Mimesis and Reason: Habermas's Political Philosophy

1. Reason and Mimesis

Chapter 1 Reason and Mimesis To represent the mimesis it supplanted, the concept has no other way than to adopt something mimetic in its own conduct, without abandoning itself. —Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialectics 15) Habermas’s theory of communicative action proceeds in a self-consciously postmetaphysical way, which is to say, it insists that we cannot but think and act politically withoutWKHFRQßGHQFHRIDQH[WUDZRUOGO\VRXUFH of validation for those activities, and that we must always be on guard that our most cherished convictions, and even the seemingly most prosaic —our view of reality, for instance—may be inadequate and in need of sometimes mind-altering correction. We do not judge the adequacy of our convictions on a scale that measures a right correspondence between our XWWHUDQFHVDQGß[HGUHIHUHQWVLQWKHZRUOGQRUFDQZHUHO\RQDVXSSRVHG correspondence between our moral convictions and an eternal moral order. We may judge our convictions adequate or inadequate only with reference to the normative horizon of the world in which we live and act, and this GHPDQGVDKLVWRULFDOVHOIXQGHUVWDQGLQJDFULWLFDOUHàHFWLRQFRPELQHGZLWK a hermeneutics.1 The fundamental principles of truth, morality, and any method that determines adequacy must become cognizant that cognition itself cannot reproduce an objective image of the world, but always already takes its form and direction from the politically contested activity of historically situated meaning-making.2 Old-fashioned “consciousness-raising” must 9 10 Mimesis and Reason UHPDLQRQWKHWDEOHIRUSROLWLFDOSXUSRVHVEXWQHLWKHU WRPL[PHWDSKRUV  as a stepchild to political economy, nor any longer naively in thrall to a narrative of turning false consciousness to true. Instead of revealing what is already good and true, we postmetaphysical moderns are fated to agonize over our convictions and how they stack up against those of others, and how, in our world of Weberian value-pluralism, a normative political science might endeavor to think about how to adjudicate among competing claims answering to different notions of the good. A postmetaphysics brings the politics of interpretation front and center. This does not lead to wholesale relativism, for reasons addressed later, but it does mean that DQDO\VWV DQG REVHUYHUV FDQQRW SUHWHQG WR H[FOXGH WKHPVHOYHV IURP WKH court of opinion, because that, for good or ill, is what court there is, and the moral–political task is to discern better from worse from within this twilight world of opinion.3 I. The Postmetaphysical Condition of Reason In the demise of a viable socialist vision, a normatively democratic view ßOOV WKH KRUL]RQ RI RXU FRQWHPSRUDU\ PRUDOÓSROLWLFDO LPDJLQDU\ DQG WKLV democratic form of political decision-PDNLQJ SURYHV D ßQH KRPRORJ\ IRU the premises of postmetaphysics. Following self-assertively in the tradition of Enlightenment, Habermas lays the possibility of a secular morality under conditions of an advanced, democratic capitalism based on the character of reason. Value-pluralism does not trump the necessity of mutual coordination and understanding; it is, rather, the enabling condition of understanding. Reason does not illuminate reality per se, but rather, the reality for those to whom it belongs. The peculiar illumination that reason provides comes in the form of articulate reasons, reasons that can be accepted or rejected on the basis of common understanding. The deepening of understanding comes through the practice of reasoning-in-common, and the reality that reasons illuminate is the discursive reality of being-in-common. We might call this process becoming-in-common. Thus, any theory of reason requires a concomitant understanding of the social solidarity and common understandings and commitments that underwrite its truth-value, while preserving and even LQFLWLQJDFULWLFDOFDSDFLW\IRUVHOIUHàHFWLRQWRGHWHUPLQHEHWWHUIURPZRUVH progress from regression. For Habermas, “we must distinguish between the social fact that a norm is intersubjectively recognized and its worthiness to be recognized” (1990, 61). Why must a democratic theory turn to reason, and why a reason that self-consciously asks itself to split the difference between historicism and UHàHFWLRQUDWKHUWKDQDQVZHUWRPHWDSK\VLFDODGHTXDWLRQ"&RQWHPSRUDU\ 11 Reason and Mimesis critiques of Reason’s traditional conceits of foundationalism and metaphysLFV  KDYH ZRUNHG WR XQGHUPLQH FRQßGHQFH LQ WKH VHFXODU YDOLGLW\ RI DQ\ NLQGRIH[WUDZRUOGO\DXWKRULW\DQGKDYHFRQWULEXWHGWRD ODUJHO\EHQHßcial ) suspicion over the supposed neutrality or objectivity of this-worldly LQMXQFWLRQVPDGHLQWKH...