From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other

Abstract

Of those who have influenced contemporary renewal of moral theory in continental philosophy, Jurgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas are surely most important. Finding resonances in quite different and often opposing schools of thought, Habermas's discourse ethics has brought a new level of energy and sophistication to cognitive, Kantian approaches to ethics while Levinas's meditations on moral significance of other have inspired, though not uncritically, a wide range of postmodernist attempts to get beyond that Kantian legacy.1 But though they are both inescapably important for an array of debates in contemporary moral theory, they are rarely critically evaluated in relation to one another.2 There are, no doubt, many reasons for this. The differences in their philosophical styles, for example, are like night and day, with Habermas practicing a rigorously argumentative and technical mode of critical theory while Levinas engages in his own often poetic and always dense version of phenomenological analysis.3 Their basic agendas are different as well, with Habermas's discourse ethics framed in terms of a general concern with democratic political theory while Levinas's work is largely indifferent, if not hostile, to political concerns. Beyond these obvious contrasts, however, there is a striking, though problematic, convergence in their work with respect to foundations of our sense of moral obligation in language. It is at this level that I will approach work of Habermas and Levinas in this essay, arguing that their differing accounts of moral dimensions of language can be seen as equally indispensable aspects of our moral experience. In particular, I will argue that Levinas's understanding of language as a substantive relation to other can be seen to supplement and correct some of shortcomings of Habermas's procedural understanding of language as a rulegoverned practice, while procedural dimension of language emphasized by Habermas must be understood as a condition for articulate emergence of substantive dimension stressed by Levinas. In this way, I hope to suggest how their accounts may be productively brought together to provide a more adequate understanding of way moral point of view is established within language, responding, along way, to questions concerning character of a moral theory that would encompass Levinasian insights. Because of greater difficulty of project, most of essay will be devoted to arguing for cogency and relevance of Levinas's position in relation to shortcomings of Habermas's. But my aim is, nonetheless, to make a case for their mutual value to moral theory. For Habermas's analysis of procedures of argumentative discourse and Levinas's account of substantive value of face of other person evoke dimensions of language which are not only equally important to moral point of view but crucial to one another in its constitution. Habermas and Levinas on Moral Significance of Language Habermas's position has been stated most fully in his essay Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification, in which he attempts to justify the universal validity of principle of universalization4 that underlies cognitive or Kantian inspired approaches to ethics. As he proposes it, principle of universalization is just idea that no norm can be valid unless all affected can accept consequences and side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for satisfaction of everyone's (65). It is this principle that constitutes moral point of view, for Habermas, requiring of everyone a willingness to take concerns of others who be affected by a particular norm into account in its justification. Amorally justified principle is, in short, one that is fair to interests of concerned. Citing skeptical challenge that this understanding of moral point of view might be only expression of particular moral ideas of our Western culture,5 Habermas attempts to establish validity of principle of universalization as an unavoidable presupposition of any fully human life. …