Synthesis of the reading of Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas
Volume 1. Rationality of Action and Social Rationalization.
For Piaget the concept of social cooperation implies two types of interaction, one between the subject and the objects, mediated by instrumental action, and the other between the subject and the other subjects, mediated by communicative action.
Validity claims are associated with truth, efficacy or correctness, adequacy, and intelligibility. From a semantic approach, they can be descriptive or verification sentences, normative or justification, evaluative or value judgment and explanatory sentences.
When it comes to judging the rationality of people, it will be sought that they have good reasons and success in their actions, in the cognitive dimension, that they are reliable or sapient, in the practical-moral dimension, intelligent or convincing, in the evaluative dimension, sincere or self-critical, in the expressive dimension, comprehensive, in the hermeneutical dimension and rational in all of them.
Popper presents three concepts of the world, which are the objective, the subjective and the social, the second of which offers a realm of non-community. We then have the world of physical objects or states, the world of states of mind or consciousness and the world of the products of the human mind, or of cultural tradition and scientific, poetic and artistic thought, which is essentially composed of problems, theories and arguments. Similarly, the social is an independent realm between the hard material world and the soft mental world.
To all sociology that claims to be a theory of society, the problem of rationality is posed on the metatheoretical and methodological levels. Therefore, when choosing a certain sociological concept of action, we commit ourselves to its corresponding ontological presuppositions. The first becomes utilitarian strategic action, or rationality according to ends; the second underlies the theory of social role, or rationality according to norms; the third refers to the actor / world relationships, the participants in an interaction, or the self-staging of the person in everyday life, or rationality according to success, and, finally, the communicative action, seen as a negotiation mediated by the language for consensus building, a cooperative process of interpretation,or rationality according to the understanding.
The other is there in a double condition, as an object for me and as a subject with me. Thus, we can treat the other's words as mere sounds, as facts, or consider the other as a neighbor to participate with him in the understanding process, which is the key to understanding the actions of the other actors.
All consensus rests on an intersubjective recognition of validity claims susceptible to criticism between subjects capable of criticizing each other.
The exploratory moment, oriented to knowledge, cannot be separated from the creative, constructive moment, oriented towards the production of a consensus. Thus, truth is only conceivable as a socially organized result of contingent lines of linguistic, conceptual, and social behavior. The universality of the claim to truth is appearance; what is accepted as true in each case is a matter of convention.
The path that goes from communicative action to discourse is inscribed in action oriented towards understanding. On the other hand, a world of life constitutes for those involved the horizon of the objective world, the social world they share and the subjective world of each one.
Rational action according to values is that action according to mandates or in accordance with requirements that one has the obligation to fulfill and that serve as the basis for a way of life governed by formal principles guiding the action. Weber differentiates practical rationality in terms of use of means, choice of ends and orientation by values, that is, instrumental, elective and normative rationality.
In science, morality, and art, the corresponding universal validity claims are truth, normative correctness, authenticity, or beauty, and rationality includes empirical-theoretical knowledge of external nature, practical-moral knowledge that agents have their society and the aesthetic-expressive knowledge that the individual has of their own subjectivity.
The spheres of value have their internal logic, such as truth and success for the cognitive sphere, justice and normative rectitude for the practical-moral sphere, beauty, authenticity, or truthfulness for the expressive sphere. There is a rationality of the methodical way of life, which Weber assimilates to the Protestant ethic of the profession. Thus, there is rationality according to means, ends and values.
The images of the world determine the ways in which the dynamics of interests move social action, (assuming that the dynamics of interests move action, that this dynamic is imposed within the normative limits that govern it, that normative validity rests on the force of conviction of the ideas that justify it and that this conviction depends on the objective foundation that can be put to trial in a given context). The legitimizing potential that the ideas and images of the world possess changes with the external conditions of credibility as with the internal rational conditions of validity.
Social integration requires an ethic of intention according to values, a social subsystem of cultural reproduction, such as the family and the church, and one of binding norms capable of demanding and persuading the pursuit of ethically neutralized interests, such as bourgeois law.
Rationalization is based on the evolution of cultural systems of action, which are science, law, morality and art, and on the expansion of cognitive-instrumental, practical-moral and aesthetic-expressive knowledge that are based on the modern understanding of the world.
Habermas proposes to differentiate the external world into an objective world and a social world, and to introduce the internal or subjective world. The corresponding validity claims are truth, rectitude and veracity, which underlie the modes of use of language in the various speech acts.
