Bodily felt integrity: the anarchic core of communication in Jürgen Habermas’s democratic thought

ABSTRACT

Today, deep divisions run through many societies and their political discourses on contested issues such as populism, nationalism, immigration, and integration. Such divisions strengthen already existing polarizations created by various dynamics between reason and affect. In this article, I, therefore, introduce the term anarchic core of communication. In doing so, I contribute an alternative reading of Jürgen Habermas’s democratic thought. Here, I show the significance of both disagreements and feelings in his works. I depart, then, from those Habermasians and non-Habermasians claiming that Habermas appeals only to consensus and rationality. Within this Habermasian framework, therefore, I reconstruct what I conceptualize as the moral ideal of bodily felt integrity. This is a threshold above which not even the anarchic core should be morally accepted to misrecognize individuals’ embodied dignity. In result, I propose that my idea of bodily felt integrity is relevant to judge how much anarchic communication societies can recognize and remain democracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Jürgen Habermas
• democracy
• anarchic core of communication
• disagreements
• feelings
• bodily felt integrity
• deep divisions

Acknowledgements

I thank Stephen K. White, Lasse Thomassen, Christian F. Rostbøll, Jonas Jakobsen, Øjvind Larsen, Mikael Carleheden, Rasmus Willig, Sofia Näsström, the journal’s associate editor Lars Tønder, and the journal’s anonymous referees for their suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Philosophy and Social Science Colloquium in Prague (2016), at CAPS (Centre for Anthropological, Political, and Sociological Theory) at the University of Copenhagen (2016), and the conference Active Citizenship Today: Discourses, Conditions, and Contestations at the University of Tromsø (2016). I thank these audiences for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 White and Farr identify in Habermas an ‘embodied appeal to a universal moral audience’ which ‘responds to what is experienced as an existential harm’ to a ‘moral-political space being available that honors this value of the morally equal voice of each’ and they ‘folds [human dignity and reason] together with a more conflicted and uncertain, but often courageous, taking of a stand against what one experiences as a deep wrong of some sort’ (White and Farr 2011, 2, 7, 9, 20). Although this picture may resemble my own conceptualization of a bodily felt integrity in Habermas, I believe that White and Farr lack my comprehensive immanent reconstruction of the linkage between the anarchic core, moral feelings, and a bodily situated dignity.

2 Although both Patchen Markell and I compare Habermas to Arendt, I depart from Markell’s exclusive focus on plurality in favour of my emphasis on natality (see Markell 1997).

3 Habermas uses the terms anarchic and anarchistic interchangeably and apparently without explaining if there is a difference between these notions. I take these notions to be synonymous.

4 Habermas also refers to terms such as ‘yes/no response’; ‘yes/no positions’; ‘yes/no decisions’ (Habermas 1984, 107 f., 113–115; 1987, 16, 31, 73, 146, 184–185; 1992, 445; 1994, 66, 86; 1996, 324, 427; Habermas 1998, 423; 1999, 100 f., 112, 140; 2005, 99–100; Habermas 2008, 16, 50, 51, 82, 86, 157). I understand these notions to be synonymous.

5 Despite Habermas’s interest in the phenomenon of e.g. feelings, emotions, and affects, he apparently neither clearly defines these various concepts nor systematically explains their role in his ovoeure. Although being outside of the scope of this article to do so, I believe that such an exploration is worthwhile to undertake. For attempts at doing that, see e.g. Benhabib 1986 and Rehg 1994.

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Odin Lysaker

Odin Lysaker is a Professor of Ethics at the University of Agder and he holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oslo. Lysaker’s research interests cover moral philosophy, social philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of nature. His publications include Ecological sensibility: Recovering Axel Honneth’s philosophy of nature in the age of climate crisis (Critical Horizon, 2020) and Nowhere home: The waiting of vulnerable child refugees (Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture, eds. Margareta Dancus, Maria Karlsson, and Mats Hyvönen, 2020).