Rationality and World-Disclosure in the Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas
Rationality and “World-Disclosure” in the Work of Jürgen Habermas
Copyright 1992/2019, William Heidbreder
With the introduction, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, of the concept of “world-disclosure,” Jürgen Habermas’s “theory of communicative action” has undergone a major shift in emphasis, which may help to resolve some of the problems in his thought. “World-disclosure” is the aspect of communication which makes a communicative rationalization (in the Weberian sense of an increasing order and subjection to rules that is part of modernization) which does not entail the loss of meaning and of freedom that Max Weber had thought an ineluctable concomitant of modernity. However, and for this reason, a political philosophy and a theory of modernity based on a “communicative ethics” can be seen to be problematic in so far as the latter might also exclude the “aesthetic” functions of “world-disclosure.”
The function of art, at least under conditions of modernity, is “its singularly illuminating power to open our eyes to what is seemingly familiar, to disclosure anew an apparently familiar reality (Habermas, 1985, 203). It provides “the occasion for an innovative, world-disclosive, and eye-opening representation” (Habermas, 1987a, 203). The term “world-disclosure” applies to the discovery of new idioms and new ways of seeing – “the playful creation of new worlds.” World-disclosure” is that activity or process which “renews” the “need-interpretations” that “color our perceptions,” and that we draw upon when we assert and evaluate “validity claims.” More generally, it can be defined as the creative revision of our understanding. Thus interpretation is or at least can be “world-disclosive.” “World-disclosure” is clearly an aspect or type of communicative interaction. Habermas describes its structure as that of a type of language use. What then is its relation to “communication” – to the process of “reaching an understanding”? Communication is defined as reaching a shared understanding: an agreement or consensus. This requires, among other things, presupposing that the meanings of terms are determinate and fixed. However, the function of “world-disclosure” – which is at least potentially part of everyday language use – depends on semantic ambiguity and indeterminacy. (Habermas has acknowledged in a discussion elsewhere of Derrida that in everyday interaction meanings of terms are not identical among speakers (Habermas, 1986, 202); but he insists that reaching an understanding as agreement is only possible if we assume – counterfactually – that the “same utterances have the same meaning” (Habermas, 1987a, 198)). The poetic, creative use of language to disclose new possibilities involves “suspending illocutionary binding forces and those idealizations that make possible a use of language oriented toward mutual understanding – and hence make possible a coordination of plans of action that operates via the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims” (ibid., 204). Thus “world-disclosure” is only possible in so far as the constraints of communication are bracketed; and conversely, communication is only possible in so far as it abstracts from the language-game of “world-disclosure.”
The participation of “world-disclosure” in communication is in fact what makes possible an “unconstrained consensus.” Habermas’s communicative ethics prescribes that decisions and actions are valid if and only if they can be expected to gain the consent of all those affected in a free discussion in which participants evaluate claims to validity in consultation with their own needs and interests as they understand them. Consensus must be uncoerced and unconstrained. It is false if coerced (if we are forced, we have not truly consented), and similarly if through self-deception we misrepresent our own needs. (Thus we must have an unconstrained interaction with ourselves – with our “inner nature” – in order to communicate freely with others).
In an unconstrained consensus, “need interpretations are no longer assumed as given, but are drawn into the discursive formation of the will” (Habermas, 1979, 93). Such a consensus both presupposes and makes possible an “unconstrained ego identity,” in which “inner nature is rendered communicatively transparent...” (ibid). Such a self- relation is only possible “to the extent that needs can, through aesthetic forms of expression, be kept articulable...” (ibid). Since “world-disclosure” is what “renews” our need-interpretations,” it is only in so far as communication is “disclosive” that it can be the medium of an unconstrained (and not merely an uncoerced) communication. Otherwise, since reaching an agreement is constraining by definition, communicative rationalization presents the prospect of a society which is unfree in measure that it is just. (Habermas employs two different uses of the term “constraint”: as the binding force of an agreement, and as a force that inhibits free communication. That a form of the latter derives from the former is the raison d’être of “world-disclosure”).
The possibility that societal “rationalization” might not entail a loss of freedom thus depends on there being a type of rationality which includes the “aesthetic” functions that consensual communication must exclude. The same holds for the prospect that subjecting the traditions and practices of the “lifeworld” to the demands of rational legitimation (as well as functional efficiency) entails a loss of meaning.