The author delineates actions aimed at understanding from those aimed at success in the offers of speech acts and the role of validity claims susceptible to criticism to explain why the concept of communicative action should be completed with that of the world of life.
In action oriented to success we evaluate the degree of effectiveness of the intervention, in action oriented to understanding, through communicative action, we evaluate acts of understanding based on common convictions and the negotiation of definitions of the situation.
The listener of a speech act can react as follows: first, as one who understands the utterance or grasps the meaning of what is said; second, as someone who takes a position with a yes or a no before the claim related to the act of speech, and third as who orients their action according to what was agreed.
For the communicative action, only those speech acts to which the speaker links validity claims susceptible to criticism can be considered: with a promise he claims validity for a declaration of intention, with an order, for a demand, with a confession, for expression of your feelings, with a prediction, for a statement. Similarly, when the receiver takes a stand with a, he does not dispute the correctness of the intention or demand, the veracity of the confession, and the truth of the prediction.
There are three pure types of communicative action, which are conversation, rule-directed action, and dramaturgical action. Along with the basic attitudes - objective, in accordance with the norms and expressive - a performative attitude is simultaneously introduced in the objective, social and subjective worlds. Communication pathologies are the result of the confusion between actions oriented towards success and actions oriented towards understanding.
We return to the Weberian theories of the loss of meaning and freedom due to reification caused by capitalist rationalization, since the philosophical systems of objective reason that had attached to the conviction that it is possible to discover an all-encompassing or fundamental structure of being fell into disuse. and deduce from it a conception of human destiny. Likewise, the religious-metaphysical knowledge received as doctrine has fossilized into dogma; revelation and received wisdom are transformed into mere tradition; the Enlightenment turns into myth; the conviction, in a subjective assent.
The very form of thought that the images of the world embody becomes obsolete, the knowledge of salvation and the cosmological knowledge are diluted in subjective beliefs and therefore phenomena such as the fanaticism of faith and the traditionalism of culture appear. Thus, the magical, religious and philosophical models that reflected the different forms of social domination became hollow and the thread of fraternity that held them broke. Capitalist society and its objectivity reify external life and interior life, social relations, the way of thinking and existing of the subjects; According to Lukács, the world of life is reified, because production rests on wage labor, which requires that a function of man become merchandise and this merchandise form also takes over culture,forcing the acquisition of the class consciousness of the proletariat as subject-object of history as a whole.
Horkheimer interprets the increasingly acute malaise that is registered in culture, caused by the reception of art fused with fun and by the technical reinforcement of the mass media.
Adorno renounces the illusion that it is possible to apprehend, through thought, the totality of reality. Great philosophy can no longer develop the idea of reason and of a universal reconciliation of spirit and nature, since it has succumbed together with the religious-metaphysical images of the world, and in this sense, under the ruins of philosophy also lies the capable truth buried. to give critical thought its negating and transcendent force.
Hokheimer still adds that philosophy is the conscious effort to give the whole of our knowledge and intellections a linguistic structure in which things are named by their true names, but with Adorno he remembers that the systems of objective reason are ideologies that succumb to a criticism that goes back and forth between subjective and objective reason, and therefore philosophical thought deliberately regresses to become a gesture. They add that sociology appears as a thief who appropriates treasures whose value he does not know.
Habermas concludes that the program of the first Critical Theory of society failed due to the exhaustion of the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness and its replacement by a theory of communication that allows a rethinking of pending tasks, in terms of philosophy of language and intersubjective understanding.
Individuation is only possible through socialization without coercion or repression. Thus, the analysis of the meaning of the expression “I” offers a promising key to penetrate the problem of self-consciousness, which connects subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
Volume II: Critique of Functional Reason
With the sound gestures, the participants do not limit themselves to reacting adaptively to the other's gesture, but rather give expression to an interpretation of that gesture and carry out each gesture with a communicative intention: they are addressing each other.
According to Mead, the transition from interaction mediated by gestures to that mediated by symbols represents the constitution of a behavior governed by rules, at least for two subjects, and marks the threshold of hominization, of the constitution of the self mediated by language, since one has to be a member of a community to be oneself, while Habermas clarifies that we have to analyze this transition from the prelinguistic mode of control of interaction, linked to instincts, to a mode of control dependent on language and linked to a cultural tradition.
