Again we come to the difficult topic of modernity. In company with the pragmatists Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom, Jürgen Habermas speaks of modernization as a progressive rationalization, carrying forward the spirit of the Enlightenment. But in this area Habermas principally draws on the great early 20th century neo-Kantian founding father of sociology Max Weber, who further analyzed this as a “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of (our understanding of) the world. Literally, the German means something like “de-magicking”.

Neither Weber nor Habermas sees the rationalization associated with modernity in terms of a simple global opposition between science and religion. Following Weber, Habermas treats rationalization as a development within the world’s religious traditions, in which religion itself moves progressively away from magical thinking and supernaturalism, and toward universalizing ethics. This is at the same time a movement away from particularism, toward greater degrees of universalism. However, I don’t think Habermas adequately recognizes the extent to which such an approach is already anticipated by Hegel.

I would not want to lose sight of the poetic and artistic kinds of “enchantment” that in no way depend on irrational belief in the supernatural. Such artistic, musical, or dramatic expression may itself be of high spiritual import. As Habermas also points out, while it is appropriate to condemn superstition and prejudice, the metaphorical and indeed spiritual “magic” associated with poetry, music, and other artistic creativity need be in no way contrary to reason.

As background for his development in Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas briefly surveys some of the more influential 20th-century accounts of modernity. He holds that the most thorough and well-rounded investigations are still those conducted a century ago by Max Weber. In distinction from cultural anthropology, sociology defined itself as an account of specifically modern society.

“Among the classical figures of sociology, Max Weber is the only one who broke with both the premises of the philosophy of history and the basic assumptions of evolutionism and who nonetheless wanted to conceive of the modernization of old-European society as the result of a universal-historical process of rationalization. He opened up rationalization processes to an encompassing empirical investigation without reinterpreting them in an empiricist manner so that precisely the aspects of rationality of societal learning processes would disappear” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 143).

That empirical investigations need not be conducted in a narrowly empiricist manner strikes me as very true. One hint of where he is going with this is his interest in applying the expansive outlook of the developmental cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget on children’s learning to the understanding of social processes of rationalization. Brandom has similarly highlighted the social importance of an account of learning from our errors.

I don’t believe most of the stories about so-called Western rationalism. It is just too vague a category, an uncritical joining together of disparate things. It is highly unhistorical to assume a direct cultural continuity from classical Greece to Western Europe. In Roman times, Greece was considered part of the East. Greek learning was introduced to Europe only in the high middle ages. I maintain that the birth of ethical reason and the extraordinary flowering of culture in classical Greece are not the unique heritage of the West, but a part of the heritage of humanity. That said, I still think Habermas makes a good case for the seriousness of Weber’s approach to this “historiographical” question.

“Weber analyzes the process of disenchantment in the history of religion, which is said to have fulfilled the necessary internal conditions for the appearance of Occidental rationalism; in doing so he employs a complex, but largely unclarified concept of rationality. On the other hand, in his analysis of societal rationalization as it makes its way in the modern period, he allows himself to be guided by the restrictive idea of purposive rationality [Zweckrationalität]” (ibid, emphasis in original).

The history of such disenchantment has been widely interpreted as a global, polar conflict and inverse proportionality between “reason” and “religion”. This makes both reason and religion way too monolithic.

In comparison with this unfortunate state of affairs, Habermas’s account, grounded in Weber, is highly valuable for its relatively less monolithic character. He treats “disenchantment” as part of a progressive development of world religions themselves. (In his recent Also a History of Philosophy, he adopts Karl Jaspers’s notion of the “axial age” — the thesis that in several disparate parts of the world, around roughly 500 BCE, religions simultaneously became less oriented to myth, magic, and ritual, and more oriented toward ethics and something resembling metaphysics. Habermas thinks that recognizing this positive role of the great world religions on a long time scale is important as a counterweight to eurocentrism.)

