has taken up this problem in a 197^ essay 2 entitled "Moral Development and Ego Identity." In this es­ say he reviews the contributions of analytical ego psychology, congitive developmental psychology and sociological theory of action to the question of ego development. He then presents 66 an extended critique.and reconstruction of Lawrence Kohl- berg's theory of cognitive-developmental moral education.

Habermas' criticism takes two general directions: (l) By describing.the stages of moral development without adequately explaining how this development occurs, Kohlberg perpetuates

Kant's non-explanation of the genesis of moral principles.

(2 ) The stages of Kohlberg's scheme, expecially the higher

stages, are noticably formalistic; thus they share the limits

of Kantian ethics and are subject to Hegel's original criti­ que of Kant's system. As we shall see in Chapter Seven, this

second criticism leads to Habermas' attempt to move beyond the formalism inherent in such theories toward a critical

ethics, one that includes all three mediations of the Hegel­

ian triad.

We might briefly sketch here Kohlberg's cognitive- developmental approach to moral education. It consists of

three levels of moral awareness: the pre-conventional, the

conventional, and the post-conventional or principled level.

Kohlberg traces these distinctions back to John Dewey's cate­ gories in "What Psychology Can Do for the Teacher" (1902 )

and also aligns them with Jean Piaget's premoral, hetero-

nomous and autonomous stages.-^ On the basis of longitudinal

and cross-cultural studies begun in 1955» Kohlberg has re­

divided each stage into two sub-stages; the result is a

six-stage schema of the development of moral reasoning or

judgment. (See Chart I.) Stages of Moral Consciousness According to Lawrence Kohlberg

Obedience and punish­Egocentric deference to superior power or ment orientation prestige, or a trouble-avoiding set. I Objective responsibility. Preconventional level Instrumental Right action is that instrumentally satisfying the hedonism sclfs needs and occasionally those of others. Naive egalitarianism and orientation to exchange and reciprocity.

Good-boy Orientation to approval and to pleasing and orientation helping others. Conformity to stereotypical images of m ajority or natural role behavior, and judgm ent by intentions. II Conventional Law and order Orientation toward authority, fixed rules, and level orientation the maintenance o f the social order. Right behavior consists o f doing one’s duty, showing respect for authority, and m aintaining the given social order for its own sake.

Contractual Right action is defined in terms of individual legalistic rights and of standards which have been initially orientation examined and agreed upon by the whole society. Concern with establishing and maintaining indi­ vidual rights, equality, and liberty. Distinctions arc made between values having universal, prescriptive applicability and values specific to a III given society. Postconventional level Universal-ethical- Right is defined by the decision of conscience in principle accord with self-chosen ethical principles orientation appealing to logical comprehensiveness, univer­ sality. and consistency. These principles are abstract; they are not concrete moral rules. These arc universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and.equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings and individual persons.

.From Dick Howard, "Moral Development of Ego Identity," Telos 27 s p. 178.

Chart I Kohlberg quickly admits that moral judgment is not the only significant factor involved in moral behavior, but he contends that it is the single most influential factor yet discovered. For whereas other factors in moral behavior re­ main largely "situational".and reversible, moral judgment is k long-range and irreversible. Thus even when we are faced with an ethical dilemma, our judgment remains at the highest achieved level of moral reasoning, even though our actual be­ havior may retrogress to an earlier moral stage.

As Kohlberg formulates them, the stages of moral reason­ ing are distinguished by the quality or form of the judgment rather than by its content, and by moral competence rather than by actual performance. In addition, he cites these gen­ eral characteristics of moral development stages:

1 . Stages imply distinct or qualitative differences in structure (modes of thinking) which still serve the same basic function (e.g., intelligence) at various points in development. 2 . These different structures form an invariant sequence, order or succession in individual development. While cultural factors may speed up, slow down, or stop deve­ lopment, they do not change its sequence. 3 . Each of these different and sequential modes of thought forms a 'structured whole.' A given stage- response on a task does not just represent a specific, response determined by knowledge and familiarity with that task or tasks similar to it; rather, it repre­ sents an underlying thought-organization.... Stages are hierarchical integrations....Accordingly, higher stages displace (or, rather, reintegrate.) the structures found at lower stages.-> 69

As we can quickly see from this description, Kohlberg is intent on explaining the cognitive aspects of moral deve­ lopment, leaving to other theorists the exploration of affec­ tive and motivational factors. Moral education curricula based on Kohlberg's theory reflect this emphasis on structured rea­ soning, in that they employ a series of moral dilemmas that stretch the limits of a person's achieved level of moral in­ sight. When the individual's judgment proves inadequate in the face of these dilemmas, he or she may move toward a more comprehensive stage, at least.in terms of cognition of the problem.

Kohlberg contends that there are three minimal condi­ tions for moral education based on the cognitive-development approach:

1. Exposure to the next higher stage of reasoning. 2. Exposure to situations posing problems and contra­ dictions for the child's current moral structure, leading to dissatisfaction with his current level. 3 - An atmosphere of interchange and dialogue combining the first two conditions in which conflicting moral views are compared in an open manner.°

These three conditions grow out of three basic concepts that underlie Kohlberg's theory: structured organization, develop- 7 mental sequence, and interactionism. As we have just seen in Kohlberg's list of general characteristics, "structural organization" means that any given stage of moral reasoning has an internal consistency, with a scope and strategy that are qualitatively different 70 for each stage. These qualitatively different structures form a developmental sequence, in that later stages subsume the operations of the earlier stages. Thus, later stages are "higher" insofar as they approach moral problems more adequately or comprehensively, by taking more factors into account, for example. This second concept distinguishes

Kohlberg's scheme from most value clarification approaches, which instead maintain a complete value neutrality about both the form and content of moral reasoning. Kohlberg's theory tries to move beyond such complete ethical relativity by finding a progression in the structure if not in the con­ tent of ethical judgments.

