Outsider Theory
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: October 15, 2001
Latest Update: October 15, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Outsider Theory:
Expanding Public Discourse

Review and Teaching Essay by jeanne and Susan
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors: August 2001.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This review started with the The Jürgen Habermas Web Resource Link to Foucault about half an inch down the file, then link to Habermas and Gadamer. Then link to the Previous: Universal Pragmatics.

Reproduced here for your convenience:

Universal Pragmatics

To provide such grounding, Habermas [50] proposed a universal pragmatics, the primary task of which is the identification and reconstruction of the necessary preconditions for the possibility of understanding in discursive communication. Turning to ordinary language philosophy, he attempts this reconstruction by linking Austin's [53] and Grice's [54] notions of felicity conditions underlying discourse to Searle's [55] theory of speech acts and to a consensus theory of truth, which holds that truth claims are resolved through reasoned discussion culminating in consensus. Habermas does not confine universal pragmatics to the analyses of language and speech. Rather, because he sees language as the medium in which all human action is explicated and justified, he intends ``universal pragmatics'' as the groundwork for a general theory of social action.

The resulting critical hermeneutics holds that intersubjective communication is possible, despite differences in the participants' pre-understandings, because the participants in effect posit as an ideal the attainment of a consensus (concerning the validity of statements) that is free from constraints imposed upon them by others and from constraints that they might impose upon themselves. That is, a participant posits a situation in which all participants can freely try to convince others (or be convinced by them) and in which all have equal opportunity to take dialogue roles. Put another way, participation in dialogue admits the possibility of reinterpreting and changing the perceived situation. Habermas and Apel term this idealization the ideal speech situation and consider it the participants' emancipatory interest - the situation of freedom to which they aspire. This ideal might never be attained, but even to approach it, the participants must overcome systematically distorted communication, which suppresses and conceals the speakers' interests. According to Habermas, these distortions are produced by the division of labor and a correlated structure of domination. Habermas turns to a Freudian psychotherapeutic model to prescribe treatment for the pathological consequences of the systematically distorted horizons produced under these conditions. According to him, the task of the social theorist is to act as therapist, encouraging citizens (patients) to reject internalizations of distorted institutional arrangements (class domination). For Habermas, then, understanding involves compensating for these distortions, and interpretation requires an account of how they were generated.

The Habermas-Gadamer Debate

Gadamer [56] attacks this position by pointing out that the psychotherapist or social theorist is not immune from the pre-understandings of tradition and that these pre-understandings are not themselves necessarily free of distortion. Gadamer sees Habermas' effort as part of the traditional social scientific goal of attaining ``objective'' knowledge of the social realm. Habermas [38] appears to believe that the social theorist, like Schleiermacher's interpreter, can understand the social actor better than the social actor understands himself. That is beyond belief for Gadamer, given his notion of ontological pre-understanding. For his part, Habermas sees Gadamer as too ready to submit to the authority of tradition and too reticent to offer any methodological considerations (apart from the exceedingly abstract notion of ``interpretive horizons''), thereby giving unwitting support to positivist degradations of hermeneutics.

In reply to Gadamer's claim that prejudices are inescapable, Habermas insists that a self-reflective methodology can overcome prejudices and that an objective social theory can be approached, bootstrapping from an initial understanding of society. Habermas argues that the systematic distortions in communication which bias an initial understanding of society can be analyzed and reduced using generalization from empirical knowledge of society, quasi-causal explanation (deductive verification), and historical critique. To build this comprehensive social theory, Habermas must provide a theory of knowledge grounded in: 1) a general theory of communicative action; 2) a general theory of socialization to explain the acquisition of the competence that underpins communicative action; 3) a theory of social systems to show the material constraints on socialization and their reflection in cultural traditions; 4) a theory of social evolution that allows theoretical reconstruction of the historical situations in which communicative action obtains. But this move apparently fails to counter Gadamer's objection, since interpretations of the theoretical tools used to forge this theory may themselves be subject to other interpretations that vary across the cultural traditions of social interpreters.

Outsider theory posits a lack of consensus because some of us have not been heard. Habermas and Gadamer are positing elite levels of knowledge, theory, and analysis in their argument. We are not qualified to enter the academic discourse at that level. We'd have to read all those books none of us have the time for. But we can sit on the front porch of the general store and think on this. (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.)

Ordinary folks, far removed from the academies with the leisure to contemplate the intricacies and permutations of scholarly considerations, are coping with the life-world problems of inclusion, exclusion, legitimacy, and colonization. Since, for many of you, this is your first introduction to the Habermas-Gadamer debate, I would like you to think about what this debate means to us in our life-world and how we feel about it.

I think the debate is about my little piece of the world fitting in with the little pieces each of you need, and how we will manage to avoid permitting some of us to take pieces that encroach upon the pieces of others. The tension between the individual and the social group. We need both.

Habermas, as I understand him, says that we can set aside our prejudices and come to a reasoned consensus. Gadamer says no. We can't "clean up" our thinking by getting rid of the out-of-awareness impressions. They are precisely "out-of-awareness". Gadamer sees that we have been given disinformation when we often have access to no other. Habermas says our drive for freedom will overcome the prejudices. I don't know. It will take a while for all these arguments to sink in. But at least, through my learning to follow some of this theory, I will have better access to information. I can leave the esoteric answers to Habermas and Gadamer and Giddens and Zizek and all the other theorists. But I need to understand what the argument is about. For myself. So that I can engage in public discourse in my own life-world.

I need to understand about radical social construction that contends that my self is constructed of social influences. There certainly are a lot of those. Buy, buy, buy. Hate, hate, hate. Win, win, win.

But sometimes I doesn't want to buy, to hate, to win.
Sometimes I doesn't want to just sit and think.
Sometimes I just wants to sit.

Variatiion of a theme from an old poster in our social research center that said:

"Sometimes I just sits and thinks.
And sometimes I just sits."

Our discussions on the front porch of that old general store are where we catch out disinformation, where we test those skills we'll need in public discourse, where we catch each other up on the latest information. To do that well, this can't be a closed game, where there is an established hierarchy. We have to seek out information in good faith, and we have to welcome all validity claims.

And we can't make unstated assumptions that mask underlying prejudices. We have to at least try to get at that issue that's worrying Habermas and Gadamer, that we've been conditioned to accept many unquestioned assumptions, and that they have altered our reason and our beliefs. That means that we have to face up to the moments when we just want to sit, when freedom seems too far away, when survival in the daily life-world takes all the energy we have. If we don't acknowledge what we really feel, then we become complicit in the dilemma of control. And we must find our voice. For Habermas and Gadamer need us. We are the stuff of which their thinking is formed.

I am reminded of Edward M. Said's definition of the public intellectual as the one who continually challenges, the one who questions the received wisdom of dominant discourse. Habermas says our thirst for freedom will lead us to that role. Perhaps one of the reasons Gadamer is less sure of that is that "public intellectuals" are generally visible only when the have the standing of an Edward Said. But Said insists that we all have the potential for being public intellectuals. Each of us who learns in good faith, questions self-reflexively, and makes his/her voice heard in the discourse is a public intellectual. Would that be compatible with Habermas' idea that our need for freedom will drive us past our prejudices? Would that solve some of Gadamer's mistrust of the shaping of our beliefs?

If we all take seriously our role as intellectuals, and if we have forums such as Dear Habermas for providing access to that level of discourse, maybe we can shed some of our prejudices, and at least learn to grant dignity and respect to the Other. That's how Dear Habermas came to be.