“According to Marx, the rationalization of society takes place directly in the development of productive forces, that is, in the expansion of empirical knowledge, the improvement of production techniques, and the increasingly effective mobilization, qualification, and organization of socially useful labor power. On the other hand, relations of production, the institutions that express the distribution of social power and regulate a differential access to the means of production, are revolutionized only under the pressure of rationalization of productive forces. Max Weber views the institutional framework of the capitalist economy and the modern state in a different way — not as relations of production that fetter the potential for rationalization, but as subsystems of purposive-rational action in which Occidental rationalism develops at a societal level. Of course, he is afraid that bureaucratization will lead to a reification of social relationships, which will stifle motivational incentives to a rational conduct of life. Horkheimer and Adorno, and later Marcuse, interpret Marx in this Weberian perspective” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 144).

“On the one hand, Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno identify societal rationalization with expansion of the instrumental and strategic rationality of action contexts; on the other hand, they all have a vague notion of an encompassing societal rationality — whether in the concept of an association of free producers, in the historical model of an ethically rational conduct of life, or in the idea of fraternal relations with a resurrected nature — and it is against this that they measure the relative position of empirically described processes of rationalization…. The action concepts that Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno take as basic are not complex enough to capture all those aspects of social actions to which societal rationalization can attach…. The rationalization of action orientations is not the same as the expansion of the ‘rationality’, that is, complexity of action systems” (pp. 144-145).

“However, I would like to make clear at the start that Weber took up the rationality theme in a scientific context that had already discharged the mortgages from philosophy of history and the nineteenth-century evolutionism encumbered by it” (p. 145).

“As sociology developed in the wakes of Scottish moral philosophy …, it found the theme of societal rationalization already at hand” (ibid).

“The most important motifs of the philosophy of history are contained in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind of 1794. The model of rationality is provided by the mathematical sciences of nature. Their core is Newtonian physics; it has discovered the ‘true method of studying nature’…. It becomes a paradigm for knowledge in general because it follows a method that raises the knowledge of nature above the scholastic debates of philosophers and reduces all previous philosophy to the status of mere opinion” (ibid).

“Condorcet wants to conceive the history of mankind on the model of the history of modern science, that is, as a process of rationalization…. The advances of the human mind are not limited by a telos inherent in it…. The human mind owes its advances not to approaching a telos, but to the unimpeded operation of its intelligence, that is, to a learning mechanism…. The concept of knowledge developed on the model of the natural sciences devalues, as if with one blow, inherited religious, philosophical, moral, and political opinions” (p. 146).

For me, the telos of a rational being is not a predefined limit or fixed configuration, but an endlessly branching source of alternatives that have some focus, but always have a hypothetical character.

Here we see Habermas’s usual negative view of teleology. For the most part, he only considers the false, non-Aristotelian kind of teleology that was so eloquently denounced by Spinoza. There is one passage later on that I previously quoted, where he does give the word telos a positive sense, in speaking of shared understanding as the inherent telos of human speech. The ambitious norm to which he gives voice is the idea that mature humans learn to think for themselves, and furthermore naturally collaborate in so doing.

“In the battle against the traditional powers of church and state, enlightenment requires the courage to make use of one’s own reason, that is, autonomy or maturity” (p. 147).

Here we are on the ground of Kantian autonomy. Habermas uses his summary of Condorcet to develop the social implications of rationalization.

“Like Kant, Condorcet sees the progress of civilization along the lines of a republic that guarantees civil liberties, an international order that establishes a perpetual peace, a society that accelerates economic growth and technical progress and does away with or compensates for social inequalities. Among other things, he expects ‘the complete annihilation of the prejudices that have brought about an inequality of rights between the sexes’; he expects the elimination of criminality and degeneration, the conquest of misery and sickness” (p. 148).

“This conception is representative of eighteenth-century philosophy of history, even if it could only reach such a pointed formulation from a contemporary of the French Revolution. Precisely this radical quality makes the cracks in the type of thinking characteristic of the philosophy of history stand out” (ibid).

“Victorian theories of social evolution can be characterized in a simplified manner as follows: They questioned neither the rationalism nor the universalism of the Enlightenment and were thus not yet sensitive to the dangers of Eurocentrism; they repeated the naturalistic fallacies of the philosophy of history, albeit less blatantly…. From the standpoint of the history of science, the situation in which Max Weber took up the rationalization thematic again and turned it into a problem that could be dealt with sociologically was defined by the critique of these nineteenth-century theories of evolution” (pp. 152-153).

