Knowledge and Human Interests edition by Jürgen Habermas Politics Social Sciences eBooks
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Habermas describes Knowledge and Human Interests as an attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with the intention of analysing the connections between knowledge and human interests. Convinced of the increasing historical and social importance of the natural and behavioural sciences, Habermas makes clear how crucial it is to understand the central meanings and justifications of these sciences. He argues that for too long the relationship between philosophy and science has been distorted.
In this extraordinarily wide-ranging book, Habermas examines the principal positions of modern philosophy - Kantianism, Marxism, positivism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, the philosophy of science, linguistic philosophy and phenomenology - to lay bare the structure of the processes of enquiry that determine the meaning and the validity of all our statements which claim objectivity.
This edition contains a postscript written by Habermas for the second German edition of Knowledge and Human Interests.
Knowledge and Human Interests edition by Jürgen Habermas Politics Social Sciences eBooks
This is Habermas's best book. In my humble view, I think KHI is one of the most important works of the twentieth century. The only reason it does not get the attention it deserves is that Habermas moved away from it in the 1970's. In KHI, he analyzes four major developmental thinkers of the last few hundred years -- Kant, Hegel, Marx and Freud -- within a hermeneutical, yet systematic, framework for a social theory. As Kortian puts it in the "Introduction" to Metacritique (a study of KHI), this book is "an attempt to rewrite the Phenomenology of Spirit," but without Hegel's postulate of absolute identity. For those philosophers who, like myself, remain unconvinced by Habermas's post-KHI turn toward Kant, cognitive-developmental psychology and formal pragmatics, this book is an absolute gem.Product details
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Knowledge and Human Interests edition by Jürgen Habermas Politics Social Sciences eBooks Reviews
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Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist who is one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School. He wrote many books, such as The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1 Reason and the Rationalization of Society,The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2 Lifeworld and System A Critique of Functionalist Reason,The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,Truth and Justification,The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1968 book, “I am undertaking a historically oriented attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with the systematic intention of analyzing the connections between knowledge and human interests… The analysis of the connection between knowledge and interest should support the assertion that a radical critique of knowledge is possible only as social theory. This idea is implicit in Marx’s theory of society, even though it cannot be gathered from the self-understanding of Marx or of Marxism. Nevertheless I have not gone into the objective context in which the development of philosophy from Hegel to Nietzsche took place. Instead I have limited myself to following immanently the movement of thought.”
He asserts, “Positivism marks the end of the theory of knowledge. In its place emerges the philosophy of science. Transcendental-logical inquiry into the conditions of possible knowledge aimed as well at explicating the meaning of knowledge as such. Positivism cuts off this inquiry, which it conceives as having become meaningless in virtue of the fact of the modern sciences. Knowledge is implicitly defined by the achievement of the sciences. Hence transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possible knowledge can be meaningfully pursued only in the form of methodological inquiry into the rules for the construction and corroboration of scientific theories.” (Pg. 67)
He points out, “The problem remains. On scientistic presuppositions, positivism suspends the theory of knowledge in favor of a philosophy of the sciences, because it measures knowledge only in terms of the actual achievements of the sciences. How, then, prior to all science, can the doctrine of elements make statements about the object domain of science as such, if we only obtain information about this domain from science?” (Pg. 88)
He concludes Part Two of this book with the statement, “The systematic cultural sciences establish general theories and yet cannot simply be cut off from the basis of world history. How can the claim to universality that is put forth for their theories be harmonized with their intention of comprehending individuated historical processes? Freud did not take up this question as a methodological question. Yet psychoanalysis, if we comprehend it as a general theory of life-historical self-formative processes, provides an answer to it.” (Pg. 186)
He suggests, “General interpretations can abstractly assert their claim to universal validity because their derivatives are additionally determined by context. Narrative explanations differ from strictly deductive ones in that the events of states of which they assert a causal relation is further defined by their application. Therefore general interpretions do not make possible context-free explanations.” (Pg. 273)
He concludes with the statement, “For the new phase of positivism, Nietzsche seemed to have furnished the proof that the self-reflection of the sciences only leads to the psychologizing of matters that, like matters of logic and methodology, may not be placed on the same level as empirical relations. The ‘self-reflection’ of the sciences could appear as a further example of the naturalistic fallacy… Accordingly, it was believed that all that was necessary was a restoration of the separation in principle of questions of validity from those of genesis. In the process, epistemology, including the theory of knowledge developed immanently out of the logic of the natural and cultural sciences, could be surrendered to the psychology of research. On this basis modern positivism then erected a pure methodology, purged, however, of the really interesting problems.” (Pg. 300)
In the Appendix, he summarizes, “my first thesis is this The achievements of the transcendental subject have their basis in the natural history of the human species… My second thesis is thus that knowledge equally serves as an instrument and transcends mere self-preservation… My third thesis is thus that knowledge-constitutive interests take form in the medium of work, language, and power… My fourth thesis is thus that in the power of self-reflection, knowledge and interest are one… My fifth thesis is thus that the unity of knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed.” (Pg. 312-315)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying Habermas’s thought.
