Thoughts on William Rehg's Insight and Solidarity

Abstract

William Rehg's booklnsight and Solidarity1 is an important piece of careful scholarship and will make the work of understanding some of the most com? plex and argumentatively dense aspects of Habermas's work a good deal easier for those who follow him. It offers not just expositions of Habermas's posi? tions but careful consideration of some of the most interesting and provocative theses which challenge it. Rehg carefully teases out responses that demonstrate that discourse ethics can accommodate the best insights of many of its chal? lengers while remedying their shortfalls. Among the most interesting discussions in the book are his reconcept ualization of the discussion of the priority of the right over the good provoked by communitarians like Maclntyre and Sandel and his reflections on how dis? course ethics can respond to Charles Taylor's work on authenticity, subjec? tivity, and identity. His discussion of how particular moral decisions can be informed by universal norms is made especially helpful by his explication and development of Habermas's distinction between discourses of justification and discourses of application. His response to the charge that Habermas's discourse ethic posits a rational subject disconnected from history, desire, or the bonds constitutive of particularity, recapitulating the shortcomings of the Kantian moral agent, give rise to his account of insight and the way relations of social solidarity are implicated in it. This in turn leads to his critique of the inad? equacies that he sees remaining in Habermas's theory and to his provocative, and in my view ultimately worrisome reformulation of the concept of insight. It is this reformulation and its relationship to the determination of the norms which serve as a standard for criticizing the way the actual deviates from the ideal that will be the focus of my remarks. I will argue that even before Rehg