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Knowledge & Human Interests

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Habermas says in an interview that he has basically followed the same research program since 1970--that is, since "Knowledge and Human Interests." (KHI) In many ways, KHI marks the peak of Habermas's effort to carry out the classic program of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. In this, one crucial question is how to integrate the individual psychology of Freud with the sociology of Marx. Another is how to integrate a generally Darwinian paradigm into the Continental philosophical tradition stemming from Hegel.
In KHI, Habermas argues that our "interests," by which he means our basic life concerns--almost in a Maslow-like sense--from survival to meaning, are ultimately evolutionarily rooted. Knowledge does "ride on top of" these interests--thus keeping, barely Marx's distinction between "base" and "superstructure"--in the sense that we want to know things because we are the sort of creature who know in order to survive, to live together, to find meaning in life, etc. But since knowledge--culture in all its forms--is the tool we use, as it were, to meet our needs (to address our interests), what we need to pay attention to in order to meet the needs of our bodies and selves is culture, human understanding.
Habermas evidently felt that with KHI he had reached a dead end. During the 1970s (following lectures at Princeton) he set off to ground social theory in social existence--that is, in our relationships as they occur by means of talking with each other. This led to his magnum opus, "The Theory of Communicative Action." His work in the 1980s and 1990s was a defense and elaboration of TCA, especially in the direction of political and legal philosophy.
But in my reading of Habermas, he has remained a secular philosopher of hope from his very first writings in the 1950s. Both in terms of tools--for instance, his use, unusual for a Continental, of Anglo-American philosophy of language, and his use, unusual for a philosopher, of empirical sociology and psychology--and in terms of themes--emancipation, freedom from self-delusion, consensual and informed participation as the guarantor against a repeat of the Nazi disaster--he has remained on a life quest to see that his boyhood under Hitler is never repeated.
KHI is a major step on that path, an effort to summarize a tradition's ability to contribute before he struck out on his own. It is odd for English-world people because of how seriously he takes Freud and Marx. It is dated in its 1960s references and atmosphere of young revolt and idealistic remaking of society, and in its pre-spirituality craze secularism. But it is a magisterial reading of many European authors, including especially Nietzsche, and by no means of interest only to Habermas scholars. Anyone looking for answers as to how to avoid both tyranny and terror while dealing with globalization and pluralism will benefit from Habermas's struggle with the same issues.
Note: not as technical and encumbered by social-scientific jargon as many of his later works. Habermas is no friend to readers, but a "New York Times" regular will be able to manage it.
Recommended for serious readers.

This is a very interesting book and well worth reading. Habermas's primary thesis is that knowledge is transcendentally grounded in various interests which have a natural basis in our evolutionary history and an historical basis in our cultural, social and economic history.

Habermas sees the empirical, natural sciences as being transcendentally grounded in our interest in the technical control of nature. Our interest in increasing our technical control over the natural world in our effort to survive determines the way in which nature is objectified in the natural sciences and the form that our scientific theories take (hypothetico-deductive connections of propositions, which permit the deduction of law-like hypotheses with empirical content, pg308) as well as the way those theories are tested and corroborated (the experimental method which is based on scientists ability to physically reproduce the same phenomena given identical initial conditions). There are definitely echoes of Nietzsche and Heidegger here in the notion that science is ultimately a means for technical control as opposed to pure theoretical speculation. The interest in technical control finds its ground in 'work' which, as Marx argued, is the process whereby the species reproduces itself in a physical sense. The process of work provides a feedback loop between theory and pragmatic testing (what works survives; what does not work is abandoned) which is similar to the method of the natural sciences and which leads to technological advance. Habermas follows Marx in the sense that it is no longer a transcendental consciousness determining the form of objectivity in the theoretical sciences but is rather "the concrete human species, which reproduces its life under natural conditions," a process which "takes the form of processes of social labor" (pg27). The knowledge generated in this process takes on external existence as a productive force thereby altering both nature and the laboring subject (pg36) and this accounts for progress. Habermas criticizes Marx, however, for reducing the "self-generating act of the human species to labor" (pg42). Habermas believes that what Marx called the relations of production (in distinction to the forces of production) are equally important and equally generative of knowledge constituting interests.