Habermas holds that there is a constitutive relation between “meaning” (which is disclosed or created by the “poetic” use of symbols) and “validity.” Thus, artworks are only meaningful in so far as they embody a “potential for truth.” Yet, since the world- disclosive” and “problem-solving” uses of language, although part of a unity in everyday speech, are structured differently, they can become autonomous of one another. If this autonomy becomes absolute, then art no longer has any critical function, since this involves a relation to claims which can be evaluated in arguments as well as the creative reformulation, revision, or “renewal” of our understanding. (Habermas claims this is precisely what happens with “radical critics of reason” such as Nietzsche and Bataille who regard (even) discursive rationality as instrumental and objectifying. Then, in order to figure as the locus of a subjectivity freed of constraints, “the aesthetic domain...is hypostatized into the other of reason” (Habermas, 1987a, 99). Instead, “world- disclosure” is properly understand as a “moment of reason” which is “at least procedurally connected with objectifying knowledge and moral insight in the processes of providing argumentative grounds” (ibid., 96).
But what does it mean to say that “world-disclosure” is a “moment of reason”? Is it an aspect of reason or is it something that must be related to it? It is unclear whether Habermas understands world-disclosure and discursive validation as part of a totality which only together constitute “reason” in the fullest sense, or whether world-disclosure is an auxiliary activity which is necessary to provide the work of reason with meaningful content. Thus Habermas claims that “world-disclosure” ought properly to be rendered subject to “testing” according to the different aspects of validity (truth, rightness, sincerity) and to “learning processes,” as if the latter could be wholly identified with consensual validation. But of course learning processes involve both discovery and verification, both the formation of interpretations and their systematic testing.
Similarly, there is an ambivalence in Habermas as to whether interpretation is constitutive of “reaching an understanding” (as he maintains in his discussion of Gadamer in The Logic of the Social Sciences [Habermas, 1988]) or auxiliary to it (as he suggests in a passage in the second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action[Habermas, 1987]). In so far as communication is oriented towards consensus and must presuppose semantic determinacy, interpretation and “world-disclosure” generally must be auxiliary and supplementary.
Habermas’s earlier distinction between communication and discourse, whereby the former is a means of coordinating action and the latter involves bracketing the “constraints of action” in a manner similar to poetic speech, might be taken as suggesting that those interactions in which claims can be freely evaluated are also those in which “need-interpretations” can be discovered and articulated – which would make possible the unity of aesthetic and practical rationality which Habermas seems to think is threatened. But discourse now seems burdened with all the constraints of communication. (In discourse, claims cease to be directives which have immediate consequences for action and are rendered hypothetical; but it remains oriented toward reaching an understanding which will have “binding force”).
In so far as the structure of reaching an understanding is just the raising and evaluation of validity claims, it is possible for communication to merely appropriate current interpretations that are embodied in our practices, and not alter our understanding. Asserting a claim may or may not involve “disclosing” some aspect of the social “lifeworld” in a way which is at variance with current or prevailing interpretations.
The work of achieving an understanding is not primarily structured by argumentative discourse; more fundamental is the kind of observational and interpretive skill that is involved in appreciating a work of art. Understanding is advanced by work that is disclosive, revealing something that we find meaningful because of its relation to previously acquired bits of knowledge. Moreover, the requirement of the criticizability and politicization of values, norms, institutions, and practices which is part of the “normative content of modernity” does not rest solely or primarily on the criticizability of statements. This is because the “lifeworld” does not consist of unarticulated statements like “beliefs” and “assumptions”; it consists of something like an ensemble of meaningful practices. Those of our beliefs which are sufficiently articulated that a discourse has developed around them may assert on us a claim of validity. But an ethics of communication which depends solely on the “discursive redemption of validity claims” cannot be adequate to the tasks of a critical social theory, because the aspects of a culture that might be worth criticizing are not always explicitly articulated, and the maxim that participants must be permitted to articulate their own needs does not suffice to ensure that what ought to be articulated will be, especially since needs and desires may themselves be products of power relationships.
Within limits, we can thematize aspect of our practices and treat them as if they were explicit “norms” which can be propositionally articulated as criticizable claims – even though our ways of doing things are normally maintained and transmitted without ever becoming thematically articulated. Our ability to do this – and thus to criticize aspects of our practices – depends on the function Habermas calls “world-disclosure.”