Finally, Kohlberg's theory demands interaction among students and teacher, or more generally, among people at different stages of development. This condition arises be­ cause stages of moral reasoning are not innate in each per­ son, needing only time or reflection to make them manifest.

They require actual interchange with other moral subjects and with the norms that grow out of such interchange. Here we see the direct influence of George Mead and his explana­ tion of the social origin of the individual. This also connects Kohlberg's theory with a central tenet of the Pro- gressivism of John Dewey and others, namely that education and activity are interdependent. Finally, interaetionism

seems to relieve Kohlberg's theory of the charge of moral

indoctrination, in that students are expected to discover 71 through their interaction the more adequate stages of rea­ soning rather than receive them in a passive manner. Here too we can connect Kohlberg's strategy with Dewey's answer to the charge that any consideration of values in the class­ room inevitably involves indoctrination. For both Kohlberg and Dewey, the active role of the student is intended to undercut this charge, although the success of this defense 8 against indoctrination has been periodically questioned.

So Kohlberg's scheme describes the irreversible pro­ gression from early moral decisions based on fear of punish­ ment, through reasoning based on voluntary conformity to personal expectations, to a mature social contract or prin­ cipled orientation. We might note that Kohlberg claims no inevitable progression for an individual; a person's develop­ ment can stop at one stage or another. In fact, Kohlberg estimates that most people never attain a stage of moral judgment much beyond the conventional level, that is Stages

3 and And perhaps 10-20% reach the post-conventional level of Stage

While Kohlberg's theory has attained a certain popular­ ity and has been adapted in various moral education curricula, it has not escaped criticism. In an article entitled "Why

Doesn't Lawrence Kohlberg Do His Homework?" R. S. Peters sums up these criticisms in four categoriesj (l) Kohlberg seems to view a Kantian morality as the only possibility, ignoring alternative like utilitarianism, for instance; 72

(2 ) Kohlberg fails to follow out the educational conse­ quences of his estimate that most people remain at Stages

3 or (3 )' his scheme is weak in its treatment of the affec­ tive side of morality, ignoring the role of guilt, for one thing;...and (k) Kohlberg recognizes the importance of ego strength and will in morality, but offers no account of 10 how such strength might be encouraged.

One might also miss in Kohlberg's system any consistent basis by which to explain how a moral subject progresses from one qualitatively different stage to another. Kohl­ berg pays little attention to this question after positing his six stages and their hierarchical relationship, appa­ rently seeing little need to reconstruct this movement. But certain significant questions remain. For instance, as R. S.

Peters continues, does learning what is means to follow a rule prepare one in any way to follow one's own rules?

Such a transition is, after all, implicit in a move from the 11 earlier stages to the post-conventional level. More gene­ rally, we might ask how one moves from the external emphasis of Stages 1 through ^ to the autonomous emphasis of Stages 5 and 6. Finally, we might ask what motivates a person to adopt a "higher" level of moral reasoning. Is there, for example, something more at work here than a desire for logi­ cal consistency or comprehensiveness?

Perhaps Kohlberg avoids such questions with good reasion, since they would immediately involve him in a number of . 73 perennial ethicai controversies. Thus the question of how one internalizes a rule quickly resurrects the long-standing tension between formalist and utilitarian ethics. Similarly,

the question of motive pushes beyond Kohlberg's cognitive

emphasis to affective and motivational factors more often

Considered with utilitarian ethical theories. So Kohlberg

tries to bridge these gaps between external and internal on

a formal or structural basis, but that strategy creates its

own set of impasses. Along with the unsolved problem of how

one. moves from lower to higher stages, the question of the

genesis of such stages remains unexamined.

As a starting point for his critique, Habermas asks a

question of his own, this time a methodological ones Are

the stages of development sufficiently distinct to substan­

tiate Kohlberg's claim to a developmental sequence? Habermas

contends that Kohlberg's basis is inadequate; he then proceeds

to reconstruct the six stages from a different angle., one

based in a general theory of action. In the process, Haber­

mas uses many of the terms and concepts found in Parsons'

IESS article, and tries to align these relationships with con­

cepts from psychological theories of ego development. And

this seems to be an appropriate juxtaposition, since Par-

sonian theory of action attempts to fill just those gaps

which Kohlberg inherits from modern philosophy generally and

from Kantian ethics in particular. 7^

What results-is a reconstruction, of the six stages, based on the communicative interaction involved at each stage. Specifically, Habermas tries to substantiate Kohl­ berg's theory within the practical sphere, that is

...by linking consciousness with general qualifications of role action. For this, the following three steps . will be usefuls I will first of all introduce a struc­ ture of possible communicative action in the succession in which the child grows into this sector of the sym­ bolic universe . I will then coordinate this basic structure with the cognitive ability (or competence) which the child must acquire to be active in the current level of his social environment, i.e., in order to be able to take part in incomplete or, complete interaction, .or also, finally, in communications which require a transition from communicative action to discourse. The series of these general qualifactions should be concep- tualizable as a logic of development. Finally, the stages of moral development ought to be derivable from this analysis.I2

