Habermas on Communicative Reason and Performative Contradiction

Abstract

Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Question of Performative Contradiction We have become familiar with skepticism and various strategies in defense of rationality. Among the former have been the classical skepticisms of Cratylus, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho of Ellis, and Sextus. Among the latter have been the Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian rational arguments on behalf of intelligible universe; Augustine's faith seeking understanding in Contra Academicos; and the modem attempts to overcome epistemic doubt by various turns of critical, transcendental, and self-reflective reason. This paper takes up the current argument of the critical modernist, JIurgen Habermas, against postmodern evasions of rationality. Is there anything philosophically interesting in rehashing the old theme of the ratio? Doesn't this problem die out with philosophies that engendered it? No, the very nature of philosophy is at issue in the division between modernists and postmodernists, a division which takes over and runs through the traditional split between contemporary continental and Anglo-American thought. Habermas locates the formal issue of rationality and performative contradiction within the debate on the crisis of modernity. But before we can take up the formal concept of performative contradiction, we must first define the broad historical context of this contradiction, second, see how the performative problem occurs in concrete existential strategies of contemporary philosophy, and third, evaluate the place of the project of modernity in light of these historical and existential contexts. Broadly defined within its historical context, performative contradiction is any argument which, in Habermas's understanding, proposes a wholesale