Habermas sees the human sciences as being transcendentally grounded in our interest "in the preservation and expansion of the intersubjectivity of possible action-orienting mutual understanding" (pg310). The form of understanding in the human sciences cannot be understood on the model of technical control but must be understood on the model of the intersubjective interest in achieving mutual understanding. In everyday life we are usually able to communicate with relatively few problems. This is especially true when we are dealing with people who speak the same language we do and have similar cultural backgrounds. There are times, however, when we run into problems communicating our intended meaning and an effort of translation is necessary in some form. Habermas sees the human sciences, which attempt to understand historical texts in foreign languages from vanished cultures, as grounded in a similar problem of understanding. It is our interest in reaching mutual understanding which guides this research and determines the correct methodology for the human sciences (hermeneutics). It is very important for Habermas to realize that the human sciences are grounded in a different interest than the natural empirical sciences. One of Habermas's goals in this work is to overcome the dominance of the natural sciences in epistemology (especially positivism) and he does this by grounding different sciences in different interests which determine the object domain of the sciences in a transcendental fashion.

The third and final interest which Habermas sees as constitutive of a form of knowledge is our interest in emancipation through critique (or self-reflection). Habermas believes that psychoanalysis as developed by Freud is a paradigmatic example of this form of knowledge (as is the critique of ideology inaugurated by Marx). Habermas offers a very interesting interpretation of Freud in the final sections of this work in which he argues that Freud's metapsychological concepts (the topology of the psyche in terms of the ego, id, and superego) can only be understood correctly from the standpoint of the analytic situation and the attempt to overcome deformed language or communication and behavioral pathology. Habermas believes that Freud, believing that he was introducing the methods of the natural sciences into the realm of the psyche, misunderstood the peculiar nature of his own theories and so misconceived his theories in an objectivist fashion. Habermas sees the peculiarity of psychoanalysis as residing in the interest which grounds it transcendentally and, therefore, believes it is a mistake to attempt to introduce the methodology of the natural sciences into psychoanalysis (a nice rejoinder to all of those who criticize psychoanalysis for being unscientific). Psychoanalysis has its own form of understanding grounded in its own interest in human emancipation. Habermas also attempts to combine Freud and Marx in the the final sections in this work. Freud believed that civilization rested on the compulsion to work and the renunciation of instinct. This renunciation of instinct led to utopian fantasies and collective neuroses which to a certain extent were inescapable being determined by natural conditions of survival. These necessities, however, are enforced in the form of institutions (Marx's superstructure and relations of production) which to a certain extent have a life of their own and inflict the necessary renunciations of civilization unequally (class structure). Habermas writes, "If technical progress opens up the objective possibility of reducing socially necessary repression below the level of institutionally demanded repression, this utopian content [the utopian content generated from the renunciation of instinct] can be freed from its fusion with the delusory, ideological components of culture that have been fashioned into legitimations of authority and be converted into a critique of power structures that have become historically obsolete. It is in this context that class struggle has its place" (pg280). Class struggle has its place here precisely because instinctual renunciations fall most heavily on the lower classes who are the ones who have an interest in institutional change once technology has advanced to a point to make the institutionally demanded level of repression unnecessary. One can see clearly here how Habermas's transcendental-pragmatic epistemology based in human interests provides the grounds for his critical theory. The final section of the work is, in my opinion, the most interesting and thought-provoking.

I should also make a few general points. First, even if one finds oneself disagreeing with some (or all) of Habermas's fundamental theses (I am not sure that the interest in technical control can fully determine the natural sciences since some modern scientific theories, like those of Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman, specifically deny the predictability of the future and, hence, the possibility of technical control) there is still a great deal that I think will still be of interest in this book. Habermas constructs this book as a series of chapters each dealing with a major figure (the figures dealt with are: Hegel, Marx, Comte, Mach, Peirce, Dewey, Kant, Fichte, Freud, and Nietzsche). Habermas has some very interesting things to say about all of these thinkers and so anyone who has any interest in any of them will certainly find what Habermas has to say interesting. Also, Habermas is often criticized for his difficult writing style. Personally I actually thought this work was quite lucid. It is certainly difficult and probably requires some prior familiarity with the figures being discussed on the part of the reader but I think Habermas's writing style (at least in this work) compares very favorably with most Continental philosophers.

All in all I would give this book my very highest recommendation! It is truly one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in a long time.

-Brian

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