Thus Habermas examines the stages of a person's competence as a moral actor or agent in a social environment, tracing the child's introduction into a symbolic universe of language and the child's developing ability to interact with other agents. By including the increasingly symbolic or reflexive nature of this process, Habermas adopts a principle agreed upon by both psychology and sociology:

Identity is produced by socialization, i.e., by that through which the developing person integrates himself for the first time in a definite social system through the acquisition of symbolic publics. The identity is secured and unfolded later on through individualization, i.e., through a growing independence of social systems.13 75

Habermas' reconstruction begins, then, with the factors that produce moral identity. Rather than presuppose an already-formed moral agent, Habermas starts with "the sym­ bolic components of communicative action which.must be pre- -i JLl supposed for the perception of moral conflicts." . That as, for a child to perceive even the most elementary moral con­ flicts requries that he recognize s

■ ■1 . actors who in fact interact as moral agents 5 2 . behavior expectations and corresponding intentional actions, as well as roles and norms that govern ac­ tion; 1 3 . situational elements like the consequences of actions and the conditions for applying norms; orientations to action, insofar as they are effective as motives for action.

The terminology used here reflects an expanded theory of action, one that tries to conceptualize the symbolic and interactive aspects of social phenomena. This approach con­ tinues Kohlberg's commitment to an interactionist view; in fact,.Habermas would claim that his reconstruction moves

Kohlberg's theory from its original monologic base to. an interactive or "dialogic" foundation. In so doing, Habermas moves behind the questions of how or why an individual a- dopts a moral principle to the more basic question of what it means to be a moral subject in the first place.

In the process, Habermas is extending Hegel's critique of Kantian ethics to this contemporary version of formalist ethics. But he does this with the aid of terms and concepts 7 6 developed by Mead, Parsons and others during the 20th Cen­ tury. In Chart II we see how Habermas uses these function­ alist differentiations in his reconstruction. The progres­ sion traced there— from concrete actions through symbolic interpretation to the analysis of hypothetical validity claims— has its equivalent in this description:

For the preparatory school child, who still finds him­ self cognitively at the stage of pre-operative thought, the sector of his symbolic universe relevant to action consists primarily in particular concrete behavior ex­ pectations and actiorsas well as in the consequences of action which can be understood as gratifications or as sanctions. As soon as the cnild has learned to play social roles, i.e., to participate as a competent member in interaction, his symbolic universe consists no longer only in actionswhich express particular intentions (e.g., wishes or the fulfillment of wishes). Action can now be understood as the fulfillment of temporally generalized behavior expectations (or as violations of these). When the youth has finally learned to question the validity of social roles and norms for actions, he once more broadens the sector of the symbolic universe; principles are now introduced in terms of which conflicting norms can be judged. This analysis of hypothetical validity claims demands the temporary suspension of the constraints of action, or, to put it in another.way, the passage into a realm of discourse in which practical questions are clarified through discussion. 16

• The increasingly-reflexive process described here con­ cludes with Habermas' concept of "discourse," an idea that has become central to his recent work. By "discourse" Haber­ mas means the process of analyzing validity claims, that is, of judging the adequacy of an explanation or justification by means of the objectivity found in the hypothetical use of language. For example, as a child matures, language 77

.Role Competence and Stages of Moral Consciousness

Age Requisite Stages of Idea of the •Philosophical Age level Level ofCommunication Reciprocit) moral con* Good Life Range Recon­ level sciousness struction maximum pleasure/ incomplete 1 minimum un­ reciprocity pleasantness actions and generalized through natural and 1 their consc- desire/ obedience social sequences aversion Ita complete ditto through environment naive 2 reciprocity exchange hedonism culturally concrete mor­ groups of pri­ Roles interpreted 3 ality of pri­ mary refer­ needs incomplete mary groups ence persons II reciprocity Norm (concrete concrete mor­ membership thought ac­ systems duties) 4 ality of secon­ in political cording to dary groups community ordered rules

universalized desire/ civil liberties, rational 5 allascitizens aversion public welfare natural law (uses) all humans universalizedcomplete formalistic 111 Principles 6 moral freedom as private duties reciprocity ethic III persons universalized moral and alias members universal lin­ interpretation 7 political ol a fictitious guistic ethic ofneed freedom world society

From Dick Howard, ''Moral Development and Ego Identity: A Clarification," Telos 2 7 : p. 1 8 0.

Chart II 78 provides a means first to separate particular actions from the roles.and norms that govern action and then to distinr guish. those roles and norms from principles that can be used to judge the adequacy of the norms themselves.. At this final stage of discussion, "speech acquires the status of an independent medium over against the societal reality of established values and norms.In other words, discourse allows one to move beyond the practical sphere toward criti­ cal or emancipatory reflection. These features of Habermas' work will be developed fur­ ther in the next chapter. For the moment let us note that they give Habermas' scheme an underlying basis for movement between stages and also help account for the genesis of stages of moral reasoning by locating it firmly within the practical sphere.. So even in terms' of internal consistency, Habermas' approach seems to have an advantage over Kohlberg's.

One place this internal advantage can be seen is in an anomaly that developed within Kohlberg's research, namely in the discovery of significant regressions to lower stages of moral reasoning. This apparent contradiction to Kohlberg's claim that stages of moral reasoning are irreversible was first noticed among college students in their sophomore year.

One study indicated that attaining a Stage k level during high school, about 20% of a sample of sophomores reverted to a hedonistic reasoning process characteristic of Stage 2 .

