Jürgen Habermas

German philosopher and social theorist (b. 1929), the leading second-generation figure of the Frankfurt School and of the critique of ideology. In the wiki he appears as Gadamer's critical-theory interlocutor — the source of the most influential objection to philosophical hermeneutics: that its universalism is conservative and lacks a critical principle against distorted tradition.

Key Points

• The "no critical principle" objection. Habermas charges that hermeneutics legitimates a prejudice in favor of existing social relations: by deriving understanding-as-agreement from our language-dependence and our belonging to tradition, it deters reflection from its critical, emancipatory task. Tradition can be a vehicle of domination, not only of meaning.
• The extralinguistic bases. Habermas presses work and domination (and prelinguistic experience) as experiential bases that hermeneutics underestimates — so that hermeneutic understanding looks like a closed circle of cultural-tradition meaning lacking purchase on material and power conditions.
• Gadamer's reply: "perfect enlightenment is illusory." Gadamer answers that the ideal of a completed reflection lifting society into "rational self-possession" is "vacuous and undialectical"; making structures of domination conscious does not always emancipate; reflection does not dissolve all prejudice. Hermeneutic universalism "has the truth of a corrective," not a positive dogmatic principle; rhetoric and hermeneutics are universal and belong to reason.
• The standing tension. Critics (and the wiki's own Diagnostics) note that Gadamer's reply wins the negative point (total critique is impossible) while conceding the positive one (he offers no criterion to criticize a currently distorting tradition). See prejudice, effective-history.

Connections

• contests philosophical hermeneutics — the missing critical principle; hermeneutic universality as conservative.
• presses the weak point of prejudice and tradition — the retrospective-only criterion for legitimate prejudice; the assumed benignity of tradition.
• is answered by Gadamer via "the truth of a corrective," the illusion of perfect enlightenment, and rhetoric/practical reason (phronesis).

Open Questions

• This page reflects only the Gadamer–Habermas debate as it surfaces in Truth and Method's Afterword and Supplement II; Habermas's own Knowledge and Human Interests and the Theory of Communicative Action are not yet ingested. confidence: medium.

Sources

• gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Supplement II ("To What Extent Does Language Preform Thought?", pp. 569–575) and the Afterword (the conservatism / critical-principle reply, pp. 592–596).