Habermas points out a positive role of neo-Kantianism, particularly its perspective that a seriously scientific orientation does not require the abnegation of all serious value judgment.

“Weber himself stands in the tradition of Southwest German Neo-Kantianism…. Beyond its dualistic philosophy of science, Neo-Kantianism gained special significance for the critique of evolutionist approaches in the social sciences because of its theory of value. It brought to bear at the methodological level a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, between statements of fact and judgments of value, and in practical philosophy it emphatically criticized all varieties of ethical naturalism. This is the background to Weber’s position in the controversy over value judgments in social science. He is critical of concepts of progress and evolution precisely when they play an implicitly normative role in social science” (p. 154).

“Max Weber adopted in this controversy a cautiously universalist position…. He mistrusts the rationalization processes set loose and detached from ethical value orientations — so much so that in his theory of rationalization, science and technology forfeit their paradigmatic status. Weber’s research is focused on the moral-practical bases of the institutionalization of purposive-rational action” (p. 155).

This is an interesting variant. The “purposive” rationality associated with means-ends calculations is here circumscribed by a “moral-practical” layer. This falls short of the full view that ethics is the one self-bootstrapping discipline, and still gives an elevated role to efficient causality. But it puts important qualifications on any claim that efficient causality comes unconditionally first.

“Weber regards not only science but autonomous art as a form of manifestation of cultural rationalization…. Aesthetically imbued counterculture belongs, together with science and technology on the one hand, and with modern legal and moral representations on the other, to the whole of rationalized culture. The complex that is taken to be central to the rise of modern society is, however, this ethical and juridical rationalism” (pp. 161-162, emphasis in original).

“This ethic is distinguished, from a formal point of view, in that it is based on principles and is universalistic. The soteriological religiosity of congregations grounds an abstract ethic of brotherliness that, with ‘one’s neighbor’ as a point of reference, supersedes the separation between in-group and out-group morality…. From the perspective of a formal ethic based on general principles, legal norms (as well as the creation and application of laws) that appeal to magic, sacred traditions, revelation, and the like are devalued” (p. 162, emphasis in original).

“Weber sees in this ‘a very general, and for the history of religion very important consequence of the development of innerworldly and otherworldly values toward rationality, towards conscious endeavor, and towards sublimation by knowledge‘” (p. 164, emphasis in original).

“Weber starts with a broad concept of ‘technique’ [Technik] in order to make clear that the aspect of regulated employment of means, in a very abstract sense, is relevant to the rationality of behavior…. Every rule or system of rules that permits reliably reproducible action, whether methodical or customary, that can be predicted by participants in interaction and calculated from the perspective of the observer, is a technique in this sense. ‘Thus there are techniques for every conceivable type of action: techniques of prayer, of asceticism, of thought and research, of memorizing, of education, of exercising political or hierocratic domination, of administration, of making love, of making war, of musical performances, of sculpture and painting, of arriving at legal decisions. And all of these are capable of the widest variation in degree of rationality” (p. 169).

Again we have an ambivalence. Technique clearly has a relation to efficient causality, but Weber greatly broadens its meaning.

“We can speak of techniques in this sense whenever the ends that can be causally realized with their help are conceived as elements of the objective world…. To the conditions of purposive action there belongs not only an instrumental rationality of means, but a rationality of choice in setting ends selected in accord with values. From this standpoint an action can be rational only to the degree that it is not blindly controlled by affects or guided by sheer tradition…. ‘Actions are purely value-rational when the agents, regardless of foreseeable consequences, act according to their convictions of what seems to them to be required by duty, honor, beauty, a religious call, piety, or the importance of some “cause”‘,” (pp.170-171, emphasis in original).

Habermas speaks of the historical advent on a world scale of what he calls “religions of conviction” (as opposed to a primacy of myth, magic, and ritual) as providing the basis for what he calls an “ethics of conviction” (as opposed to an ethics of obedience). He clearly sympathizes with the neo-Kantian critique of “enlightened self-interest” as an adequate basis for ethics.