Subsequent longitudinal studies revealed that by age 25 these 79 retrogressors ha.d returned at least to their highest a- .

chieved stage, but for a number of years this study proved 18 to be a troublesome exception to Kohlberg's theory.

At first Kohlberg was led to posit a paradoxical combi­ nation of structural and functional features:

...the apparent resurgence of Stage 2 reasoning in col­ lege sophomores had been interpreted as a structural retrogression, i.e., a return to a lower structural stage, but a functional advance. It was a functional advance in flowing from a question of previous commit­ ments and standards necessary before these standards could be stabilized as 'one's own identity.

A few years later, after more analysis, Kohlberg labeled

such retrogression as Stage a. new stage marked by ethi­

cal relativism and individualism rather than by simple

hedonism. Thus while both Stage 2 and Stage subjects

will say that the morality of an action is relative to in­

dividual needs or wishes:

The thinking of transitional relativists in our sample could best be characterized as Stage bg, i.e., as a way of thinking that equated morality with Stage *J- thought and then Questioned the validity of morality in Stage ^ terms. 20

What we find in this revision of Kohlberg's stages is

the distinction between concrete moral reasoning and hypo­

thetical disoourse that is basic to Habermas' reconstruc­

tion. Habermas' scheme needs no epicycle between Stage

and Stage 5» because his approach provides a consistent 80 basis for explaining what appears to be retrogression. That is, the retrogressive sophomores were moving from norm- guided reasoning to a more reflexive stage where discourse— the hypothetical questioning of a norm's validity--could begin. Herein lies the greater internal consistency of

Habermas' approach, in this case, provided by the distinc­ tion between complete and incomplete reciprocity we find in the third column of Chart II.

It follows from Habermas' reconstruction that to be a moral subject consists in taking part in this process of form­ ing one's moral sense through discourse or rational recon­ struction. This process is based in language and its'hypo­ thetical function. It shares the risks and unexpected turns that Macintyre refers to in his characterization of the her­ meneutic approach. From this point of view, moral insight involves much more than aligning one's actions with a hier­ archy of principles that somehow exist outside the formative processes of interaction.

Certainly Kohlberg would not restrict moral reasoning . to such a.simple process of alignment; with Kant he would have to admit to the existence of phenomenal as well as noumenal factors in moral decisions. But one important bene­ fit of the interactive basis of Habermas' scheme is that he can pay greater attention to these phenomenal factors than can Kohlberg. Habermas can move beyond purely formalist explanations of moral action to consider the obstacles that .81 hinder or complicate the rational formation of such deci­ sions, that prevent, for example, the transition from one

stage of moral reasoning to the next. Kohlberg's formalism makes- any such consideration of "outside" influences at best .

secondary and gives his theory a certain abstractness or one­

sidedness. The difficulty of maintaining the balance of

Hegel's Jena triad is only increased by the formalist basis

of Kohlberg's theory. But it is just these outside influences that Habermas

hopes to account for. Whether they be institutional, poli­

tical or ideological, such obstacles are seen by Habermas as

"distortions" of the formative processes described in this

chapter. As we shall see, this concept of "distortion" pro­

vides Habermas with a way to reconnect the language-based

process of discourse with the other two moments of Hegel's

triad, that is, with labor and interaction. By reestablish­

ing this balance among the ways we know the world, Habermas

hopes to achieve an analysis of what we might call "situated

freedom," that is, a way of conceiving our traditional values

of freedom and autonomy within the material and social condi- 21 tions that both ground and limit such values. 82

FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER SIX

1 .. Jurgen Habermas, "Labor and Interaction," p. 150. 2 Jurgen Habermas, "Moral Development and Ego Identity," Telos 2^i pp. M - 5 5. See also Dick Howard, "Moral Develop­ ment and Ego Identity: A Clarification," Telos 27s pp. 176- 182. 3 ^Lawrence Kohlberg, "The Cognitive-Developmental Ap­ proach to Moral Education," Phi Delta Kantian. vol. 56, no. 10 (June 1975)! P- 6 7 0.

^Ibid., p. 6 7 2.

' ^Kohlberg, "Continuities in Childhood and Adult Moral Development Revisited," in Life-Snan Developmental Psycho­ logy! Personalitv•and Socialization, ed. Paul B. Baltes and K. Warner Schaie (New York: Academic Press, 1973)» PP* 181- 182.

. ^Kohlberg, "Cognitive-Developmental Approach," p. 675• 7 . James Rest, "Developmental Psychology as a Guide to Value Education: A Review of 'Kohlbergian' Programs," Review of Educational Research, vol 4*4-, no. 2 (197^)* P* 24l. Q See, for example, the controversy over indoctrination sustained by Progressive educators for four years in the pages of The Social Frontier, beginning with the October, 193 ^ issue. ■*- '^Kohlberg, "Cognitive-Developmental Approach," p. 671. 1 n R. S. Peters, "Why Doesn't Lawrence Kohlberg Do His Homework?" Phi Delta Kappan. vol. 5 6, no. 10 (June 1975)* p. 678.

n ibid.

1 2 ‘ Habermas, "Moral Development," p. *4-7 • 13 Ibid., p. 45.

■^Ibid.; pp. ^7-^8. 83

^ I b i d . , p. ^J-8.

l6Ibid. 17 'Habermas, "Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmaticsr A Working Pacer. "'Theory and Society 3 (1976)* p« 163*

■^Kohlberg, "Continuities," p. 190.

19Ibid.

