Brandom on Habermas

“Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 280).

I’m reviving a draft that earlier I put aside, in favor of first saying something about Habermas based on his own writings.

Habermas contrasts what he calls communicative reason with the instrumental reason that is oriented toward utility. Communicative reason aims at consensus on meanings and validity claims. Brandom recounts that when he was a brand-new assistant professor, his senior colleague Richard Rorty was more excited by Habermas’s early work Knowledge and Human Interests than by the publication of Rorty’s own Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Habermas preceded Brandom in combining influences from German Idealism, American pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. He was one of the first to bridge the gap between Continental and analytic philosophy. Like Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom, he is a strong defender of modernity, which he understands in terms of Enlightenment values of reason, freedom, and equality. He has also been very involved with questions of democratic politics. His work emphasizes what Aristotle would call our status as talking animals, and the discursive character of reason. He combines a Kantian concern for ethical universality, rules, and deontology or moral necessity, with strong concern for intersubjectivity and the possible sharing of meaning.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas aims for what he calls a “formal” pragmatics and semantics, and his ethics seem to have a somewhat formal character as well.

For Habermas, there are three equally primordial kinds of meaning-critical validity: propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity of expression. He gives a specialized sense to “illocutionary” speech acts, as closely aligned with his idea of communicative reason. Speakers make validity claims in order to reach understanding. In making assertions, we implicitly guarantee that we can provide good reasons for them, and allow that hearers are free to either accept or reject what we said. This aspect is very close to Brandom.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas seems to have no idea of explaining propositional truth in terms of normativity. More conventionally, he treats truth and normativity as parallel concerns. This seems to go along with his more formal emphasis.

Habermas has an old-fashioned, stereotypical view of Hegel. In his recent Also a History of Philosophy, in passing he literally refers to Hegel as reviving the One of Plotinus. But Brandom credits Habermas as having first given him eyes to see the highly original ideas that he now sees in Hegel.

Brandom sees Habermas as applying detailed linguistic analysis from analytic philosophy to questions of social criticism: “A central pillar of [Habermas’s edifice] is his transposition of the issue raised by the unmaskers of ideology into a thoroughly linguistic key” (Brandom, “Towards Reconciling Two Heroes: Habermas and Hegel”, p. 32, emphasis in original).

“The appraisal and legitimation of social practices and institutions has become in the modern era a wholly discursive affair. That entails that unmasking an ideology is a metadiscursive matter of diagnosing systematic distortions in discursive structures: deformations of communicative action. These will have, to be sure, broadly pragmatic as well as narrowly semantic manifestations. But it is principally to the language we speak, the concepts we use, and the social-practical context in which we do so that we must look to understand distinctively modern forms of unfreedom, as well as for the tools to combat them” (ibid).

“If understanding the relations between reason and ideology is one of the principal philosophical tasks of our age, then there is indeed a case to be made for a suitably broadened (especially along the pragmatic dimension) philosophy of language as ‘first philosophy'” (ibid).

“Kant had the idea (and Hegel follows him down this path) that a post-theological conception of distinctively moral reasons could be built out of the idea that (to put the point in [Brandom’s] terms rather than [Kant’s]) certain principles of conduct make explicit, in the form of rules, normative commitments that are implicit in our engaging in discursive practices at all — simply in our talking and thinking, judging and acting intentionally” (p. 33).

It seems reasonable to apply the term “post-theological” to Brandom’s account of normativity. I think that for Kant though, it is better to speak simply of morality and ethics as having a basis that is independent from theology.

What Habermas calls universal pragmatics seems to refer to the elaboration of these meta-level commitments that are implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all. These include principles like the responsibility to be able to explain why we assert what we do, if we are asked; that the better argument should not be overruled; that everyone potentially affected by something should have a voice with regard to it; and so on. Similar principles were earlier articulated by Gadamer in his work on the ethical significance of Platonic dialogue. Brandom acknowledges a major debt to Habermas, and in Tales of the Mighty Dead he references Gadamer as the 20th-century standard-bearer for hermeneutics.

“One of the central ideas that binds the various German Idealists together is that the implicit structural pragmatic commitments that form the necessary background against which any semantically significant ground-level commitments (whether cognitive or practical) can be undertaken form in principle the basis for a philosophical ethics and a corresponding politics. It has been one of Habermas’s tasks in our own time to transpose that thought into a linguistic key, and to develop it in the light of the results of philosophy’s more than century-long fascination with language. This is his discourse ethics, and his idea for founding political theory on an account of the nature of communicative action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brandom and Habermas both stand out from the mainstream in arguing that pragmatics or language use takes precedence over semantics. But where Habermas calls for formal pragmatics and formal (verificationist rather than model-theoretic) semantics, Brandom develops a normative pragmatics and a material-inferential semantics.

