Notes on Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity"

Charles Ess, Drury College

From: Habermas and Modernity, edited and with an introduction by Richard J. Bernstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. 161-175

Rorty gets it right, I think, when he notes that, over against Lyotard's notion of "postmodern" as an incredulity towards metanarratives (which provide the legitimating frameworks of modernity including the Enlightenment metanarrative of liberation endorsed by Kant through Habermas, and including Marx and Freud, but explicitly rejected by Lyotard),

For Habermas, the problem posed by "incredulity towards metanarratives" is that unmasking only makes sense if we "preserve at least one standard for [the] explanation of the corruption of all reasonable standards. [Habermas, "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment," New German Critique, 2:6 [1982], p. 28] If we have no such standard, one which escapes a "totalizing self-referential critique," then distinctions between the naked and the masked, or between theor and ideology, lose their force. If we do not have these distinctions, then we have // to give up the Enlightenment notion of "rational criticism of existing institutions," for "rational" drops out. We can still, of course, have criticism, but it will be of the sort which Habermas ascribes to Horkheimer and Adorno: "they abandoned any theoretical approach and practiced ad hoc determinate negation...The praxis of negation is what remains in the 'spirit of . . . unremitting theory'." [Ibid, p. 29] Anything that Habermas will count as retaining a "theoretical approach" will be counted by an incredulous Lyotard as a "metanarrative." Anything that abandons such an approach will be counted by Habermas as "neoconservative," because it drops the notions which have been used to justify the various reforms which have marked the history of the Western democracies since the Enlightenment, and which are still being used to criticize the socioeconomic institutions of both the Free and Communist worlds. Abandoning such a standpoint which is, if not transcendental, at least "universalistic," seems to Habermas to betray the social hopes which have been central to liberal politics.

So we find French critics of Habermas ready to abandon liberal politics in order to avoid universalistic philosophy, and Habermas trying to hang on to universalistic philosophy, with all its problems, in order to support liberal politics. To put the opposition in another way, the French writers whom Habermas criticizes are willing to drop the opposition between "true consensus" and "false consensus" or between "validity" and "power," in order not to have to tell a metapnarrative in order to explicate "true" or "valid." But Habermas thinks that if we drop the idea of "the better argument" as opposed to "the argument which convinces a given audience at a given time," we shall have only a "contextdependent" sort of social criticism. He thinks that falling back on such criticism will betray "the elements of reason in cultural modernity which are contained in ...'bourgois ideas'" e.g., "the internal theoretical dynamic which constantly propels the sciences and the selfreflexion of the sciences as well beyond the creation of merely technologically exploitable knowledge." [Ibid, p. 18] 161-2

Rorty also rightly goes on to point out that part of what is at stake in the Habermas- Lyotard debate is the character of modern science. [I know that Habermas relies on the natural sciences as a paradigm of coming to consensus regarding truth claims that have more than context dependent validity, as an important example of what he hopes his discourse ethics will also lead to in the domain of ethical norms.] Lyotard explicitly rejects such a notion of science in favor of a postmodern conception:

Postmodern science by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, 'fracta', catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical. [Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 60, quoted in Rorty, 163].

Rorty directly rejects Lyotard's argument here with regard to science (163). For that, he states that Lyotard has a point one shared "with Mary Hesse's criticism of Habermas's Diltheyan account of the distinction between natural science and hermeneutic inquiry." (163) This involves a "debunking of empiricist philosophy of science" one which Hesse characterizes:

it has been sufficiently demonstrated [by what she calls 'postempiricist' Anglo-American philosophy of science] that the language of theoretical science is irreducibly metaphorical and unformalizable, and that the logic of science is circular interpretation, reinterpretation, and selfcorrection of data in terms of theory, theory in terms of data. [Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington, 1980), p. 173), in Rorty, 163

Rorty's position is that what has been debunked is an empiricist account of science not science per se. Lyotard makes the mistake of assuming that science per se "used to be what empiricism described it as being." (163) Indeed, Rorty as much as accuses Lyotard here of falling prey to a positive dichotomy between "scientific knowledge" and "narrative." This mistake launches his (Lyotard's) critique of Habermas as being out of date.

This seems to say that Rorty finds Lyotard's critique of Habermas on this point a failure one resting, somewhat paradoxically, on Lyotard's failure to understand what's going on in contemporary philosophy of science. If this is Rorty's point, for what it's worth I agree with him.

Nonetheless, Rorty is sympathetic with Lyotard's (and Hesse's) effort to soften this contrast in order "to assert the rights of 'narrative knowledge.'" (164) On Lyotard's approach, by ridding ourselves of legitimating metanarratives, we are forcibly returned to first-order narratives which, for Lyotard, have always been the real source of legitimation.

Rorty quotes Lyotard:

There is, then an incommensurability between popular narrative pragrmatics, which provides immediate legitimation, and the language game known as the question of legitimacy....Narratives...determine criteria of competience and/or illustrate how they are to be applied. They thus define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do. (Lyotard, 23, in Rorty, 164)

Rorty comments:

This last quotation suggests that we read Lyotard as saying: the trouble with Habermas is not so much that he provides a metanarrative of emancipation as that he feels the need to legitimize, that he is not content to let the narratives which hold our culture together do their stuff. He is scratching where it does not itch. (164)

[and, of interest to me:

On this reading, Lyotard's criticism would chime with the Hesse-Feyerabend line of criticism of empiricist philosophy of science, and in particular with Feyerabend's attempt to see scientific and political discourse as continuous. It would also chime with the criticisms offered by many of Habermas's sympathetic American critics, such as Bernstein, Geuss, and McCarthy. These critics doubt that studies of communicative competence can do what transcendental philosophy failed to do in the way of providing "universalistic" criteria. [ftn. 13: See, for example, Thomas McCarthy, "Rationality and Relativism: Habermas's 'Overcoming' of Hermeneutics," in Habermas: Critical Debates, John B. Thompson and David Held, eds. (London, 1982)] They also doubt that universalism is as vital to the needs of liberal social thought as Habermas thinks it.

It would seem that these critics of Habermas are important for Rorty as they chime with his effort to preserve liberal social thought but without the scaffolding of universalism.