A speaker can question an emission in a triple aspect: depending on whether it is a statement, the manifestation of a feeling, or a command, he can question its truth, its veracity or its legitimacy. In communicative action, the offers of speech acts owe their strength to the relationship between validity claims and reasons, since the former cannot be accepted or rejected except with rationally motivated agreements to coordinate plans and actions.
The self is a social structure and is formed in social experience through communicative self-presentation. It is clear that individuality is also a socially generated phenomenon. So the process of socialization is at the same time a process of individuation.
In speech acts, three types of relationship are integrated (cognitive, moral and expressive) with external nature, with collective identity and with internal nature. Normed behavioral expectations and grammatical speech complement each other to give the norm-governed structure of linguistically mediated interaction.
The performative attitude adopted by ego and alter (sender and receiver or speaker and listener) when they act communicatively with each other is linked to the presupposition that the other can take a position with a yes or a no in front of the offer that represents the act of speaks.
In communicative action, no matter how governed by norms it may be, no one can take the initiative and no one can give it up. The self brings the feeling of freedom, novelty, and surprise.
The transmission of cultural knowledge is done through action oriented to understanding; Through the coordination of action, compliance with norms and social integration are served, and with socialization, internal controls of behavior are established and personality structures are formed, through linguistically mediated interactions.
Democracy appears as the political form by which society reaches its purest consciousness of itself and where deliberation, reflection and critical spirit play a considerable role in the conduct of public affairs. The unity of the collective can only be established and maintained as a unit of a communication community, that is, through a consensus sought and communicatively reached within the opinion.
The linguistic mediation of rule-governed action may have represented an impetus for the rationalization of the world of life. The semantic contents of sacred and profane origin fluctuate in language and a fusion of meanings occurs; the practical-moral and expressive contents are united with the cognitive-instrumental ones in the form of cultural knowledge.
Morality, converted into discourse ethics, makes it possible to distinguish between moral representations of tradition, moral rules of the normative system, and moral conscience of the personality. A universalist morality can be entrusted with the task of maintaining the cohesion of a secularized society, since an act, to be moral, must have a universal character.
Mead affirms that we are what we are thanks to our relationship with others and that, inevitably, our aim must be social and that the appeal to a larger society corresponds to a larger self, that is, an autonomous subject capable of be guided in their action by universal principles, since only those who take charge of their own life can see in it the fulfillment of themselves.
The components of the world of life differ in culture, society and personality and there is a displacement of sacred knowledge by one based on reasons and different claims of validity, legality and morality are separated, law and morality are universalized and diffused individualism with growing claims of autonomy and self-realization. On the other hand, cooperation also has its intrinsic morality.
The world of life, constituted among other elements by language and culture, is presented as a context in communicative action. I have to understand my world of life to the degree necessary to act in it and act on it. The world of life is from the beginning, not my private world, but an intersubjective world.
In actor-world relationships, pure types of action oriented to understanding appear, in which the participants carry out their plans in common agreement to avoid the risk that the understanding will fail, and the risk that the action plan will fail.
When executing a speech act, a relationship is established with something in the objective world, in the social world (relationships), or in the subjective world (experiences), based on the confidence that the world will remain as it is known until now and that the provision of knowledge received from others and that constituted by one's own experiences will continue to maintain its basic validity.
The communicative action, under the functional aspect of understanding, serves the tradition and the renewal of cultural knowledge; under the aspect of coordination of action, it serves social integration and the creation of solidarity; and under the aspect of socialization, it serves the formation of personal identities. To these processes of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization, correspond the structural components of the world of life that are culture, society and personality.
Habermas starts from the communicative action to understand society as the world of life of the members of a social group, where the concept of the world of life is complementary to the concept of communicative action and is the contextualizing background of the understanding processes. The symbolic reproduction of the world of life is separated from its material reproduction in order to understand communicative action as the means through which the symbolic structures of the world of life are reproduced, finding a functional differentiation between processes of cultural reproduction, of social integration. and socialization.
The world of life receives the contribution of the cultural heritage of knowledge, personality, society, skills acquired in the process of socialization and institutional orders. This background also consists of individual skills, the intuitive ability to know how to deal with a situation and socially ingrained practices. The certainties of the world of life have the cognitive character of cultural traditions, the psychic character of acquired and proven skills, and the social character of accredited solidarity.
There is no concrete human individual that is not an organism, a personality, a member of a social system and a participant in a cultural system, which shows how the decisions of an actor are regulated by living traditions. However, the empirical independence of culture from society and from the social, psychological and organic environments of action is evident.
