The forstian bargain: overrationalizing the power of reasons

ABSTRACT

Focusing on differences in Rainer Forst's and my otherwise similar discourse theoretical approaches to power and reason, I argue that Forst's equating all power with “noumenal” (i.e. reasons-mediated) power -  the “Forstian bargain” -  is flawed and should be resisted. For Forst, reasons are justifiers. This ignores reasons’ multiple rational forces.  I propose to respecify “fully noumenal” power as a particular form of power, “discourse-power“, the power of reasoners to uphold or to modify via acts of discursive argumentation their convictions about the genuine value of their reasons.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• discourse
• reason
• justification
• rationalism
• Noumenal Power Theory (NPT)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Forst adds an important qualification to the Habermassian framework and its Foucauldian contrary: ‘Power is always “discursive” in nature (…), but it is not always “communicative” in Habermas’s sense or exclusively part of subject – constituting, disciplining “epistemes”, as Foucault argues’ (Forst 2017:9).

2. Its Kantian earmarks nicely pinpointed by Forst in Allen et al. 2014: ‘practical reason entails not just knowledge of how one would have to justify one’s moral claims but also that one must do so’.

3. We ‘should reserve the concept of power neither for a negative nor for a purely positive phenomenon. Power can be either constraining or liberating’ (Forst 2017a:39f.)

4. ‘If we understand intersubjective, social power as the ability of an agent A to bring another agent B to think or do something that B would not otherwise have thought or done, then it is at first an open question whether this is a result of a good and convincing discourse, a recommendation, a lie, an act of seduction, a command, or a threat. This understanding of power is evaluatively neutral’ (Forst 2017c:63).

5. Forst gives the example of a tank that you know would easily crush you if it were attacking you and in this sense ‘has physical force over you, but no longer any human, normative power to guide your thoughts’ (Forst  2017a:40). I find this example misleading in a number of ways but will not go into this. Forst’s positive characterization of power as what normatively guides a person’s thoughts strikes me as clearer. Forst, borrowing Wilfrid Sellars’ notorious opposition of two ‘spaces’ (of inferentially related reasons, of causally related states and events) holds that ‘in characterizing a situation as an exercise of power, we do not merely give an empirical description of a state of affairs or a social relation; we also, and primarily, have to place it in the space of reasons, or the normative space of freedom and action’ (Forst 2017a:38).

6. Power is being exercised ‘when someone acts for certain reasons for which others are responsible – that is, reasons that he or she would not otherwise have had and that still characterize him or her as an agent for whom alternative ways of acting remain open’ (Forst 2017a:38).

7. The ‘means in question can be a “powerful” speech, a well – founded recommendation, an ideological description of the world, a seduction, an order that is accepted, or a threat that is perceived as real. All of these are exercises of noumenal power’(Forst  2017a:41).

8. Resp. ‘the true and original nature of power’ (Forst 2017c:63).

9. That they do not differ at all is suggested for instance when Forst claims ‘that the real and general phenomenon of power is to be found in the noumenal realm, or (…) in the “space of reasons” (…) understood as the realm of justifications’(Forst 2017a:38).

10. In an interview for the German journal Information Philosophie, Forst (2017c) explicitly addresses the question, whether ‘justification’ in Forst’s parlance exceeds what can be expressed by speaking of best reasons. Forst’s answers that he is primarily interested in politically relevant justification, and that ‘the genuine authority of justification in the political realm is the authority of a collective’ (ibid.:62, my translation, M.K.). This reply is either elliptic or misses the point since all authority of any kind of reason is constituted by the authority of collectives, namely real and idealized communities of communicative interaction. More on this Apelian point in Kettner 2016.

11. To name but one attempt to develop such an account: (Smith 1994).

12. For instance, we have to distinguish the normative force of justifications and justification narratives from their quality”(Forst  2017c:64).

13. (Kettner 1998, 2009, 2012).

14. One merit of this approach is that it goes a long way towards a constitutive definition of argumentative discourse, cf. Kettner 2017.

