The Theory of Communicative Action by J?rgen Habermas

The Theory of Communicative Action by J?rgen Habermas

Author:J?rgen Habermas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-10-15T16:00:00+00:00


This ethic of unconditional affirmation of, and adjustment to, the world presupposed the unbroken and continued existence of purely magical religion. It applied to the position of the emperor, who, by personal qualification, was responsible for the good conduct of spirits and the occurrence of rain and good harvest weather; it applied to ancestor worship, which was equally fundamental for popular and for official religiosity; and it applied to unofficial (Taoist) magical therapy and the other survival forms of animistic compulsion of spirits (i.e., anthropo- and herolatric belief in functional deities).45

Thanks to Joseph Needham’s pioneering investigations,46 however, it is now well known that the Chinese, from the first century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D., were evidently more successful than the West in developing theoretical knowledge and in using this knowledge for practical purposes. Only since the Renaissance has Europe clearly taken the lead in this field. This suggests that the rationalization potential of these traditions might have been studied first of all from the standpoint of cognitive and not of ethical rationalization—all the more so, as Greek philosophy, which shares with the cosmological ethic of the Chinese a world-affirming attitude, also advanced the rationalization of worldviews more in the direction of theoreticization. Moreover, successful Chinese science appears prima facie to have run up against the same limits as the metaphysical view of the world of Greek philosophy: in both cases, the ethically rooted, noninterventionist attitude toward nature and society blocked

the evolutionary transition from the stage attained by da Vinci to that of Galileo. In medieval China, experimentation was carried out more systematically than was ever attempted by the Greeks, or even by the Europeans of the Middle Ages; however, so long as there was no change in the “bureaucratic feudalism,” mathematics, empirical observation of nature, and experiment could not be combined in such a way as to produce a wholly new approach.47

The essentials of a rationalizable worldview are as little lacking in Confucianism and Taoism as they are in Greek philosophy. In the concept of a concrete world-order, the multiplicity of appearances is systematically grasped and related to principles. To be sure, the dominant salvation motif, which sharpens the dualism between the world of appearances and the world-transcending principle, is missing. Nevertheless, the dualistic worldview structure is sufficient to put the world of appearances at such a distance that it can be objectivated under one of the aspects (which are not yet differentiated at the level of principles), indeed under the cognitive aspect of being and becoming. Under this aspect, worldviews can count as the more rational, the further the world of appearances is distilled out from abstract points of view as a sphere of the existing or the useful, and is purified of other—normative and expressive—aspects. A cognitively rationalized worldview represents the world as the totality of all forms and processes that can be made contemplatively present to the mind. To the extent that practical needs take precedence here (as Weber emphasizes is the case for the Chinese mind), the fundamental attitude of world affirmation takes the shape of adjustment to the world.



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