20 Ibid., p. 192 . 21 On the concept of distortion, see Habermas, "On Sys­ tematically Distorted Communication," Inquiry vol. 13> no. 3 (1970): pp. 205-218. See also, Albrecht Wellmer, "Com­ munications and Emancipations Reflections on the Linguistic Turn in Critical Theory," in On Critical Theory, ed. John O'Neill (New Yorks Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 231 -2 6 3 . CHAPTER SEVEN

SITUATED FREEDOM AND MORAL EDUCATION

In Chapter Four we described. Kant's formalistic defense of moral autonomy against the objectifying trend of Enlight-. enment science. This defense resulted in a triple separa­ tion of man from his world, with man as moral subject placed in opposition to nature, to social traditions, and to indi­ vidual feelings. • In Kant's system,, as in all formalistic ethics, personal interests and the promptings of nature and tradition were ruled irrelevant to moral judgments and to moral actiqn. If anything, moral autonomy demands that one overcome these influences so that choice'might be tatally . free. In that completely undetermined freedom we find the . ultimate formal test of moral judgment and action.

Of course, we gain a valuable insight from this concep­ tion of autonomy, one that helps to account for the con­ tinued appeal of the formalistic tradition. For there can be no real moral action if such autonomy is absent; it seems to be a logical condition for acting as a moral sub­ ject. 8^ 85

At the same time, to assume a built-in opposition, be­ tween man and his natural conditions has too often placed crippling limits on ethical theory. The price demanded by

Kant's approach.and by formalist ethical systems generally is too high. For when we consider moral questions or criti­ cally examine values within such systems, we find little room to measure the effect of significant albeit non-formal factors. Any expansion like the one described in Chapter

•Five meets continued resistance within formalist systems.

So while Habermas wishes to preserve the increasing auto­ nomy of Kohlberg's moral stages, he also sees the pressing need to account for the influence of "more-than-formal" factors. This chapter focuses on his attempt to delineate the situated nature of freedom, primarily by trying to com­ bine the autonomy essential to formalistic ethics with the substantive factors usually associated with utilitarian or naturalistic ethics.

In "Labor and Interaction," Habermas lists some of the crucial factors, that formalists overlook. He notes that when we make moral judgments on formalistic grounds,

...we must first abstract from the concrete consequences and ramifications of action guided by moral intentions; furthermore we must abstract from the specific inclina­ tions and interests, from the 'welfare' by which the moral action is motivated and which it can serve objec­ tively; and finally we must abstract from the content of duty, which is only determined within a specific situation. 1 Given these three abstraction, formalist pronouncements

often seem quite empty and isolated from .the actual condi­

tions’ that surround moral decisions. So Habermas seeks an

approach that would take the full range of significant fac­

tors into account while at the same time preserving Kant's

goal of individual autonomy. Such an approach would move

us closer to an adequate conception of the situated nature

of moral autonomy.

Another way to. describe this methodological goal is

in terms of Oilman's theory of internal relations. His

analysis would suggest that our concepts of freedom, auto­

nomy and other basic values are inadequate insofar as they

are seen only in their theoretical aspects, as they tend to

be in formalistic explanations. For then they remain aloof

from practice and defeat their primary objective of guiding

such practice. Instead such concepts must be tied to an

internally-related analysis like the one Habermas has been

working toward. Such an approach would move beyond the

theoretical sphere to conceive of freedom and autonomy as

related to factors within the practical sphere, the sphere

from which such values grow in the first place.

An internally-related ethical theory would take into

account the material conditions and social relations that

surround the decision-maker', as well as the ethical princi-

■ pies to which he has access. In terms of Parsons' analysis

it would differentiate both on the side of the object and 87 on the side of the subject. Richard Bernstein describes

Habermas' view of this relation between material conditions and language-based "symbolic interaction" in this manner:

While critical of positivists and vulgar Marxists who understand social life exclusively in terms _pf concepts shaped by a technical interest, he [Habermas} is equally . critical of the idealist tendency to bracket symbolic interaction and isolate it from work and labor. The specific historical forms of work and labor exert a - powerful causal influence on the nature and quality of symbolic interaction....Consequently, while Habermas is deeply suspicious of the tendency to think that there are historical material conditions that automatically bring about the 'realm of freedom,' he is sufficiently Marxist to maintain that free symbolic interaction or unconstrained communication cannot concretely exist unless nonalienating and nonexploitative material con­ ditions exist. 2

Translating this tension into ethical terms, we might say that Habermas wants to admit that an ethical decision

is influenced by non-formal factors without lapsing into a thorough determinism. Just as an adequate theory of ac­ tion would recognize the significance of the differentia­ tions’ we noted in Chapter Five, so too an adequate ethical

theory would take into account the influential roles of

individual interests and inclinations, of prevailing,notions

of social welfare, of surrounding material and social rela­

tions. In sum, Habermas is seeking a way to negotiate

autonomy and heteronomy, a way to connect Kant's noumenal

•and phenomenal selves. Thus, to take an example from econo­

mics, he would like to account for a consumer's free deci­

sions within a market economy as well as for the social, 88 economic and advertising pressures that bear on such deci­ sions. And this connection is difficult, since, for one thing, individuals are usually less than completely aware of these various pressures.

Before, we turn to Habermas' strategy for making this connection, we might note, for the sake of contrast, two alternative ways of handling this apparent contradiction between freedom and necessity. One way to negotiate the tension between autonomy and heteronomy is to leave the opposing sides unconnected. One might follow Kant's lead and say that reason can recognize both aspects of human ex­ perience, but must stop short of explaining their relation­ ship. Given the limits of reason, the best that we can do is to delineate the formal characteristics of autonomy.