Habermas’s theory of the crisis of capitalist modernity as the “colonization of the lifeworld” by the functional rationality of markets and bureaucracy (Habermas, 1987) depends on the claim that the “rationalization” of the lifeworld that takes places as traditions are subjected to discursive legitimation does not entail the kind of reification or cultural impoverishment that result from the functional mediation of everyday life contexts and concerns. However, it is obvious that if it were possible (as we have seen that it is) for there to be a kind of communication which subjects norms to discursive validation but excludes the openness, flexibility, and creativity of world-disclosive language use, then cultural impoverishment would be a permanent danger accompanying communicative rationalization. This seems to be the case: Habermas places the two functions of communicative interaction in opposition and wants to ensure that they get properly mediated. Thus communication can take place with or without “world- disclosure.” Consequently, communicative rationalization may or may not involve an increasing facility in entertaining new possibilities or in the encounter with what is foreign and opaque. But this is a problematic that cannot be explained in terms of the “colonization” of the lifeworld by the “media” of money and power (which coordinate action by means of a kind of code with built-in values and preferences, thus substituting for the communicative and interpretive processes in which these values are formed, re- evaluated, and determined). Habermas seems to think communicative and functional rationality are strictly exclusive (although one way of explaining the “distorted communication” in power relationships is that functional imperatives intervene to short- circuit discussion). It seems that the real prospect, which he had raised in a 1971 essay on Walter Benjamin (Habermas, 1983), of cultural impoverishment as the result of a communicative rationalization which realized the interest in justice but was blind to the interest in happiness, indicates a crisis of modernity which is not explained by the “colonization of the lifeworld” and which will not be cured by a paradigm-shift (such as Habermas argues for in this book and in The Theory of Communicative Action [Habermas, 1984: 1987b]) that claims to replace an objectifying rationality with the model of consensual action-coordination.
The “utopian dimension” of a “critical theory” based on an ethics of communication depends on its inclusion of the “poetic,” “world-disclosive” aspects of language-use if Benjamin’s insight is correct that “the claim to happiness can only be made good if the sources of that semantic potential we need for interpreting the world in light of our needs are not exhausted” (Habermas, 1983). (Evidently, the creative, transgressive use of symbolic forms in art has a unique access to this potential for meaning). Without the creative renewal of our understanding via “disclosive” interpretations, we would have no way of imagining alternatives and thus of effectively criticizing need-interpretations that have become problematic.
Central to Habermas’s critique of the over-extension of “systems-functional rationality” is the claim, as he put it in Legitimation Crisis, that “there is no administrative production of meaning” (Habermas, 1975). But is there a communicative production of meaning? This is problematic precisely in so far as communication is administrative, which it clearly is. Institutions can be anchored in the public sphere because communication is a means of action-coordination; and we need to have access to our own needs because communication is rooted in necessity. Communicative action- coordination is a means of administering the distribution of scarce resources, which is why it is necessarily constraining, and those forms of action which are relatively free of constraint must be auxiliary to it. Meaning also becomes auxiliary; it becomes a non- renewable “resource” when communication is reduced to the administrative task of adjudicating between claims. Communicative rationalization at least differs from the functional kind in that it does not pretend to substitute for meanings, norms, and motivations which derive from traditions and practices that cannot be formalized or (adequately) represented. But it seems that its capacity to reproduce meaning in a way that remains viable and effective is not guaranteed.
As we have seen, the world-disclosive power of language, which derives from the creative employment of ambiguities to produce novel interpretations, is dependant on the suspension of the binding force of a pressure toward consensus which blunts ambiguities and renders meaning artificially fixed. Since it is only through world-disclosive language use that meaning is renewed, and the function of world-disclosure is absent or at least marginal to the extent that the interest in consensus prevails, semantic and cultural impoverishment is a specter that haunts communication theory to the extent that it ties rationality to consensus.
Bibliography
Works by Jürgen Habermas
Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
“Moral Development and Ego Identity,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, pp. 69-94.
Philosophical-Political Profiles. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.
The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
“Questions and Counter-questions.” In Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985, pp. 192-216.
“Life Forms, Morality, and the Task of the Philosopher.” In Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, edited by Peter Dews. London: Verso, 1986, pp. 191-216.
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987(a).
The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987(b).
On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson and Jerry A. Stark. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Other Works Consulted
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Alfred Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978.