The Horror of Self-Reflection: The Concealment of Violence in a “Self-Conscious and Critical Society”

If one looks at recent developments, the repeated appearance of such themes as self-knowledge and reflexivity in the agendas of political philosophers suggests that some long neglected problems are gradually receiving attention.ⁱ The nexus between the mental and the political has suffered considerable neglect by philosophers all too ready to set the standards of reasonableness that people are expected to meet in a politically relevant course of action. Apart from a general preoccupation with the rationality of action and rational choice there is also an influential strain in modern political theory, well represented by Marx and Arendt, supporting a form of objectivism and materialism “that takes primacy over concern with intangible essences, ... denying the fundamental role that consciousness, thinking, inwardness, and subjectivity play in their theory” (Ring 1989: 443). Jürgen Habermas has acknowledged such “intangible essences” by pointing out that people can satisfy the normative expectations set by the specific roles they are required to play within a liberal polity only if they satisfy a set of given cognitive premises (Habermas 2005: 124 and 141ff.).ⁱⁱ A similar argument pursues the Wittgensteinean track, for which “if we are to maintain a liberal society, that is, one in which each member is free and equal in contributing to its structure and governance, we are obliged to make possible the conditions under which each member can achieve self-knowledge through intelligibly articulating her claims to the group” (Pohlhaus-Wright 2002: 821).

Politics does not refer merely to facts that take place out there in a distant world that hardly registers with us. On the contrary politics is the very domain of reflexivity, inasmuch as it concerns myriad conscious activities whereby people seek to adjust their conduct to circumstances. Such activities are, to be sure, normatively constrained, so long as they demand the reflective application of rules of reasoning that virtually nobody -- at least within a relatively narrow circle of neighbors -- would find unreasonable to apply.

Post-Rawlsian philosophy seems to have realized that the standard story of how morally sound political institutions are designed is a bit naïve. This story was essentially focused on standards of reasonableness, while it passed over other aspects of people’s mental life as, for instance, a reflective relationship with one’s own mental states, or the importance of practices of self-scrutiny, or the kind of suppression of inwardness that J.L. Austin indicated as the truest foundation of morality (Austin 1979: 236). That story failed to acknowledge the mutual implications of reflexivity and human sociability so much stressed by what Adorno called the “philosophy of immanence.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Reflexivity is a key-feature of reason inasmuch as it refers to the faculty by which we fulfil the very nature of human rationality, namely, its open-endedness, the idea that we do not just have thoughts about facts of the world, but we also have “thoughts about our thoughts, and thoughts about our thoughts about our thoughts” (Pinker 2002: 336).^iv Reflecting on reflexivity becomes especially critical when it comes to inquirying into the difficult relationship between people’s reflective habits on the one hand, and the ways that institutions are organized on the other. Reflexivity, admittedly, is deemed to be a good thing, insofar as institutions supporting people’s thinking reflectively about their own thoughts aim at minimizing “self-conceit” (Taylor 1989: 97). However, we tend to agree that

it is not foolish to believe that any social and political order which effectively uses power, and which sustains a culture that means something to the people who live in it, must involve opacity, mystification, and large-scale deception. Reasonable people can believe, contrary to the ideals of liberalism, that human beings cannot live together effectively, at least on any culturally ambitious scale, if they understand fully what they are doing.^v

The ambition of this paper is to understand to what extent the principles of liberalism are compatible with strong demands for reflexivity. The works of political theorists of a liberal persuasion are replete with reminders that an open and reflective appreciation of...