This strategy allows one to maintain that there are auto­ nomous decisions in the economic marketplace, for instance.,

even though such decisions may also be adequately explained

in terms of social, economic and advertising pressures.

• Alternatively, one might adopt a positivistic explana­

tion of human behavior, and let the opposition stand un­

explained until the social sciences make possible a final

reduction of human action to its physical components or its

economic motives. In. this case, the autonomy side of the

paradox is no longer significant to warrant explanation.

But both of these strategies have a detrimental effect on autonomy, the first, by its inability to consider the 89

conditions that do in fact surround individual decisions, the second, by its tendency to reduce autonomy to a pre- scientific illusion. There is, however, a stronger criteri­ on for theories.of human action, one that demands that we account for both autonomy and heteronomy, and attempt to explain their inter-relations. This is the criterion de­ scribed by Robert Paul Wolff at the conclusion of his com­ mentary on Kant's ethical system:

...an adequate foundation for moral theory requires some coherent, way of understanding men's, action both as caus­ ally determined, predictable, natural events and as rationally initiated, policy-directed actions. None of the familiar dodges, relaxations of the conflict, or reinterpretations designed to dissolve the problem will do....If any sense is to be made of responsibility and action, then one and the same bit of behavior which can . be explained physiologically, predicted statistically, and brought within the scope of a scientific theory must also.be capable of being consistently understood as ^ issuing from the autonomous action of practical reason.

In much of his work, Habermas seems to be applying this strict criterion, since neither the idealist response nor the positivist reduction seems adequate. Thus, in ethics,

Habermas wants to overcome the abstractness of a theory like

Kohlberg's and restore a practical content to the formula­ tion of values. He wants to consider individual interests without reducing ethics to a utilitarian calculation! at the same time, he wants to preserve individual autonomy without the abstractness of ethical formalism. 90

This last goal provides one of the clearest connections between Habermas' work and the historical materialism tradi­ tion. But, as Bernstein and others have noted, the standard

Marxist conception of what guides the development of values, namely, that progress occurs at the juncture of labor and proletarian consciousness, is no longer persuasive for

Habermas. He and others would hold that -vents of the past hundred years have undercut the revolutionary potential of the working class. At the same time, Habermas sees as even more inadequate an idealistic answer to this question, that is, that Absolute Spirit guides history to some inevitable and rational conclusion. Furthermore, he contends that i despite all their claims to tough-mindedness, modern posi- tivistic sciences continue that idealistic abstraction through their faith in inevitable progress according to strictly technical criteria.

Given the inadequacy of these alternative ap­ proaches , we can now rephrase a central question of this study: Without certain faith in either proletarian con­ sciousness, Absolute Spirit or technical progress, where can we find the basis for values, especially those that move us beyond conventional morality? In Habermas' terms, this be­ comes a question of what guides our rational reconstruction of the values that develop within the practical or interac­ tive sphere. 91

Habermas answers this question by. arguing that we are provided With a guide for the rational reconstruction of ethical universals within the pragmatics of language. By

"pragmatics" he means to include

...the general structures which appear in every possible speech situation, which are themselves produced through the performance of specific types of linguistic expres­ sions, and which serve to situate pragmatically the ex­ pressions generated by the linguistically competent speaker

To connect theory and practice, form with content, Habermas proposes that values are both presupposed and anticipated by the relationships that hold between speakers. Thus such relationships provide us with a value-guide that is both rational and transpersonal.

Specifically, Habermas sees language as assuming an

equality among speakers, a freedom from restraint, and an

interest in reaching consensus. In his inaugural address,

he stated this idea thus: "Our very first sentence ex­

presses unequivocally the intention of universal and uncon­

strained consensus."^ In a later elaboration of. this theme,

Habermas drew this parallel: As linguistically-competent ' '

speakers we understand at least tacitly the condition of

intelligible speech; so too, as communicatively-competent

subjects we. tacitly understand the conditions of uncon­

strained consensus. As subjects we need not have these

intentions constantly in mind, just as we need not have'

grammatical norms in mind as we speak. In fact, our use of . 92

sp,eech may at times intend just the opposite of these

deeper pragmatic intentions? we may use language to avoid

. consensus, to impose a compliance.short of real consensus,,

or to perpetuate an inequality among speakers. But these

uses of language are individual and instrumental. Beneath

such a purely instrumental interest, Habermas posits an

.intersub jective and emancipatory interest for language, one

that seems very close to MacIntyre's hermeneutic view, of

conversation.

In this "ideal speech situation," speakers move

beyond individual or "strategic" interests toward an inter-

subjective interest in undistorted communication. As Haber-'

mas noted in a recent essays

In short, the communicatively produced power of com­ mon convictions originates in the fact that those in­ volved are oriented to reaching agreement and not primar­ ily to their respective individual successes. It is based on the fact that they do not use language "per- locutionarily,' but 'illocutionarily,' that is, for the, noncoercive establishment of intersubjective relations.

