From Consensus to Dissensus and Back Again: Habermas and Lyotard

Abstract

The modernism-versus-postmodernism divide has to a large extent emerged from major disagreements among philosophers of both sides whose engagement with one another’s work had otherwise been rather minimal and non-thorough. Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas’s debate has been a case in point. Despite the fact that Lyotard’s attack on Habermas’s philosophy was limited to a couple of ideas, Lyotardian followers have inflated the attack to a hasty and blanket dismissal of Habermas’s theory. As I argue in this article, this blocks the possibility of a more fruitful exchange and of a less polemical and more balanced response on the part of Habermasians. The article aims precisely to fill this gap by reconstructing some important points of a critical dialogical response to Lyotard’s philosophy along Habermasian lines yet beyond established polemics. These points concern assumptions on language that remain neglected especially in discussions of Habermas and Lyotard that give priority to the issue of legitimation. Hopefully, this reconstruction reinforces neither an impression that a dialogue between Lyotardians and Habermasians is reducible to a differend nor that the charge of a foundationalist “ideal speech situation” is as damning as critics of Habermas assume.

Notes

1. For an analysis of postmodern criticisms of consensus and a critique of Lyotard, see Cristopher Norris, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985).

2. Alain Badiou detects arrogance in the works of the critics of meta-narratives. See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 27ff. He argues that “it is never really modest to declare an ‘end’, a completion, a radical impasse. The announcement of the ‘End of the Grand Narratives’ is as immodest as the Grand narrative itself, the certainty of the “end of metaphysics” proceeds within the metaphysical element of certainty” (31).

3. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer whose constructive criticism regarding the topical character of an engagement with this debate gives me the opportunity to clarify why this debate is still significant.

4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 320.

5. Marianna Papastephanou, “Communicative Action and Philosophical Foundations: Comments on the Apel-Habermas Debate,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23.4 (1997): 41–71.

6. Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” Praxis International 4.1 (1984): 32–44.

7. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxv.

8. Paul Fairfield, “Habermas, Lyotard and Political Discourse,” Reason Papers, 58, at: http://reasonpapers.com/pdf/19/rp_19_5.pdf; accessed 3 October 2012.

9. See Emilia Steuermann, “Habermas versus Lyotard,” in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992).

10. Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” 40ff.

11. Hence Habermas’s critique of the pragmatist solidarity in “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning Stage 6,” in The Moral Domain, ed. Thomas E. Wren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 224–54.

12. Habermas, “Justice and Solidarity,” 16.

13. For reasons why speaking is not like playing a game of chess, see Donald Davidson, “Communication and Convention,” Synthese 59 (1984): 3–17. Although I would not agree with the conclusions Davidson draws, I find his remarks on language and chess games compatible with the “universal pragmatic” assertion that language cannot be adequately explained in terms of strategic action.

14. See Marianna Papastephanou, “The Idea of Emancipation from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Continental Philosophy Review 33.4 (2000): 395–415.

15. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996).

16. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 15.

17. For a development of this point, see Marianna Papastephanou, “Exploring Habermas’s Critical Engagement with Chomsky,” Human Studies 35.1 (2012): 51–76.

18. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), xiii.

19. See for instance, Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 14–24, and Truth and Ethics of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 11–15, 25–27, 49, 54, 107–8.

20. Albrecht Wellmer, “On the Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism,” Praxis International 4 (1984–85): 340.

21. Wellmer, “On the Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism,” 216.

22. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 168–69.

23. Marianna Papastephanou, “Communicative Ethics:The un-Kantian Side of a Post-Kantian Ethical Project,” Minerva e-journal 4 (November 2000), at: http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol4/ethics.html.

24. Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 148, 149.

25. Lyotard, The Differend, 37.

26. See Papastephanou, “Exploring Habermas’s Critical Engagement with Chomsky.”

27. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action 2 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 104; henceforth abbreviated as TCA2.

28. Lyotard, The Differend, 46.

29. “When the unknown party on the phone responds to the question of who he is with “I”, he makes himself known as an identifiable person, that is, as an entity that fulfills the identity conditions for a person , that cannot be identified merely through observation.” Habermas, TCA2, 104, 105.