15. NPT „is more ‚realistic’ than theories” for NPT ‘explains all those forms of power’ which other theories locate in physical i.e. supposedly non-noumenal means in terms of noumenal means (reasons, jusifications) and NPT moreover explains ‘all those forms of power that cannot be explained by recourse to’ physical means: ‘the power of speech’, of good or bad arguments, ‘of seduction, of love, of “acting in concert”, of commitments, of religions, of morality, of personal aims etc.’ (Forst 2014:180, 2017a:43).

16. Forst notices this lacuna at least in a footnote: ‘I leave the issue of having power over oneself undiscussed’ (Forst 2017a:42).

17. When we carefully reconstruct our common uses of a variety of power concepts with a view to ordinary language in which these uses have found their linguistic articulation (cf. Morriss 2002:199–206) it is safe to claim that the concept of power ‘is always a concept referring to an ability, capacity or dispositional property’ (ibid.:13). Moreover, there is a conceptual core in terms of familiarity and irreducibility: power as ability (or capacity) to effect (i.e. to accomplish) something. And since abilities ‘are those (peculiarly human) powers that differ from ordinary dispositionals in that (in suitable conditions) they are exercisable by the powerholder at will’ (Morriss ibid.:207), an ‘intention is usually part of the definition of any power that is an ability – for abilities are things we can do when we want’ (ibid.:27). Summarizing Morriss’ diligent clarifications I would maintain that power, in the conceptually basic sense, is of actors as intentional agents. ‘Only beings that are in some (perhaps metaphorical) sense conscious and active can effect anything because only these beings can bring about or accomplish something whilst a much wider range of entities can affect. Hence books and ideas can affect but not effect, and so can famous but dead people, like Cézanne’ (Morriss 2002:30). That agential power-to is conceptually central does not rule out ordinary uses of the noun ‘power’ in connection with entities that are not agents, provided there is something active in them. The locution ‘the power of cannabis to relax smokers’ picks out the active property viz. capacity of producing an effect (relaxation). And when we attribute to a mixture of sulphuric and nitric acid ‘the power’ to dissolve gold, we are using power semantics in a conceptually distinct sense. What we actually mean here is literally captured in the semantics of the verbs ‘to affect’ and ‘to have an effect’ [on someone or something]: The acids ‘affect’ gold so that it gets dissolved, or, if you will, bringing the acids in contact with gold ‘has the effect’ that it will dissolve. It would be odd, however, to say, of the acids, that they effect the dissolution of gold in the sense of bringing about or accomplishing its dissolution. ‘To affect something is to alter it or impinge on it in some way (any way); to effect something is to bring about or accomplish it’ (Morriss 2002:29). A ‘capacity to affect is not power unless the capacity to effect is also present’ (ibid.:30). Power, in the conceptually central sense, ‘is not concerned at all with affecting, though “influence” is’ (Morriss 2002:30). Given an interest in clarifying the semantics of ‘power’ and related terms and concepts, it is important to distinguish our conceptually central actor-related notion of power-to (as ability to effect) from what we mean when we speak of influencing, or of something or someone having (a lesser or greater amount of) influence on something or someone. To influence usually is ‘to affect in some hidden, unclear or unknown way’ (Morriss 2002)

18. Compare this with Max Weber’s classic notion of power as the position of some actors within social relationships that increases their chances, based on whatever, of carrying out their will, no matter if others are willing or unwilling to cooperate or comply. Now Kantianize Max Weber by adding the clause that a person’s will is always a reason-responsive will and you get Forst’s notion of noumenal power.

19. Cf. the opening paragraph of chapter 17 in Fontane’s novel. The original German text has a more telling formulation for what in the translation is ‘a kind of instrument designed to instill fear’: ‘eine Art Angstapparat aus Kalkül’.

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Matthias Kettner

Matthias Kettner is professor of philosophy at Witten/Herdecke University (www.uni-wh.de). Diploma in psychology and a PhD in philosophy (with Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas) at Goethe-University, Frankfurt. Research interests: relaunching discourse ethics; elaborating a viable theory of socio-cultural pathology as part of Critical Theory; theorizing digital transformations of our powers of responsible self-governance.