“The route that Habermas establishes from a theory of communicative action in general to political theory turns on the assertion within that base theory of a necessary and essential connection between discursive meaningfulness and the making of validity claims that must under various circumstances be redeemed, vindicated, or justified in order to achieve their effect. The distinctive kind of authority speech acts claim comes with a correlative justificatory responsibility. The idea is that the notion of ‘meaning’ that is a principal topic of semantics cannot be understood apart from practices of justifying, of asking for and offering justifications or reasons, which are a principal topic of pragmatics” (p. 35, emphasis in original).

“Habermas has shown how much can be done with these two ideas: Thinking of discursive practice in terms of a distinctive kind of normative practical significance characteristic of speech acts as such, and thinking of semantics methodologically as a kind of explanatory auxiliary in the service of an account of the proprieties of the use of linguistic expressions, which is pragmatics” (ibid).

These are two ideas of Habermas that Brandom strongly endorses. Brandom turns to his own theses about Kant and Hegel, which put normativity and ethical inquiry at the root of an account of knowledge and truth.

“Kant’s deepest and most original idea is that what distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. ‘Responsibility’, ‘commitment’, ‘endorsement’, ‘authority’—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (pp. 35-36).

Perhaps Kant’s greatest lesson is this questioning of naive notions of self, “subject”, and consciousness. This stands in sharp contrast to the one-sided readings of Kant as making “the” turn to “the” subject. This vital point has been obscured by the neo-Kantian and other commentators who aimed to make Kant as compatible as possible with empiricism and early 20th-century philosophy of science.

I am broadly sympathetic to Macintyre’s critique of deontology and rule-based ethics, but I think Hegel already showed the way out of this, and did it in a better way. This issue should be approached in terms of something like Robert Pippin’s highlighting of the simultaneous Aristotelian and Kantian elements in Hegel, rather than in terms of the theistically modified medieval Aristotelianism that Macintyre advocates.

Brandom summarizes, “Our freedom for Kant consists in our authority to make ourselves responsible for judgments and actions (thinkings and doings). This is a normative characterization of freedom” (p. 36).

One of Brandom’s most valuable contributions has been the explanation of Kantian freedom in a way that is not only not voluntaristic, but also does not attach freedom ontologically to “the” subject. Brandom is at one with Habermas and Gadamer in distinguishing what I call ethical reason from modern-style causal explanation.

Reason arises “freely” in a normative and reflective interpretive context. It is not caused to conclude as it does by any physical cause. Neither does it trace to a supernatural cause.

“Rationality in this sense does not consist in knowers and agents generally, or even often, having good reasons for what they believe and do. It consists rather just in being in the space of reasons, in the sense that knowers and agents count as such insofar as they exercise their normative authority to bind themselves by norms, undertake discursive commitments and responsibilities, and so make themselves liable to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. In particular, they are liable to assessment as to the goodness of their reasons for exercising their authority as they do, for taking on those specific commitments and responsibilities. Whatever the actual causal antecedents of their judgings and intentional doings, Kantian knowers and agents are obliged (committed) to have reasons for their judgments and actions” (ibid).

Brandom stresses Hegel’s ideal of the symmetry of authority and responsibility.

“Hegel takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility (what show up in the Phenomenology as ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’) are socially instituted statuses. The attitudes and practices that institute them are recognitive attitudes and practices: taking or treating each other in practice as authoritative and responsible. Further, authority and responsibility are co-ordinate statuses. Authority and responsibility come together. (There is no independence that does not incorporate a moment of dependence — essentially, and not just accidentally.) For the context in which such statuses are non-defectively instituted is one of reciprocal or mutual recognition. Each attempted exercise of authority is at the same time implicitly a petitioning for recognition of it as valid, legitimate, or warranted, as one the author is entitled to. And that is to say that attempting to exercise authority is always also making oneself responsible to those one recognizes as authorized (entitled, perhaps obliged) to validate it by recognizing it in turn” (pp. 36-37).

“Correspondingly, an attempt to make oneself responsible, even in judgment and intentional action, is authorizing others to hold one responsible. Hegel’s fundamental idea [is] that self-conscious individual subjects and their communities (“social substance”) are alike synthesized by reciprocal recognition. This is Hegel’s way of making sense of the connection between meaningful speech acts and validity claims, between discursive authority and discursive responsibility that is at the center of Habermas’s account of communicative action and discursive practice. Seen the other way around, Habermas’s theory of communicative action is his account of the practices Hegel talks about under the heading of ‘reciprocal recognition’” (p. 37, emphasis added).

Once again, the very act of making an assertion at all already authorizes others to question it, and to hold us responsible for it. This point is common to Brandom, Habermas, and Gadamer.

“Hegelian Geist [spirit] is the normative realm of all our normatively articulated performances, practices, and institutions, and everything that makes them possible and that they make possible” (ibid). “It is socially instituted by reciprocal recognition… That normative discursive realm in which we live, and move, and have our being is itself instituted by recognitive relations that are constitutively mutual, reciprocal, and symmetric” (ibid).

Hegel’s Geist is ethical and cultural, not metaphysical or mystical.

