Abstract
This article investigates the model of the transnational cosmopolitan moral-legal community of limitless communication. This model, using philosophical means, appears as an attempt to underscore the impossibility of authoritarian monopolies of power which resulted in the dictatorial regimes and national (pro)totalitarian communities of the 20th century. I will reconstruct this model of the supranational community, and analyze the mode of morally-oriented intersubjective interactions within this community. I will show that the differentiation of limits between the “interior” (subjective) and the “exterior” (intersubjective) worlds is an essential communicative and ethical problem in Habermas’ theory. According to this differentiation, subjective “verity” of an individual/local community may be defined and justified by purposes, axiological preferences, and tastes of a particular individual/community; while a claim pretending to be an intersubjective norm should be justified and voluntary accepted by all concerned with this norm. The non-differentiation of limits between what one believes to be “veritable”, and what one claims others should accept as a norm (or imposing on others one’s particular axiological position as a universal norm) underlies most social, (geo)political, ethnical, confessional conflicts, and communicative deformations. Until recently, academic literature did not pay much attention to this key aspect of Habermas’ theory. At the same time, it is this differentiation between the subjectively “veritable” and the intersubjectively valid that makes Habermas’ community anti-totalitarian, and reveals the deep political significance of intersubjective limits.
Highlights
There are, in our own day, gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life practised, and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions propounded which assert an unlimited right in the public to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it admits to be innocent. (Mill, 1977: 286)
Starting from the 1960s, Habermas works over the concept of communicative rationality that he suggests to be a normative ideal of any social interaction
It does not contradict the idea of a universal international community in the scope of the mankind, or as Habermas calls it in his latest work, a “cosmopolitan reunion of the citizens of the world” or “world community with political constitution,” etc
Summary
There are, in our own day, gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life practised, and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions propounded which assert an unlimited right in the public to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it admits to be innocent. (Mill, 1977: 286). The principle notion of my reasoning, I understand the formal, logical, and imaginary borderline that separates one autonomous subject (a person, a party, a community, a nation, or a state) from another.
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