This is a very interesting book and well worth reading. Habermas's primary thesis is that knowledge is transcendentally grounded in various interests which have a natural basis in our evolutionary history and an historical basis in our cultural, social and economic history.
Habermas sees the empirical, natural sciences as being transcendentally grounded in our interest in the technical control of nature. Our interest in increasing our technical control over the natural world in our effort to survive determines the way in which nature is objectified in the natural sciences and the form that our scientific theories take (hypothetico-deductive connections of propositions, which permit the deduction of law-like hypotheses with empirical content, pg308) as well as the way those theories are tested and corroborated (the experimental method which is based on scientists ability to physically reproduce the same phenomena given identical initial conditions). There are definitely echoes of Nietzsche and Heidegger here in the notion that science is ultimately a means for technical control as opposed to pure theoretical speculation. The interest in technical control finds its ground in 'work' which, as Marx argued, is the process whereby the species reproduces itself in a physical sense. The process of work provides a feedback loop between theory and pragmatic testing (what works survives; what does not work is abandoned) which is similar to the method of the natural sciences and which leads to technological advance. Habermas follows Marx in the sense that it is no longer a transcendental consciousness determining the form of objectivity in the theoretical sciences but is rather "the concrete human species, which reproduces its life under natural conditions," a process which "takes the form of processes of social labor" (pg27). The knowledge generated in this process takes on external existence as a productive force thereby altering both nature and the laboring subject (pg36) and this accounts for progress. Habermas criticizes Marx, however, for reducing the "self-generating act of the human species to labor" (pg42). Habermas believes that what Marx called the relations of production (in distinction to the forces of production) are equally important and equally generative of knowledge constituting interests.
Habermas sees the human sciences as being transcendentally grounded in our interest "in the preservation and expansion of the intersubjectivity of possible action-orienting mutual understanding" (pg310). The form of understanding in the human sciences cannot be understood on the model of technical control but must be understood on the model of the intersubjective interest in achieving mutual understanding. In everyday life we are usually able to communicate with relatively few problems. This is especially true when we are dealing with people who speak the same language we do and have similar cultural backgrounds. There are times, however, when we run into problems communicating our intended meaning and an effort of translation is necessary in some form. Habermas sees the human sciences, which attempt to understand historical texts in foreign languages from vanished cultures, as grounded in a similar problem of understanding. It is our interest in reaching mutual understanding which guides this research and determines the correct methodology for the human sciences (hermeneutics). It is very important for Habermas to realize that the human sciences are grounded in a different interest than the natural empirical sciences. One of Habermas's goals in this work is to overcome the dominance of the natural sciences in epistemology (especially positivism) and he does this by grounding different sciences in different interests which determine the object domain of the sciences in a transcendental fashion.