“Interest positions change, whereas generalizable values are always valid for more than merely one type of situation. Utilitarianism does not take into account this categorical difference worked out by the neo-Kantians; it makes a vain attempt to reinterpret interest positions into ethical principles, to hypostasize purposive rationality itself as a value” (p. 172).

“Weber differentiates the concept of practical rationality from the three perspectives of employing means, setting ends, and being oriented to values. The instrumental rationality of an action is measured by effective planning of the application of means for given ends; the rationality of choice of an action is measured by the correctness of the calculation of ends in the light of precisely conceived values, available means, and boundary conditions; and the normative rationality of an action is measured by the unifying, systematizing power and penetration of the value standards and the principles that underlie action preferences” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This “rationality of choice” as an alternative to a sole focus on instrumental reasoning is a step in the right direction. I think, though, that ethical deliberation involves interpretive judgment, and not just “calculation in light of precisely conceived values”.

“When persons and groups generalize this type over time and across social spheres, Weber speaks of a methodical-rational conduct of life. And he sees the first historical approximation to this ideal type in the Protestant vocational asceticism of Calvinism and the early Puritan sects” (pp. 172-173, emphasis in original).

“The complex concept of practical rationality, which Weber introduces as an ideal type in connection with the methodical conduct of life in Protestant sects, is still partial” (p. 174).

Weber famously correlates capitalist economic rationality to Calvinist ethics. But he also sees the world history of religions in terms of a larger development toward reason and enlightenment. I will dwell more on the latter than on the former.

“On the one side, rationalized worldviews satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of formal-operational thought…. On the other side, however, rationalized worldviews also satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of a modern understanding of the world, which categorically presupposes the disenchantment of the world. Weber investigates this aspect of rationalization primarily in connection with the ‘ethical rationalization’ of religions of salvation. With regard to ‘all kinds of practical ethics that are systematically and unambiguously oriented to fixed goals of salvation’, Weber applies the term ‘rational’ (in the sense of a categorially disenchanted world) to ‘the differentiation between the normatively “valid” and the empirically given’. He sees in the overcoming of magical beliefs the essential achievement of the great world religions as regards rationalization” (p. 175).

Habermas has a rather high estimate of what formalism can achieve. He highlights Weber’s interesting suggestion that rationality has to do with distinguishing between normative validity and empirical givenness.

“We would fail from the start to grasp Weber’s theory of rationalization if we did not explain the sociological concept of an order of life [Lebensordnung] with the help of the philosophical concept of the actualization of value [Wertverwirklichung]” (p. 186).

Neither Weber nor Habermas is a fan of Hegel, but here we nonetheless meet one of the most important Hegelian concepts, that of processes of actualization.

“Weber could not have put forth a theory of rationalization had he not been convinced as a neo-Kantian that he could view processes of value actualization from the outside and from the inside simultaneously, that that he could investigate them both as empirical processes and as objectivations of knowledge, that he could tie together the aspects of reality and validity. The disenchantment of religious-metaphysical worldviews calls for an analysis of just this kind” (p. 187).

This seems to lay the ground for a happy convergence between this neo-Kantian view of value both from the outside and from the inside and a Hegelian view of processes of actualization.

“Weber speaks of normative validity and legitimacy when an order is subjectively recognized as binding. This recognition rests directly on ideas that harbor a potential for grounding and justification, and not on self-interest” (p. 189, emphasis in original).

Habermas directs our attention to questions of grounding and justification, and our handling and pursuit of them. This, he argues, will yield better sociological interpretation than the appeals to interests that are standard in the tradition derived from utilitarianism. He points out how Weber applies the standard neo-Kantian distinction between facts and norms to criticize different manifestations of ethical naturalism.

“In his exchange with Stammler, Weber, in the tradition of neo-Kantianism, stresses two differentiations: the difference between de facto regularities of behavior and normative regulations of conduct and the difference between the meaning of a validity claim and the fact of its actual recognition. Weber then criticizes the confusion of descriptive statements about accepted standards of evaluation and established norms with statements that recommend, express, or justify norms” (p. 191).