In a sense we have no need for ethical principles beyond

those implicit in the pragmatics of language, for the

rational justification of norms

... is already contained in the structure of intersub­ jectivity and makes specially introduced maxims of universalization superfluous. In taking up a practical discourse, we unavoidably suppose an ideal speech situa­ tion that, on the strength of its formal properties, allows consensus only through generalizable interests. A cognitivist linguistic ethics has no need of principles. It is based only on fundamental norms of rational speech that we must always presuppose if we discourse at all.7 93

But the values implicit in this ideal speech situation do not exist in isolation from social, economic and politi­ cal realities t the patterns of labor and interaction must be taken into account and recognized as essential ingredi- ants in the formation of values. As Habermas puts it, fac­ tors from' the spheres of labor and interaction can "distort" the unconstrained search for consensus among equals. Speci­ fically, from the technical realm of labor, material rela­ tions, economic structures and ways of distributing know­ ledge cam inhibit any movement toward consensus. These fac­ tors in turn interact with the other two spheres, so that, for example, authority structures or ideologies must be reckoned with in an adequate analysis of the formation and

justification of values. To consider this problem in educational terms, we might say that distortions often enter the educational process

from the interactive sphere. Distortions may appear as

authority relationships within the school, as peer relation­

ships among students, even as a reluctance to question pre­ vailing moral or social beliefs. These are motivational,

social and ideological factors that most educators recog­

nize as influential in any learning situation, although they

become especially crucial in moral education, where the in­

fluence of the "hidden" curriculum is particularly heavy.

A formalist system of moral development tends to con­

ceive of such influences as individual limitations, more 9^ specifically, as individual limitations within the cog­ nitive sphere. Here Habermas' approach has a greater poten­ tial for critical reflection not just because he includes a wider range of factors in his analysis. He also gains an advantage with his notion of "distortion," which allows for an analysis of social or systematic obstacles to moral deve­ lopment or to the critical evaluation of values. In. his system, obstacles need not remain individual or private. As a result, Habermas can posit a 7th Stage of moral conscious­ ness, where all three moments of Hegel's triad can come into play, where moral as well as political freedom can be con­ sidered, and where generalized needs can be evaluated. (See

Chart II, p.77-) As Habermas notes in "Moral Development, and Ego Identity":

On the third plane, the natural process of need inter­ pretation, which until now depended on an unplanned cul­ tural tradition and the conduct of institutional systems, can itself be elevated to an object of discursive forma­ tion of the will. In such a way, critique and the justi fication of need interpretations can achieve an action orienxins force beyond the already culturally interpreted needs.

It is this final stage of the rational reconstruction of values that allows Habermas to overcome the incomplete plu­ ralism that plagues our present view of universals. Here he can take into account empirical relations that systemati­ cally distort the formation of values, as well as the gen- . eralizable interests that guide that formative process. Such

an approach offers some hope for bridging the gap between 95 individual awareness and autonomy and the larger patterns of. social dynamics that can be detected by empirical me­ thods . In such a linguistic ethic there remains a concern with the form of value formation, in that values must be at least hypothetically open to justification through an un­

constrained consensus process. At the same time, the in­ creasing autonomy that characterizes Kohlberg’s theory of moral development is preserved. In this way, Habermas re­ tains the three basic characteristics of Kohlberg's scheme, that is, interaction, structured organization, and develop­ mental sequence. But he has added a closer analysis of the

.complex mechanism of moral development, suggesting a

language-based process of rational reconstruction that makes room for an analysis of obstacles and for the addition

of substantial content. Whether such an approach will clar­

ify the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy still remains to be seen.

At this point, we might make Habermas' contribution

more specific by applying it to a question that frequently

occurs within moral education theory, namely, the question

of whether a teacher can effectively teach moral reasoning,

say at the A’th or 5th Stages, while running the class in an

authoritarian manner. Here we have a classic example of

the discrepancy between manifest and latent curricula in

schools. Formalist theories like Kohlberg's are not very

well equipped to resolve such theoretical problems, cut off 96 as they are from the internal relations between values and the prevailing material and social conditions. According to formalist approaches, one should be able to teach any value under any circumstances, despite, for instance, dark classrooms', or hungry students, or authoritarian teachers.

Conversely, one should be able to teach any value without confrontation with the practical realm of necessity. But as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have pointed out, per­

sonal powers develop through such confrontations 5 this seems especially persuasive when our aim is autonomy and

the reconstruction of values.

Habermas' theory of communicative ethics is critical

and emancipatory insofar as it moves between these poles

of freedom and necessity, and exposes the internal connec­

tions between them. He both recognizes the power of the

practical sphere and tries to move beyond this realm

through his concept of unrestrained consensus. A moral

education curriculum based on his reconstruction of Kohl­

berg's theory would have to do likewise, by' recognizing,

for example, the material relations between the school and

the students attending it, by uncovering the ideological

biases both students and teachex*s bring to a values curri­

culum, and by confronting the authority relationships that

exist within every classroom.

We might speculate that within such a curriculum, a

teacher's authoritarian manner might be legitimate, as long as it was open to questioning and justification within the process of rational reconstruction. . What is crucial here is that a theory of moral education recognize the complex­ ity of the practical sphere and the possible conflicts be­ tween the manifest objectives of a curriculum and the social and material relations that comprise the "hidden” curriculum. This is not to say that such relations will be easily overcome by a communicative ethical curriculum, but uncovering their influence will help move moral educa­ tion out of the abstract realm and into the actual world where ethical decisions must finally be made.

