Habermas: The Possibility of an Emancipatory Science

The work of Adorno and Horkheimer tended towards sweeping generalizations, a matter of thinking about thinking at its grandest level, and they tended to think themselves into a pervasive pessimism.

In comparison, Habermas is a sober and very careful, if often obtuse, thinker about the nature of society, science, social science and philosophy. There are two ideas of his which are particularly useful contributions to the debates considered in this book. The first is to be found in Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas 1968, 1986) where he suggests a way of looking at the human sciences which brings together all the approaches we have considered so far. He does this not at the level of methodology, with which the positivists are primarily concerned, nor by distinguishing between the different objects of the social sciences - the concern, as we will see later, of contemporary realists. Rather, he organizes them according to their relationship to what he calls ‘human interests’. He suggests a sophisticated pragmatism.

These ideas come from the earlier part of Habermas’s work and have been modified, particularly as he has moved away from the Hegelian background of critical theory. Nonetheless, they are worth holding onto simply because they do bring together very different ideas of science and relate them to an overall human project of gaining understanding and knowledge in order to improve human life. He suggests that our scientific enterprises are rooted in and guided by different cognitive interests which we possess by virtue of being human.

Habermas’s critique of Marxism develops that of the earlier Frankfurt theorists - that Marxism concerns itself only with the economic, the instrumental aspects of human existence. Human beings are of course producers, and we have a technical interest in controlling and manipulating the objects around us. This gives rise to the natural sciences and the technologies that grow out of them and to those aspects of the social sciences that are most like the natural sciences; it also provides a place for at least some of the ideas of positivism.

There is also a practical interest, says Habermas, in being able to communicate with others - this enables cooperation to the mutual benefit of everybody and this gives rise to the hermeneutic sciences, the sciences of understanding. And there is a third interest, a reflexive interest that we have in understanding ourselves and our ways of thinking about the world which provides us with the possibility of autonomy as well as the possibility of reflexively understanding the existence of these interests. This is the emancipatory interest and takes us back to critical theory. To achieve autonomy we need to know about the objects in our world, we need to be able to understand the people around us and we need to be able to understand what we ourselves are doing.

Habermas’s example of an emancipatory science is psychoanalysis, which works on all three levels. First, it gathers information about our bodies and the way our bodies, through our sexuality for example, limit the things we are capable of. This is working at the level of the technical interest. Second, it is concerned with the meaning we give to the world and the way we communicate with others - it is a hermeneutics.

The above is of course an oversimplification of what Habermas is saying, but it should be sufficient to get across the general idea. It is important for two reasons. First, it takes us to two central arguments in this book: that there are different types and levels of scientific activity beyond the straightforward distinction between the human and the natural sciences, and that these can coexist with each other. Second, it is our first explicit encounter with a philosophical anthropology - a theory of human nature. Although philosophers still argue about these things, social scientists do not show a lot of concern about the issues when perhaps they should. Any social scientist carrying out research actually presupposes something about human nature, however limited and scientifically ‘objective’ the study. Rational choice theory seems to assume that human beings are rational actors, pragmatism that people have purposes, while Weber and hermeneutics assume that people are meaning-creating animals. These assumptions may not be very sophisticated but they are always there whatever we do, and for Habermas part of the work of critical theory is to elaborate and refine such assumptions.

In this sense Habermas can be seen as developing and criticizing the philosophical anthropology of Marx for whom human beings were primarily collective producers, forever transforming their environment and therefore transforming themselves. We can also find the communicative and emancipatory interests in Marx’s work, but they are implicit, not developed as concepts. All critical theorists would argue that it is the centrality of instrumental reason in the development of Marxism which encouraged the development of Stalinist tyranny.