Next he returns to Austin’s notion of performativity, or doing things in language. When we do things in language, we are implicitly taking what I would call a second-person attitude. Habermas contrasts this with an “objectivating third-person attitude”. What we call facts are implicitly third-person expressions; by analogy, I want to suggest, interpretations are implicitly second-person expressions.

“Questions regarding the ideal validity of norms, whether for the theoretician or for those involved themselves, can be posed only in the performative attitude of an actor (or of a participant in discourse), whereas questions concerning the social ‘validity’ or currency of norms, questions of whether norms and values are or are not actually recognized within a group, have to be dealt with in the objectivating attitude of a third person. Corresponding to this at the semantic level is the distinction between value judgments and judgments of fact. Weber rightly insists that statements of the one type cannot be inferred from statements of the other type” (ibid).

In Habermas’s terminology, “social validity” is expressly defined as having an empirical, factual reference. But he also recognizes “ideal validity”, which applies to questions of value, and is linked to performative, second-person, doing-in-language.

“In this rational reconstruction of processes of cultural (and societal) rationalization, the social scientist can not confine himself to describing de facto views; he can understand the empirical power of convincing new ideas, and the devaluation, the loss of power to convince, of old ideas only to the degree that he becomes aware of the reasons or grounds with which the new ideas established themselves” (p. 192, emphasis in original).

We should seek not a history of ideas, but a history of reasons.

“In the analysis of the development of religious and metaphysical worldview, it is especially important to separate constellations of validity from constellations of causality” (p. 195).

The investigation of validity has to do with reasons, and is different from the investigation of causality. He looks beyond what Weber achieved.

“What first strikes one is that Weber limits the rationalization of worldview to the standpoint of ethical rationalization [Ethisierung]; he traces the development of a religiously grounded ethic of conviction — more generally, the development of posttraditional legal and moral representations…. But the rationalization of worldviews could have been traced equally well in two additional dimensions: Weber could also have investigated the transformation of cognitive and expressive elements looking back from the perspective of modern science and autonomous art” (p. 197).

From the point of view of debates about the furtherance of enlightenment, it is interesting that Weber does not follow the cliché that Habermas illustrated in referring to Condorcet above. Where Newtonian physics serves as role model and driver of enlightenment for Condorcet, Weber apparently applies instead a somewhat empirical variant of the Kantian primacy of practical reason.

“Rationalization is tied to a theme that is common to all world religions: the question of justifying the unequal distribution of life’s goods…. What is new is the idea that individual misfortune can be undeserved and that the individual may cherish the religious hope of being delivered from all evil, from sickness, need, poverty, even from death” (p. 201).

The unequal distribution of life’s goods is a serious ethical matter. I would however not at all call it a cornerstone of the world’s religions, though it is true that institutionalized religion has often played a less than admirable role in relation to matters of economic justice.

“The revaluation of individual suffering and the appearance of individual needs for salvation — which made the question of the ethical meaning of what is meaningless the point of departure for a religious thought pushing beyond local myths — did not fall from heaven. They are the result of learning processes that set in as the ideas of justice established in tribal societies clashed with the new reality of class societies” (ibid).

I have grave doubts about the trope of individual salvation, and about an “ethical meaning of what is meaningless”. I am doubtful about the applicability of Piagetian learning processes to transitions from tribal societies to class societies..

“The question of the justification of manifest injustices is not, however, treated as a purely ethical question; it is part of the theological, cosmological, metaphysical question concerning the constitution of the world as a whole. This world order is so conceived that ontic and normative questions are blended together” (p. 202).

I must be blunt here. On behalf of the universe, let me just say that there is no justification of manifest injustices. But I assume Habermas does not really mean that there is such justification, only that many or some people have come to believe that there is. I am surprised that he is not more clear about it though.