“In particular cases, asymmetric recognitive relations are intelligible” (ibid). “But these are in principle derivative cases, parasitic on the universal normative medium of discursive practices” (ibid).

“Denizens of this realm, the speakers and agents who are the only candidates for exhibiting more specialized, derivative, institutional normative statuses, are, once again, rational in the normative sense of exercising rational authority and taking on rational responsibility — being permanently liable to distinctive kinds of assessment and appraisal — rather than in the descriptive sense that addresses how good they are at doing what they are responsible for doing or vindicating the sorts of authority they claim” (ibid).

Brandom expresses his debt to Habermas.

“When it is described in these terms, I hope it is clear that Habermas is the foremost contemporary theorist of Hegelian Geist, the one who has taught us the most about its fine structure, the theorist who has best found an idiom for making explicit the commitments that are implicit in our being discursive normative creatures” (ibid).

Habermas himself seems to take the Young Hegelians’ hostile caricatures of Hegel as the last word on the subject. The 19th-century Right and Left Hegelians give opposite values to what are in fact broadly similar misunderstandings of Hegel.

“One issue arises from what I take to be a misreading of Hegel that is evident in some recent German interpretations that understand Hegelian Geist as a kind of divine mind, a social subject that is self-conscious in something like a Cartesian sense. It is a development of the right-wing Hegelian picture of the Absolute as a kind of super-individual thinker (an interpretation propounded already by Hegel’s student Gabler). This reading was very influential for the British Idealist admirers of Hegel, and remains part of the popular conception of Hegel’s thought among non-philosophers. Some of Henrich’s students (Kramer, Düsing) seem to have drawn the conclusion from his brilliant reading of Fichte that Hegel must take as a central theme the self-reflective structure of individual self-consciousness. But one of Hegel’s decisive insights is expressed in his non-mentalistic, indeed non-psychological, normative conception of self-consciousness as a social achievement that takes place largely outside the skull of the particular organism who becomes a self-conscious individual by entering into recognitive relations with others whose practical attitudes are equally essential to the institution of that status. (Already in the 1920’s the neo-Kantian Hartmann had emphasized that ‘The founding intuition of German Idealism is: “The Absolute is reason. It is not consciousness”‘. ) This Hegel is Habermasian; the Hegel who is a ‘philosopher of consciousness’ in the sense of Fichte’s or Schelling’s ‘absolute subjectivity’ is not” (p. 38).

This is a really key point that is still often lost sight of today: “reason, not consciousness”.

“Hegel does think that there can be a fully adequate, final set of logical, metasemantic, metaphysical concepts — the organ of a distinctive kind of philosophical self-consciousness that permits us to say and think what it is we are doing when we say or think anything about ourselves and our world. But he does not think that bringing those concept-determining activities and structures out into the daylight of explicitness — achieving the alarmingly titled state of “Absolute Knowing” that both the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic aim to produce — settles what ground-level concepts we ought to have, or the conceptual commitments, theoretical and practical, that we ought to adopt. Inquiry and deliberation must go on as before, with the sole difference that now we know what it is we are doing when we inquire and deliberate” (ibid, emphasis added).

Inquiry and deliberation must go on as before. There is no magic, no sleight of hand.

“All that [Hegel] thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings” (p. 39).

“There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic [truth-oriented] sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions” (p. 40, emphasis in original).

Consider the trajectory of a life, or the evaluation of its Aristotelian “happiness”.

“That is what distinguishes the normative notion of ‘freedom’ Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about” (ibid).

That is to say, contrary to a few confusing remarks by Kant, the freedom relevant to ethics is not to be understood in terms of a special kind of causality.

“Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reason’s march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of self-consciousness Hegel calls ‘Absolute knowing'” (ibid, emphasis in original).

We are the agents of reason in history. This has nothing to do with infallibility, but rather with our status as participants in dialogue.

“Of course, no retrospective story one tells can succeed in rationalizing all of the actual contingent applications of determinate concepts that it inherits. (That is what in the final form of reciprocal recognition, we must confess, and trust that subsequent judges/concept-appliers can forgive us for, by finding the line we drew between what could and what could not be rationalized as itself the valid expression of a prior norm.) And no such story is final, because the norms it discerns must inevitably, when correctly applied, lead to incompatible commitments, which can only be reconciled by attributing different contents to the concepts” (ibid).

Brandom argues for the very strong position that no historically achieved concrete truth is permanently stable. This has a liberating potential. It means that every received truth and every authority must be subject to questioning.

“It is open to us to repackage those kinds of authority and responsibility in accord with the best lessons we can draw from the history and tradition we are able to discern. This is an instance of the fundamental Hegelian lesson about the ultimately social character of normative statuses, which are understood as instituted by recognitive practices and articulated by recognitive relations. This insight marks a fundamental advance over Kant’s understanding of the normativity he rightly saw as constitutive of our sapience. And it is an insight as fundamental to Habermas’s thought as it is to Hegel’s” (p. 41).