Any system of action is interaction and reciprocal understanding of culture, society, personality and organism, which specialize, respectively, in the function of maintaining patterns, social integration, achievement of goals and adaptation.
Social systems contain subsystems, as significant institutions, the state administration in the political dimension, for example, the company, in the economic dimension, the law, as an integrating subsystem, and the church and the family, as maintainers of cultural guidelines.
The symbolic structures of the world of life can only be reproduced through action oriented to understanding. Actions can only be coordinated through the formation of a consensus if the communicative practice is inserted in a world of life determined by cultural traditions, institutional orders and individual competences.
The potential for rationality of the understanding is expressed in the fact that agreement and dissent depend on the intersubjective recognition of validity claims susceptible to criticism.
The potential for rationalizing the world of life is achieved as language assumes the functions of understanding, coordination of action and socialization of individuals and is the means by which cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization, where solidarity occupies as prominent a place as personal interest.
In everyday communicative practice, cognitive interpretations, moral expectations, expressive manifestations and evaluations have to be combined and fused together and constitute a rational whole. This communication infrastructure is threatened by two tendencies that are mutually penetrating and reinforcing: a reification systemically induced by the autonomization of subsystems governed by means of control, such as money and power, and a cultural impoverishment, originated in the extinction of living traditions. and in the differentiation of science, morals and art, as well as the elitist rupture of the culture of the experts with the contexts of communicative action.
Modernization seems to exclude the development of institutions of freedom that protect the spheres of action in the spheres of private life and public life and the connection of culture with communicative practices that require living traditions founding meaning. The bourgeois critique of culture has tried to derive the pathologies of modernity from two causes: that the secularized images of the world lose their integrating force or that the high level of complexity of society exceeds the capacity for integration of individuals.
Social consensus is the first link in the chain of formation of the collective will and the basis of legitimation. In modern forms of understanding of communicative action, different forms of argumentation are distinguished, such as theoretical discourses in the sphere of science, practical-moral discourses in the sphere of public opinion and in the legal system, and aesthetic criticism in the field of art and literature.
A colonization of the world of life can occur when traditional ways of life are disjointed in the components culture, society and personality; when exchange relations are regulated through roles differentiated by labor activity, demand from the economy, client relations with bureaucracies and formal participation in legitimation processes; when the workforce of employees becomes available and the vote of the electorate mobilized in exchange for system-compliant compensation and hopes of self-actualization and self-determination through the roles of consumer and customer are privatized.
By way of conclusions:
The electronic mass media represent a substitution of what is written for the image and sound and appear as devices that penetrate and take over the everyday communicative language entirely, transmuting the authentic contents of modern culture into neutralized and aseptized stereotypes and ideologically effective in reducing the existing, eliminating the subversive or transcendent features of the culture and exercising a social control entrenched in individuals.
But this authoritarian potential is always precarious because communication carries the counterweight of an emancipatory potential in the face of validity claims susceptible to criticism, because they can never be completely shielded against the possibility of being contradicted by actors capable of responding autonomously for their own acts. Thus, in the last analysis, it is people when they talk to each other, and not when they hear, read or attend the mass media, who really make the opinion change.
The new conflicts in modern societies are not unleashed around material or distribution problems, but around questions related to the ways of life, expressed in the silent revolution that changes in the values and attitudes of the population signify. and in a transition from the old policy, focused on internal and military, economic and social security, towards a new policy, in which problems such as quality of life, equal rights, individual self-realization, participation and rights arise. human rights.
While there are movements of resistance and withdrawal that react against the colonization of the world of life, caused by not distinguishing between its rationalization and the increase in complexity of the social system, there are also tendencies of neo-conservative defense of a postmodernity that strips its content. rational and its future prospects to a modernity at odds with itself.
The theory of society, with the concept of communicative reason, of a reason immanent to the use of language directed to the understanding, once again considers philosophy capable of fulfilling systematic tasks and to demand a theory of rationality from it. The knowledge that serves as the horizon of daily communicative practice and the background of the world of life is brought to consciousness as something we need to make sure of.
Well, in modern societies, both in the deinstitutionalized forms of treatment in the sphere of private-family life, and in the sphere of public opinion coined by the mass media, logic becomes true in practice. characteristic of the communicative action. At the same time, the imperatives of the autonomized subsystems penetrate the world of life and impose, by way of monetarization and bureaucratization, an assimilation of communicative action to formally organized spheres of action and call into question the symbolic structures of the world. of life as a whole.
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