Habermas by Stefan M & uuml;ller-Doohm

Author:Stefan M & uuml;ller-Doohm
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745689104
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

2 Habermas (1991), Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, pp. 9–30. [The English edition, Justification and Application. Remarks on Discourse Ethics (1994), omits some of the chapters of the German edition, has one additional chapter, and changes the sequence of chapters.] Some of the papers presented at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research can be found in Honneth and Joas (1986), Kommunikatives Handeln.

3 See Müller (1985), ‘Habermas im Zentrum’. On 1 March 1987, a generally critical discussion of the Theory of Communicative Action appeared in the journal Kommune: Forum für Politik, Ökonomie und Kultur (which was discontinued in 2012). Here, the philosopher and politician of the Grün-Alternative Liste Hamburg [Green alternative list Hamburg] Willfried Maier criticized Habermas’s concepts of nature, communication and politics against the backdrop of Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. He not only accused Habermas of ignoring the ‘by now crisis-ridden relationship between society and nature’ but also claimed that there was no way his theory might be applied to ecological questions. Sensuousness and corporeality, he said, are excluded by Habermas because of a ‘thorough subjectivization of needs, wishes and feelings’; his concept of rationality is truncated because rationality is seen as something belonging exclusively to subjects and tied up with language. Maier continues: ‘Because Habermas looks only at what elevates humans above nature, and not at the same time what unites them with nature, his model of communication and of communicative action becomes incorporeal and airy. But not just that, his lifeworld, as a sedimentation of communicative action, also appears strangely ethereal and bottomless.’ He further levelled the charge against Habermas that, inspired as he is by Luhmann’s systems theory, the function of securing the conditions for social life rests exclusively with the two systems of the state and the economy. He concluded: The ‘Theory of Communicative Action’ is normative in the sense that what exists and acts must justify itself with regard to ends which are shown to be rational by way of discussion. It is a theory of the domination of the rational, not a theory which establishes the right of existing particularities and investigates their connections with other such particularities. It is therefore justified to confront it with a critique which suspects that there is still a secret totalitarianism of reason at work in it. (Maier (1987), ‘Stimmen ohne Körper’, pp. 40, 42, 48 and 56)

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