A Comparative Perspective on Rorty and Habermas (original) (raw)
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019
The metaproblematic of this article is the cognitive structure of morality. In the context of an investigation into Habermas's theory of validity which respects his strong cognitivism and emphasis on moral knowledge, the focus is on his proposal to treat rightness as 'justification-immanent' rather than as 'justification-transcendent,' as in the case of truth. The imputation of asymmetrical validity bases to rightness and truth is probed in terms of the distinction between achievement and validity concepts which is informed by the mathematical-philosophical conceptual pair of finite and infinite ideal limit concepts. The thrust of the argument is spearheaded by the question whether the process of the discursive construction and justification of rightness is not of necessity required, as in the case of truth, to have recourse to a transcendent – albeit immanently rooted – cognitive property beyond formal-pragmatically backed procedural presuppositions to secure its validity. A final brief coda collates suggestions made in the course of the argumentation toward a cognitive-sociological approach that links up with Habermas's central concepts and could complement his inspiring vision of the 'cultural embodiment of reason'. Introduction Habermas originally presented his view of the difference between truth and rightness in his early writings and, since then, it has become apparent that his particular interpretation of rightness in contrast to truth actually represents a characteristic feature of his thought. In his late work, however, this distinction is treated with greater precision, although not wholly differently, due to a significant extent to his revision in the late 1990s of his long-held discursive or consensus concept of truth. The revision did not entail a complete surrendering of this concept, to be sure, but it did require compensation of its limitations by the adoption of a complementary pragmatic concept of truth. The effect of this move was the strengthening of the discursive concept's practical roots and procedural implications by pragmatism – but a pragmatism simultaneously interpreted somewhat more strongly in Kantian terms than many an American pragmatist would be willing to countenance. Habermas accomplished this feat by recognizing that pragmatism retained the transcendental framing inherited from Kant, yet managed to mitigate the tension between the empirical and transcendental moments. This recognition was consolidated by the introduction of the crucial concept of 'immanent-transcendence'. It marks the displacement of the dualistic metaphysics of Kant's transcendental idealism by a processual conception showing Hegel's fingermarks according to which transcendental conditions in the form of strong idealizations instead of Kantian ideas of reason are understood as being rooted in the world and in their transcending thrust beyond return to the anchorage in the world. This notion compelled the transgression of the conception of the discursive justification of truth claims as a purely immanent process, leading to truth being characterized as a 'justification-transcendent' concept. But what is striking in Habermas's late writings is his insistence that rightness, in contrast to truth, is a 'justification-immanent' concept instead.