30. As Lyotard writes explaining Kripke, “The proper name is a designator of reality, like a deictic; it does not, any more than a deictic, have a signification, it is not, any more than a deictic, the abridged equivalent of a definite description or of a bundle of descriptions” (The Differend, 39).

31. Lyotard, The Differend, 40.

32. Lyotard, The Differend, 43. The similarity between the function of the name (see also 44) and the function of the schema in Kant’s terms, justifies, in a way, Rorty’s criticism about the third dogma of empiricism (see above).

33. Wellmer, “On the Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism,” 358.

34. Lyotard, The Differend, xiii.

35. Lyotard, The Differend, xii.

36. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.

37. See K.-O. Apel, Analytic Philosophy and the Geisteswissenschaften (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1967).

38. Lyotard, The Differend, 28.

39. See Lyotard, The Differend, 41.

40. Lyotard, The Differend, 152.

41. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 23.

42. By this remark, I do not suggest that Western culture would be justified in making any claims to superiority, in general, over primitive cultures. One can take seriously Claude-Levi Strauss’s argument against such a claim in his Races and History (Paris: Unesco, 1952) while still accepting the value of procedural reason as an argument against the romanticist idea of a happy and free primitive society. What I am suggesting is that there might be a relation of complementarity rather than incommensurability between different traditions.

43. Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 78.

44. Lyotard, The Differend, 31.

45. Stephen Watson, “Habermas and Lyotard: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Rationality,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 10 (1984): 15.

46. For a vindication of this idea via Habermas’s or Apel’s account, see Habermas’s discussion of the idea of a communicative competence in “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 360–75.

47. Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism, 22.

48. Marianna Papastephanou, “Ulysses” Reason, Nobody’s Fault: Reason, Subjectivity, and the Critique of Enlightenment,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 26.6 (2000): 47–60.

49. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 72.

50. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 4.

51. This is an argument that Lyotard’s critics have already, convincingly I believe, developed (see for instance Peter Dews’s introduction to Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity [London: Verso, 1992], 21–23), but which Lyotard’s followers seem to ignore or put aside. (See for instance Cecile Lindsay, “Corporality, Ethics, Experimentation,” Philosophy Today 36 (1992): 398, where she writes: “Kant and Wittgenstein make it possible for us to conceive of this dispersion which, for Lyotard, shapes our postmodern context: the former with his separation and conflict of the faculties, and the latter with his formulation of separate language games.”

52. Lyotard, The Differend, 42.

53. There is an immense bibliography on the subject of covert metaphysics in science, especially after Thomas Kuhn’s and Paul Feyerabend’s epistemologies. Here my source is Cornelius Castoriadis, “Pseudo-chaos, Chaos kai Kosmos,” in Anthropologia, Politiki, Philosophia (Athens: Ypsilon, 1993), 96.

54. It would be very appropriate to argue against Faurisson that the existence of a concept does not entail the spatio-temporal existence of an object (Frege). Also, the occurrence of a fact or the existence of a state of affairs is not necessarily bound up with presence. It can be very well spelt out within the conditions of absence of witnesses which Faurisson considers so decisively prohibitive. Jacques Derrida’s “Supplement of Copula,” in Margins of Philosophy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) would provide us with very incisive parallels.

55. As Norris puts it, discussing Lyotard on the sublime: “the character [of the Kantian sublime] is such as to block all appeals to cognitive or epistemic criteria” (Truth and Ethics of Criticism, 49). In my view, this comes about because Lyotard does not recognise a self-reflexive dimension of language and thus, when it comes to ethics, he has recourse to an extralinguistic form of legitimation, that is, the sublime, a move that is strongly reminiscent of Levinas and his way of prioritizing ethics over ontology.

56. For these and some further criticisms of Habermas’s theory, see Michael J. Shapiro, Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice (Minneapolis:, MN University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 8, 3, 8–9, 25, 47–8, 138. On whether discourse ethics is concerned with real political conversations of everyday life, see Georgia Warnke, “Rawls, Habermas and Real Talk: A Reply to Walzer,” Philosophical Forum 21 (1990): 197–203.

57. See Georgia Warnke, Justice and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 94.

58. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 57.

59. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 72.

60. Dews, introduction to Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 23.