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On the Pragmatics of Communication (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought): Jorgen Habermas

This anthology brings together for the first time, in revised or new translation, ten essays that present the main concerns of Jürgen Habermas's program in formal pragmatics. Its aim is to convey a sense of the overall purpose of Habermas's linguistic investigations while introducing the reader to their specific details.

Habermas's program in formal pragmatics fulfills two main functions. First, it serves as the theoretical underpinning for his theory of communicative action, a crucial element in his theory of society. Second, it contributes to ongoing philosophical discussion of problems concerning meaning, truth, rationality, and action.

By the "pragmatic" dimensions of language, Habermas means those pertaining specifically to the employment of sentences in utterances. He makes clear that "formal" is to be understood in a tolerant sense to refer to the rational reconstruction of general intuitions or competences. Formal pragmatics, then, aims at a systematic reconstruction of the intuitive linguistic knowledge of competent subjects as it is used in everyday communicative practices.

Review: An Ideal Speech Situation!

While reading of On the Pragmatics of Communication, I enjoyed a mild but indispensable conceptual breakthrough: viz., that in order to grasp thoroughly Habermas's notion of "universal pragmatics" and its relationship to linguistics, one must first understand the tenets of the later Wittgenstein's (i.e., Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations) thought, particularly his metaphor of the fly in the bottle. Specifically, Wittgenstein asks, "What is your aim in philosophy?" (ý309), and preemptively supplies the answer himself: "To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle" (ý309).1 I understand this metaphor to be an elegant refiguration of the same idea underlying The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which the second edition of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy defines as "the statement in quantum mechanics, formulated by Werner Heisenberg, that it is impossible to measure two properties of a quantum object, such as its position and momentum (or energy and time), simultaneously with infinite precision."2 A simple substitution of terms makes the relevance of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to Wittgenstein's "fly" metaphor much clearer. If the fly in Wittgenstein's metaphor is analogous to the quantum object in the above definition, then it stands to reason that the former's presence in the bottle represents its more precise isolation in space, its position. Thus it is more amenable to observation; one can gather quite an accurate sense of the physical features of the fly. However, because the fly is isolated from its natural environment and is moreover constrained to such a small, artificial and featureless environment, i.e., "the fly-bottle," one cannot get an accurate sense of the fly's function, to which one presumes that the fly's physiology is suited. In other words, if the notion of the fly's "fly-ness" depends on understanding both its form and function, then liberating the fly from its environmental rarefaction in the bottle appears to be the only way of achieving a more precise understanding of "fly-ness." Chances are, however, that upon its liberation from the fly-bottle, the fly would quickly escape our observation of it. Therefore, both the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Wittgenstein's "fly" metaphor reveal a certain economy of perspective intrinsic to empirical observation.

For Wittgenstein, then, philosophy is the bottling of the fly, because the former seeks to isolate human concerns and practices from the context in which they are articulated, i.e., the world, which is "the totality of possible states of affairs" in Wittgenstein's philosophical idiom. For instance, the "proposition" of logical positivism is in essence an alembicated version of a given utterance used in a workaday context, and is therefore submitted to an evaluation (e.g., of its truth content) which in itself has no relation to a workaday context, but rather to the highly specialized and jargon-laden philosophical context of logic. In so doing, philosophy "bottles up" an utterance and thereby effectively estranges it functionality. Therefore, it is incumbent upon every philosopher to avoid this tendency, which Wittgenstein considers to be philosophy's failing.

Enter Habermas. His theory of "universal pragmatics" strikes me as an attempt to overcome the limitations imposed on philosophy by Wittgenstein. Ever mindful of the philosophy's ineluctable tendency to alembicate the meaning of utterances, Habermas endeavors-to extend the "fly metaphor"-to discover a bottle large enough to accommodate both observer and observed. To accomplish this goal, he privileges the human impulse to sociality, and thus never interrogates the validity of this tendency, because to do so is to risk "bottling up" sociality from the context it instantiates, i.e., "the lifeworld." I understand Habermas's notion of the lifeworld as a mediating and mediated conceptual aggregate (complex of ideologies?), similar to Althusser's notion of humankind's "lived relation to the real," which is so multifarious and protean (i.e., historically contingent [in a non-metanarrativistic sense]) that one cannot cognize but a minute fraction of its totality at any given time. It is also quite similar to Wittgenstein's concept of the largely inscrutable, ever-shifting "background," as well as to Wilhelm Reich's concept of the "work-democratic."

Habermas has a lot at stake in privileging the human propensity for sociality: for him, human endeavor cannot be the, discursively palliated (concealed?) but fundamentally Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes that such poststructuralist thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jean-Franýois Lyotard assume it to be. Human affairs must instead be a negotiable and coordinated effort in the first instance. Any perversion of this cooperative endeavor, resulting from the naked self-interest of one of the participants or otherwise, is parasitic upon the initial cooperation, and is therefore a posteriori, not a priori, as Foucault et al would have it.

Habermas certainly has a lot at stake, but his philosophical gambit, i.e., privileging sociality, is cagily pragmatist in nature. That is, Habermas refrains from invoking any sort of metaphysics; rather, he simply adopts human sociality as his fundamental presupposition because of its relative incontestability: one cannot deny that humans tend to be social, for whatever reason (beware the "bottle" of Hobbesian depredation!), and that sociality necessarily requires a modicum of sociality from among its members, again, for whatever reason. Therefore, sociality as a fundamental supposition has tremendous explanatory power-Jamesian "cash value," as it were-when applied to phenomenological concerns such as the form and function of language.

An interesting implication: dismissing Habermas's theory of "universal pragmatics" (rest assured that I am well aware of the oxymoronic nature of the terms) in favor of postructuralist assumptions, or vice versa, is itself a pragmatist proposition inasmuch as one must inevitably resort to evaluating either set of assumptions for their respective "cash values," and find in favor of one or the other with no more metaphysical certainty than ever-unless of course one goes back to "the bottle.

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