Contra Geuss: A Second Rejoinder Seyla Benhabib Originally published on Medium by the Hannah Arendt Center, 6 July 2019.
As Raymond Geuss admits in his reply, having published his initial critique of Habermas in 1981,1 he no longer followed the work except for a review of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (German, 1985; English, 1990), which he considered equally to be a “tissue of misunderstandings.” I did not harbor any illusions that I would be able to change Raymond Geuss’s mind about Habermas’s work through my reply, but I just wanted to set some of the record straight, particularly for new generations of students and scholars, out of whose milieu the Point, which first published Geuss’s article, seems to have emerged. (Martin E. Jay has now written an in-depth rejoinder to Geuss on this website: https://thepointmag.com/2019/criticism/ the-liberal-idea-has-become-obsolete-putin-geuss-and-habermas.) Geuss’s principal critique of Habermas is that the program of searching for “transcendental conditions of communication” is a philosophical failure. This is a perfectly legitimate philosophical disagreement but Geuss simply does not state the problem precisely. Habermas is NOT searching for transcendental or quasi-transcendental conditions of communication überhaupt; rather, in the tradition of speech-act theory, he is analyzing the conceptual presuppositions which we as speaking agents make in order for our utterances to be intelligible to each other. The distinction here is between “knowing what” and “knowing that,” or between implicit and explicit knowledge. Speech acts are embedded in communicative actions in the lifeworld. As is well known, J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts presupposes an institutional analysis of the background conditions against which our utterances become intelligible performances for our interlocutors. We can do “things with words” (as when the couple gets married by saying “I do” in front of the justice of the peace or other relevant official) because these statements are uttered in certain lifeworld contexts. In such contexts, we take certain assumptions about what is the case, what is proper to do or say, the language in which we communicate, and why we communicate, always, already for granted. Habermas digs deeper than Austin in analyzing just those assumptions that make speech acts possible and uncovers the four validity claims. It is these four conditions (and their world references, which I will not go into) that Habermas names “transcendental.” Geuss does not sort out speech-act theory from communicative action. For Habermas, the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech effects is one that we must presuppose for communicative action to
Contra Geuss: A Second Rejoinder
Seyla Benhabib
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