The third and final interest which Habermas sees as constitutive of a form of knowledge is our interest in emancipation through critique (or self-reflection). Habermas believes that psychoanalysis as developed by Freud is a paradigmatic example of this form of knowledge (as is the critique of ideology inaugurated by Marx). Habermas offers a very interesting interpretation of Freud in the final sections of this work in which he argues that Freud's metapsychological concepts (the topology of the psyche in terms of the ego, id, and superego) can only be understood correctly from the standpoint of the analytic situation and the attempt to overcome deformed language or communication and behavioral pathology. Habermas believes that Freud, believing that he was introducing the methods of the natural sciences into the realm of the psyche, misunderstood the peculiar nature of his own theories and so misconceived his theories in an objectivist fashion. Habermas sees the peculiarity of psychoanalysis as residing in the interest which grounds it transcendentally and, therefore, believes it is a mistake to attempt to introduce the methodology of the natural sciences into psychoanalysis (a nice rejoinder to all of those who criticize psychoanalysis for being unscientific). Psychoanalysis has its own form of understanding grounded in its own interest in human emancipation. Habermas also attempts to combine Freud and Marx in the the final sections in this work. Freud believed that civilization rested on the compulsion to work and the renunciation of instinct. This renunciation of instinct led to utopian fantasies and collective neuroses which to a certain extent were inescapable being determined by natural conditions of survival. These necessities, however, are enforced in the form of institutions (Marx's superstructure and relations of production) which to a certain extent have a life of their own and inflict the necessary renunciations of civilization unequally (class structure). Habermas writes, "If technical progress opens up the objective possibility of reducing socially necessary repression below the level of institutionally demanded repression, this utopian content [the utopian content generated from the renunciation of instinct] can be freed from its fusion with the delusory, ideological components of culture that have been fashioned into legitimations of authority and be converted into a critique of power structures that have become historically obsolete. It is in this context that class struggle has its place" (pg280). Class struggle has its place here precisely because instinctual renunciations fall most heavily on the lower classes who are the ones who have an interest in institutional change once technology has advanced to a point to make the institutionally demanded level of repression unnecessary. One can see clearly here how Habermas's transcendental-pragmatic epistemology based in human interests provides the grounds for his critical theory. The final section of the work is, in my opinion, the most interesting and thought-provoking.
I should also make a few general points. First, even if one finds oneself disagreeing with some (or all) of Habermas's fundamental theses (I am not sure that the interest in technical control can fully determine the natural sciences since some modern scientific theories, like those of Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman, specifically deny the predictability of the future and, hence, the possibility of technical control) there is still a great deal that I think will still be of interest in this book. Habermas constructs this book as a series of chapters each dealing with a major figure (the figures dealt with are Hegel, Marx, Comte, Mach, Peirce, Dewey, Kant, Fichte, Freud, and Nietzsche). Habermas has some very interesting things to say about all of these thinkers and so anyone who has any interest in any of them will certainly find what Habermas has to say interesting. Also, Habermas is often criticized for his difficult writing style. Personally I actually thought this work was quite lucid. It is certainly difficult and probably requires some prior familiarity with the figures being discussed on the part of the reader but I think Habermas's writing style (at least in this work) compares very favorably with most Continental philosophers.
All in all I would give this book my very highest recommendation! It is truly one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in a long time.
This is Habermas's best book. In my humble view, I think KHI is one of the most important works of the twentieth century. The only reason it does not get the attention it deserves is that Habermas moved away from it in the 1970's. In KHI, he analyzes four major developmental thinkers of the last few hundred years -- Kant, Hegel, Marx and Freud -- within a hermeneutical, yet systematic, framework for a social theory. As Kortian puts it in the "Introduction" to Metacritique (a study of KHI), this book is "an attempt to rewrite the Phenomenology of Spirit," but without Hegel's postulate of absolute identity. For those philosophers who, like myself, remain unconvinced by Habermas's post-KHI turn toward Kant, cognitive-developmental psychology and formal pragmatics, this book is an absolute gem.
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