In the process, the triple diremption within formalist fthics may be reduced, along with some of the less desir­ able side effects of those diremptions. For example, if we look at moral education in terms of each Kantian sepa­ ration, we might first note that a narrow focus on the form of moral judgment can have a negative effect. For if stu­ dents become proficient in the forms of moral reasoning while seeing the outoome of such reasoning as at best secondary, then we may find a counter-productive process at work. Such "inconsequential" efforts may end up doing more harm than good, as students come to see ethics as com­ pletely separate from any practical outcome. For this rea­ son, a values curriculum must try to rejoin consequences to form in ethical reasoning, so that Kant's initial separation of intention and consequence might be reduced. 98

Along this same line, we might consider what prompts a student to develop moral reasoning abilities in the first place. Surely an interest in the structure of reasoning does not provide an adequate justification. Thus, in addi­ tion to logical adequacy and comprehensiveness, some notion of social welfare must play a significant role in moral reasoning and thus in moral education curricula* In this case, we must reevaluate Kant's second separation of duty and welfare..

Finally, in attempting to overcome Kant’s third diremp- tion of duty's form and content, we must recognize that the content of a moral decision is not unconditioned by time and place, but instead is historically situated. An ade­ quate moral education curriculum would be able to look critiqally at its own political and social situation, begin­ ning most likely with the relations that exist within the classroom and school itself. In the course of moving out from this immediate setting, students may begin to question the values held by their society as well as by other cul­ tures. But such critical questioning need not remain solely a matter of personal opinion or private preference, as is now so often the case within such discussions. For a com­ municative ethics allows for the rational testing of a society's values both in form and content. Thus, students might defend the conclusion that unrestrained consensus has little chance of occurring in bureaucratic or totalitarian 99 states, where political decisions are dominated by a hier­

archy of experts or party members respectively. The same

conclusion might be reached concerning capitalistic soci­

eties , where the uneven distribution of wealth and oppor­

tunity undermines any real consensus among theoretically

equal citizens.

To allow, such political content into moral education

curricula would no doubt generate controversy for the edu­

cational system, for- by necessity such efforts would reach

beyond the present self-understanding of local and national

communities. But such•substantial conclusions would be

defended rationally within a communicative ethical curri­

culum and, by extension, could be defended rationally to

the surrounding-community. Indeed it may be preferable to

include students in such controversial discussion rather

than subject moral education to the limitations of strictly

formalistic approaches. For one thing, the active nature

of value formation as well as its intersubjective basis

would be emphasized by such an approach. Furthermore., a

commicative ethical theory would allow us to define moral

development more adequately, that is, as the increasing

ability to reconstruct values rationally, even in the face

of social and empirical constraints. Finally, this ap­

proach would.allow students and teachers to consider the

specific content of ethical decisions and the ideas of social

welfare that guide such decisions. 100

Once again, the addition of these three emphases to moral education will not resolve all the problems and dif­ ficulties that exist in this area. In fact, we must expect and allow for a continuing tension between autonomy and heteronomy, between the realms of freedom and necessity.

Nevertheless, a communicative ethical system provides a more comprehensive and realistic view of the process of moral development than we now have, and for that reason should provide us with a better basis for moral education.

We must note, in concluding, that Habermas' theory of communicative ethics is far from complete. As Albrecht

Wellmer notes, it is probably the most controversial aspect of Habermas' work at the moment. For it involves Habermas is a wider and seemingly paradoxical project of construct­ ing a "materialist phenomenology of mind." As Wellmer puts it:

It would be a materialist theory in that it reckons with the irreducible empirical contingencies which define the starting points and the boundary conditions of the evolution of the human species; and it would be a phenomenology of mind in that it.reckons with the fact that the reproduction of the human species is mediated by language, i.e., by the ide'a"of' truth, and therefore its evolution is tied to an internal .progress of. the 'consciousness of freedom.

Much of the controversy surrounding this approach results from Habermas' attempt to negotiate.a balance be­ tween materialism and idealism generally, and, in ethics, between utilitarianism and formalism. Such an attempt at balance places him in opposition not only to traditional 101 interpretations of Hegel and Marx, and to most 20th Century ethical theorizing, but also in opposition to those positi- vistic positions that deny any significant connection among

the spheres•of language, labor and interaction. Habermas' work centers on a source of continuing theoretical prob­

lems for each of these approaches, namely, on their con­

ceptions. of value and its rational formation.

Habermas contends that such problems are insolvable

without a .proper balance among the three moments of Hegel's

triad. Moreover, these are not just methodological im­

passes of only theoretical interest; the continuing im-

'balances in technology, philosophy and political theory

have, as we have attempted to show, pressing practical con­

sequences for social and educational practice. As Habermas

reminds us in the closing lines of "Labor and Interaction"«

Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation, for there is no automatic developmental relation be­ tween labor and interaction. Still, there is a connec­ tion between the two dimensions. Neither the Jena Realphilosonhie nor the German Ideology have clarified it adequately, but in any case they can persuade us of its relevance; the self-formative process of spirit as well as of our species essentially depends on that relation between labor and interaction.I0 102

FOOTNOTES - CHAPTER SEVEN

1 •• • Jurgen Habermas, "Labor and Interaction," pp. 151-152. 2 Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, p. 197*

^Robert Paul Wolff, The Autonomy of Reason (New York* ' Harper and Row, 1973)» P« 217. h, Jurgen Habermas, "Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence," Inquiry vol. 13,. no. k (1970): p. 372.

•^Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. p. 31^*

^Jdrgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Con­ cept of Power," Social Research vol. kk, no. 1 ,(1977)* P* 6. 7 1 Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 110. p Habermas, "Moral Development," pp. ^8-^9 .

^Wellmer, "Communications and Emancipation," p. 260. 10 Habermas, "Labor and Interaction," p. 1 6 9. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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