He mentions theodicy in this context, with very little detail. The Theodicy of Leibniz is actually a quite interesting work, in the tradition of the arguments of Proclus on the goodness of the world. To say that the world is good, and to say that particular manifest injustices are justified, are two entirely different things. Proper theodicy in the sense of Proclus and Leibniz is concerned with the former, and not with the latter.

Nonetheless I think Habermas is onto something important with this, when he says above that the justification of injustices is not treated as a purely ethical question, and that ontic and normative questions are blended together in the constitution of the world as a whole. Ideology falsely ontologizes contestable value judgments.

Neo-Kantianism often seems to work by developing contrasts. Habermas follows Weber’s development of what I would call a rather lame schematic contrast between Eastern and Western religion, although it was relatively enlightened for its time. Its limits are noticeable for example when in passing he repeats Weber’s summary judgment, without any explanation, that the practice of yoga is irrational.

“Weber contrasts above all the two basic conceptual strategies: one, the Occidental, employs the conception of a transcendent, personal Lord of Creation; the other strategy, widespread in the Orient, starts from the idea of an impersonal, noncreated cosmos. Weber also refers to these as transcendent and immanent conceptions of God…. In the one case, the believer seeks to win God’s favor, in the other to participate in the divine” (ibid).

This very coarse schematism can only be fitted to the case of Greek philosophy by classifying Greek philosophy as Eastern rather than Western. In the Roman world, Greece was in fact considered part of the East. With Aristotle and Plotinus, I too consider that the participatory view is rational and ethical, while the favor-seeking one is not.

“The religious foundation of ethics is also different in the two traditions; the hope for divine grace stands in contrast to the idea of self-deliverance through knowledge in Asiatic religiosity” (ibid).

This also is too simple. Speaking at this very shallow level, Buddhism classically denies the reality of the substantial self whose divinity Hinduism classically aims to recover. The notion of an (implicitly active) self-deliverance does not fit well with Taoism either. Some translations literally have the Tao Te Ching advocating “non-action”. In any case, the Tao seems closer to a notion of grace, even if its workings are impersonal.

“A negative attitude to the world first became possible through the dualism characteristic of the radical religions of salvation” (p. 203).

Following Weber, Habermas seems to consider a negative attitude toward the world to be an essential dimension of the rationalization that led to modernity. That is because Weber’s model for the origin of modernity is the ethical severity of Calvinism and Puritanism, which is taken to represent a negative attitude toward the world. By contrast, I would hold that there is nothing inherently progressive or ethical about a negative attitude toward the world, or dualism, or an emphasis on individual salvation.

“To be sure, Weber is inclined to assume that a world-affirming attitude can be maintained only where magical thought has not been radically overcome and where the stage of a dualistic (in the strict sense) interpretation of the world has not been reached. But he could have tested whether or not this was the case only through a comparison of Confucianism and Taoism with Greek philosophy; such a comparison could have determined whether radical disenchantment, a dualistic worldview structure, and affirmation of the world might not also go together. World rejection would then depend more on a radicalization of the thought of salvation, which led in religions of conviction to an accentuation of the dualism found in all world religions” (pp. 203-204).

“A negative attitude toward the world resulting from an orientation to a sacred value that transcends the world or is hidden in its innermost recesses is not, however, per se conducive to the ethical rationalization of life-conduct. World rejection leads to an objectivation of the world under ethical aspect only when it is connected with an active mode of life turned toward the world and does not lead to a passive turning away from the world” (p. 207).

Here we see Habermas is to an extent at least tentatively trying out possibilities. I appreciate his acknowledgement that a negative attitude toward the world is not a requirement. I also appreciate the explanatory role he gives to practical reason in a Kantian sense. On Hegelian grounds though, I am doubtful about the positive role he assigns to “objectivation of the world”.

“The essentials of a rationalizable worldview are as little lacking in Confucianism and Taoism as they are in Greek philosophy” (p. 210).

I would tend to agree, at least as far as Confucianism is concerned. Taoism is a more difficult case. Habermas sincerely wants to be both universal and definite, and to avoid a “Western” ethnocentrism. I think he deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt on that. But there are still real limits to what can be achieved with formal analysis of historical material at this level of generality.